they’re going to build camps
the day after The 2024 Election, i happened to be in berlin. the night before i’d assiduously avoided the news and yet somehow i didn’t fall asleep until late into the morning. it was as if i was channeling the world’s cumulative anxiety. i came to, feeling exhausted, and checked the news, and felt worse.
it was an appropriately somber day: cold, foggy, near freezing. after we gathered our wits, we planned on visiting the brandenburg gate and the nearby memorials. on arrival, we saw a half dozen geriatric protestors holding a banner against russian war sanctions, and for “peace”, and a lone counter protestor with a ukrainian flag churned an organ grinder.1
we wandered towards the holocaust memorials. it felt sobering, which of course is their purpose, though it’s not like i learned anything i didn’t know before. i had a ww2 phase2 in university, i’d visited these same monuments long ago. but this time on this day i was struck by the timelines presented in the memorial plaques.
it’s not like people got shipped to a camp from one day to the next, as soon as the reichstag burned down. there was a whole decade of ratcheting humiliation and persecution. prevented from leaving, forced to divest of your heritage and your life savings, separated from your family, and finally worked to death. at an industrial scale they squeezed every ounce of vitality and hope from you before extinguishing your flame forever.
the last time i was here i didn’t have a family. the last time i was here i wasn’t queer yet, or at least i didn’t know it at the time. now i had an extra weight on my mind: is there anything worse than being separated from your children? people just like me were sent to these camps, too, a pink triangle pinned to their chest.
and i thought: they’re going to build new camps. first, they’ll come for the undocumented immigrants; people who are not quite like me, but whose spanish last names are similar to mine. then, they’ll come for the most annoying, the rowdiest leftists, the people willing to punch back and put their bodies on the line; people who have less to lose than i do, but whose politics are very similar to mine. and then, then they’ll come for people exactly like me, folks who live and love in freedom. and after that, the deluge, the free-for-all, the grab what you can.
at the next memorial, i wandered along the concrete stelae, feeling their smooth surface. as i walked along the uneven ground they rose above me, towering, grey columns against a grey sky. they obviously resemble giant tombstones: who could you have been?, i wondered.
and i thought: you can be ground to dust, and the echoes of your ghost will be used by your grandchildren to justify new atrocities. the death of your babies will be used to explain why someone else’s babies must die.
silence equals death, but as i type this i feel weary of talking too much or too plainly about that genocide, the genocide that’s currently happening, for fear of retribution. in some quarters talking about it critically has been nearly criminalized. i’ve seen people get punished and blacklisted for speaking plain truths.
i’ve seen people i respected spew vile, reprehensible things, whether openly racist or just knowingly obfuscated. it’s sobering to know who – how many more – will see my humanity as conditional, too. is this something i’d be willing to lose a job over? it’s not my people, it’s not my fight, it’s far away, there’s hardly anything we can do anyways, i don’t need the attention.
am i on a list already?
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i squinted and tried to replay my understanding of european political discourse. i think they’re pro the evil dictator mainly because they are anti-north atlantic alliance? the geezers had an “anti-imperialist” vibe. ↩
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i took a course on international relations leading up to ww1, which was mostly 19th century history. i took a course on ww2, and read the textbook, and then i read the rise and fall of the third reich (shirer), and then i read a world at arms (weinberg). i had a vague memory of newscasts playing footage from the fall of the berlin wall, but i did not apprehend its meaning until i took a course on the cold war. then i read postwar (judt). ↩