How Rhetoric Induces Atrocities

“First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me”
– Pastor Martin Niemöller, 1946

Written by Martin Niemöller, a German and former supporter of the Nazis, this poem has become an infamously sobering reminder of how the Nazi movement started and grew to develop into what we know it as today. Martin Niemöller passively complied with the Nazi’s actions against other groups, and only when they came after him and his church and put him in a concentration camp did it become truly personal what the rhetoric and actions targeted against isolated and marginalized communities resulted in, brutal oppression. 

In the beginning stages of the Nazi movement, prominent figures and leaders used actionable rhetoric against minority communities to quell the resentments of the working class in Germany due to their material poverty. After the First World War, German citizens suffered greatly with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which held Germany financially responsible for the war, forcing them to pay reparations and crushing the German economy. The Nazi Party found that the best way for them to rise into power was by claiming they would address the material conditions of the Germans by isolating minority groups, whom they falsely claimed were ruining the nation and needed to be exterminated. 

This rhetoric justified the brutal white supremacy of German fascism, which excluded German Jews from being recognized as White, making them a community of ‘others’ free to be exploited.    This rhetoric was used to justify the banning of “race-mixing” and create the apartheid structure, legalizing violent oppression and genocide of Jewish, disabled, and Roma people.

A large part of the Nazi movement was their mass deportation effort. They called for a return to previous eras of Germany — a return to the German golden age. The Nazis sought to “purify” their nation by eradicating people whom the Nazis deemed as poison. From the beginning, it was implausible to try to deport the millions of Jews who lived in Germany, and predictably, it led to the formation of Concentration camps. Eventually, these Concentration camps inevitably transformed into death camps as they became overcrowded,: by design.

In the United States today, we see the conservative movement using the same sort of rhetoric when discussing immigrants in America. Conservatives direct the resentment the American people have towards their poor living conditions, decades of stagnant wages and the exponentially increasing cost of living towards immigrants. 

White Americans, in particular, are preyed upon by upper-class conservatives, who manipulate their lack of class consciousness to their advantage. Conservatives feed them a lie about a better, greater America from the past, without explicitly naming a specific year or time period. This ambiguity, in cooperation with their previously mentioned rhetoric, serves to imply that this period of greatness specifically came before all these “other” groups of people in America got their rights.

This is not a new phenomenon in America. During the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, the material conditions in the South were very poor. Their cities were destroyed and their jobs were nonexistent. To top it off, formerly enslaved people were legal citizens with voting power, and the South was occupied by the Union Army. 

The discontent of southern citizens was a growing threat to the Economic elite in the South, who worked alongside the Conservative politicians throughout the South to establish an Apartheid structure in America, known today as Jim Crow. They convinced the poor whites that their poor living conditions were not because of the ridiculous war they just fought against the Union to protect the institution of slavery, nor because of their lack of collective bargaining, but instead, their issues stemmed from the fact that Black people were free.

The American capitalist system has always used white supremacy to justify the exploitation of groups deemed “non-white” — an ever-changing demographic. 

But it wasn’t just the conservatives who perpetrated this exploitative white supremacy. Liberals did not fight back against conservative attempts at Apartheid in the post-Reconstruction era, and even directly fought back against attempts to change that oppressive system for the better, resisting the Civil Rights Movement until they literally could not anymore. 

In recent years, Liberals paralleled their failures of the Reconstruction Era by not calling out the blatant lies Republicans (and other Liberals) parroted about immigrants and illegal migration. The truth is that the only difference between a legal or illegal migrant is a simple piece of paper. The only fundamental difference is documentation, hence why more illegal immigrants overstay visas than cross the border, and why illegally crossing the border is a misdemeanor, the same as jaywalking. 

Liberals do not stand for migrants. They stand solely for their billionaire capitalist donors, just like the conservatives, who profit from the exploitation of illegal immigrants in the American workforce.

For this reason, Liberals allow the Conservatives to spread Hitlerian talking points about migrants, such as: “Migrants abuse Social Security and Medicare,” “Immigrants vote for Democrats in big numbers,”“They are violent criminals who make our communities less safe,” and “They take our jobs.” 

Each of these is an outright lie. First, illegal migrants cannot use Social Security or Medicare and, instead, actually pay billions of dollars in taxes to fund these programs. Illegal migrants also cannot vote in federal elections, and commit crimes at a much lower rate than natural-born citizens. Immigrant communities are safer than non-immigrant communities, and as immigration has increased in America, crime has gone down. 

Finally, illegal migrants do not steal domestic jobs from citizens; they complement the workforce and keep inflation down. No matter how clear and straightforward this information is, you would be hard-pressed to find any liberals saying this — before Donald Trump won the election or even today. This is by design.

As I mentioned earlier, in Germany, this unchecked rhetoric, left to fester by an incompetent Liberal party, led to the Holocaust. But the Holocaust wasn’t bad for everyone. German capitalists and wealthy elites were able to use the resentment created against Jews as justification for the slave labor these corporations used to profit at the expense of the lives and humanity of the occupied populations. 

Companies like ThyssenKrupp AG used over 100,000 people from concentration camps as free labor, allowing them to see sky-high profits. During the post-Reconstruction Era in America, private prisons, industrial corporations, and more used prison labor, which skyrocketed due to the implementation of the Black Codes (Apartheid). Profits soared.

Today, the Trump administration is following the tried-and-true method of exploitation employed numerous times throughout history. We are in the early stages of the American holocaust. Soon, we will have our own concentration camps, filled with migrants, political opposition, and dissenters. Corporations will exploit them. Profits will soar. If we don’t take action to stand against this oppression today, it will be us who are targeted tomorrow, and who will be left to speak for us?