When I was a kid and we learned about Anne Frank or the Underground Railroad, I took it for granted that if my family had lived through a horrible time, we’d do the upstanding thing. After all, it seemed obvious: if a Jewish family needs to hide from slaughter and you have an attic, give it to them. If slaves are travelling north for freedom and you have a place for them to hide, give it to them. 

All that changed about 10 years ago when I took a program focused on the skills and mindsets required for wise leadership. As we delved into books on the Holocaust, I began to wonder what kind of “average” German I’d have been in the 1930s. When we got to the book Extraordinary Evil by Barbara Coloroso, I realized that “average” people often let horrible things happen. Coloroso had me understand that the behaviours of schoolyard bullies are somewhere along the same spectrum as the behaviours of those who commit genocide. (Before you argue, please check out the book and/or remember that this spectrum is a loooong one.)

Among other things, she used the Rwandan genocide from the 1990s to illustrate her points. When the Tutsi population was attacked, the murders were often committed by the victims’ Hutu neighbours. And sure, if you told me to go kill my neighbours tomorrow, I’m quite sure I would refuse. But what if you took time over a series of years, convincing me that those neighbours were out to get me? That they wanted my job, or that their way of living was a threat to children’s safety? 

Even in those cases, I hope you’d still fail at convincing me to murder my neighbours. But what if someone else murdered them? Or what if someone enacted rules and laws that made it harder for my neighbours to thrive? Honestly…I might not say very much. It might depend on how much else I had going on, or how stressful or distracting my day-to-day responsibilities felt. And in this way, we might understand how a bystander comes to be a bystander…or how an average German in the 1930s passively helped pave the way for what followed in the 1940s. 

I wonder how many people stayed quiet in 1933 as book burnings took place. There was a push that year to act against the “un-German spirit”, to remove undesirable professors from positions, and so on. I wonder how these actions compare to banning certain content from K-12 education today, or deciding to let an unelected billionaire do mass terminations of federal government officials, or restricting the use of certain words at major government agencies. 

Also in the 1930s, there were “peaceful annexations” as Hitler set his sights on the neighbouring country of Austria, and as he eventually pressured the Austrians into accepting his various demands in 1938. Later that year, he also occupied parts of nearby Czechoslovakia – about a full year before the more violent invasions that we generally think of as the start of World War II. Can you imagine? Can you imagine that a democratically elected leader would talk about taking over friendly countries nearby…and then do it? 

We know where this went in the 1930s. And I just learned that a German poet had written a caution into a much earlier play that, “those who burn books will in the end burn people”. Hmmm.

You might be tempted to tell me I’m overreacting.

You might tell me we live in Canada where these things don’t happen – and I’d unfortunately have to remind you that we have a history that includes groups of children ending up in unmarked mass graves (in case you need a refresher or you’re not from around here, this link describes one example).

You might tell me that banning some words in government communications isn’t a direct road to genocide – and I’d want to agree with you. But then I’d remember a White House post on social media from a few days ago: they shared a video of people being deported. You might tell me that illegal immigration should be curbed and deporting non-citizens is a country’s right – and you’d have a point. But then I’d remember the specifics of the White House video and how they encouraged viewers to listen to the sounds of handcuffs as a form of ASMR – a term for relaxing noises. 

Do you see this? Do you see that it’s dehumanizing to glibly encourage people to relax while listening to other humans being locked up? Do you see that’s not so far removed from the Rwandan “leaders” encouraging one part of their population to think of the other part as cockroaches? Remember this: the people called cockroaches were later killed by their neighbours. With machetes. 

If you don’t see these connections, then please, please tell me. Tell me I’m overreacting. I would love to be overreacting, because if I’m not…it seems like we should be very worried. As I go about my day and watch myself and everyone around me having regular conversations and doing regular chores and taking care of regular business, I wonder: what should we be doing? The 10-year old version of me who learned about Anne Frank thinks I should be doing something. 

Maybe, at a minimum, we should be talking about what’s happening. I don’t mean doomscrolling. I mean really talking. Talking to our closest people, our distant relatives, our colleagues, our friends. 

Otherwise – and left to my own devices – I keep looping back to two images. 

In the first image, I am standing in a room in Sarajevo. There is a map of local Winter Olympics sites from the 1984 Games on the wall – the Winter Olympics were in Sarajevo just four years before they came to my city. Overlaid on the Olympics map in that room was an outline of all the places that snipers used while shooting people a few years after the Olympics…the people were shot for being Bosnian. I remember standing in that room and thinking, “Wow, imagine if my city’s Olympic sites were connected to sniper locations.” I also remember thinking, “Nah, that wouldn’t happen to us.”

And that takes me to the second image. A few years ago, I was visiting a fort used during the transatlantic slave trade and saw this quote inscribed in stone (I learned later that it was originally written by a German named Martin Niemöller and has been displayed in other locations as well):

They came first for the Communists,
But I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

I don’t know what else we can do but try to speak up. Or…maybe you can convince me that I’m overreacting. 

I’d really like to be overreacting. 

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