Yesterday on social media I encountered a Holocaust denier. He spouted ugly words on my post about Dachau, laughing at the deaths of millions of Jews. I struggle to understand how anyone can willfully reject reality on this level. The evidence is there. Anyone who truly wanted to know the truth could find it. There are photographs, videos, transcripts of the Nuremberg trials. How could it have been possible, as this troll would claim, for four of the world’s most powerful nations to conspire to create a fiction, to prosecute crimes that didn’t happen? It beggars belief.
People like this scare me, more than flat earthers, more than climate change deniers. If they do not believe the genocide occurred, they have no impetus to stop it from happening again. The people who laugh about Alligator Alcatraz would laugh about Auschwitz. We who swore “never again” stand by helplessly as innocent people are deported to American concentration camps; meanwhile, the trolls delight in the idea of feeding immigrants to predatory wildlife. It is a grim future for the US.
At the same time, Nuremberg gives me hope. If those war criminals could be brought to justice, perhaps someday we will see justice for the victims of the genocide being perpetrated by the US government against its own people. I only hope we don’t have to have millions of deaths and another World War to stop it.