Ivanka Trump Prototype Dies at 88

There continue to be parallels between 1930-1940's Germany and 2018 America.  One is that both Germany of that era and America today had/have their "blonde princess" who brazenly refused to admit the ugliness and evil of their fathers.  For Germany, it was Gudrun Himmler, the true-believing daughter of Heinrich Himmler (for Fox News viewers, Hitler's second in command).  For 2018 America, it is Ivanka Trump Kushner.  The Washington Post looks at the death of Himmler's daughter who remained unrepentant to the end and denied the existence of the Holocaust and helped provide money and comfort to former Nazis convicted or suspected of war crimes.  After a visit to Dachau, Himmler's daughter described the experience as :very nice."  Under the regime of her father, Ivanka looks the other way as toddlers are ripped from their parents and now are being hauled before deportation courts alone and unaccompanied by adults known to them. Here are highlights from the Post coverage of the death of Himmler's daughter:

Gudrun Burwitz, the true-believing daughter of Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s highest-ranking official after Adolf Hitler, died May 24 in or near Munich. She was 88.

 Mrs. Burwitz, who was sometimes called a “Nazi princess” by supporters and detractors alike, remained unrepentant and loyal to her father to the end. Although she had visited a concentration camp, she denied the existence of the Holocaust and, in later years, helped provide money and comfort to former Nazis convicted or suspected of war crimes. 

At the time of her birth in 1929, her father was consolidating power as leader of the elite Nazi paramilitary corps known as the SS. Himmler also commanded the German secret police, the Gestapo, and established the system of prison and concentration camps in which more than 6 million people — primarily Jews but also Roma (or Gypsies), homosexuals and others — would perish.The only person who outranked Himmler in the Nazi hierarchy was Hitler himself.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the bespectacled, undistinguished-looking Himmler enjoyed having Gudrun at his side, as a blond, blue-eyed symbol of Aryan youth. In a diary later seized by Allied authorities, she noted that she liked to see her reflection in her father’s polished boots. She attended Christmas parties with Hitler, who gave her dolls and chocolates. 

When she was 12, Gudrun accompanied her father to the Dachau concentration camp, which was the site of Nazi medical experiments and the execution of tens of thousands of people.Gudrun recalled the visit in her diary: “Today we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau. We saw everything we could. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous.  “And afterward we had a lot to eat. It was very nice.”

Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler was born Aug. 8, 1929, in Munich. Except for a brief interview in 1959, she is not known to have spoken in public about her father or her later life.

She did, however, often wear a silver brooch given to her by her father, depicting the heads of four horses arranged in the shape of a swastika. She was also known to be active in a group called “Stille Hilfe,” or silent help, which was formed in the 1940s to help Nazi fugitives flee Germany, particularly to South America, and to support their families.

The organization is “closely linked to a number of outlawed neo-Nazi movements and actively promotes revisionism — the notion that the Holocaust never happened and Jews caused their own downfall,” Andrea Roepke, a German authority on neo-Nazis, told Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper in 1998.

Among followers of the group, Mrs. Burwitz was “a dazzling Nazi princess, a deity among these believers in the old times,” according to German author Oliver Schrom, who wrote a book about Stille Hilfe.

Mrs. Burwitz attended underground reunions of Nazi SS officers, often held in Austria, possibly as recently as 2014. . . . Mrs. Burwitz also provided support, through Stille Hilfe, to convicted Nazi war criminals, including Klaus Barbie, an SS officer dubbed the “Butcher of Lyon,” and Anton “Beautiful Tony” Malloth, who was convicted of killing prisoners at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Am I being too harsh on Ivanka?  I don't believe so. 

The Right/GOP's Psychology of Dehumanization

Throughout history one of the key elements of setting the stage for genocide has been the dehumanization of others.  Once the opponent becomes less than fully human, killing men, women and children becomes far easier on one's conscience - assuming you have one.  We have seen this taken to a high art in Nazi Germany where a campaign of making Jews less than fully human was pressed by the Nazi regime with horrific results.  Often religion has fostered a similar dehumanization and hatred of non-believers or those of differing faiths.  The Crusades are but one example.  The conflict in Northern Ireland where Catholics and Protestants dehumanized each other that costs so many lives is yet another.  But genocide and mass murder are not always the only example.  The Christofascists have sought to dehumanize gays for many decades and have pursued a campaign to depict gays not only as a threat to society and children, but as promiscuous, sex obsessed alcoholics/drug users.  More recently, we saw the Trump/Pence campaign use the dehumanization of others and racism to win the votes of white voters.  That dehumanization effort continues with the efforts to depict Muslims and brown skinned immigrants as a threat and "other."  The recent proposal to separate illegal immigrant mothers from their children is symptomatic.  As a commentator on radio asked, how many white Americans would approve such treatment for themselves and their children.  The answer, of course is none.  But it's just fine for those deemed other and not fully human.  A piece in Vox looks at this dangerous phenomenon that the Trump regime, much to the praise and applauding of most Republicans, is pursuing.  Here are excerpts:

You can think of human psychology as a series of overlapping mental programs. One program identifies faces as individuals we recognize. Another is working memory, which allows us to make quick calculations in our heads. These programs were coded by evolution and help us survive every day; they are the sources of our ingenuity and our compassion. They are everything we are.

These mental programs — etched in all of us — are also the sources of horror and pain.
Nour Kteily is a psychologist at Northwestern University whose research is about understanding one of the darkest, most ancient, and most disturbing mental programs encoded into our minds: dehumanization, the ability to see fellow men and women as less than human.

[T]he prevailing wisdom has been that most people are not willing to admit to having prejudice against others.

Kteily suspected otherwise. And so he and his colleagues created a new way to measure people’s levels of blatant dehumanization of other groups. It’s not subtle.

In Kteily’s studies, participants — typically groups of mostly white Americans — are shown this (scientifically inaccurate) image of a human ancestor slowly learning how to stand on two legs and become fully human. And then they are told to rate members of different groups — such as Muslims, Americans, and Swedes — on how evolved they are on a scale of 0 to 100.

Many people in these studies give members of other groups a perfect score, 100, fully human. But many others give others scores putting them closer to animals.

“We have this incredible capacity for cooperation; it’s what makes us human in many ways,” Kteily says. “And yet we have this capacity for othering.”

And that conclusion is opening a Pandora’s box of revelations about the new wave of intolerance toward Muslims and immigrants in America under President Donald Trump — and what it could bring about.

“Dehumanization doesn’t only occur in wartime,” says Nick Haslam, a psychologist who is the world’s current leading expert on the topic. “It’s happening right here, right now. And every day, good people who don’t see themselves as being prejudiced bigots are nevertheless falling prey to it.”

Often “people’s spontaneous, knee-jerk reactions to other people who are dramatically different from them is negative,” says Susan Fiske, a psychologist at Princeton University and a leading expert on prejudice. This is especially true when we have quick, minimal exposure to them — as we do today via the media. These thin slices activate the us-versus-them conflict encoded in our minds since the dawn of humanity.

Look back at some of the most tragic episodes in human history and you will find words and images that stripped people of their basic human traits. In the Nazi era, the film The Eternal Jew depicted Jews as rats. During the Rwandan genocide, Hutu officials called Tutsis “cockroaches” that needed to be cleared out.

At Stanford, Albert Bandura, showed that when participants overhear an experimenter call another study subject “an animal,” they’re more likely to give that subject a painful shock. If you think of murder and torture as universally taboo, then dehumanization of the “other” is a psychological loophole that can justify them.

From these experiments, and those that followed, it became clear that “it’s extremely easy to turn down someone’s ability to see someone else in their full humanity,” says Adam Waytz, a psychologist at Northwestern University who studies how people think about minds and collaborates with Kteily. Even children as young as 5 years old see the world in terms of us versus them.

What’s shocking about Kteily’s results from the “Ascent of Man” experiment, she says, is that “people are willing to admit that they have relative scales of humanity in their heads.” . . . . With the “Ascent of Man” tool, Kteily and collaborators Emile Bruneau, Adam Waytz, and Sarah Cotterill found that on average, Americans rate other Americans as being highly evolved, with an average score in the 90s. But disturbingly, many also rated Muslims, Mexican immigrants, and Arabs as less evolved.

“We typically see scores that average 75, 76,” for Muslims, Kteily says. “Which I think is a lot on a scale that’s so extreme.” And about a quarter of study participants will rate Muslims on a score of 60 or below.

In the months since Donald Trump was elected president, it’s become shockingly commonplace for Americans to blatantly dehumanize Muslims and Mexican immigrants — and then use violence against them. Hate crimes against Muslims in the US are at their highest levels since 2001. In the 1970s, Bandura predicted that dehumanization leads to increased aggression. Today, Kteily and colleagues find something similar: Willingness to dehumanize on the “Ascent of Man” scale predicts aggressive attitudes toward the Muslim world.

[B]latant dehumanization of Muslims and Mexican immigrants was strongly correlated with Trump support — even when compared with support for other Republican candidates. The data is “consistent with the idea that support for some of the Republican candidates (and Trump in particular) comes not despite their dehumanizing rhetoric but in part because of it,” Kteily and Bruneau conclude in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“What we have in this era that’s unique is the legitimizing of those perspectives with laws, with people in [positions] of authority,” she says. “It’s given license and legitimacy to these perspective. they’re not perspectives that people have to hide or sugar coat, or qualify in any way.”

It’s hard to draw a direct line from Trump to these incidents. But it’s plausible that he is emboldening people with these feelings, and helping to change norms around talking about members of other racial and ethnic groups.

Something very ugly and dangerous is happening that must be opposed and stopped.  For now, Muslims and Mexicans are the targets, but Der Trumpenführer will find other targets down the road.  If the First Amendment Defense Act passes, LGBT citizens will be legally lesser under the law and subject to unrestricted discrimination, a first big step in the dehumanization process.  Be very afraid of what Trump and the GOP are unleashing. , 

New DHC Proposal: Rip Mothers and Children Apart

The woman and child in this photo are from my mother's birth country

My already abysmally low opinion of fundamentalist and evangelical Christians and the politicians they support just plunged even further as details of a new proposal by the Trump regime they supported and put in office have been released.  The regime these "godly Christians" put in office wants to rip immigrant families apart and separate mothers from their children (apparently even infants) in an effort to keep America majority lily white for a little bit longer.   Fear of brown skin trumps - no pun intended - the Gospel message of aid and caring for the poor, the homeless, and those in need of aid.  Sadly, if one doesn't look just like them, believe the same beliefs, and have the same sexuality, then they are condemned to less than human status.  No matter how many Sundays these people go to church and feign piety and piousness, it will not wash away their utter moral bankruptcy. They and their political representatives are a foul stench in America.  As author Anne Rice once said, if this is what it is to be Christian, then count me out.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the horrifying proposal that is a cold and inhuman as something out of Nazi Germany.  Here are highlights:

The Department of Homeland Security is considering a proposal that would separate mothers and children if they are caught illegally crossing the border into the United States, Reuters reports.

The proposal would have mothers remain in custody while they wait for an asylum hearing or a date with an immigration judge, while their children would be put into protective custody with the Department of Health and Human Services. Under current policy, families awaiting a court date are generally released and allowed to live with relatives in the U.S. as they wait for their court date, which could take years to arrive.

The point of the proposal, according to the officials who spoke to Reuters, is less about keeping undocumented women off the streets than punishing them for crossing the border with their children. The ultimate goal would be to deter families from illegally entering the U.S., the officials said.

Implementing the proposal would present two obvious and immediate challenges. First, long-term detention of mothers who are now released would require space that may not exist and it would be expensive. More severely, the children who are stripped from those mothers would potentially suffer “lifelong psychological trauma,” Marielena Hincapié, of the National Immigration Law Center, told Reuters.

Sadly, these folks do not care about the harm done to children.  Welcome to Trump's Amerika. People wonder how the horrors of the Nazi regime happened.  Take a good look at the mindset of the core GOP base and you will see the answer in front of you.  #NotMyPresident!

Israel Continues to Murder Palestinian Children

One of the lucky children who wasn't killed by Israeli forces

At the risk of causing a fire storm I am going to venture some thoughts on the horrors going on between Israel and its Palestinian citizens and neighbors.  The murder of three Israeli teenagers - the spark for the current increased violence - is reprehensible, but the murder of Palestinian youths, children and families does not only serves to undermine support for Israel by decent and moral people.  Ironically, perhaps that is the goal of Hamas.  The other irony is that many Israelis are descendants of those who survived the horrors of World War II and the Nazi Final Solution, yet the leadership in Israel strikes me as being incapable of seeing the humanity of Palestinians as fellow humans.  Indeed, the mindset is akin to that of racists who cannot see the humanity of blacks and other minorities and Christofascists who view gays as less than human.  A piece in The Guardian looks at the latest sad news about the murder of four Palestinian children and the wounding of others by Israeli forces.  Here are highlights:

The first projectile hit the sea wall of Gaza City's little harbour just after four o'clock. As the smoke from the explosion thinned, four figures could be seen running, ragged silhouettes, legs pumping furiously along the wall. Even from a distance of 200 metres, it was obvious that three of them were children.

Jumping off the harbour wall, they turned on to the beach, attempting to cross the short distance to the safety of the Al-Deira hotel, base for many of the journalists covering the Gaza conflict.

They waved and shouted at the watching journalists as they passed a little collection of brightly coloured beach tents, used by bathers in peacetime.

It was there that the second shell hit the beach, those firing apparently adjusting their fire to target the fleeing survivors. As it exploded, journalists standing by the terrace wall shouted: "They are only children."

In the space of 40 seconds, four boys who had been playing hide and seek among fishermen's shacks on the wall were dead. They were aged between seven and 11; two were named Mohammad, one Zakaria and the youngest Ahed. All were members of the extended Bakr family.

Three others who were injured made it to the hotel: Hamad Bakr, aged 13, with shrapnel in his chest; his cousin Motasem, 11, injured in his head and legs, and Mohammad Abu Watfah, 21, who was hit by shrapnel in his stomach.

The Israeli military said it was looking into the incident. The Israel Defence Force told the AFP in a statement: "Based on preliminary results, the target of this strike was Hamas terrorist operatives. The reported civilian casualties from this strike are a tragic outcome."

The Islamist group Hamas, which controls Gaza, on Wednesday formally rejected Egypt's ceasefire proposal that had been accepted by Israel to end the nine-day-old conflict that has left at least 213 Palestinians and one Israeli dead.
Alongside the air strikes, Israel told tens of thousands of residents of the northern town of Beit Lahiya and the Zeitoun and Shujai'iya neighbourhoods of Gaza City– all near the Israel border – to evacuate their homes by 8am. The warnings came by automated phonecalls, texts and leaflets dropped from planes.

The Israeli military said in its message that large numbers of rockets were being launched from these areas and that Israel planned to bomb these locations.

"Whoever disregards these instructions and fails to evacuate immediately endangers their own lives, as well as those of their families," the message said.

Part of me wants to say "a pox on both their houses."  On the other hand, the continued brutality by Israel makes me want to contact my U.S. Senators and demand that they vote to cut off all aid to Israel.  Is that the emotion Israel is seeking to evoke?  I suspect not.