77 Years Ago

Our fathers and mothers fought a global war to fight fascism and imperialism.

But before our country was attacked we curled up in our little shell of isolationism where we didn’t care about China, Korea, and Indonesia being attacked by Japan. We didn’t care that Germany invaded a list of countries a yard long.

That was “over there” and we didn’t belong fighting another war to end all wars.

Meanwhile while we looked the other way Japan and Germany were waging genocide on “inferior” races and people. In Germany they used their scientific efficiency to murder millions of people, Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, blacks, the physically and mentally disabled, the Romani (Gypsies), and also social undesirables which included lesbians, gays, and trans people.

Holocaust Memorial Day: The lessons we should learn from the Nazi persecution of gay people
Pink News UK
By Benjamin Cohen
27th January 2018

PinkNews publisher Benjamin Cohen reflects on the persecution of gay people by the Nazis as Britain marks Holocaust Memorial Day.

If I was alive 75-year-ago and living in Berlin and not London, my outlook would not have been looking good and not just because I’m Jewish. Like some of those who found themselves in concentration camps, I also have a disability, I am member of a trade union and perhaps more pertinently, like many of the people reading this article, I am gay.
[…]
What happened during the Holocaust also stands to us as a warning to all of us that societies can go backwards as well as forwards. In the 1920s, Berlin was one of the gay capitals of the world, where Germany’s prohibition on homosexuality was widely ignored by the police and a large, open, flourishing gay community was in existence. Just before the Nazis took power, the German legislature was poised to repeal the legal ban of male homosexuality. It took a political climate that had nothing to do with gay people to radically alter the treatment of this minority group. The Nazis drew on deep rooted, latent homophobia within the population to stigmatise gay people to justify to ordinarily rational people the single largest act of persecution on the basis of sexuality that the world has ever seen, just as it engulfed the largest single act of anti-semitism on the planet.

I have to wonder is it happening again?

I see the streets Charlottesville and it sent a shiver up my spine. I heard what Trump said and another shiver ran up my spine.

I see it around the world in Russia, Chechyna, in the Middle East, in Indonesia, Africa, and here in the States where we are being used as scapegoats for the world troubles.