Einsatzgruppen

My wife and I were watching a documentary on the Einsatsgruppen, the units sent in behind the Wehrmacht to engage in genocide in the East.  Very depressing, of course.  The filmmakers naturally interviewed Christopher Browning author of the fascinating Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland.  He made a point that I had read in his book.  While the killers were often very ordinary Germans, often police officers in civilian life, nearly half the commanding officers were Ph.D.s.  It took extraordinarily eloquent men to persuade even men who had grown up in a society that compared Jews to rats to engage in these crimes against humanity.  It also took a lot of alcohol, both before and after these mass murders .  (Dorothy Parker's famous "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker," as a statement about alcohol as the fastest way to get a Jazz Age woman in bed by lowering her inhibitions, comes to mind.)

That intellectuals led these mass murders, and the dehumanization of disfavored groups, has some obvious parallels to modern America where the hated groups are those enjoying "white privilege,"  cis-male privilege, homophobes, and the rest of "the deplorables."  The antidiscrimination laws concerning same-sex wedding cakes and floral arrangements are only a slightly more subtle form of painting Juden on shop windows as a way to economically break an enemy group.  The antifas are self-organizing Sturmabteilung.)

I can easily see when the Democrats again get power (as they will when a generation comes of voting age with no memory of their past idiocy*), that we are in grave danger of civil war.  The antifas will become the American Einsatzgruppen, swayed by the increasingly progressive media and academics to see us as vermin in need of looting and extermination.  While the establishment progressives will at least rhetorically discourage these crimes, they will not abandon their excuses for these crimes, as happened with the recent attack on Republican Congressmen.  At some point the crazier Black Lives Matter activists are going to repeat the 2016 Dallas police murders and racially retaliatory attacks like that by Dylan Roof are going to create more excuses for these attacks, rather like the way that Herschel Grynszpan's murder of an anti-Nazi German diplomat in Paris was the Nazi excuse for Krystallnacht.

If I had the time, it would make a great novel with a warning of where this dehumanization of opponents of the progressives are taking us.  In the meantime, more ammo, and more time practicing with rifles.  I need to do likewise.

*Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich observed that secondary and college instructors turned out for the Nazis in the 1932 elections, as did the newly enfranchised 18 year olds with no employment prospects and the Nazi slogan "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz"  (""The common good before the self good") appealing to an immature idealism.