This year for Holocaust Remembrance: Never Again, for anyone, in any form.

I spent the first week of April 2018, with my grown child and spouse, visiting my Dad’s homeland. His family was forced to leave Germany in 1939, because they were Jewish and Hitler was in power. In 2018, we visited Synagogues, throughout Eastern Europe, built or refurbished for tourists. We toured former Jewish neighborhoods that are now outdoor museums. On the last day we visited Dachau Concentration Camp.

All the while, I thought about a question Dad and I debated 36 years ago, when he took me on a similar roots trip. What does Never Again mean? I knew, back in 1983, that the US foreign policy was defying the Never Again promise; arming and funding governments like El Salvador engaged in Nazi-like terror. In 2018 I was again thinking about aspects of US domestic and foregn policy that were Nazi-like. Both times I wondered at the worth of such a promise when you know it is a lie as you say it.

Germany has done a better job than most governments in remembering a horror carried out in their name. Visiting Dachau, one understands unequivocally that the horrors of the Nazi reign, the body count, the genocide, the vast schemes to wring profit from the bodies you enslave, torture and throw away. No one with a beating heart could deny this history, after visiting.

When we leave however, we are on our own in deciding how we interpret and implement our Never Again pledge.

While we were visiting Dachau and outdoor museums to a community that no longer exists, a regime elected by the children of Holocaust survivors was reigning terror on a people protesting decades of forced removal, stealing homeland, depriving livelihood, targeted violence. Murdering protestors. Never Again for those supporting Israel’s murderous attack on Palestinian protestors means only for MY people.

Never Again is also rendered meaningless when we reserve it only for an exact replica of horrific events. We put in a box one historical experience. We put the German Nazis1933–1945, into a category of their own. Not human. Not us. We say that the horrors of Nazism in Germany, and the genocidal policies against Jews, can not be compared to anything else in human history or current events.

To make Never Again meaningful and liberating we must compare, make historical connections, point out and dismantle current aspects of Nazi-like policies. In doing so we will again have to deal with those who make specious and oppositional comparisons with German Nazism. Some I have heard: The youth from Parkland Florida, compared to Nazi youth. (Yes a Minnesota legislator made this assertion.) A teacher who assigns too much homework is a teacher-Nazi. The government who creates parking spaces for disabled people is the Gestapo.The high school in Tucson Arizona that teaches Mexican American Studies to Mexican American students is facscist. Women who support liberation for women are FemiNazis.

These egregious misuses make the essential comparisons we need to make meaningless.

Time to take back Never Again.

To make humanity-liberating comparisons we are not looking for an exact replication. History never completely repeats itself. It echoes. It ruts.

The Nazis themselves learned from past atrocities. A few US precedents they looked to: The genocide of Native Americans. Hitler studied this historical example, noting forced removals, poisoning, and other forms of targeted mass violence and propaganda campaigns to dehumanize. The Jim Crow Laws and Black Codes, provided Hitler with a template for the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, separating citizens based on race and thereby denying them human rights. A concurrent eugenics movement in the U.S. included forced sterilization of people of color and people with disabilities, self and forced-deportations, provided Hitler with company in the 1930s

The Nazi regime employed a series of oppressive measures on the way to the “final solution” — the gas chambers.

With that in mind, here are Nazi-like policies and practices in the U.S. today. Note that I use the term Nazi-like, not fascist. The focus is one the oppressive policies of the Nazi regime, regardless of how they are defined by political scientists.

• Prison Industrial complex The web of policies and practices that have resulted in racially targeted police violence and the incarceration of millions -5% of the world’s population, 25% of its prisoners- targeting, especially African American men, but also Latinx men, Black and Latinx women, for non-violent or trumped-up offenses, is Nazi-like.
• Solitary Confinement, requires special condemnation. The Nazi’s perfected solitary confinement- putting people in coffin-sized spaces and providing them with a rope, to induce suicide. No, the rooms in which we confine people do not need to be as bad to make this comparison. Solitary confinement in the US. is meant and does torture, as it did in Nazi Germany.
• Prison Labor. Dachau was opened March 22, 1933, as a work camp for political prisoners. It provided the template for all the others, and trained the people to embrace the camps. As a tour guide at Dachau said ‘If you could justify the incarceration and prison labor of poltical dissidents you would be able, eventually, to justify all Nazi terror’. The US practise ot prison labor, building corporate profits on the backs of prisoners, is Nazi-like.
• Violence against transgender people, and gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and other queer people. This includes both death and assault at the hands of residents and police and laws and practices that target LGBTQ people. Nazis targeted homosexuals and transsexuals in order to shore up support. Anti LGBTQ propaganda is Nazi-like.
• Ablism. Any effort to curtail the rights, or ridicule people with physical or mental abilities that do not fit an invented norm, or blame people with disabilities for societies ills. The Nazis were obsessed with a standard of physicality they invented. Any policies or practices that deify one physical standard is Nazi-like. Any policies or practices that create a hierarchy based on physical or mental ability are Nazi-like. Discussions of mental illness and gun violence are one example today. The prevalence of police murders of civilians who suffer from mental illness is another.
• Caging Immigrants on our borders and in dentention centers around the country.

Never Again is the mantra. We repeat it, especially when we visit Concentration Camps and on Holocaust Remembrance Day. At Dachau it is cast in stone in several languages.

Never Again is meaningless if we confine it to one population, or we expect an exact replica, and if we are not willing to call out individual echoes of Nazi policy and practice.This year for Holocaust Remembrance: Never Again, for anyone, in any form.

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Anne Winkler Morey, Ph.D. is a writer, historian, and activist based in Minneapolis. In 2011–12 she and her spouse biked the perimeter of the United States, with forays into Mexico and Canada, 12,000 miles. Her book: Wind: Bicycling North America’s Political Divides is forthcoming. Her Minneapolis Interview Project (turtleroad.org) is aiming for 100 interviews: stories of people whose lives reflect on inequality and social justice in Minneapolis. She also blogs on Social Movements (turtleroad.org).

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Anne Winkler Morey, Ph.D. is a writer, historian, and activist based in Minneapolis. In 2011–12 she and her spouse biked the perimeter of the United States, with forays into Mexico and Canada, 12,000 miles. Her book: Wind: Bicycling North America’s Political Divides is forthcoming. Her Minneapolis Interview Project (turtleroad.org) is aiming for 100 interviews: stories of people whose lives reflect on inequality and social justice in Minneapolis. She also blogs on Social Movements (turtleroad.org).