Why is Holocaust Denial Growing?

This month Jews everywhere marked the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur to welcome our New Year. They are solemn days and a time for renewal shared with family and friends every year, even by the most secular Jewish people.

As a child I was moved by those days when I stood with my parents and siblings in our small synagogue and listened to the Hebrew prayers being chanted. I loved hearing the Shofar blown on Rosh Hashana and the time for reflection and hope at Yom Kippur, a day of atonement when we forgive ourselves for the past year’s transgressions and promise to do better in the coming year. I crafted a poem about these annual rituals some years ago as I remembered years gone by.

In that poem called “Kol Nidre” – the mournful prayer that marks Yom Kippur - I wrote this (edited) verse: “Kol Nidre  and I am bound to every Jew, in every place, at every time…and in every corner of the globe [where] a Jew is standing, swaying, weeping, praying…I stand beside the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, and in the camps, and I am with the Jews of pogroms,… Kol Nidre, and I am everywhere and in every time there is a Jew to remember.”

Later I wrote another poem. It was inspired by my learning that I was born in the same month as the fall of the Krakow Ghetto. A month later the Warsaw Ghetto collapsed. “It happened over and over again, until the black saber of the Holocaust disemboweled European Jewry,” I wrote, imagining myself in Anne Frank’s attic, and wondered “if I would have had the courage, the cunning, the chutzpah to survive?” I imagined what it must have been like in Kracow and Waraw and Auschwitz “because I was born a Jew.” “I might have been among them, racing for a cellar, a closet, a bed cover. Anywhere where they could not, will not find me.”

I share those excerpts because both of my parents had fled pogroms in Ukraine with their families when they were children early in the 20th century, simply because they were Jewish. I share them because the pogroms and the Holocaust are part of my history and my heritage. I share them because I’ve read Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl and copious other writers who wrote true Holocaust stories. I share them because I’ve been to Yad Vashem and Holocaust museums and memorials here and in Europe, and I share them this year because for the first time I was afraid to attend High Holy Days services given the increase in anti-Semitism and the increasing denial of the Holocaust.

An April program on PBS’s News Hour reported that “antisemitism rose in the U.S. last year and shows little sign of abating worldwide,” according to researchers. Last year a similar study reported that “2021 set a new high for antisemitic incidents, and in some countries, most alarmingly the United States, it intensified.” Additionally, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) reported that the number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. increased by more than 35 percent in the past year.

A survey reported in The Atlantic titled “The World Is Full of Holocaust Deniers,” almost ten years ago found that only 54 percent of the world’s population had heard of the Holocaust. Let that sink in: 54 percent, in 2014.  Only a third of the world’s world population at that time believed the genocide had been accurately described in historical counts and 30 percent of survey respondents thought that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.”

Today the problem is exacerbated by social media and the Internet where misinformation, memes, and hate-filled posts that perpetuate antisemitism and Holocaust denial are proliferating.  Most sites have done little to end this travesty in the name of free speech and debate. For example, Facebook and Twitter enacted weak policies prohibiting Holocaust denials a few years ago but as of this year, they continue to allow dangerous content on their sites. And they are not the only ones.

In 2022 the United Nations approved a resolution stating that genocide “will be forever a warning to all people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.”  Israel’s ambassador to the UN at the time went a bit further. A grandson of Holocaust victims, he said “the world lives in an era in which fiction is now becoming fact and the Holocaust is becoming a distant memory. Holocaust denial has spread like a cancer, and it has spread under our watch.”

The resolution and the rhetoric of politicians and diplomats seems to have had little impact. Holocaust denial and distortions are growing, and they are stunning, while antisemitism has risen in many countries. The Netherlands is one of them.

A government minister there made this statement at a cabinet meeting in July this year: “Denial of these kinds of heinous crimes against humanity is commonplace. …This … should not be left unaddressed, as the lesson of the Holocaust is not just a history lesson. It affects the here and now. … It is about good and evil.

He’s right of course. But we need more than words and resolutions to stop the scourge that has so many Jews frightened. We need to bear witness as the few remaining survivors of Auschwitz and other death camps give testimony. We need to read the books of Holocaust writers and to look at the photos and write poems. We need political action and responsible information platforms. And we need it all now so that we can feel safe - simply because we are Jewish.

Balfour's Big Blunder and Today's Israel

“What goes around, comes around” and “You reap what you sow” are truisms that come to mind when I learn what is happening in Israel. I wouldn’t know much about it if I relied on mainstream media or cable news because no editorial decisionmakers dare risk raising the issue of ethnic cleansing in a country that the U.S. supports in policy, rhetoric, and military support, despite the consequences. Nor do policymakers want to utter a word that might result in the alienation of Jewish organizations, funders, or voters. 

As a Jewish American, like many others, I am heartbroken by what is happening to Palestinians because of the excessively rightwing government now in power in Israel, a country that was founded because of atrocities committed against them. 

Understanding how Israel got here is helpful. A brief history is instructive. In 1917 a document, the Balfour Declaration, was issues by the British government calling for the establishment of a “national home” for the Jewish people in Palestine. It was the first time the term “Zionism” was used by Britain, a major political power.   No boundaries for what would constitute Palestine were specified in the document, but it was made clear, rhetorically, that the national home of Jews would not cover all of Palestine. The declaration also called for safeguarding the civil and religious rights for Palestinian Arabs, who made up a vast majority of the local population.  In 2017 the British recognized publicly that the Balfour Declaration should have assured political rights for Palestinians in the declaration.

So how did we get here? That question is largely answered in Ilan Pappe’s 2006 well documented book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. He explains that in 1948 over 700,000 Arabs, three fourths of the Palestinians living in territories that became Israel, fled or were expelled from their homes. Pappe identifies that exodus as the planned beginning of ethnic cleansing by Israel, designed by David Ben Gurion, a leader in the Zionist movement, and his advisors who had declared before 1948 that they were developing plans for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in order to establish Israel. The exodus and expulsion of 500 Arab village residents along with terrorist attacks against civilians came from that plan known as Dalet.

The Palestinians called the ethnic cleansing occurring during Israel’s establishment Nakba (catastrophe) as they became “stateless refugees.” For Palestinians, Nakba continues, and no wonder. Many Israelis, including political and religious leaders think Plan Dalet didn’t go far enough. In March, for example, a Palestinian man was killed by an Israeli soldier or settler. Israeli settlers then set hundreds of Palestinian homes and cars on fire in the occupied West Bank and Netanyahu’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a senior member of the Knesset, said in an interview that he thought “the village needed to be wiped out.” Two years ago he told Palestinian members of the Knesset that “it’s a mistake that Ben Gurion didn’t finish the job and throw you out in 1948.” Smotrich was recently appointed governor over the occupied West Bank.

Another favorite ethnic cleanser advocate, National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, has been given an Israeli national guard, actually a militia. He’s the guy who went to Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque in May and stood there in mock prayer as a Jew in an affront to Palestinians, thus mixing politics with religion. (The site of the mosque is called Temple Mount by Jews.)

Clearly tensions are mounting. No wonder. In February the Israeli military killed ten Palestinians, include two elderly men and a child, and injured numerous others in a raid on Nablus, then blocked Palestinian medical teams from treating them. More recently Israeli forces raided a refugee camp along with several Palestinian cities and villages where they fired live ammunition into crowds of people, injuring over 70 and killing two young Palestinians, one of whom had a disability. Again, they blocked Palestinian ambulances from providing medical care and used tear gas in a hospital.

Attacks are increasing and getting worse. In June a brutal assault was carried out, authorized by Smotrich, to hasten settlement expansion. F-16s and Apache helicopters fired on Palestinian ambulances, killing a teenager. Also in June, Israeli forces fired at a car, killing a two-year-old and critically injuring his father outside their home. Mohammad, the child, was the 27th Palestinian child killed by the Israeli military in the first half of this year. His death will not be the last of the child victims.

Palestinian journalists are also being targeted. In June six of them covering Israeli raids, were targeted. A cameraman was shot covering the Jenin killings, a journalist was killed in raids along with two youngsters, and another journalist was shot in the head. Let’s not forget that it’s been a year since the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by Israeli forces – an anniversary that American media failed to mention.

I have written frequently about Israel’s increasing violence against Palestinians, so I know to expect blowback, some of it chilling. But I cannot remain silent, and neither should our government in light of what has just occurred in Jenin, and is likely to continue elsewhere. As Israel becomes a fascist dictatorship, it’s imperative that we call out the “intentional escalation of violence by an occupying military power” as Jewish Voice for Peace says.

We must not reap what we sow in silence.

Where is Abigail Adams in Today''s Political Discourse?

In all the talk about encroaching autocracy in America and elsewhere, politicians, pundits, media personalities and others need to remember the words and wisdom of the revolutionary first First Lady, Abigail Adams, who admonished her husband to “remember the ladies.”

Another First Lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton, echoed her predecessor in a recent CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour when she called out the absence of misogyny in various analyses of forces at work when countries descend into autocracies and dictatorships.

She was right to do that. In the growing discourse about various factors that prevail when democracies slide into autocracy, white supremacy, race, class and caste quickly rise to the surface as identifiable and frightening factors.  But not a word is uttered about the systemic oppression of women, which has been part of dictatorial regimes and cultures throughout history. 

Examples abound from ancient times to now, with women being treated like second class citizens in almost every country and culture. In ancient Greece women were thought to hinder democracy as the weaker sex. Considered property, they lived in seclusion without rights, valued only as the bearers of male progeny. In medieval times religious institutions kept women quiet and voiceless while the idea of women as property prevailed into more modern times as women were “owned” by their fathers and husbands by virtue of economic indenture and lack of agency in male dominated societies.

Fast forward to the 20th and 21st centuries and consider the fact that women were denied the vote in America until 1920, and dictators like Hitler and Ceausescu mandated childbearing, rendering women nothing more than semen vessels and property of the state, something we are seeing emerge in our own country. Women continue to have limited access to leadership positions, economic parity, and agency over their own lives – largely legislatively ignored and increasingly court ordered.

The question is why.  The answer? It is intentional, overtly or unconsciously, because in a world dominated largely by (white) men terrified of losing patriarchal power, woman are immensely threatening.  The fact is powerful men know that women have different priorities than they do, and that those priorities are grounded in a profound commitment to human rights and social justice, not in greed, moral and financial corruption, massive profits, or overwhelming power. They also know that women are deeply intelligent, strategic, capable people and that they are organizing as never before.

One has only to look at the brave women of Iran who are willing to face torture, rape and murder for “Women, Life, Freedom”, or to consider the courage of Kurdish women who fought on the battleground and Rohingya women standing up to their oppressors.  Or to remember the abuelas of Latin America who never gave up the fight to find their missing children, the women of Liberia and India whose work saved lives and changed policy, the French and Ghetto resistance movement women who helped win a war. Then there were the women who shared their personal stories about rape and sexual abuse at global conferences and with local newspapers, the million women who marched in Washington, DC the day after Donald Trump became president, the women artists, writers, musicians, photographers, organizers, the mothers demanding gun legislation, the lawyers who raised an army of volunteer lawyers overnight to litigate on behalf of immigrants at airports or helped a ten year old raped child escape forced childbearing.  The examples go on and on and on.

That is why male retaliation against women in Iran is so violent, why rape is increasingly a war crime, why the Supreme Court of the United States has rendered women property of the state, why domestic abuse and gun violence against women are on the rise, why books by and about women are banned in such high numbers, , why women are going to jail for having a miscarriage and more broadly why teachers can no long teach history or talk about gay marriage or use certain words, or encourage girls to play sports or to dream of becoming president and so much more.

It all paints a portrait of misogyny at its most extreme because powerful men simply cannot abide a world in which women too are powerful whether in their homes, communities, states, or countries. The very thought of sharing the podium or the parliament or a pay scale with females is completely abhorrent because deep down powerful men know that women bring skills and experience to bear on pressing issues of our time, so they resort o to further and deeper methods of domination, exclusion, and abuse.

And that is why we must include misogyny in the public and private discourse surrounding our deep concerns and increasing acknowledgement that our democracy, and democracy elsewhere, are indeed in a precarious and perishable place. It is why women are choosing, and working hard, to revolt against the evils of autocracy that could well render them “a leaf blowing in the whirlwind,” a destiny that political philosopher Hannah Arendt warned us all against.

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The Life Force of Livid Women is at Work

In 1995 when activist, advocate and former Congresswoman Bella Abzug uttered these words at the 4th World Conference of Women in Beijing, thousands of women there and everywhere felt the force of her words: “Women will change the nature of power, power will not change the nature of women. Never underestimate the importance of what we are doing. Never give in and never give up!”

Recently, when I quoted those words to a group of adult learners in recounting United Nations conferences focusing on women that had occurred over 20 years between 1975 and the Beijing conference, some participants struggled to understand what Abzug meant about the nature of power as it relates to gender.  For several days I pondered their questions searching for clarity in how to respond. Then on October 3rd something happened that helped me articulate an answer.

That was the day Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to be seated on the Supreme Court of the United States, and I realized that the three critical voices of dissent on the badly damaged highest court in our county would now be women’s voices. Their intelligent, impassioned collective legal analysis would still be in the Court’s minority, but having them there, “speak[ing] truth to nonsense” as legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick, author of the new book Lady Justice puts it, highlights a watershed moment in which the nature of power for both women and men is shifting, not symbolically but in real terms, representing a new understanding of how women are reshaping how we live.

Described as “a beacon to generations” in one account of her first day on the bench, it was not lost on legal scholars, and many women, that Justice Jackson has arrived at the Supreme Court at a critical and necessary time. Her effectiveness as a voice of dissent, reminiscent of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s, was apparent when with quiet authority she offered to “bring some enlightenment” to a provision in the Clean Water Act in her response to an attorney hoping to kill the Act.

The voices of women like Justice Jackson and Dahlia Lithwick, inside and out of courtrooms, speak volumes to multitudes of women and their advocates in a time when females are being dragged back to a full throttled misogyny so devoid of understanding, compassion, and justice and so deeply punitive and threatening it boggles the mind.

That’s why acts of resistance like the one Iran’s women are bravely mounting with global support have always existed, whether over female sexuality, the quest for freedom, need for voting rights and economic security, or egregious political acts of injustice. Women in vast numbers through the ages have had enough. They are tired of being silenced, rendered invisible, and metaphorically burned at the stake. They’ve had enough of being told to calm down when revealing their consciousness and attempts at social justice based on lived experience, whether in capitals, courtrooms or communities. They’re exhausted from abuses in the marketplace, the academy, the home, and the mine fields of micro-aggression. They are more ready than ever to self-advocate in the face of misogyny driven violence, abuse and poverty while rejecting discrimination, deprivation, and  unrealistic expectations.

In a recently published LitHub article about her new book Dahlia Lithwick captures this frustration while interviewing numerous women who worked within the legal system. One of them was Anita Hill, who shared this personal story about giving a presentation on Supreme Court decisions. “A young white man said, ‘Aren’t you being a little paranoid? You act as though the sky is falling.’” Hill replied, “Here’s a list [of examples]. You tell me when the sky is falling.” Later she realized “it wasn’t just that the sky was falling. It was because we don’t live under the same sky.” Lithwick adds, “I realized that much like the 6-3 conservative supermajority that now controls the court, they simply don’t live under the same sky.”

Therein, Hill and Lithwick capture a key problem. As Lithwick puts it, addressing charges of paranoia and hysteria, “The mirror image of telling a woman you believe her is telling her she is being hysterical. … That is the real problem when women’s pain is substituted for actual justice.” And as she points out, “our very presence is outrageous. The fact that we even say anything is a sign of resistance.”

It is that resistance to insults and dismissal that I think Bella Abzug was reaching for when she spoke of gendered power in 1995. She knew, of course, that not all the world’s women would be with her along with the thousands of women who came to Beijing, nor would they all welcome the change women so badly need. But she also understood that for millennia, power has been the purview and prerogative of men, a notion that has been considered a social norm, despite women having always been a profound presence seeking justice and human rights, rendering themselves a thorn in the side of patriarchal power.

Women’s voices and calls for justice are always fundamental to resisting imposed silence, so Bella’s clarion call to a fatigued sisterhood who needed to be infused with new energy and hope was deeply important in that moment. It’s also why Judge Jackson’s presence on the Supreme Court now, along with Justices Kagan and Sotomayor, is so very important. 

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social justice from Brattleboro, Vt.

Feminism Isn't Dead, It's Exhausted

Just days before the horrific Supreme Court decision that killed Roe v. Wade, a grievous act that rendered women and girls property of the state and subjected them to forced childbearing, a spate of opinion pieces appeared bemoaning the fact that feminism was all but gone in the face of massive backlash. Feminists I admire wrote disheartening columns that included expert opinion, research findings and personal analysis.

New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote that “As the backlash gains steam, a lot of feminism feels enervated. There had been a desperate hope, among reproductive rights activists and Democratic strategists alike, that the end of Roe v. Wade would lead to an explosive feminist mobilization, that people committed to women’s equality would take to the streets and recommit themselves to politics. But after the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, it’s far from clear whether a political groundswell will materialize.”

Susan Faludi’s New York Times piece argued that pop culture, celebrity, rampant consumerism along with fierce individualism has fueled not just a backlash but a subtle generational divide in which younger feminists can be said to fight against “practical impediments to equality,” while second wave feminists (like myself) were “old-fashioned shoe-leather organizers” who were “oblivious to race and class.” In making her argument against generational conflict she asks for “a reckoning with feminism” that “goes beyond generational indictments. It’s an admirable goal that has merit but her language seems to fuel the divide.”

What these two essays have in common is a focus on millennial feminism and their collective analysis should be taken seriously, But what troubles me is the notion that feminism, in all its variations and iterations, has spawned a powerful backlash and become divisive to the point of annihilation. As a second wave feminist I reject that idea having worked, marched, protested with and mentored millennial women. The feminism of my generation, flawed though it has been, is not dead; it is exhausted. In the words of the beloved civil rights leader Fanny Lou Hamer, we are simply “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Our fight has been long and arduous and unless you’ve been through it it’s impossible to grasp what it took to keep on keeping on, and how punishing it could be – which leads me to some thoughts on younger feminists.

First, with due respect to millennial women who never experienced a pregnancy scare in pre-Roe v. Wade times, times when women couldn’t get credit without a male guarantor, could be fired for being pregnant, couldn’t earn anything like what men doing the same work did, had no recourse to domestic violence, and more, there are lessons to be learned from those feminists – their mothers and grandmothers - who preceded and fought for them. Sadly, they are about to find out what it’s like and what it takes to begin again from the ground up. When they do find out their elders will be marching, protesting, voting, lobbying and more by their side. There will be no false dichotomy because we are all women who have been there or find ourselves there now. In that sense, context, as older feminists know, is everything; and “the personal [really] is political” because what happens to one of us can happen to all of us when male power presides over our lives.

In that context I urge young women to educate themselves fully about women’s history and courageous fights for equality, full personhood, social justice and human rights in this country. Our battles cross every sector of society and we have fought them well so that our daughters and granddaughters could lead better lives than many of my generation did.

As I tell my young friends, there is a qualitative difference between pussy hats and T-shirt slogans, and social media is not the same as showing up in big numbers, which takes organizing on a scale that can feel overwhelming. (Just ask Stacy Abrams.) Also, it’s deeply important to understand the politics of power, and the power of politics in order to think and act sufficiently strategically so that change becomes a new reality.

I’m not arguing against a new, different feminism; as the wise Greek philosopher Heraclitus knew, “The Only Constant in Life Is Change.” I’m making a case for a hybrid feminism that doesn’t fall prey to conflict among its constituents for lack of context, depth, and experience.

As for the disastrous decisions of a Supreme Court run amok, Rebecca Traister offered this call for hope: Noting that the situation is “wretched and plain” and will get worse,” she wrote in The Cut, “the task for those who are stunned by the baldness of the horror, paralyzed by the bleakness of the view, is to figure out how to move forward anyway. … because while it is incumbent on us to digest the scope and breadth of the badness, it is equally our responsibility not to despair.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Tina Smith agree. Writing in a New York Times op ed., they noted that this is a “dark moment” that “will require a long, hard fight.” As second wave feminists, they know what they’re talking about. “The two of us lived in an America without Roe v. Wade, and we are not going back. Not now. Not ever.” I’m with them.

Another Day, Another Newtown: The Obscenity of Gun Violence

When news of another school slaughter broke, this time again in Texas, the bile that rose in my throat was as bitter as the memory of Columbine, Newtown, Parkland – and the other grievous incidents of gun violence in schools – all 554 of them since Columbine, as NPR has reported.

From the Carolinas to California, 27 school shootings are among the 200 mass shootings this year alone in America, and it’s only May.   But this is not a time for numbers. It is a time for unprecedented action borne of rage about what is happening in our country. It is also time to answer burning questions: why is it happening, and what are we going to do about it? It is a time to shout our disgust and dismay, to demand gun legislation now, and to take action to end the slaughter of innocent children.

Here is what I believe must happen NOW. All living presidents (with the exception of Donald Trump) should stand together before Congress and declare that we are done with thoughts and prayers. We are done with the platitudes that surround grief and loss. We are done with inaction, and with turning the other way because political power is more important than loving our babies, especially among those who champion fetuses but ignore the needs of living children.

Go on strike because that is what it will take – teachers, clergy, workers, moms, women and men alike. Call for and participate in a national strike against violence and the insanity of mass murder. Bring down the economy as well as the evil that prevails on Capital Hill if that’s what it takes to stop the killing.

Call it what it is: a public health epidemic, not a gun violence or mental health issue.  We can and must learn the lessons of pioneering health communication campaigns, including, against all odds, the successful fight against the tobacco industry, which saved the lives of hundreds of thousands and demonstrated that people are capable of change.

It is vital for Americans to vote, this year and in 2024, with all the energy a soul can muster.  Stand in line for days if that’s what it takes to be counted among the family of humankind, and the families who must now endure unimaginable and unending sadness.

Most importantly, Americans who want the massacres of innocents to stop must demand an end to the filibuster and lobby for killing the Second Amendment -- the only way to halt the madness we’ve grown used to. Forget appeasing the irresponsible, vicious right wing with calls for limited legislation; go for the one thing that can stop gun violence faster and more conclusively than anything else -- an end to an irrelevant and antiquated amendment written before bullets and rifles that tear bodies apart in seconds were invented.

I believe that what lies at the heart of the tragic problem that is ours alone among developed countries is this: We are a nation wedded to violence and we always have been.

From the time white men first set foot on American soil guns have been used in genocides to eliminate non-white Native American peoples. During slavery guns were a way (along with physical punishment) to ensure forced labor and to instill terror among human beings who were bought and sold. Throughout our entire history guns have been part of our increasingly lethal war arsenals and today the sale of weapons in the U.S. is higher than it has ever been, while the people least likely to be killed by a bullet are made exceedingly rich.

Killing, it appears, is in our DNA. Mass murder has come to define us, whether through war, incarceration, racist law enforcement, the consequences of ignoring poverty while clamoring for personal and financial power, and random gun violence. All of it results in deep-seated human pain in a nation that is “exceptional” in all the wrong ways. We must end our killing fields if we are ever to have pride in a country that asks us to pledge our allegiance.

We have become a country in which the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, appears at NRA’s convention, held in Texas, three days after 19 children were brutally shot to death there, a country where a former president who tried to overthrow an election, and a Senator from Texas who thinks we need more guns, join the governor. It is a country that exposes the personification of evil and reminds us how often scum rises to the top.

So I say this to Governor Abbott: Have you, at long last, no decency? And to Ted Cruz I say: You are not sorry. You are guilty. You have colluded with mass murderers. May the words spoken to me by a 4-year old child ring in your adult ears for all eternity: “Sometimes sorry is not good enough.”  As for Donald Trump, there are no words.

To all the others akin to these monsters, I say only this: We condemn your evil. We will inscribe your names and your deeds and your selfishness in the world’s history books, and we will celebrate the end of your cruelty for all our days.

Women Who Change the World: La Pasionaria Past and Present

Throughout history women have left their mark on the world in numerous, and often unknown, unrecognized, or forgotten ways. What better time to honor some of them than Women’s History Month, especially the “pasionarias.”

La Pasionaria, a term that has come to encompass powerful, activist women whether by word or deed, derives from a Communist leader in the Spanish Civil War, named Dolores Ibarruru. According to the Encyclopedia  Britannica, she became known as La Pasionaria - “The Passionflower” in Spanish – because of her brilliant oratory and her war cry, “No pasaran!” (They shall not pass!) Her oratory led to her imprisonment several times, but she never stopped talking on street corners and other venues. When Franco became Spain’s dictator, she fled to the Soviet Union where she represented her party at Kremlin congresses until 1960, returning to Spain in 1977, where she served in the Spanish parliament until her death in 1989.

  Not all pasionarias are as forceful in their rhetoric as Ibarruru, but she is matched by one of my favorites -- Sojourner Truth, who knocked the socks off the white men who heard her fiery speech, “Ain’t I A Woman?” at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Ohio  “…..That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere,” the petite, illiterate truthteller before them said. “Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? ….Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? … From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him…” From her slave roots to the White House at the invitation of Abraham Lincoln, the itinerant preacher never stopped advocating for abolition, civil and women’s rights.

Some women exercise their power by speaking publicly, but others use words in other irreversible ways. One of them was Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the pioneering work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, published in 1792. In her groundbreaking treatise she argued for women’s right to education, surpassing other pleas on the same topic by calling for national education systems. While her ideas languished in her own time, by the middle of the 19th century her impact was being felt by women’s rights leaders, including Emmaline Pankhurst in England and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her colleagues in America, who included numerous rights for women in their demands.

Women who entered the realm of politics were often pasionarias. One of them was Jeannette Rankin, the first woman member of the U.S. Congress, a Republican representing Montana from 1917 to 1919, and again from 1941 to 1943, thus serving during both WWI and WWII. A social worker by training, she campaigned for women’s suffrage for years before gaining the right for women to vote in Montana. An outspoken pacifist, she voted against war with Germany in 1917 and again in 1941, ending her political career, but she continued advocating for social reform and peace. “If I had my life to live over again,” she once said, “I’d do it all again, but this time I would be nastier.”

Many lesser-known women have had major political, literary, and rhetorical impact. I was privileged to know some of them when I worked in Washington, DC on behalf of women. There was Mildred Marcy, who wrote the sentence that became known as the Percy Amendment, so that women became equal beneficiaries in U.S. foreign assistance programs.  Virginia Allen saw to it that every state had a Commission for Women. Others quietly effected change behind the scenes.

Among that generation of outstanding women who helped create a constituency for the life-changing women’s movement was Esther Peterson with whom I had a special friendship. She worked on behalf of women from the days of FDR to the Carter and Clinton administrations. The first woman lobbyist for the AFL-CIO, she was assigned to lobby a young legislator named John F. Kennedy, Jr. They became fast friends. When JFK became president, he asked Esther what she would like to do in government, That’s how she became head of the Women’s Bureau at the Labor Department where she was recognized for her quiet, highly effective leadership.

Many women throughout history from all countries, cultures, and walks of life have been, and are, worthy of being called pasionarias. From the Roman Hortensia who was renowned as a skilled orator, and Aspasia of Greece, who held influential salons attended by Socrates, to today’s Emma Gonzales, whose oratory after the Parkland school shootings stunned a nation, to Greta Thunberg, who as a teenager shocked United Nations representatives with her condemnation of climate change cliches, and Malala Yousafzai, who, like Mary Wollstonecraft, became an influential leader advocating for girls’ education, the tradition of women’s wise and powerful words, whether written or spoken, goes on.

As Dolores Ibarruru and all the others who have gone before us might have said, “Brava, Pasionarias, Gracias, and Abrazos! We commend you, and we are ever grateful.”

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Elayne Clift writes about women, politics and social issues from Vermont. www.elayne-clift.com

The Normalization of Fascism

When my siblings and I were growing up and we did something untoward that got us into trouble my mother would say, “Let that be a lesson to you!” I’ve remembered that line whenever someone thinks I’m over-reacting when I say the Trump administration has opened the way to a functioning autocracy rapidly morphing into full-blown fascism.

I think about the truism that “history is prologue.  We should be taking that truth more seriously.

A chilling December article in The Guardian by Jason Stanley revealed why. “America is now in fascism’s legal phase,” Stanley posits.

His article begins with a 1995 quote by the late Toni Morrison. “Let us be reminded,” the writer said, “that before there is a final solution, there must be a first solution, a second one, even a third. The move toward a final solution is not a jump. It takes one step, then another, then another.”

Morrison recognized the connection between racism, anti-Semitism and fascist movements propagated by and aligned with oligarchs, as Stanley does. His compelling article lays out the various ways in which Donald Trump led us to the tipping point “where rhetoric becomes policy.”

Among the issues Stanley discusses are the takeover of our courts by Trump appointees, right wing attempts at voter suppression, increasing corporate influence, the crackdown on reproductive rights and enforced gender roles, Jim Crow laws and controlled school curricula, increased political and police violence, mass incarceration particularly among blacks, threatening vigilante groups, and punitive actions towards journalists and non-loyalists. It’s a gobsmacking portrait of where we are now as a country on the brink.

This isn’t the first time America has had to confront insurrection and political violence, but it is a time to consider history, and to remember that this isn’t America’s first fascist threat.

The lessons of history include a close look at all dictatorships. In this moment, it is urgent that we consider Hitler’s rise to power. As Stanley and others make clear, Hitler and his minions were adept at using propaganda and lies to create a narrative that led to his election, and his subsequent hideous policies. Citing “the big lie” that the last election was stolen, Stanley notes that “we have begun to restructure institutions, notable electoral infrastructure and law” and that “the media’s normalization of these processes encourages silence at all costs.’

German fascism didn’t arise overnight. Germany’s National Socialist Party began small, but extremely right wing and anti-democratic, according to historians. Masked in nationalist rhetoric, its agenda resonated with people who felt worried and humiliated. They welcomed scapegoats. Stanley put it this way: “The central message of Nazi politics was to demonize a set of constructed enemies, an unholy alliance of communists and Jews.” Nazi leaders “recognized that the language of family, faith, morality, and homeland could be used to justify especially brutal violence against an enemy represented as being opposed to all these things.”

Sound familiar? We’ve already heard talk of book burning, spying on each other, and Jews altering their behavior as precautionary measures. We’ve witnessed racist violence, attacks on peaceful protesters, and acts of white supremacy grounded in the claim that we are a Christian nation. Congress has its share of pro-autocracy politicians, and our local and state governments have all been infiltrated. Vigilante groups prowl the streets, guns and hate placards waving.

What more do we need to wake up?

This is not the first fascist threat to American democracy but the pro-Nazi movement of the 1930s and early 1940s was the most frightening to date. Characterized by a 1939 event at Madison Square Garden, a rally of 22,000 members of the German party known as the Bund, saluted large banners in Nazi fashion. The banners showed George Washington surrounded by swastikas.  

The movement included summer camps for children, billed as family friendly venues, where Nazi indoctrination took place.  At one of them in New York state an annual German Day festival attracted 40,000 people. Germany’s brown-shirted camp kids later became SS thugs. 

The American Nazi movement, with which Charles Lindbergh sympathized, came to an end only after the 1939 invasion of Poland by Hitler, followed by the Bund being outlawed in 1941. All of this is captured in Philip Roth’s semi-autobiographical novel The Plot Against America.

Nevertheless, America has continued to witness Nazi inspired acts. In 1978 a rally in Skokie, Illinois repeated the language of the Third Reich. Donald Trump coopted a German slogan in “America First” as support for anti-immigration sentiments. And now white supremacist rhetoric is being spewed as it was in Charlottesville in 2017. A year ago, a massive crowd of insurrectionists stormed the Capital wearing T-shirts embossed “Camp Auschwitz.”  

In her speech at Howard University, Toni Morrison asserted that fascism relies upon media to convey an illusion of power to its followers.  Now, finally, the media is listening to booming alarm bells and the military is preparing for an all-out coup which could happen in 2024 if not before.

It’s time now to ask for whom the alarm bells toll. As Ernest Hemingway knew, it tolls for all of us.

Terrorist Plots and Truthful Testimonies

 They came to the Capital on January 6th bearing weapons as lethal as stones, spears, sprays, racist epithets, and yes, guns. They came with hatred and treasonous purpose. They perpetrated unspeakable violence against law enforcement officers, including beating them viciously, trying to blind them and bashing their heads in. They murdered one of them.

In compelling testimony before Congressional Committee members and those who witnessed the televised hearing on July 27th, four courageous Capital police officers shared what it felt like to believe they were about to die. They were officers who refused to stand down, to give up, to stop doing all they could to stop a likely massacre. They spoke eloquently and with conviction about the need to protect our democracy. Committee members were moved to tears as they thanked the witnesses and pledged to seek the truth about what had happened on that awful day. Those of us watching at home wept with them.

Kevin McCarthy, the House Minority Leader, did not.  He’d already made his position and those of Republican deniers clear before the hearing began. Attacking the Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), House Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and a number of other House members, he declared vehemently that the purpose of the Committee hearing should be on making sure such an event never happened again by being more prepared.

Republican Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and others, who marched in protest of the hearing, joined the fray, with Rep. Stefanik blaming Rep. Pelosi for “the tragedy that occurred on that day” – a day that will be part of American history forever.

But here’s the thing. The four witnesses in the hearing that took place on July 27th also brought weapons to Capitol Hill. 

Their words and witnessing were the weapons of truth telling. They were words that built monuments to accountability and transparency. They reminded committee members that overriding political machinations and power grabs is an urgent priority, and the true purpose of the Committee. They gave us all a moment in American history that will remind us forever how close we came to the demise of our democracy.

In building their word monuments, they warned us that without getting to “the hit man” and who hired him, we are still at risk.  They demanded, politely, articulately, and with deep conviction, that Congress do what only it can do, which is to get not just to the bottom of what happened, but to the top of how it happened.  They said what many others in Congress won’t: Donald Trump was responsible for the so-called insurrection.

Republicans can obfuscate and try to steer their remaining followers away from that truth, but if the Committee does what it promised as it reacted emotionally to the four witnesses, they cannot avoid getting to the totality of what occurred on January 6th and holding all those who colluded and cooperated accountable.

As Chairman Bennie Thompson noted in his opening statement, “A violent mob was pointed toward the Capitol and told to win a trial by combat. Some descended on this city with clear plans to disrupt our democracy. One rioter said, ‘We were just there to overthrow the government.’”

Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), one of only two conservative Republicans who agreed to be on the Committee, added that she was “obligated to rise above politics” by participating. “We cannot leave the violence of January 6th and its causes un-investigated. We must also know what happened every minute of that day in the White House – every phone call, every conversation, every meeting leading up to, during, and after the attack.”

The four witnesses, and all who heard their testimony and watched, yet again, traumatizing video clips during the Committee hearing, couldn’t agree more.

But perhaps it is the simple words of Harry Dunn, a black officer who suffered racist slurs and violence during that fateful day, that resonate most powerfully: “I want you to get to the bottom of it,” he said when asked what he wanted the Committee to do.  Or maybe it was when Michael Fanone, a DC Metropolitan Police officer who was beaten unconscious and tased to the point of suffering a heart attack, slammed his fist on the table as he called the violence “disgraceful.”

Whatever those of us remember most about the Committee’s hearing, for me it comes down to something Harry Dunn said. “There was a hit man. I want you to get to the bottom of that.”

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What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

What Do We Mean When We Talk About Human Rights?

“Human Rights.” It’s a term tossed around all too easily, a hollow piece of rhetoric practiced in the breach, a faux cliché uttered in fragile times. It’s a mantra lacking moral conviction and humane behavior, a way to cover the shame of failed promises, a salve without resolve spread by self-righteous, glib politicians at podiums and to the media. It’s a hollow claim that enables us to believe we are an “exceptional” country. It’s a lie in the face of multiple human tragedies in which we are complicit. These are tragedies that we fuel, facilitate, ignore, without asking ourselves how committed we are as a nation to the imperative of human rights.

I come to this awareness when I ask how it is that we condemn Russia’s or China’s or Myanmar’s human rights abuses against their people while continuing to sanction Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinian people among them.

I come to it when I think about how we abandoned the people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia who helped us during that dreadful war, and then tried to do the same thing to the Afghan people who worked at the American Embassy or for American contractors and the American military, lessened in its shameful practice, but not eliminated only because of public outcries.

I came to it when we were silent about what Saudi Arabia has done in Yemen, and in its embassy in Turkey, and when our silence did not help end the atrocities in Syria. Of course, I understand the politics of non-action no matter where it occurs, but when politics trumps humanity I shudder.

I come to it when a kid is tased by cops for going through some bushes to see his girlfriend, and when black men are shot in the back and black women are shot in bed.

I come to it when women are denied agency over their own bodies and jailed for “infanticide” when they miscarry.

I come to it when we fail to make the connections between poverty, policy and practices, whether in schools, courtrooms, jails, or other institutions, for surely housing, food security, safety from judicial harm, appropriate quality healthcare, a decent and equal education, and a livable planet are all basic human rights.

Surely there is something inhumane about the Bezos and Zuckerbergs of the world accumulating billions of dollars of wealth while paying no taxes and the poohbahs of parliaments think earning a livable wage is too much to sanction and legislate.

The fact that almost seven million people in the world live in abject poverty according to World Vision-- often situational, generational or geographic -- while wealthy nations like ours look the other way, illuminates the hollow rhetoric of “human rights.” It is also shameful that the United States has the fourth highest poverty rate in the world– nearly 18 percent – and the largest income inequality gap in the world according to the Brookings Institution.

According to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a milestone document in the history of human rights, there are two kinds of human right violations: those committed overtly by the state, and those in which the state fails to protect against human rights violations. These violations can be civil, political, economic, cultural, or social in nature.  Civil rights include the right to life, safety, and equality before the law while political rights include the right to a fair trial and the right to vote.

Economic, social and cultural rights include the right to work, the right to education, and the right to physical and mental health. These rights relate to things like clean water, adequate housing, appropriate healthcare, non-discrimination at work, maternity leave, fair wages, and more.

Just take a look at that list of human rights and then try convincing me that we haven’t violated, and that we don’t continue to violate each and every one of them, all the while claiming that we champion “human rights.”

Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr. are often quoted on the issue of human rights, reminding us of our failures to protect these rights. Mandela asked that we remember that “To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.”  Martin Luther King, Jr. admonished us to never forget that “A right delayed is a right denied.”

Mary Robinson, Ireland’s first woman president, asked us never to forget that “today’s human rights violations are the causes of tomorrow’s conflicts.”

Wise words, all. But how sad that we need to hear them over and over again, and that we still fail to instill them in our hearts and our policies.

For me, the words of Eleanor Roosevelt resonate most: “Where, after all, do universal human rights begin?” she asked. Her answer: “In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world ... Such are the places where every man, woman and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere.”

Would that we take to heart what she said at every level of our private and public lives.

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Elayne Clift writes about women, health, and social justice from Saxtons River, Vt.

Just published! A 21st Century Plague: Poetry from a Pandemic

Like the Covid-19 virus, poetry related to the pandemic has flourished. This anthology, which I am proud to have conceived and edited, adds to the literature of the pandemic in unique ways, capturing some of the best poetry on the topic in a moving, diverse and empathetic collection that includes noted writers and award-winning poets.

 Contributors are wide-ranging. From well-known writer Marge Piercy to an Irish Franciscan brother, a prison inmate, an Indian poet, a geriatric care nurse, artists and educators, the poetry speaks to challenging times in which we must find our strengths and forgive our foibles.

   There are 53 poets and 70 poems in this collection. Works range from the poignant to the practical. Ginny Lowe Connors writes in “Her Eyes,” about seeing her patients, “Above the mask, behind the face shield, eyes huge, red-rimmed, gritty, glassy.” Brian Daldorph considers “Love in the Time of Plague,” as a couple “sit on the beach together” although “they’ve been told not to do it, to keep distant, to wear protective clothing.” Scholar Rai d’Honore contemplates prior plagues, including “The Black Death … As nasty a death as can be…” Burt Rashbaum remembers being virus exhausted: “The simplest things: do I really need celery, how much dog food is left, is that a dry cough or do I just need a glass of water.”

  The works in this collection bear witness and give universal meaning to shared experience. They help us remember, reflect, reconcile, and rejoice in small pleasures and new insights. They are each a story in verse, carefully composed, to create word monuments that quiet and comfort. In that way, they become gracefully therapeutic and healing while recording for future generations what it was like during a 21st century pandemic.

 “These poems, varied in form and content, beautifully capture the global experience of this pandemic as well as the individual emotions and struggles that are, at the same time, unique and universal: fear, defiance, longing, grief, anger, loneliness, gratitude for time and respite, hope―and often, joy in life's small, continuing gifts. Editor Elayne Clift has gathered a community of poets whose words are haunting, moving, charming, surprising and, finally, comforting.  Reading this anthology, you might find yourself saying, Yes, yes, I understand― I've felt that way too. I'm not alone.”

Cortney Davis, nurse practitioner; author of "I Hear Their Voices Singing: Poems New

Women and War: A Memorial Day Tribute

They were nurses, soldiers, code-breakers, factory workers, resistance fighters, POWs, victims. We should remember them on Memorial Day.

 Women have been warriors throughout history. During the Civil War, they assumed male aliases, wore men’s uniforms, and charged into battle on both sides. Harriet Tubman was a spy then and the first woman to lead a battalion into battle.

 Marge Piercy’s 1980 novel, Gone to Soldiers, revealed many tasks undertaken by women during WWII. Some ferried planes for the Air Force. Others, symbolized by Rosie the Riveter, worked in factories producing war goods. Women served as intelligence officers in Europe and others were social workers helping returning soldiers and their families.

 Nearly 800 women were sent to European warehouses to sort mail addressed to U.S. servicemen.  Major Fannie Griffin McClendon, who joined the Army’s only all black, female WWII battalion, the Six Triple Eight, was one of them, helping to boost morale among service members. She was honored at the Library of Congress in 2019 at the age of 99 when she was featured in the documentary “Six Triple Eight.”

 Many French women, courageous resistance fighters, were sent to concentration camps if caught. One, a young musician, played her violin outside a Nazi camp to sooth captured friends.Some were couriers or took food to Jews in hiding. Others blew up German trains and troops.

 In her book Code Girls, Liza Mundy tells the story of America’s women cryptographers who cracked difficult communication systems. More than 10,000 women were selected for this work. After Pearl Harbor, the military built its intelligence operation by bringing women college graduates in math and science to Washington, D.C. for training. They went on to break codes from merchant ships in the Pacific supplying Japanese troops so the Navy could sink them, and they gave Germans false information about where the Allied landing on D-Day would happen.

 Minnie Vautrin was an American missionary in China during the infamous 1937 Rape of Nanking, when an estimated 80,000 women were brutally violated by Japanese soldiers.  Minnie saved hundreds of girls and women, facing down bayonets at the college she headed. After helping women find their husbands and sons at the war’s end, she returned home where she committed suicide in 1941.

 So called “comfort women,” most of whom were Korean women and girls, were taken as sexual slaves by the Japanese. The horror was an early use of what we now acknowledge as a war crime and it affected 200,000 women and girls.

 In Europe, as Hitler’s “final solution” gained momentum, there were many women who deserve to be memorialized. Among them was Etty Hillesum, often called the mature Anne Frank. Like Anne, she was born in Holland, a Jew and a diarist. She went to Auschwitz because she volunteered to accompany arrested Jews in 1943. She threw a postcard from the train that read “We left the [holding] camp singing.” She died three months later at age 27.

 Back in Asia, Japanese invasions accelerated as people struggled to survive. Among them was Helen Colijn, author of Song of Survival: Women Interned, which became the film Paradise Road. She and other European women trying to get home became prisoners of war on Sumatra. Most of the women died before liberation, including Margaret Dryburgh, who formed the prison choir that kept morale up despite starvation, disease and brutality.

 Another group of amazing women prisoners in the Pacific were 99 Army and Navy nurses later known as “the angels of Bataan and Corregidor.” They were the first unit of American women sent into battle and the only group of American women imprisoned by an enemy. They’d helped build and staff hospitals and pioneer triage nursing in a stifling jungle. At the end of their three-year incarceration, they survived by eating weeds cooked in coldcream. Their story is told in We Band of Angels.  Sadly, they were not fully recognized by the military until 1986.

 The nurses in Vietnam were another “band of angels.” All volunteers, they too were not fully recognized when they came home. One of them, Lily Jean Adams, was 22 when she volunteered.  An ICU nurse, she remembered comforting dying soldiers. “They would say ‘don’t leave me,’ and I wouldn’t.  I sensed it was just as important as taking care of the living.”

 Women in the Gulags of Siberia also struggled to survive as political prisoners during the Soviet Stalinist Era post WWII. Some received 25-year sentences in unbearable conditions. Their stories are told in the book Dressed for A Dance in the Snow.

 Women war journalists have been equally brave and important.  Vera Brittain, Nellie Bly, Margaret Bourke-White and Martha Gellhorn were among them.  They wrote about the trauma of war, especially for women and children, rather than tactical questions and policy disputes, as male journalists did. Theirs were stories of ordinary civilians desperate to survive.

 Today women comprise about 20 percent of America’s military. They are graduating in increasing numbers from our military academies. As Frank Moore wrote in 1866, “The story of the war will never be fully written or understood if the achievements and contributions of women are unrecognized.”

 How right he was.