Deja vu: A Replay of the 1930s?

Growing up, my mother loved telling stories of my Jewish grandfather murdered by the Nazis before I was born.

“He was a good man,” she’d say of her Polish father, who spent most of his life in Germany. “He was very trusting. People would tell him, ‘it’s getting dangerous here; you should leave,’ but he’d just say, ‘the Nazis don’t really mean what they say; nothing will come of it, you’ll see.’”

And so he stayed, eventually suffering a cruel death along with his wife and a son.

I think about that often these days, watching current world events unfold. And wonder whether we’re again entering a pre-Nazi era like the one my mother described.

“If I could have a shot of whisky every time someone in the Jewish Diaspora [asks whether we’re] living through the new 1930s,” Dr. Daniel Staetsky declares in a recent Algemeiner essay, “I would have ended up in rehab by now.”

Staetsky, a statistician, offers a chilling answer. “The bad news,” he concludes, “is that we are indeed living through a version of the 1930s.”

His argument: that today’s political alignments are strikingly similar to those of the pre-war era. Citing a study by The Economist, Staetsky notes that in the 1930s, extremists on both sides of the political spectrum garnered 30% of the European vote. Which, though not a majority, eventually allowed the Nazis to take control.

Following the catastrophe of World War II and, later, the fall of the Soviet Union, both extremes fell out of favor. Until now. “Having crashed completely,” Staetsky writes, “both the far right and the far left came back to life,” creating a situation “closely [resembling] that of almost a hundred years ago. So the question, ‘Are we living in the 1930s?’ can now be put to rest. We are.”

Which partially explains the recent violent upheavals throughout Europe, extremist electoral victories in America, and general political instability worldwide. “We have reached a point that has probably never existed since the Holocaust,” Katharine von Schnurbein, Germany’s newly appointed federal antisemitism commissioner, told a German newspaper.

There are differences, of course. Though the far left has changed little since the 1930s, the would-be Nazis of today are largely represented by the Islamic jihadists whose historic adherence to fascism is well documented. Millions have seen pictures of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, meeting with Hitler in 1941. He was “one of the most prominent Palestinian leaders of the 20^th century,” a Palestinian Authority TV anchor recently gushed.

The Grand Mufti himself minced no words regarding his stance. “Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany,” he reportedly wrote in his memoir, “was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world.” Speaking in Arabic on Nazi radio during the war, he urged Muslims to “Kill the Jews wherever you find them…”

Which isn’t very different from what his political descendants are saying today. Except that now they’re coalescing with the leftists. Two recent examples: the election of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and last week’s victory by US senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, both proud Democrats, avowed socialists, loudly pro-Palestinian, virulently anti-Israel, and devoutly Muslim

And that illustrates another difference between the 1930s and the 2020s: back then, the lefties sided with the Jews. The example I know best: my Uncle Leo, a communist, who spent the war years helping Jews and other victims of Nazism escape under the auspices of his party.

Nowadays, it’s conservatives helping the Jews; most notably America’s Republican Party, which has generally supported the world’s only Jewish state. And therein lies the single biggest difference between then and now: the existence of Israel acting forcibly on behalf of itself and Jews worldwide.

But here’s the rub: it’s never just about the Jews. As many now understand, they are “the canaries in the coal mine,” indicating the wind’s direction.

Let’s pray that the coming storm doesn’t blow us all into a horrendous replay of history.