Now is the Time for the ‘Politics of Truth’

Riot police push back a crowd of supporters of President Donald Trump after they stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. (Roberto Schmidt AFP via Getty Images, via JTA)

By Rachel Dubin

On Wednesday, Jan. 6, I watched in horror from my living room in Washington, D.C., as the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol unfolded.

I felt violated.

This was a place I had visited many times, and where I interned 25 years ago. I knew its tunnels and how to get from the Capitol to the House and Senate Office Buildings and the Library of Congress. I had walked its halls and sat in those galleries — and now it was being desecrated in real-time.

Arnold Schwarzenegger was right when he compared the insurrection to Kristallnacht. I can only imagine how the Jews of Germany and Austria felt when they saw their Torah scrolls burned and desecrated and their synagogues set alight. I felt acute pain as I saw windows broken, artifacts stolen, and the parliamentarian’s office ransacked.

This was our American Kristallnacht. This was the destruction of what America stood for, of multi-racial, multi-party democracy.

People matter, but symbols also matter. Kristallnacht in 1938 taught us that when buildings and symbols are destroyed, people will be, too.

Not only was I horrified, but I also felt I was watching a civil war unfold. As an American, that’s a strange place to be. We are used to seeing civil wars in other countries like Lebanon from the 1970s to the 1990s, various African countries since 1960, and Yugoslavia in the ‘90s.

And as a Jew, it was a stranger place still. I may be comfortably American, but the memory of the Holocaust and of the Czarist pogroms is an intergenerational trauma that has left its indelible scars on me, a Gen-Xer. For my generation and for the older Millennials, the Holocaust is neither academic nor ancient history; many of us have or had grandparents who were survivors.

Growing up, we were taught that we’re lucky to live in America, because we can be Jewish openly and don’t have to worry about being killed because of who we are. And for more than 350 years, America has been mostly good to us. Although for most of the 20th century, we faced quotas in the Ivy League and anti-Jewish covenants in some neighborhoods, those limitations are gone now, and we can live and study where we want. We have become full, secure citizens of America.

However, seeing the numerous neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic slogans and symbols on Jan. 6, I was struck with an existential fear. Suddenly, I wasn’t quite totally American, and the feeling of being a perpetual outsider that seems to have been subconsciously passed down from my ancestors to my parents to me reared its head.

And I wondered yet again whether I would have to pack up and escape, and tried to remember which of my gentile friends have a basement. Jewish history has taught us to always be on our guard and prepared to leave if we’re being persecuted.

Three times now, America has lost its innocence. After Nixon, when we learned it’s possible for presidents to subvert democratic institutions. After 9/11, when we learned we’re no longer an island of sorts and could no longer be cavalier about terrorism coming to our shores.

Now, however, we have completely lost our innocence. We can no longer blind ourselves to the fact that we have a far right in this country. We can no longer be naïve about the existence of anti-Semitism, racism, and economic and social injustice.

We can no longer be naïve about the fact our democracy is fragile. We cannot endure, as President Lincoln said, “half slave and half free,” nor can “a house divided against itself stand.”

There are those who call for unity, love and understanding, but now is not that time. Now is the time to expel the Republicans who showed their true, traitorous colors — censure and resignation are not enough. Now is the time to bring up all those insurrectionists on charges of insurrection and sedition and put them in jail.

President Trump has blood on his hands, not merely for the nearly 375,000 victims of COVID-19, but also for the two Capitol Police officers and the four seditionists. Now is the time to look seriously at racism, at the policing disparity, and to institute meaningful social and economic reform.

Now is the time to fix our far-right problem, de-Nazify this country, smash the patriarchy and dismantle white supremacy. Now is also the time to start what the late Czech President Vaclav Havel called the “politics of truth,” where truth is greater than politics.

And now is the time to reinstate civics education in the public schools and teach critical thinking and history. Let this be the last time America loses its innocence, and let a new, more honest, more inclusive country emerge from all this.

Rachel Dubin

A Baltimore native, Rachel Dubin is a researcher who lives in Washington, D.C.

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