To the Editor:
As one reporter who covered the Nuremberg Trials noted, “The most frightening thing about the Nazis was that they were NOT insane.” If not insanity, then what motivates such murderous acts and what do these past wrongs have in common with the Buffalo murders?
While history can’t predict our future or solve all our problems, it can inform us about certain patterns of behavior and help us avoid repeating past horrors. Incidents in our own history from the Salem witch trials to the lynch mobs of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and even the Great Hanging in our own community share an underlying pattern with the Nazi regime: they all grew from the most dangerous of human emotions—fear, anger, and hate. It’s nearly impossible for human beings to employ reason or understanding when they are scared or angry. Hate, however, comes all too easily under such emotional power.
Unfortunately, those who seek power or profit often grasp that the quickest way to achieve their goals is to mobilize the emotional power of fear and anger. In recent years, we have seen this dynamic at work as powerful politicians, media moguls, television and radio personalities, internet trolls, and twitter influencers create a climate of hate that threatens the social fabric of our nation and endangers democracy itself. They may have different goals—more enthusiastic voters, higher TV audience share, more ad revenues, more likes on social media, more retweets, etc.—but they all use the same approach to get our attention: make us mad or scared. Tucker Carlson’s “Great Replacement” theory and his concern for “Legacy Americans,” as well as the hysteria being stirred up about so-called “Critical Race Theory” are just the most identifiable examples of the fearmongering that has come to dominate our public life.
In this context the Buffalo murders have to be seen as part of a larger historical pattern. The shooter was acting on the oldest and most engrained product of the fear, anger, hate triad in our society: racism. In pre-Civil War America, elite slaveholders depended on the power of racism to sustain an economic system that degraded not only their workers but also the free labor of poor whites. Ultimately the fear slavery generated sparked the deadliest war in our history. The Texas Declaration of Secession insisted that the nation was “established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity,” and the “African race” was “regarded as an inferior and dependent race. . .[and] in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.” In a perverse revision of the Declaration of Independence, they proclaimed, “All white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights . . . [and] the destruction the existing relations between the two races. . . would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding states.” And those who were themselves harmed by slavery fought to protect their imagined solidarity with the white masters. (See here for the full text.)
Even though the race-based system of slavery ended with the Civil War, the hate continued. White sharecroppers were pitted against black sharecroppers to perpetuate essentially the same pre-war power structure under the Jim Crow regime. Today it remains a relatively simple route to power and profit. It seems it’s easier for politicians and media moguls to make us fear and hate each other and to inspire “culture wars” than it is to come up with actual solutions to real problems. It should come as no surprise that such hate too often plays out in violent outbursts. After all, it once set us at war against each other.
