The Holocaust And US Politics

I wrote this for an assignment in my English class at school.

The Holocaust was a horrifying event in history infamous for unmasking the raw brutality that we as people can hold. It was beyond words, the terror and sickness of it. Imagine, being first denied all rights as though you were below human, then ripped from your family, your home, and either mass-murdered or dead to exhaustion. In the rare events you would make it out, chances are you don’t have a loved one with you. It sounds like the worst thing possible, right? But what if I told you it all started out with one man’s opinion, then escalated into the Holocaust? What if I told you the same first steps are unfolding in the US right now, today? Here are the ways America is following in Nazi Germany’s footsteps:
Anyone who knows about the Holocaust knows the man behind it: Adolf Hitler, a man who gained power with deceit and propaganda. He was not voted upon by majority and sustained his power with a charismatic outtake, acting like everything he did was perfectly justified and that Jews were criminals, monsters, not human and didn’t deserve to live. In the article, How Did Adolf Hitler Happen?, from the National World War 2 Museum, “Hitler, a mesmerizing public speaker, addressed political meetings in Munich calling for a new German order to replace what he saw as an incompetent and inefficient democratic regime. This New Order was distinguished by an authoritarian political system based on a leadership structure in which authority flowed downward from a supreme national leader. In the new Germany, all citizens would unselfishly serve the state, or Volk; democracy would be abolished; and individual rights sacrificed for the good of the führer state.” This depicts how Hitler rose to power and took hold of the minds around him, forcing his ideals into people’s heads, and though they were obviously antireligious and biased, people were enchanted and desperate enough to take it as justified.
Similarly, in the US today, the President is Donald Trump. His first time being President, in 2016, happened when the electoral college (a group of elected people for each state that voted for the President) chose him. However, the popular vote (the collected vote of every individual in the country, instead of the electoral college) was won by another candidate, Hilary Clinton. This just goes to show how the democratic system of the US isn’t exactly perfect, and even if the majority of the country votes against a President, they still have the ability to win. Trump, like Hitler, gained power not by majority, but by X, and maintained his power with propaganda. Trump supports news stations like Fox News, a platform that gravitatesd towards preserving the President’s picture, and therefore, their own. In the text, Donald Trump Has Threatened To Shut Down Broadcasters, But Can He?, by Brookings, “As both candidate and president, Donald Trump has called for the FCC to revoke the licenses of “fake news” media outlets, such as NBC and ABC….The current Chair of the FCC, Jessica Rosenworcel, responded, ‘the First Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy. The FCC does not and will not revoke licenses for broadcast stations simply because a political candidate disagrees with or dislikes content or coverage.’” This clearly shows how a news station that may speak the truth of what is going on in current politics, such as NBC and ABC, is immediately disliked by the man who blames every contrary opinion on “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, an offensive and insulting way of accusing his opponents of not being able to think straight.
Meanwhile, news stations like Fox News, Trump will support because it paints him in the right light and caters to his every beck and holler. In the text Fox News to Trump’s White House: Trump Taps 19 Fox Pundits, Personalities, and Producers for Second Term, “So far, he has selected at least 19 former Fox News hosts, journalists and commentators for senior positions in his second White House term. Of those, seven were working for Fox at the time Trump announced them.” It is a known fact that Trump supports Fox News because they support him, and it just goes to show how he assigns important jobs to people based solely on the fact that they benefit his picture.
When one thinks of the Holocaust, what comes to mind would often be the concentration and death camps. The symbol of Nazi brutality, these camps were stuffed full and the people (mainly Jews) kept there had to endure starvation, beatings, and exhausting work, all with the loom of death behind them if they so much as fell over when their legs gave out. In the text, Living Conditions [of Majdanek], “The camp survivors perceived Majdanek as one of the most primitive of all the German Nazi camps, where the living conditions were atrocious….Even in early 1943, the prisoners were quartered in unfinished barracks which lacked windowpanes or even the most basic furniture. Before bunk beds were installed and bedticks were distributed, the inmates were forced to sleep directly on the floor or the ground…. Since leaving the barracks was forbidden during the nights, a set of large, wooden containers served as communal toilets until each morning. These tended to be permanently overfilled and the stench they generated was appalling, particularly given the fact that all windows had to remain closed even in the greatest heats of the summer.” This shows that in a camp called Majdanek, prisoners had to endure lack of sanitation, beds (for a stretch of time), and sparse necessities. During the Holocaust, many camps were horrible and resulted in a lot of death, but were mainly centered on having prisoners work until they could no more, to prolong their death until they’d been pushed to the brink in helping Germany. However, there were still plenty of camps, like the infamous Dachau, centered mainly around mass killings and exterminating Jews as efficiently as possible.
Similarly, today deportees are being held in camps. Of course, they aren’t being killed, but they don’t exactly have human rights, either. Just because they ran from their country, most likely because conditions at home were terrible compared to conditions in the US (keep in mind, there are secret wars around the world that are happening, even if it doesn’t appear on the news. They are kept under cover by the government, and yet, as the only people who know about this, the government is still sending people away who were coming from such terrible circumstances). Also, the US seems great on the outside and is certainly plentiful in resources, especially from the rural perspective, but in the cities you can see the hierarchy of wealth and how too many people don’t have enough to feed themselves.
In the text, The Conditions Inside The Infamous El Salvador Prison Where Deported Migrants Are Held, “...there's no doubt that there's an implicit cruelty and dehumanization in the treatment of the prisoners there. They leave the lights on 24 hours a day. They restrict the time of…about an hour a day…that prisoners can leave their cells. The overcrowding is excessive to international standards and the access to toilets and other hygiene clearly seem to be limited….in other prisons we have seen testimonies of prisoners taking turns standing and lying down due to overcrowding. Skin disease is rampant. It's more likely that prisoners in the other prisons have scabies on their skin or even signs of physical abuse than the tattoos that you see in the images that are often projected from CECOT [The prison]....What prosecutor could investigate the crimes they allegedly committed? What judge could even see their cases, and what judge could oversee their rights while they're in detention? They're in a judicial black hole.” The Trump Administration has famously accused countless deportees of being gang members, hence their gang tattoos, but, “in the first 50 days of the Trump administration, ICE made 32,809 enforcement arrests, with [only] 1,155 of those being criminal gang members.” You may think ‘well, at least no one’s died’ in these new camps. The truth is, people have died in these camps. There was a list of deaths issued by ICE (basically modern-day SS guards), and the worst part is a lot of people being deported are innocent and do not have a trial. Their human rights are being stripped away for no reason other than being undocumented. My mom’s friend is a teacher who had students that were here on student visas. These students received an email at 2:00 in the morning telling them they had a week to self-deport or they would forcefully be removed. Incidentally, they had—recently—spoken out against how deported people were being treated.
Another example of this would be from the text, Deaths At Adult Detention Centers, “Over the years, the Detainee Death Reports, Mortality Reviews, and congressional and independent reports have documented several disturbing findings: The use of solitary confinement in response to individuals experiencing a mental health crisis and staff failures to perform necessary suicide watch checks; Delayed or substandard medical care such as failing to receive proper medication or doses; Facility staff falsifying medical records or failing to properly document patient care; and Signs of physical abuse and extreme pain experienced while in custody prior to an individual’s death.”
After the war, Hitler had achieved most of his goal; he hadn’t exterminated the entire Jewish population, but had killed over six million Jews in the span of eight years. What’s more, Jews weren’t the only people he killed; he also killed Gypsies, ethnic Poles, people with physical and mental disabilities, and generally anyone who could pose a “racial threat” to the Aryan race, among others. But eventually other countries overtook Germany and Nazi rule fell. Hitler was never actually prosecuted, however. In the text, The Nuremburg Trials, “The suicides of top Nazi leaders such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler prevented them from standing trial.” Though Hitler and other war leaders weren’t prosecuted, due to their death (they wanted to go out swinging, I assume, not by execution), there were still others convicted. There were over 200,000 Nazis who had committed war crimes, 140,000 cases, of the total, and shockingly, of those tried, only 6,656 of them were ever convicted. It is unknown how many Nazi fugitives escaped and continued to live, though surely there were quite a few.
Donald Trump is the current figure of what the US government has been evolving into. Democracy is an illusion, these days, and so is freedom of speech. As Tom Morello (a political activist and musical artist) says, “...American democracy is inverted when what passes for democracy is an electoral choice between two representatives of the privileged class. America's freedom of expression is inverted when you're free to say anything you want to say until it upsets a corporate sponsor.” Trump also made holders of office take an oath of loyalty. In the text, Loyalty Tests and MAGA Checks: Inside the Trump White House’s Intense Screening of Job-Seekers: “Job-seekers hoping to join the Trump administration are facing intense loyalty tests, including questions on who they voted for and when their moment of ‘MAGA revelation’ occurred….An application form on the Trump transition website asks candidates how they supported Trump in 2024…” Imagine getting a job someplace where your opinion, no matter what it is, is supposed to be valued and accounted for. Then imagine, once you are filling out your application, the questions involve something you might not necessarily support, and if you stated that you didn’t support this, the job probably wouldn’t go to you. This is essentially what was going on while Trump hired people.
Trump still appointed those who supported him, even if said supporters were entirely unfit for the government. A recent and infamous example of this would be the multi-billionaire Elon Musk. As seen in the text, How Elon Musk Gained So Much Power In The Trump Administration, “President Trump has tasked Elon Musk with an enormous job, to search across the federal government and root out inefficiencies and waste. But Musk's initial, often chaotic infiltration of various government departments has sparked alarm….[Musk] appearing today in front of an audience at CPAC, wielding a chain saw he said he'd used to slash the federal bureaucracy…..Elon Musk, Department of Government Efficiency: If the bureaucracy is in charge, then what meaning does democracy actually have?...He…also…had a child who was coming out as trans and beginning a gender transition… ‘So the reason it's called dead-naming is because your son is dead, killed by the woke mind virus.’ [-Musk]” You can see at the end of this excerpt that Musk wasn’t even willing to accept his child as trans. It’s clear Musk can’t handle even societal differences, but turning away one’s own child? What kind of person that can’t accept differences with their own child is fit to rule a country where differences are celebrated? (Or, at least, supposed to be.)
Musk clearly said he was disarming the bureaucracy, and he certainly did, conniving with Trump to fire over 24,000 government officials for practically no reason at all. They put up tariffs that sent our economy plummeting and inflation rocketing, beating healthcare across the face, and battering people’s lives into the ground with deportation. One of the worst parts? This is just an example on our current democracy. Musk was never voted upon, like nearly every other important government official. Certainly we should have some say over how our government is built up and torn down, what with us living in the “land of the free”? Decidedly not.
So what is there left to do? A quote by Zack de la Rocha states: “A good friend of ours once said that if the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after World War II…every single one of them, every last rich white one of them from Truman on, would have been hung to death and shot—and this current administration is no exception. They should be hung, and tried, and shot. As any war criminal should be.” Ironically, when this reached Fox News, they created the headline “Rock group Rage Against the Machine says Bush admin should be shot". A guest on the show vehemently spat, “They're losers, their fans are losers, and there's a lot of violence coming from the left wing." De la Rocha then responded at another concert with: “...[Fox] said we had said George Bush should be assassinated. We did not say that. We said he should be tried for being a war criminal....what they refused to air which was far more provocative in my mind and in the minds of my bandmates is this: that this system has become so brutal and vicious and cruel that it needs to start wars and profit from the destruction around the world in order to survive as a world power. THAT's what we said. And we refuse not to stand up, we refuse to back down from that position…” It is now our mission to take things into our own hands, to take down the people that are supposed to serve us but are only interested in things benefiting themselves and their beliefs.
Hitler came to power and stayed in power by saying his actions were justified, that Jews were monsters, that he was supposedly cleaning out the Aryan race. Trump came to power and has stayed in power with propaganda and charm, like Hitler, and is saying that deporting people is okay, because there are criminals being flushed out because of it. In the text, In First 100 Days, Trump 2.0 Has Dramatically Reshaped the U.S. Immigration System, But Is Not Meeting Mass Deportation Aims, “...the administration has also begun remaking other aspects of the U.S. immigration system. It has invoked many policies that will reduce legal immigration both directly and indirectly, ranging from a proposal to restrict birthright citizenship to pausing refugee resettlement and performing greater scrutiny of green-card holders, international students, and intending immigrants. The administration is also seeking to rework the social compact for immigrants, by moving to withhold safety-net public benefits from large swaths of the foreign born and even their U.S.-citizen relatives in mixed-status families.” It’s bad enough to punish innocent people for having the same mixed-paperwork as foreign criminals. It’s worse to start to punish people who are here legally, refugees (fleeing from a war or conflict in their home country), or relatives of illegal immigrants. America is supposed to be the safe place where people can go if there is a disaster in their country (not involving a criminal offense), and if people have a clean track record, why are they still being deported? For lacking the proper authentication? How are they supposed to gain the proper papers if we are building walls instead of bridges?*
We need our government to be peaceful and just, as we intend them to be. We don’t need to alienate people because they are different. How many people legally in the US are criminals and not illegal immigrants? It’s ironic how Trump has been deporting people who’ve done no wrong while at the same time pardoning people like the January 6 rioters. In the text, Criminal Records of Jan. 6 Rioters Pardoned By Trump Include Rape, Domestic Violence, “On his first day in office, President Donald Trump granted clemency to every person charged or convicted for their role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, even those convicted of violently assaulting police officers. But Trump's pardons and commutations for people he has called ‘patriots’ did not wipe away certain defendants' extensive criminal records or any other criminal charges they may be facing.” The January 6 riot was an attack against the US capitol as the votes were being certified in the 2020 Presidential election. As the “heavily armed, Trump-incited” rioters stormed the capitol, 5 people were killed. How can Trump justify pardoning people with criminal records after they attacked the capitol, even after doing it in his name—but deport thousands of innocent people without trial?
Perhaps the more important question; what can we do? How can one person in a country of an estimated 347.27 million people, make a difference? I think about this a lot. In this increasingly hopeless “democracy”, how can one 14-year-old girl rally enough people to make a change? I don’t want violence, but I’m angry. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but I need to get my point across. I need to rage, but not lose control. How do I possibly take down a President who is so full of himself, so convincing, all bark and no bite (unless it’s something he wants to do, like deporting people or renaming the Gulf of Mexico)? There are so many people out there who agree with me and probably have less futile efforts of starting a rebellion, but how am I supposed to know? How am I supposed to find them? Little acts of rebellion go a long way with me, like reporting a problem on Google Maps regarding the Gulf of “America”, or blasting Rage Against The Machine (specifically: Maria, a song about an illegal immigrant hoping for better luck in the US but instead being abused).
What I really hope to accomplish someday soon is publishing a book. The arts and politics can go hand-in-hand, if not used deceptively, and can reach a lot more people. Plenty of people are simply uninterested in politics, but if you reach them through the arts, they can begin to learn about ways they could (and should) change society. I want to weave politics and themes of peaceful protest into my writing, while at the same time making it interesting for readers. I want to spend my life as an author AND political activist, which may seem like a lot to aspire to for a 14-year-old girl and a society that tends to underestimate, but I will make a difference, and I will stay true to my beliefs while also having an open mind.



*Taken indirectly from a quote by late Pope Francis, who often said to “build bridges, not walls”.