Life in the U.S. right now is deeply challenging on both mental and emotional levels. Healthcare is out of reach for so many, the cost of everything is rising, and immigration agents are taking over major U.S. cities. Things are looking bleak. From those watching from the outside, it’s safe to say that it looks like we’re headed down a worrisome path. One California woman shares some interesting information she found out when she asked her German grandfather some important questions. It turns out, America should have been paying attention in history class.
Joline (@mindfulmess.mom) is a German woman living in California and she’s terrified of what she sees happening in our country. As she looks back on German history and its fascist regime, she has some questions. She asks, “Why did nobody stop them?” To get this answer, she decided to speak with her German grandfather who lived through it and is privy to that information firsthand.
Joline asked her grandfather, “Why would you vote for this? Why would you ever let a monster like this be in charge of a country?” As Joline found through her grandfather, nobody knew better. Everybody was poor and could barely afford to put food on the table. Their prospective leader, who became a totalitarian dictator, made promises to them so he could get their vote. He promised to reduce the prices of “eggs and bread.” On top of that, most people didn’t believe the concentration camps were a real thing and that they were just rumors to most Germans. With no social media, most people couldn’t differentiate between reality and lies.
Joline’s grandfather said Germany hired its own police who would go around and look for people who they deemed “bad.” They would then kidnap them – or worse. Does that sound familiar? With what’s happening today with U.S. immigration officials kidnapping and detaining families, and even using violence against them, it should. On top of what Joline found out, she discovered that Germans were too scared to fight back on most occasions. They told her, “We wouldn’t have made it out alive.” If you tried to help Jewish people at that time, you were seen as an enemy.
Joline says that she left Germany for the U.S. in 2021. She never expected that anything happening in Germany’s history would ever happen here. However, now she says she’s “seeing it with my own eyes” and can’t believe it. As she says, nobody ever believes this could happen because we “learned from this.” The truth is, many Americans act as if they’ve learned nothing, leaving the country to grapple with a skewed system of power.
One commenter mentioned, “My 8th grade world history teacher once said, ‘History doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme’ and that stuck with me.” Another person shared, “My grandparents grew up in Germany during the war and told us the same story. People wanted him because he promised lowered grocery prices and gave people jobs. The last few years of her life my grandma used to watch the news every day and tell us how this was just like back then, and that was only in his first term.” It gives you chills. If you point this out, some conservatives may dismiss it outright. But how is it any different? Black and Brown Americans live in fear of losing everything they know, being separated from loved ones, and fighting for their lives. To me, it feels eerily familiar.
