What of US in 2019 and Germany in 1938?

Trump presiding over his rallies is Mussolini, complete with smug gurn, lower lip buttoned over the upper. Sickening approval of his goon squads, he is Goebbels to his “blood and earth” drunken beer bellies.

No, it is not Auschwitz of 1943, but Kristallnacht in 1938, when a phalanx of torch-bearing know-nothings, encircled, chanted hatred, and immolated shules, killed innocents, randomly incarcerated and starved and tortured 50,000 Jewish men in Buchenwald, while that German Landsleute who could have stopped the infamy stood by as spectators, enjoying the tyranny, lapping it up, appetites whetted for more horror.  Ask anyone who witnessed Kristallnacht whether or not it appeared to be the simple rehearsal for the main act.

Those who were there will tell you not to demand my apology for overreacting, for not trusting the “heroic” Trump, and for calling me a socialist (which I claim with ambivalence).  They will tell you that they witnessed all of it before, phalanxes of know-nothings bearing torches, circling the shule in Charlottesville, ready to torch at a moment’s notice, while our First Goon cynically smiled at the “good people” on both sides of the equation, and the besotted hoi polloi bought their ice cream and shuffled home.  “Me?” they said, and we said back to them, “No prob, you didn’t really do anything that scared us too much.”

There will be no “I told you so’s,” from me.  But just look at what is happening, and do not lull yourself and much of Jewish middle-class Americans into believing that it “could never happen here.” Just look at brown babies behind the barbed wire crying for their mammas, as we indifferently sit by and cheer at “America’s Got Talent!”