“The Destruction of the European Jews”...In response to “garden variety” oppressors, the Jewish community developed and honed an adaptive response over many centuries that ultimately relied on the oppressor’s self-interest: make them “not slaughter the goose that lays the golden eggs for them”.
Jews reacted to persecution by making themselves indispensable. Until they ran into a political class that was willing to dispense with them.
That was the mentality of Jewry, and of Jewish leadership, on the eve of the destruction process. When the Nazis took over in 1933, the old Jewish reaction pattern set in again, but this time the results were catastrophic. The German bureaucracy was not slowed by Jewish pleading; it was not stopped by Jewish indispensability. Without regard to cost, the bureaucratic machine, operating with accelerating speed and ever-widening destructive effect, proceeded to annihilate the European Jews. The Jewish community, unable to switch to resistance, increased its cooperation with the tempo of the German measures, thus hastening its own destruction.
There's a lesson here for all of us who cling to the belief that the Left will leave us alone in the end.
Outside the immediate context of the Shoah, in a broader sense, it boils down to the importance of recognizing when the rules of the game have fundamentally changed, and therefore the old, tried-and-true, approach not only no longer can be expected to work, but clinging to it will be disastrous.
Remember the "Bill of Rights?" The freedom to practice your religion? How's your church doing. The freedom of speech? Are you careful about what you say for fear of getting fired? A free press? When every member belongs to the Government Party? And what did President Biden say about your Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms?
The rules are changing by the day.
