Tim Giago: America is learning how to hate all over again

Monday, May 13, 2019  

When the first movies came to Kyle, (Pejuta Haka, Medicine Root) on the Pine Ridge Reservation in the early 1930s, they were always shown at the school gymnasium at what is now Little Wound School.

A large, white sheet was hung between two poles and this served as the movie screen. I was four years old in 1938 when I attended my first movie there. All of the small children were seated on the floor in front of the movie screen. The adults all sat on folding chairs behind us.

In those days before every movie started with short subject, a short like the Three Stooges, but just before the short they always had what was known back then as a “newsreel.” The newsreel brought the news of the week in movie form for all of us to learn what was happening in the world.

It was in mid-November of 1938 when I saw a newsreel with men marching through the streets of cities in Germany carrying lighted torches and waving flags with swastikas and wearing armbands with the same swastikas. In German they were shouting hate against the Jews and saying over and over, Blood and Soil, Blood and Soil. This was a night that became known all over the world as Kristallnacht, the night the German storm troopers began to smash the windows of all Jewish owned businesses. This was the “night of broken glass.”

Blood and Soil (German: Blut und Boden) refers to an ideology that focuses on ethnicity based on two factors, descent (Blood (of a folk)) and homeland/Heimat (Soil). It celebrates the relationship of a people to the land they occupy and cultivate, and it places a high value on the virtues of rural living. The second chant that night was “Jews will not replace us.”

In two days and nights, more than 1,000 synagogues were burned or otherwise damaged. Rioters ransacked and looted about 7,500 Jewish businesses, killed at least 91 Jews, and vandalized Jewish hospitals, homes, schools, and cemeteries. The attackers were often neighbors. Some 30,000 Jewish males aged 16 to 60 were arrested. To accommodate so many new prisoners, the concentration camps at Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen were expanded.

This happened in Nazi Germany on November 9, 1938. I saw it with my own eyes in the newsreels shown us in November of 1938 at Little Wound School in Kyle and I saw it again in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. White men and women carrying torches marched through the streets of Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil.”

How could something as dreadful as this be happening in America? Is this how Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again” is being interpreted by his dimwitted followers? Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanics and Asian Americans know that America never was that great. Each one of these ethnic minorities has suffered at the hands of the white supremacists. But, for a little while, we even had the remote feeling that things were getting better. And under President Obama they were. The biggest mistake Obama made to the new right is that he was black.

When you see torch bearing Nazi’s parading on the streets of an American city shouting slogans of hate that led us into World War II, it really makes you wonder. What kind of fanatic is promoting this return to barbarism? A young lady is killed by one of the extremists when she is hit by his car. Many others are injured as this white supremist slams his car into the crowd.

And Donald J. Trump, the supposed President of the United States says, “There were good people on both sides.” Which is his dog whistle to let the white racists know that he is on their side.

Kristallnacht was the beginning of a time when 6 million Jews would be slaughtered in the concentration camps of Eastern Europe. And in America last week a group of American Nazi’s marched again and changed, “Six million more, six million more.”

Instead of MAGA on the hats of the Trump followers, the hats should read, “MAHA” or “Make America Hate Again.” Like a train on a hill with no engine, we are sliding backwards fast with no brakes to stop us. Where it goes from here may not be pretty, but that is the direction America is headed and all though we, Native Americans, feel different about a lot of things in this country, many of us fought and many died in America’s wars to “Make America Great” and in this time of fear, we join all good and decent Americans in making an extreme effort in stopping this erosion of our Democracy.

Nazism and White Supremacy have no place in this land of our ancestors. As a child of four I witnessed in a newsreel the “night of broken glass” and I was horrified. Hate begins in small ways and those small ways have begun.

Contact Tim Giago at najournalist1@gmail.com