Remembering the Holocaust ... and Charlottesville

Rose and Louis (The Shreveport Times photo)

     This Sunday afternoon, I will be thinking of Mom and Dad ... and millions of other people.
     I also will be thinking of last August, and the tumultuous weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.
     Thinking, remembering, and reflecting. That is what the annual Holocaust Remembrance Service in Shreveport-Bossier is for me. And I am sure Beatrice Van Thyn feels the same, as do many others.
     That is why we attend. To honor those who suffered through the Holocaust, those who paid the ultimate price (6 million Jews, 11 million victims, 60 million altogether -- military, people of the world). Our family lost too soon: four grandparents, two uncles, one aunt, an in-law aunt and uncle, one nephew, and my parents' first spouses. 
     This Sunday (3 p.m. start), I especially will think of Mom. Because the service this year will be in Brown Chapel on the Centenary College campus.
     Special connections: (1) Mom often was a featured speaker at the Shreveport-Bossier Holocaust Remembrance Service; (2) she and Dad, as Holocaust survivors, were among those lighting the 11 eleven candles commemorating the 11 million victims of Nazi occupation/persecution; (3) Mom loved Brown Chapel, was a speaker there several times, and chose it for her memorial service (eight years ago in July).
     As many people remember, for years she spoke publicly about the Holocaust, her experiences in it and in life.
     She wrote prolifically in English, her second language, although I am sure she wrote Dutch to her friends back in the old country. Long takes on her and her original family's Holocaust days; poetry -- most her own, some borrowed -- and letters to the newspapers.
     I am sharing some of those editorial-page letters (saw them again recently as I culled our paper files and created digital files).
     One of her favorite subjects -- and not in a positive manner -- was David Duke. Surprised?

1990 The Shreveport Times

     Is there anyone in the United States, and with Louisiana ties, that is more symbolic of anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and white supremacy advocate? He was the America's leading Nazi wannabe and Grand Wizard (of the Ku Klux Klan), so the answer is ... no.
     Much as I love my home state, it is a forever-stain on Louisiana that he actually had success there politically.
     He was -- among other things -- an elected state representative and a finalist in the 1991 state governor's race, having drawn 80,000 more votes in the primary than the incumbent governor, Buddy Roemer. It took a "Vote for the Crook" campaign for Edwin Edwards to keep a Nazi promoter/sympathizer out of the governor's chair. (Soon enough Edwards and Duke were convicted felons.)  
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     Duke is still around, of course, spouting his white trash, and he has enough followers to draw attention ... from those who want to pay attention. 
     Which brings us back to Charlottesville. He was there, he was on camera, and he had plenty of would-be-Nazis company. 
     Just as a reminder, I again watched the "Vice News Tonight" behind-the-scenes coverage of the Nazi/KKK/white-supremacists types ... and the slanted hatred they espouse. It is really head-shaking. Pitiful. Annoying. Obnoxious. And, well, laughable.
     Had my say on this last August: http://nvanthyn.blogspot.com/2017/08/here-is-my-red-line.html
     Do not care to rehash it any further, except to say that I will not agree with the "many sides," "both sides" were guilty. That argument is an overreach, a misinterpretation.
     And those Nazi/KKK/white supremacists publicly loved that people -- influential people -- are at least partially, if not fully, taking their side, giving them an out or an excuse.
     Of course, this protest also involved the Confederate-hero statue issue -- in this case, Gen. Robert E. Lee -- so the question of slavery, of those clinging to their Southern roots and heritage, was combined with the pro-Nazi cause.
     We could write a whole blog on that. Personally, I like statues; I did a sports page piece on the sports statues in the Fort Worth-Dallas area. But, hey, statues of Stalin and Saddam Hussein -- and for football's sake, Joe Paterno -- came tumbling down. Can you imagine statues of Hitler, Goebbels, Rommel, etc.? Yeah, right. 
     So the Confederate statues symbolize heroes to some, slavery to others. Heritage or shame. There is both sides of this debate.
     But both sides guilty in Charlottesville? C'mon. It is just not right.    
     No, no, no -- one side is bent on hate speech, and prone to violence, eager to provide that violence and, in this case, even defending and slanting the facts about a car driven into the crowd, injuring many and killing one young woman. 
     The other side is sticking up for decency. 
     Even if we disagree on politics and social issues today, I would hope we could agree that David Duke and his cronies are wrong, wrong, wrong. 
     They were waving their Nazi, KKK and Confederate flags, carrying their lit torches through the night, chanting "this is our country" and "blood and soil" -- the Nazi standby from the 1930s -- and "Whose streets? Our streets!" and, the twist on the current-day slogan, "White Lives Matter."
     The decent view is: It is all our country -- no colors needed -- and all lives matter. 
     To equate the thugs in Charlottesville with a left-wing radical shooting bullets rapidly into a Republican baseball practice, we don't consider it the same thing. Our U.S. Congresswoman from the district here in Fort Worth did that in echoing the "both sides" claim, and a couple of people on my Facebook page agreed with her. 
     Mrs. Kay Granger's office is close to where we live, across the street off University Drive, so I took a copy of my blog piece and a short note there. To her credit, she answered with a lengthy, well-done letter and strongly denounced -- twice -- the white supremacists' actions and views.
     She cited the baseball practice shooting as "an example of political violence, and I denounce it as well" and went on to write, "... I cannot imagine that anyone but severe partisans would not agree with my position in denouncing both actions."
     I don't consider myself a severe partisan -- you might -- but that was one man with an obvious mental-health problem (we've heard this description repeatedly in other cases). How many one- or two-person violent acts have we seen here in recent memory?
     One lone wolf, not a mob or a movement. It is not a parallel situation.
     Cannot deny that the counter protesters in Charlottesville -- the anti-fascist group -- were ready for battle, that some went there knowing they would have to fight to protect themselves. History tell us how violent the Nazi/KKK types love to be.
     But the rally itself -- the largest white supremacists gathering in the U.S. in a decade, they bragged -- was the instigator. 
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     Look, the Charlottesville movement had a license to protest (so giving that crowd permission was the first problem ... but where do you draw the line on protests?). 
     Tried to tell you before the current administration was in office that there would be plenty of protests. Got lots of criticism for defending the Hamilton cast ("wrong place," "wrong time," "disrespectful). 
     And now you have had the women's marches, the NFL players' national-anthem protests, the young people-led gun-restriction protests, the abortion/anti-abortion protests won't subside, the Black Lives Matter protests. We don't all agree, but -- Lord help us -- we don't want violence.

1994 The Shreveport Times

     So about Charlottesville, it's not anger I feel (although my friend in Holland, daughter of a Holocaust survivor, wrote a note saying she thought that). It's sadness. Sad that the Nazi/KKK/white supremacy loudmouths are there and visible.
     It is, true, a small and loud faction of our society. It is, unfortunately, a growing menace -- again -- in Europe. We don't need to ignore them; we need to pay attention. We need to tell them, often: You are just wrong.
     We don't need to be scared, either. Guarantee you that Rose Van Thyn was not scared of David Duke or any of the others.
     Don't think she ever was in the same room with him. She chose not to be; he had some public appearances in Shreveport-Bossier.
     But one member of our family -- my sister Elsa -- was an LSU student at the same time as Duke in the early 1970s. The other night, when I told her I was going to write this blog, she remembered several times listening to him speak at LSU's Free Speech rallies, almost always wearing his Nazi uniform (as did often on campus).
     And she remembered laughing at how outrageous he was, that while others were denouncing the Vietnam War, Duke was blaming the Jews for it and blaming Jewish women for inciting protests.
      Had my mother seen Duke, she would have gone face to face, toe to toe with him -- well, sort of, at 4-foot-9 and 110 pounds (maybe), perhaps not face to face.
      She did not use bad language, but if there was something she did not like, you knew it. She would not have backed away from David Duke. She would not have been violent, but you could see his always-present bodyguards stepping in, couldn't you? Rose did not need bodyguards. 
      What happened in Charlottesville last year, and the Nazi-type rallies and speeches we read and hear about (too often) are very good reasons why a Holocaust Remembrance Service is important.