History researchers uncover chilling correlations between Nazi Germany propaganda and Donald Trump racial profiling

Nazi letters reveal paper restorers’ role in compiling Holocaust ‘hitlist’. Researchers continue to uncover Nazi history to show the purposeful intent to create propaganda to support protecting a dominant race and to justify the evil Holocaust. 

Exclusive echo report published in The Guardian: Research uncovers program to make centuries-old records legible to detect people’s ancestry.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) dictator of Germany

Large numbers of paper restorers and bookbinders were recruited by the Nazis and “contributed directly to genocide” during the second world war, according to research.

A British historian has uncovered a Europe-wide program in the 1930s, and 1940s, in which restorers repaired and cleaned historic church and civil records, making them legible so that the Nazis could detect anyone with Jewish ancestry.

Dr. Morwenna Blewett, a researcher in conservation history and associate member of Worcester College, University of Oxford, unearthed Nazi letters and other material showing the role played by craftspeople in restoring registers of births, conversions, baptisms and marriages to seek out inherited “racial” status.

In various public institutions including the German federal archives in Berlin, she found documents that show the complicity of these conservators, restorers and paper chemists, who used their skills within Germany and in occupied countries.

“They were creating an accumulated record of who might potentially be killed – a kind of hitlist, really,” she said. “They went above and beyond to enforce their ‘racial’ registration of populations.”

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. “Even though it was known that there was this need to prove your heritage,” Blewett said, she “looked into the actual technical nuts and bolts of how this was achieved through cleaning documents.

“I found in the archives official documents about engaging bookbinders, as well as letters between various officials talking about cleaning documents, in the hope that these records would represent ‘racial purity’.”

Surviving administrative records show that by 1940 a master bookbinder called Franz Krause, from Neisse, a town now in south-west Poland, was among those recruited.

Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime' book launch - Worcester College

In one passage, a Nazi official wrote: “German church books, which capture the smallest place and every little farmstead in their closely bound mass of more than a hundred thousand volumes, are by far the most important source for the German population history, the proof of descent and the genealogy.”

Manuscripts dating back several centuries were illegible because they had become fragile, dirty and moldy.

Despite their potential importance as historical papers, the restorers used “quite destructive processes”, Blewett said. “They weren’t ensuring the safety of the historic objects, they were making them readable. It didn’t really matter to them what these objects were.”

For example, manuscript pages were saturated with glycerin to make the entries legible, even though that fell short of accepted conservation practice of the time. 

“The physical rubbing in of glycerin risked tearing already damaged paper as well as softening the paper fibes by swelling them,” Blewett said. “I also found promotional material from technical companies that made laminating material that was used to preserve very fragile pages to make them more readable.”

Blewett, who previously worked as a paintings conservator at the National Gallery in London, stumbled across the material in researching cultural heritage organizations set up under the Nazis. “I just found all this material and I didn’t understand why they were talking about bookbinding and cleaning church documents. That led me to look further into what the scheme was and what was related to producing proof of Aryan ancestry.”

Her research features in her new book, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime, published by Palgrave Macmillan this month. “Through their work, restorers conspired with the Nazi regime to aid and abet criminal acts,” Blewett writes in the book. “Their rewards were rich. But their reputations have largely remained unsullied.”

Michael Daley, the director of the ArtWatch UK restoration watchdog, said the research revealed a “shocking abuse of skill”. “How much power accrues to those who control the appearance of things – for good or ill,” he said.

In his first presidency, Donald Trump called journalists the enemy; a year into his second term, it’s clear that this time around, he’s treating us like one.

From Hungary to Russia, authoritarian regimes have made silencing independent media one of their defining moves. 

Sometimes, outright censorship isn’t even required to achieve this goal. In the United States, we have seen the administration apply various forms of pressure on news outlets in the year since Trump returned to office. One of our great disappointments is how quickly some of the most storied US media organizations have folded when faced with the mere specter of hostility from the administration – long before their hand was forced.

While private news organizations can choose how to respond to this government’s threats, insults and lawsuits, public media has been powerless to stop the defunding of federally supported television and radio. This has been devastating for local and rural communities, who stand to lose not only their primary source of local news and cultural programming, but health and public safety information, including emergency alerts.

While we cannot make up for this loss, the Guardian is proud to make our fact-based work available for free to all, especially when the internet is increasingly flooded with slanted reporting, misinformation and algorithmic drivel. 🙏

Donald Trump and maga Republicans to buy warehouses to keep immigrants are a throwback to purposeful evil

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka "evil ICE") and the queen of evil Kristi Noem want to purchase warehouses to put innocent immigrants into unauthorized prisons. This eerie proposal sounds like Auschwitz-Birkenau in the making 

Echo essay and opinion by Armstrong Williams, published in The Baltimore Sun newspaper: "Holding it felt like holding something profoundly evil," Elliott Broidy.

Preserving proof: Acquiring ‘profoundly evil’ Auschwitz-Birkenau whiteprint: Elliott and Robin Broidy discuss $1.5 million purchase.

Florida-based philanthropist and businessman Elliott Broidy, joined by his wife, Robin, speaks with The Baltimore Sun about acquiring for $1.5 million an original 1941, whiteprint of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria, a document that embodies the calculated architecture of genocide during the Holocaust.

The preservation of this whiteprint is more than historical stewardship. It is an act of resistance against denial, distortion and forgetfulness. Primary evidence anchors collective memory, and a healthy democracy depends on shared facts. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Philanthropist and Holocaust history preserver Elliott Broidy & his wife, Robin, acquired an original 1941, white print of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoria. (Courtesy of Elliott & Robin Broidy)

What is the historical significance of this original whiteprint❓

Elliott Broidy: This document is the front elevation of the crematoria building at Auschwitz-Birkenau, dated Oct. 24, 1941. It was created by SS architect Walter Dejaco under the direction of commandant Rudolf Höss. It shows the size, scale and smokestack of the structure — the physical infrastructure that would become central to industrialized murder.

This was not spontaneous evil. It was engineered: deliberate, technical, bureaucratic. It reflects the earliest architectural conception of how a prison complex evolved into a mechanized killing site. That precision is what makes it so chilling.

Why did you feel compelled to secure it❓

EB: Only two such documents are known to exist. One was last documented in Russia in 1991. When this surfaced, I believed it needed to be preserved, not hidden or lost to private hands.

It demonstrates the intentionality behind genocide, how ideology became design and design became machinery. It exposes the cold, administrative nature of what occurred. It is proof not only of horror, but of planning.

How did it survive from 1945, until now❓

EB: A rabbi in California received it years ago. It had reportedly been purchased at a neo-Nazi gathering in Germany, without full awareness of its historical weight.

We believe someone originally removed it from an architectural office at Auschwitz and concealed it. Decades later, it resurfaced. When it was examined by a former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the October 1941, date immediately signaled its importance; it placed the design at a critical early phase of the camp’s transformation.

Did you wrestle with the moral weight of acquiring something so disturbing❓

EB: Yes. Holding it felt like holding something profoundly evil. It gave both of us chills. There was a physical reaction as though we were holding a hot coal.

But preserving it is necessary. Holocaust denial persists. Historical distortion spreads easily in the digital age. This is primary evidence — tangible, undeniable documentation.

Ultimately, we intend for it to reside in a museum, likely Auschwitz-Birkenau, where it can be preserved properly and displayed for education.

You support the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism, and Radicalization at the former home of Rudolf Höss. What does transforming that home represent?

Robin Broidy: It is reclamation. That house, once occupied by the commandant overseeing mass murder, now serves as a center confronting extremism.

If this whiteprint was designed there, displaying it at House 88 would carry enormous symbolic weight, turning a place of planning into a place of truth-telling.

It demonstrates how ordinary settings and seemingly ordinary lives can coexist with unimaginable evil. That warning is not confined to the past.

With antisemitism rising globally, are artifacts like this essential proof points❓

EB: Yes. Polls show disturbing gaps in Holocaust knowledge among young people. At the same time, denial and antisemitism are increasing.

Primary-source artifacts confront falsehood with fact. They ground education in documentation rather than narrative. In an era when truth is contested, evidence matters more than ever.

“Never again” is often said. What does meaningful action look like beyond the slogan?

EB: Elie Wiesel once amended the phrase by saying, “Sometimes we must interfere.” Memory alone is not sufficient.

Hatred begins with rhetoric. It spreads through propaganda. It hardens into dehumanization. Left unchecked, it escalates from words to violence to mass murder.

Action means education. It means speaking truth early. It means refusing to normalize extremism.

What conversations have you had with your family about this acquisition❓

RB: We’ve spoken with our children about understanding history and supporting education that combats hate. This is not solely a Jewish issue. It is about preserving moral clarity and democratic values.

We want future generations of all faiths to understand the consequences of indifference and the importance of responsibility.

When history judges this era of rising extremism, what do you hope your philanthropy will have contributed?

EB: Education. Maimonides taught that the highest form of charity is anonymous. Yet sometimes visibility encourages others to act.

If our work inspires even a few people to resist hatred, protect truth, and strengthen interfaith understanding, it will have mattered.

Armstrong Williams (www.armstrongwilliams.com; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.

Donald Trump's defense enabler Pete Hegseth extended his loyalty to the cult master to becoming his executioner

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Frank Kendall.

Pete Hegseth is now the Heinrich Himmler* of the Trumpzi administration. 

While there may be little sorrow over the deaths of (proven) drug dealers somewhere in the ocean, Americans should all be concerned about how our military is being used by the Trump administration, and what that implies for the future of our country.

Over the past several weeks Donald Trump and his defense enabler and executioner Pete Hegseth have ordered American forces to kill at least 64 people whom the administration alleged were moving drugs headed for the United States. This campaign seems to be expanding and may soon include strikes into sovereign states such as Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico.  Donald Trump has unilaterally justified these actions by asserting to Congress that we are effectively at war — a noninternational armed conflict, as he calls it — with drug trafficking organizations.

Our military leaders are trained to evaluate the legality of orders they are given. As part of their professional education, the American values of respect for and compliance with the law are reinforced throughout military officers’ careers. They all understand that they have a duty to challenge any order they believe may be illegal — and disobey any order they know to be illegal.

The order to preemptively execute alleged drug traffickers at sea has never been considered a legal act before. The Justice Department informed Congress that it considers the strikes to be lawful and not to require congressional authorization under the War Powers Resolution. But many legal experts believe these strikes to be illegal; on Friday Volker Turk, the U.N. High Commissioner for human rights, said they violate international human rights law. Nevertheless, our military continues to carry out these strikes against vessels, intentionally killing people who, as far as can be determined, are not engaged in any violent, hostile act against the United States, have no perceived intent to engage in hostile acts against the United States, do not appear to be armed to carry out any attack and could be apprehended easily instead of killed summarily.

What happened to the requirement to disobey an unlawful order❓

There is a protocol for what members of our military should do when faced with this type of situation. If an officer is concerned about the legality of an order, he or she turns to the unit’s organizational legal authority for a legal opinion. If needed, there is a legal chain of command that can provide higher levels of legal authority, too. That chain starts with military judge advocates within all major commands, rises from there to that Military Department’s judge advocate generals, the general counsel of the Department of Defense, and then the White House Office of General Counsel and the attorney general of the United States.

In the course of Donald Trump’s second term, there has been a concerted and successful effort to put compliant and supportive lawyers in positions of legal authority within the administration and within the military chain of command. This is true in the White House, in the Justice Department and in the Department of Defense. Pete Hegseth has been very direct about this. One of his first actions as defense secretary, along with firing several senior leaders he viewed as too woke, was to fire some of the Military Department’s most senior judge advocate generals. He has openly bragged about prioritizing “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

Today I believe we can say with confidence that the legal chain of command for the military, at least at its senior echelons, has been populated with lawyers who will not say no to virtually anything Mr. Trump or Mr. Hegseth directs them to do.

This puts our military leaders in an untenable position. While they may question the legality of an order, once the department’s legal authority has ruled that the order is lawful, disobeying it becomes a criminal offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. They could be court-martialed for disobedience; to defend themselves, they must prove the order was illegal. Facing this situation, a few officers may, as a matter of conscience, still say no. But while I have enormous respect for the professionalism and integrity of our senior military leaders, I’m afraid they will be the exception. Most officers would almost certainly obey the order.

One of those exceptions may be Admiral Alvin Holsey, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, where the attacks on suspected drug vessels and their crews are occurring, who said last month that he was stepping down. We still don’t know the circumstances of his departure, but I have never seen a four-star officer leave a major command after what will be only one year, and after having served only one of the three years needed for retirement at his highest grade. Like many other events associated with the Trump administration, this is not normal❗

This all leaves us with two critical questions: What other illegal orders will Donald Trump or his executioner Hegseth give that would involve the use of lethal force by our military❓ And is there any use of force that Donald Trump's  handpicked legal authorities (aka "SS" squads) would find unlawful❓❗

During his first term, Donald Trump proposed sending military forces to Portland, Oregon, to respond with lethal force to protests. General Mark Milley, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had the character and the courage to push back on this proposal. Importantly, General Milley was supported by the senior lawyer in the room at the time. 

In this administration, if the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs pushes back, we can be confident that the lawyers in the room will support the president.

Frank Kendall was the secretary of the Air Force for the Biden administration.

*Heinrich Luitpold Himmler - Nazi- (b. 7 October 1900 – d. 23 May 1945) was a German Nazi politician and military leader. He was the 4th Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron; SS), a leading member of the Nazi Party, and one of the most powerful people in Nazi Germany. He was also one of the main architects of the Holocaust.

After serving in a reserve battalion during World War I without seeing combat, Himmler went on to join the Nazi Party in 1923. In 1925, he joined the SS, which was initially a small paramilitary arm of the Nazi Party that served as a bodyguard unit for Adolf Hitler. Himmler rose steadily through the SS's ranks to become Reichsführer-SS by 1929. Under Himmler's leadership, the SS grew from a 290-man battalion into one of the most powerful institutions in Nazi Germany.

Donald Trump and right wing human rights violators created an Auchwitz concentration camp in the Florida Everglades

‘Alligator Auschwitz’❓ Critics’ nickname for ICE’s Everglades detention facility renews debate over Holocaust comparisons.

Published in Jewish Telegraphic Agency news by Andrew Silow-Carroll

Nazi comparisons surge in response to aggressive, and evil immigrant detention and enforcement policies, as do rebukes that such language trivializes the Nazi Holocaust.

Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Rick DeSantis had a giddy name for the temporary ICE facility they built quickly on an airstrip in the Florida Everglades: “Alligator Alcatraz.”

“We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison,” Trump boasted July 1 as he toured the detention facility for undocumented migrants, where a forbidding swamp surrounds tents featuring rows of bunk beds behind chain fences.

Some critics put forth another name for the facility: Alligator Auschwitz.

The disparaging, historically loaded nickname for the facility surged on Bluesky, X and other social media platforms, and was featured in the headlines of articles denouncing the facility. Syndicated cartoonist Pat Byrnes drew an image of the tents under the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” gate that welcomed Jewish inmates to Auschwitz.

“When I saw the picture of the metal bunks in tiers, my thought was ‘Alligator Auschwitz,’ not Alcatraz,” wote an L.A. Times reader.

Like many previous comparisons, such language sparked an immediate debate over when, if ever, it is appropriate to use Holocaust comparisons.

Some Jewish watchdogs argue that using even a term like “concentration camp,” which long preceded the Nazi camps where millions of Jews were killed, can dilute the meaning of the genocide and dishonor the memory of its victims if used outside the context of the Holocaust.

Jewish groups have called out such language by progressive politicians referring to previous Trump policies, by GOP lawmakers denouncing their opponents, and even by Pope Francis when he decried European migrant and refugee holding centers.

“Don’t call it Alligator Auschwitz. Don’t trivialize the Holocaust,” Stuart Rojstaczer, a novelist and former professor of geology at Duke University, wrote in a Threads post critical of the facility. “I lost too many family members for me not to feel a sting whenever I hear the Holocaust being trivialized.”

“Every ass-clown who compares Alligator Alcatraz to Auschwitz clearly has no mental comprehension of how horrible the Holocaust was,” read a post on X by the Monterey County Republican Party in California. “#NeverForget the true horrors, and pray that the reality of Jewish genocide never happens again.

And yet, others have suggested that the many aspects of Trump’s draconian (evil) immigration policies invite such comparisons — not to the Holocaust, per se, but to harsh measures that dehumanize outsiders, operate outside of a country’s established legal system, and seem to at least pave the road to, well, another Auschwitz.

In a sermon he delivered on July 5, Rabbi Ammos Chorny of Beth Tikvah congregation in Naples, Florida warned against the “Auschwitz” comparison, but nevertheless invoked the Holocaust in decrying the ICE facility.

“Let me be clear. Although this is not Auschwitz, nor Bergen-Belsen, we must not disrespect history by making false equivalencies,” he said in his sermon, which was shared on Facebook by the Rabbinical Assembly, “but we would be dangerously blind not to hear the echoes of history in our midst. We know how it begins, always: with camps for those labeled ‘outsiders,’ ‘illegals,’ ‘undesirables.’ We know how even democratic societies can, little by little, begin to unravel the threads of human dignity, rendering people invisible.”

“Let us name it plainly,” he said. “A camp has opened for the detention of undocumented immigrants. It stands here, in the shadow of our own community, amid the sawgrass and swamplands of the Everglades. It is not a prison, but it is not freedom. It is a place where human beings: men, women, and children; will be confined, silenced, and uprooted from any semblance of stability or dignity.”

Andrea Pitzer, author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” wrote that Alligator Alcatraz deserves to be called a “concentration camp” based on an objective definition of the term.

“This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed,” she wrote in an article for MSNBC.

Pitzer notes that long before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, other nations, including Spain and Great Britain, “set up concentration camps in colonial regions.” She also applied the term to the internment camps where thousands of Japanese Americans were held during World War II.

Rojstaczer, the novelist, acknowledged such history in his comment about “Alligator Auschwitz.”

“Call it Alligator Arkhangelsk, a region of gulags where Stalin shipped many Polish Jews and Poles, including my mother,” he wrote. “What Trump is doing is far more akin to what Stalin was doing than what Hitler was doing.”

The tendency to invoke the Nazis in heated political debates is so common that it has a name: “Godwin’s Law,” which postulates that as an online discussion grows longer, a Hitler or Nazi comparison becomes inevitable.

Critics of “Alligator Alcatraz” say they are basing the Holocaust comparison on policies, not politics.

While Trump and DeSantis have promised that the facility, which currently can accommodate 3,000 detainees, will house ”the worst of the worst” awaiting deportation — presumably undocumented aliens with criminal records or gang affiliations — the Miami Herald published a document by the state showing that the facility is prepared to take in children.

And ICE itself, which in the first five months of the Trump administration had been targeting migrants with pending or criminal convictions, has since the beginning of May arrested an increasing number of migrants with no criminal convictions, according to an ABC News analysis of ICE data. The shift followed a directive by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who is Jewish, to greatly increase the number of detentions.

Pitzer, the historian of concentration camps, referred to rushed procedures that immigration groups say deny migrants due process. But she also wrote of “Alligator Alcatraz” as a capstone to an array of policies — plans to revoke naturalized citizenship, undoing birthright citizenship and targeting immigrants for their political activism — that “wants to define who can be an American in ways that appear profoundly racist.” She offered another Nazi-era analogy: the Nuremberg Laws, the legal framework for the systematic persecution of Jews in Germany.

Nazi-era comparisons are also being used to refer to the expansion of (evil) ICE and its aggressive tactics, which have included masked agents, large shows of force and telegenic raids. The domestic policy bill signed by Trump on Friday funds a doubling of the current immigrant detention capacity, from about 56,000 beds to potentially more than 100,000. The bill would more than triple ICE’s annual budget, with funding to hire 10,000 new agents over the remainder of Trump’s term.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz referred to ICE in May as “Trump’s modern-day Gestapo,” leading to a rebuke from the Department of Homeland Security. In June, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism issued a report showing that comparisons on social media between federal law enforcement and the Gestapo had risen to “records highs”; the foundation said that comparing ICE or any other agency to Hitler’s secret police “is more than just rhetorical excess. It trivializes the Holocaust, distorts history, and erodes public understanding of both the past and present.”

Trump officials and supporters welcomed Alligator Alcatraz in ways that felt distinctly cruel to many critics of who used the “Auschwitz” label. The Florida GOP and supporters of the facility are selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise. MAGA influencers gleefully posted photos of the caged-in bunks. Pro-Trump activist Laura Loomer, also Jewish, wrote on X that “alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now” — citing a number equal to the entire Hispanic population of the United States.

Joan Walsh, in an article in The Nation headlined “The Abominable Sadism of ‘Alligator Auschwitz,’” called such language and actions “performative fascist cruelty.”

In her remarks during last week’s tour of the facility, Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem appeared to acknowledge that the forbidding conditions were meant to frighten migrants into self-deporting. “If you don’t,” she said, “you may end up here.” She also urged other states to contact her if they wanted to set up similarly intimidating facilities.

Defenders of the administration’s policies argue that they are working. The number of people crossing the southern border illegally in June — just over 6,000 — was the lowest monthly level seen in decades.

“Another all-time record low has been set, smashing every record on the books,” Miller wrote on X, celebrating the numbers.

In his sermon, however, Rabbi Chorny described Alligator Alcatraz as not just a political story, but a moral story — and that Holocaust comparisons notwithstanding, it should be debated on its own terms.

“Yes, every nation has the right and the responsibility to maintain secure borders. But how we uphold those borders matters,” said Chorny, a native of Colombia and a former U.S. Army chaplain. “Law does not require cruelty. Security does not require inhumanity. There are lines that must never be crossed, lines that once crossed, are not - and ever will be- easily uncrossed.”

Another horrific example about how damaging Donald Trump is to our national heritage! He is desecrating the Iwo Jima Memorial!

Donald rump will silence opposition to his crusade against diversity. It's sickening and outrageous❗ Echo opinion published in NewJersey.com by
Rob Miraldi

The evil Donald Trump administration supported by Republican cult removed Ira Hayes' Native American heritage from the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo website.

The Department of Defense cited "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs" as eroding camaraderie and threatening mission execution.

Books on sensitive topics like the Holocaust and racism were removed from the U.S. Naval Academy library.

Vice President J.D. Vance is tasked with removing exhibits from the Smithsonian that promote ideologies inconsistent with federal policy.
The author argues these actions are a violation of the First Amendment and exemplify authoritarianism.

Ira Hamilton Hayes, born in 1923, was a Pima Indian, raised on the Gala Reservation in Arizona. The 15,000 Pima who lived there were known to be peaceful and educated when many of the Native Americans out West were not. But the Pima were treated poorly, their land relentlessly used up by the settlers. Hayes was quiet — very quiet — but also very intense. His nickname was “Chief Falling Cloud,” his favorite game was solitaire and he was an avid reader. If he was a loner, it should not be surprising. Pimas were not allowed to vote or be citizens.

Hayes lived in a one-room adobe hut with his parents and five siblings. His mother, Nancy, was a devout Presbyterian; the Bible and the American flag prominent in their home. While attending the Phoenix Indian School, each day would begin with news about World War II. The students would then rise and sing the Marine, Navy and Army anthems.

Hamilton Hayes (born January 12, 1923 – died January 24, 1955) was an Akimel O'odham American and a United States Marine during World War II.

Nine days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Hayes enlisted in the Marines. As a corporal in a parachute battalion, he fought with 60,000 marines in the great battle at Iwo Jima in the Pacific.

On Feb. 23, 1945, when the Americans took the island, Hayes was one of the six Marines who helped raise the American flag over Mount Suribachi as photographer Joe Rosenthal captured the image that has become one of the most iconic World War II photos.

After the war, Hayes suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He died in 1955, aged 32, of alcoholism and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery. If Hayes, a hero, had any peace in the afterlife, it was disrupted last month.

On March 17, unceremoniously — as if Ira Hayes had not sacrificed for his country, fought for the freedom to believe what he wanted and be, proudly, who he was — the Trump administration ordered that any reference to his Native American heritage be stripped from the famous federal Iwo Jima photo website.

Declared the Department of Defense, “Efforts to put one group ahead of another through Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution.”

Ira Hayes is not alone in the era of Trumpism

Thus, the government reasoned, a “digital content refresh” demanded officials take “all practicable steps” to remove “improper ideology.”

Presumably the same henious ideology that led the Defense Department to take down baseball legend Jackie Robinson’s military record. Of course, on second thought the DOD said that was a mistake, not because of a change of heart but because the ensuing outrage forced its hand.

Meanwhile, at the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland, a presidential directive ordered the removal from its library of 391 “improper” books — on the Holocaust, civil rights and racism, the Ku Klux Klan, feminism and a wide array on gender. Maya Angelou’s famous autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” was purged. Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” remains on the shelf.

Not clear is where the volumes were taken, but thus far we have no signs of a book burning. They may just be waiting because Vice President JD Vance has been put in charge of cleaning up the venerable Smithsonian Institution. Its 157 million items at 21 museums and 21 libraries will offer him lots of possibilities.

Will Lincoln’s top hat and Harriet Tubman’s shawl go? Will he take a wrecking ball to the Museum of African Art, the National American Indian Museum, the African American History Center and the American Women's History Museum?

Vance will have a ball at those since his mission is to slash funding for exhibits that promote “ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy,” including those that recognize trans people, “degrade shared American values,” or “divide Americans based on race.”

A consistent, stark disregard for the First Amendment

I wish I could assure you that purging of websites are isolated incidents, but we are only four months into this administration. And we are seeing a consistent and stark violation of both the spirit and the letter of the First Amendment guarantees of free speech.

I thought Orwell’s “1984” was fiction. Then I read the list of words that are no longer allowed to be used on federal websites. It could be comical, if not so ominous — typical of authoritarians who try to control everyone’s thoughts.

Banned words and phrases include “biased,” “Black,” “climate crisis,” “equal opportunity,” “female,” “Gulf of Mexico,” “immigrants,” “inequality,” “LGBTQ,” “marginalized,” “Native American,” “pollution,” “abortion,” “prejudice,” “racism,” “social justice,” “transgender,” “traumatic,” “unconscious bias” and “women,” among hundreds of others.

The mushrooming fear is not that the party in power today will wreck the education department or bulldoze its way to deporting immigrants or covet Greenland. We can like or dislike those policies.

The fear is the route to getting their way — silencing anyone who opposes. They will purge ideas they dislike and so chill the speech of opponents that hope for reasonable dialogue in the public space will disappear. That is what authoritarians do.

Using public relations tools to win a debate is one thing. Being better at making your arguments is the way the game has always been played. The battle for public opinion is a nasty and cunning battle built into democratic life that takes place in the open.

But, censoring the views of those you disagree with, that is exactly what the First Amendment was meant to prevent, from both sides of the aisle. It is when those who have power to silence, muffle or intimidate opponents that we cross over into fascism.

And it is arguably unconstitutional❗ The Supreme Court ruled numerous times that government is supposed to be “content neutral” when it comes to speech. In another words, it can disagree with someone’s speech but not silence them because it doesn’t like the content.

What if the speaker is the government itself

What if the speaker is the government itself❓ Can it purge ideologies and ideas it does not like? Only if the ban furthers an important or substantial government interest. Claiming to seek to silence “ideologies inconsistent with federal law and policy” is just bogus.

The Constitution guarantees equality. All I see in the government purge is racism, homophobia and intolerance, hardly bona fide government goals.

As for Ira Hayes, should a government website celebrate a man who left the seclusion of a reservation to risk his life and fight a war against the fascists? Does lauding his courage really threaten “mission execution”? Not if the mission is to enhance the equality the Constitution guarantees or to celebrate the freedom to embrace whatever ideology a citizen wants. Or to actually embrace America’s diversity.

The Constitution guarantees equality. All I see in the government purge is racism, homophobia and intolerance, hardly bona fide government goals.

As for Ira Hayes, should a government website celebrate a man who left the seclusion of a reservation to risk his life and fight a war against the fascists? Does lauding his courage really threaten “mission execution”? Not if the mission is to enhance the equality the Constitution guarantees or to celebrate the freedom to embrace whatever ideology a citizen wants. Or to actually embrace America’s diversity.

Oops, sorry Donald Trump, I am not supposed to use the word  “diversity.” I won’t say it, I will just applaud it. 

And thank Ira Hayes, Jackie Robinson and Maya Angelou. And remind them: This president does not speak for America.

Rob Miraldi’s First Amendment writing has won numerous awards. He taught journalism at the State University of New York for many years. Email: rob.miraldi@gmail.com  

American voters have the tools to fight Donald Trump autocracy: YES you and I have ability to make change

I was introduced to the Holocaust as a middle schooler. 

Echo guest editorial published in the Penn Bay Pilot newspaper, in MidCoast Maine/Rockland, Thomaston, Camden. 

Like any child would, I had a hard time fathoming the mass murder of so many people- over 6 million (+ plus 😔😡😨). 

I am not sure I was taught about the slippage of democratic norms, the years of capitulation and fear. I remember asking my mother why no one tried to stop it❓ She had vague answers, about it being far away, with it being hard to tell what was going on. 

Needless to say, the question lingered.

I kept that question with me while touring our nation’s Holocaust Memorial Museum in D.C. more than two decades ago. I stood for many minutes in the room dedicated to America's response, reading New York Times articles from the late 1930s, finding vague information, a lack of clarity, and what I perceived as a lack of alarm.

I worry. We Americans are now in the same place of inaction and vague, unfocused alarm, even though hate, racism, and an authoritarian regime are plainly amongst us. 

No ocean separates us from this horror. Not one location in the USA has been spared the change in our method of governance.

You and I — all the American people, no matter who we voted for, or even if we voted (a third of the electorate didn’t) — have been gut-punched and rolled.

We no longer live in a democracy. The administration is on a path to an autocratic regime in which dissent, rule of law, peaceable, and non-corrupt behavior is replaced by lies, intimidation, corruption, violent destruction of institutions, and disregard for the courts — replaced by the whims of the new leaders.

The Trumpzi-ism administration has fundamentally altered the way our country is governed. This is not a time to pretend this will solve itself, or go away. It won’t. We, the American people, are the ones who’ll change what’s happening. We are now at war, and we, the American people are the troops. (According to the Oxford Dictionary, war is “any active hostility or struggle between living beings; a conflict between opposing forces and principles.”)

Now’s the time to fight. These are your weapons:your emotionally regulated self that does not quiver in fear or dive back under the covers (or get lost in doom-scrolling);

• Your attention and understanding of context and big picture — this is not a singular shift, it’s part of a global trend — read Autocracy, Inc.; On Tyranny; How Democracies Die;]
• Your voice—it’s time to be loud, and get used to speaking up for democracy;
• Your words — talk to others about what you’re seeing and feeling. Write. There is certain to be several negative comments made at the bottom of this essay. Our best work is to ignore them. 
• Your energy is precious. Instead of taking the bait from those who are gullible enough to believe that they’re actually safer, or that their eviscerated autocratic government is now more efficient, use your words and energy to chat with your neighbors, call a friend, gather at one of the many democracy meetings being held (visit indivisible.org or jointheunion.us to search for a group near you); your imagination—spend some time considering where this is all heading. 

The Trump administrations’s power grab and the moves of Project 2025, plus the capitulation of the Congress, is a sign that those currently in power in the Trump administration want to move this country permanently to an autocratic state. 

These aren’t the moves of an administration that intends to allow free and fair elections or to cede control even if elections are held. Once you’ve gone down that deep hole, consider the country you’d like to live in. Consider how you want to be governed. What role can you play in the next USA? Use your imagination to paint those pictures of the after time, when we rebuild from this destruction. There will be a resurgence of democracy.

• Your creativity: it’s well known that autocrats don’t like to be ridiculed. So write the script of an absurdist play about where these leaders wind up in their dotage; or get out your paints and depict the way you want this war to end; or channel your rage into a bakeathon whose goods you share with neighbors; or create the best protest signs; or write the next anthem (creative endeavors also bring joy, which nourishes us during the struggle); 

• Your ability to show up and protest (March 29 was national take down Tesla day teslatakedown.com; April 5 is a day of national protest about all of the administration action—Hands Off; see indivisible.org);

• Your pocketbook—he current administration is motivated by greed, using corruption and dealmaking to line their pockets. Circumvent their money grabs: boycott large corporations, shop local, reduce your consumption overall. Consider delaying paying taxes until you’re convinced those dollars are being legally spent. 

• Your trust in yourself—your voice matters, your behavior makes a difference;

• Your trust in an inclusive, USA of the future — keep up your practices that promote diversity, many voices, the role of women; refuse to diminish people to “other;”

• Your community and your trust in your neighbors—do what you can to tighten those bonds;

• Your local government—get involved, inquire about your community’s plans for emergency notifications, mutual aid, and formation of neighborhood teams to help when crises strike; 

• Your belief in our democracy, and our ability to come together to win it back.

We’ll overturn this administration and win this war — non-violently, with the world’s strongest force: human hearts and minds pulling together to serve the future of our one planet.  

I’ll see 👀 you out there.

From Molly Mulhern lives in Camden, Maine

Comparing Trumpziism to Nazism makes Republican recoil like putting a cross in front of a vampire

Echo report published in Forward* by Jacob Kornbluh

Illinois’ Democratic Governor, J.B. Pritzker, drew a parallel between the Nazi regime of the 1930s and the policies of the Trump administration in a State of the State speech warning against authoritarian tactics. 

Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie 

“The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight,” Pritzker, who is Jewish, said in his annual State of the State address. “It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.”

Pritzker said that although he does not “invoke the specter of Nazis lightly,” his deep understanding of history compels him to speak out against Trump’s actions since returning to the presidency, particularly his harsh immigration measures and mass deportation orders.

“If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this,” he told lawmakers. “It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”

Republican lawmakers immediately criticized Pritzker’s remarks.
(Wow, comparing Trumpziism to Naziism is like putting a cross in the face of a vampire!"

For Trumpzi cult Comparing Trumpziism to Naziism is like putting a cross in the face of a vampire. 

“To call Trump and Republicans Nazis is dangerous political grandstanding and will only incite the violence he claims to condemn,” said Adam Niemerg, a Republican member of the Illinois House of Representatives.

Pritzker, who was on the shortlist for vice president last year and hosted the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, called out GOP Holocaust analogies during his reelection bid in 2022. 

In his Wednesday speech, the two-term Illinois Democrat, who helped create the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center before becoming governor in 2019, recounted the infamous 1978 attempt by neo-Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois, then home to one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors.

“The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika-clad young men goose-stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps,” he said. But from that dark moment came resilience. Skokie residents mobilized to ensure the Holocaust’s memory was preserved, beginning with a storefront in 1981, and growing into a major institution for Holocaust education three decades later.

“Here’s what I’ve learned,” Pritzker said. “The root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.”

*Founded in 1897 as a Yiddish-language daily, the Forward soon became a national paper, the most widely read Jewish newspaper anywhere. By the 1920s, its circulation outstripped The New York Times. It chronicled the events that affected a population of immigrants eager to earn their place in American life, and published regional editions around the country before any other newspaper.

Rosh Hashanha - Starting a new year of fighting against evil antisemitism

Antisemitism and the power of the big lie

Echo opinion by Jeff Jacoby published in the Boston Globe:

Throughout the centuries, even educated people have been induced to believe the most audacious falsehoods about Jews.

Last October 7, 2023, was the deadliest day of violence against Jews since the end of the Holocaust. It was also the start of the most virulent eruption of antisemitism in the West since World War II. 

To mention but a single statistic, in the first three days following the ghastly Hamas pogrom, online calls for violence against Jews surged by 1,200 percent, according to the Antisemitism Cyber Security Monitoring System. The orgiastic spilling of Jewish blood drove antisemites into a frenzy of hatred that has yet to subside.

A year ago, it might have been possible to believe that the post-Holocaust taboo on openly loathing Jews was still in force. Though outbursts of antisemitic viciousness had been occurring in recent years with increasing and alarming frequency — and coming from both the right and the left — they seemed the exception to a broadly enforced rule. No longer. Even in America, antisemitism is being mainstreamed, particularly among the young. The post-Holocaust reprieve has ended. Antisemitism is back with a vengeance, brazen and self-assured.

Over the millennia, the hatred of Jews has assumed predictable patterns, none more fundamental than the “big lie.” Antisemites — whether they hate the Jewish people, the Jewish religion, or the Jewish state — have expressed their hatred not merely by exaggerating negative stereotypes, denying inconvenient truths, or recycling bigoted slurs. Time and again they have also promoted falsehoods so monstrous and vicious, so audaciously and aggressively untrue, that their utter implausibility gives them the illusion of truth.

“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility,” wrote Adolf Hitler in “Mein Kampf.” Many people “tell small lies in little matters,” he observed, but “it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” That is the paradox and power of the big lie, especially when it is repeated often enough: Even reasonable minds gradually accept it as fact. After all, they subconsciously assume, why would government officials or the press or social elites make claims so shocking and scandalous unless they were true?

Hitler launched his war against the Jews with the big lie that Germany was defeated in World War I because it had been “stabbed in the back” by Jewish traitors. In reality, German Jews were exceptionally loyal to the fatherland — more than 100,000 had served in the German army during World War I and 12,000 had fallen in battle. Later came an even more unspeakable lie: the grotesque claim that Jews were racial subhumans who defiled the purity of Aryan blood. 

Today, it seems incredible that citizens of Germany, the most sophisticated and cultured nation in Europe, could have believed such insane falsehoods. But tens of millions of Germans did believe them. And when the Nazis set about ostracizing and then exterminating Europe’s Jews, it was with the avid support and participation of innumerable German citizens.

Jewish history is replete with such deadly lies.

Beginning in the 12th century, Jews were adly accused of kidnapping and slaughtering Christian children, in order to use their blood for baking Passover matzah. 

On the strength of these “blood libels,” revived again and again in medieval Europe (and recycled to this day in the Muslim world), countless Jews were imprisoned, expelled, or murdered. The accusation was not just false, it was a wholesale inversion of the truth. In Jewish culture, the consumption of blood is forbidden; indeed, it is one of the first prohibitions in the Hebrew Bible. 

An essential step in preparing kosher meat is to meticulously rinse it clean of blood. Yet this demented big lie was believed by vast numbers of Europeans.

So was the big lie, spread during the devastating Black Death of the 14th century, that Jews caused the plague by poisoning wells and springs. They intended, it was said, “to kill and destroy the whole of Christendom and have lordship over all the world.” The charge was ludicrous, not least because Jews were dying of the plague like everyone else. Yet so effective was the lie, and so fervent the antisemitic hunger to believe in Jewish culpability, that it resulted in thousands of Jews being rounded up and burned alive.

From era to era, the big lies told about Jews mutate. At the start of the 20th century, Jews were accused in the notorious “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” of conspiring to control the world. In the aftermath of 9/11, they were accused of having plotted the terrorist attacks. Louis Farrakhan has for years indoctrinated his Nation of Islam adherents in the libel that Jews were to blame for “the horror of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, plantation slavery, [and] Jim Crow.” 

A thriving industry denies that there was ever a✡️ Holocaust,🕯, insisting that the most comprehensively documented genocide in history is a Jewish fiction. 

All of these are lies so crazy, such obvious reversals of reality, that they ought to be impossible for any sane individual to believe.

Yet all of them have been believed, often in great numbers and by celebrated and influential people.

In the modern era, the most lethal antisemitic big lies have been those spread about Israel. The Jewish state has been slandered for decades as being founded on racism and practicing apartheid. Israel is smeared as a colonialist intruder with no legitimate right to exist. Long after it withdrew entirely from Gaza, it is routinely condemned as an “occupier.”

Holocaust children Nazi genocide

For decades, whenever Israel has been forced to fight in own defense, antisemites have raged that it slaughters civilians with a wanton disregard for decency and international law. 

In the year since October 7, these lies have been taken to fantastic extremes — that Israel deliberately bombs hospitals, that it knowingly induces famine, and even, in an updated imitation of Holocaust denial, that it faked the October 7 massacre for propaganda purposes and concocted the evidence of mass rape and sexual torture.

The biggest of these big lies is that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. Once again, this is not just a falsehood but a wholesale inversion of reality. It is Hamas that unleashed genocidal violence against Israel on Oct. 7, Hamas whose leaders publicly vow to carry out the “slaughter, extermination, and annihilation” of the Jews, and Hamas whose strategy explicitly relies on maximizing Palestinian deaths. To believe that Israel — which has always gone to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties — is actually trying to exterminate the Palestinian people is about as logical as believing that Jews would spread the Black Death by poisoning the drinking water.

But when it comes to Jews, people — even educated and sophisticated people — have always been willing to believe the most monstrous big lies. And the horror of October 7, far from making such lies seem more deranged than ever, has led even more people to embrace them.

Columnist Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jeff.jacoby@globe.com. Follow him on X @jeff_jacoby.