It's Interesting How the Past Can Make You Think About the Present
They say that history rhymes.
I’ve been reading Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, a history of the years leading up to World War 2. The entire book takes the form of short, stylized, factual items of a few paragraphs or less, presented in chronological order, which taken together tell the story of societies sliding—often unwittingly—into very dark places.
While reading the book, I found over and over again that certain entries would vividly remind me of things happening today. The experience was so vivid that I decided to present a few of them to you here—first, Baker’s entry in his book, and then the modern thing that it made me think of. I make no sweeping claims that one thing is just like the other, or that this time is equivalent to that time. I’m only a curious reader, not a professional historian. I make no sweeping claims at all. It’s just interesting. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain said, “but it often rhymes.”
September 18, 1930. Human Smoke:
In Berlin, Albert Einstein was talking to reporters. The Hitlerites had triumphed in an election. “There is no reason for despair,” Einstein said, “for the Hitler vote is only a symptom, not necessarily of anti-Jewish hatred but of momentary resentment caused by economic misery and unemployment within the ranks of misguided German youth.” Einstein observed that during the Dreyfus affair most of the population of France had become anti-Semitic. And then that had changed. “I hope that as soon as the situation improves the German people will also find their road to clarity,” he said.
March 21, 2019. A story from the Washington Post:
New data show economic anxiety among white Americans has evaporated in the age of Donald Trump, falling to levels last seen during the George W. Bush administration.
White pessimism defined the 2016 presidential campaign. Between 2006 and 2016, non-Hispanic whites had worried about falling standards of living at much higher rates than their black and Hispanic compatriots.
The role of economic anxiety among working-class whites was widely debated in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016… As white economic anxiety has eased, African Americans are registering their highest levels of economic anxiety since at least 2000. The measure has also been rising among the Hispanic population.
April 12, 1940. Human Smoke:
Cracow, Warsaw, and Lublin were now part of a large eastern territory in Poland that the Germans called the General Government. Hans Frank—a longtime Hitler worshiper—was the governor-general of the General Government. Millions of Jews lived in the General Government, and while Frank was prepared to tolerate that fact for the time being, he thought Cracow, his capital city, should become as Jew-free as possible. In Cracow, Frank said, housing was short, and “thousands and more thousands of Jews slink around and take up apartments.” He ordered all but economically useful Jews to leave the city.
March 10, 2025. A story by Spectrum News:
Vice President JD Vance suggested undocumented immigrants are part of the reason home prices have almost doubled since early 2020.
Speaking at the National League of Cities Congressional City Conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday, Vance said immigrants are competing with American citizens for a limited supply of homes…
“When we talk about housing and why costs are so high, we don’t talk enough about demand, and one of the drivers of increased housing demand is that we’ve got a lot of people over the last four years who have come into the country illegally,” Vance said. “That’s something we have to work on if we want to meaningfully reduce the cost of housing.”… Vance said the Trump administration’s efforts to strengthen the border and reduce the number of undocumented immigrants coming into the U.S. will give “blue-collar people in the United States of America a shot at the American dream again.”
August 20, 1941. Human Smoke:
Goebbels and Hitler had another talk about the many Jews who were still in Berlin, and Hitler made him a promise. “Immediately after the conclusion of the campaign in the East, I can deport the Jews of Berlin to the East,” Goebbels recorded in his diary. “It is revolting and scandalous to think that seventy thousand Jews, most of them parasites, can still loiter in the capital of the German Reich.” The situation, he said, must be approached without sentimentality.
January 8, 2025. A story from NBC News:
The incoming Trump administration is considering conducting a high-profile raid targeting undocumented immigrants in its initial days, according to three people familiar with the discussions. The raid could target immigrants allegedly living in the United States illegally at a workplace in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, the people said…
The transition officials’ discussions about workplace raids suggest the incoming administration is not simply focused on immigrants living in the United States with criminal histories, but rather making arrests and deportations on a large scale, even if migrants have committed no crimes besides entering or working in the United States illegally.
August 22, 1941. Human Smoke:
In Paris, a German colonel was stabbed in the subway. Six thousand Jews were arrested. A decree said: “In case of a new criminal act, a number of hostages corresponding to the gravity of the act committed will be shot.”
March 27, 2024. A story in 19th News:
In 2015 it was Kate Steinle, a 32-year-old woman who was fatally shot on a San Francisco pier. A year later, Sarah Root, a 21-year-old Iowa woman, was killed in a crash involving a drunk driver. In 2018, 20-year-old Mollie Tibbetts was killed while jogging in her rural Iowa hometown. Now, it’s Laken Riley, a Georgia college student killed last month while also jogging.
All were White women, and their deaths, linked to immigrant men, became flash points in Republicans’ push for hard-line immigration policies. Led by Donald Trump, the party is using these deaths to call for policies like mass arrests, detention camps and militarized deportations, and pairing that with violent anti-immigrant language.
October 1941. Human Smoke:
Ulrich von Hassell, a Hitler resister, had been hearing accounts of the nighttime evictions of Jewish Berliners: “terrible scenes,” he’d been told, and the orders had come from Hitler himself. “The populace in part was so disgusted,” von Hassell wrote, “that the Nazis found it necessary to distribute handbills saying the Jews were to blame for everything.”
These handbills said: “Every Jew is your enemy. Every German who aids a Jew for reasons of false sentiment—even by only showing a friendly attitude toward Jews—commits treason against his own people.”…
The Gestapo sent out bulletins to all branches: “It has repeatedly come to our notice recently that persons of German blood continue to maintain friendly relations with Jews and appear with them in public in a blatant fashion.” The Gestapo’s orders were to take a Jew-friendly person into “protective custody for educational purposes.”
May 2, 2025. A story from the Baltimore Banner:
President Trump signed an executive order earlier this week directing the Department of Justice to identify sanctuary cities and determine what forms of federal funding they receive could be terminated if they don’t comply with the White House’s crackdown. Dubbed the “border czar,” White House advisor Tom Homan insinuated that federal authorities could take things a step further
“Wait to see what’s coming,” Homan said Thursday when asked if federal agents would arrest the leaders of those jurisdictions.
“You cannot support what we’re doing, and you can support sanctuary cities if that’s what you want to do, but if you cross that line to impediment or knowingly harboring and concealing an illegal alien, that’s a felony and we’re treating it as such,” Homan said.
Order “Human Smoke” from an independent bookstore.
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Related reading: Seeing Things For What They Are; A Television Show Called the USA; Meanwhile, in Gaza; Anti-Immigration Democrats Fuck Off.
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That was a great article…horrifying…but very eye opening. If my eyes could get any wider… 👁️👁️ lol
This is off topic somewhat, I read "Human Smoke" several years ago, and what jumped out at me was Baker's controversial assertion that is was Churchill who initiated the bombing of civilian targets. I mention this only as another possible motivator to read the book. The book is disturbing for the reason Hamilton Nolan points out, but it also documents how tribalism brings out the worst in us.