Concentration Camps: Is the US still the "savior" or will they happen here? Fascism on the rise in health and everything else.

Recently, in Trieste, I visited the San Saba concentration camp, also known as the Rice Mill because that’s what it had been. On the scale of concentration and extermination camps of the Third Reich, it was small. “Only” 3000-5000 people, mostly Jews, were incinerated here, although others were shipped off to Auschwitz to experience a similar fate. It was my first visit to a concentration camp, and I do not know that I will ever go to Auschwitz, or Treblinka, or Sorbibor, or Belsen, but it was very disturbing. However, at one point the guide noted that it had been liberated by the Americans on May 1, 1945.* My eyes, already full of tears of sadness, teared up yet again but this time with pride. It was the same pride I have felt ever since I was a little kid, born only a few years later, every time I hear about my country, the US, standing strong against Nazism and Fascism, and liberating the camps.

But today it was a bittersweet feeling, because in just the last two weeks my country has been rapidly moving toward fascism. The separation of powers, the core structure of our Constitution has been ignored by the current President. I used to call him the Trumpenik, because it sounds very like the Yiddish word “trombenik”, defined by Wiktionary as 1. a lazy person or ne'er-do-well, or 2. a boastful loudmouth, both of which were good descriptions of him. But now he has decided to become Il Duce, another comparison that is very scary here in Italy.  And he, who was at least elected President if not dictator, hasn’t even been doing all this work himself. He has let Elon (who he sometimes calls Leon) Musk do it. Musk, not elected to anything, not appointed to anything with the advice and consent of the Senate, has taken control of the government’s two most critical functions, the funding of it and the information it possesses on all of us, including Social Security and Medicare. Medicaid has already suffered serious threats to its continued ability to help provide healthcare to poor people. As a federal/state partnership, the federal government pays from about 60-80% of the cost, higher in the poorer states – which are often also the most Republican states. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds health and medical research; the largest amounts are spent on cancer research, though many other conditions that affect many Americans – heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease and many others – as well as basic science research that sets the stage for discoveries on diseases we recognize. In addition to the direct funding of the research, the institutions grantees work at also get indirect funds to “keep the lights” on and to provide many of the resources that allow research to go on. The Musk lackeys see this as pork, or worse, things that “enable a leftist agenda” by, I assume, funding universities. The issue of NIH direct and indirect funding is well described by Dr. Jeff Burns, a neurologist and researcher at the University of Kansas Medical Center, in a Facebook post that unfortunately doesn’t have an out-of-FB link**.

Medicare and Social Security are the most popular programs in the country, put in place by Democratic administrations (as have virtually all programs that actually benefit a significant percent of the American people), and its recipients, mostly seniors, aren’t going to be happy to have those programs cut. It is not clear if anyone in the administration cares. Musk has his own ideas of what programs are worthwhile and what are not (often colored by his personal history and interest) and wasn’t elected to any position and is unlikely to be. Decimating the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which will be devastating to working people in the US, serves the interests of folks who run major corporations like himself and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. It has also been suggested that his animosity to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) may in part be a result of its support for the majority population of South Africa, from which country’s minority white former rulers Musk comes. And their investigation of his company Starlink’s contracts with Ukraine. And Trump himself is unlikely to run for election again – he got this job and will stay out of jail and make a lot of money and get his revenge on his perceived enemies. And maybe cancel future elections. But going after senior and rural people and programs that benefit red-state residents is not going to increase his popularity.

I care a lot about healthcare and the healthcare system as well as health research, but the moves toward fascism go much farther. Every agency, especially those tasked with enforcing the law and pursuing criminals (like say, felon Trump) has had its professional staff replaced with loyalists and ideologues, especially both the Department of Justice (including the FBI) and the Department of Defense. There are some glimmers of light, particularly from the federal courts, in decisions such as ‘Judge halts Access to Treasury Payment Systems by Elon Musk’s Team’, and indeed the NY Times suggests that the federal judiciary may be the last obstacle to him. But the top decision maker in the federal judiciary is the Supreme Court, to which Trump appointed three justices and has been very friendly to him. And it will be a long time before a lot of those cases get through the courts. And someone has to enforce it. And who thinks that Musk and his Gen-Z minions who have gotten access to and control of federal databases and funds will all of a sudden, even if these cases are successful, rewrite the codes to be the way they were and not leave themselves backdoors to get in? You can’t un-ring a bell.

Enough of this by me. There is plenty of detail being provided by many other sources, and almost all of it is depressing. Let us get back to my feeling of pride in the US and its fight against Nazis and Fascists, of being, on the world stage, the good guys. Of course, it was not always true that we were – plenty of countries were invaded by the US or had their governments overturned by CIA-supported coups, etc., and even in WWII there were the Allies, including the Soviet Union which lost 20,000,000 people! And there were pro-Nazis and fascists in the US, always. Even US concentration camps (if not death camps) were started by FDR, for Japanese-Americans.

But the idea that an opponent of democracy and freedom, a person who wants to be Mussolini, or Hitler, or Stalin, or Putin, or even Viktor Orban, is the President and has moved so quickly to dismantle our Constitution and has had no significant opposition? That makes me sad, and I wonder when we will re-create camps like the one I visited in Trieste, or worse?

 

*Actually, Trieste was first freed on May 1 by Yugoslav partisans. New Zealanders came May 2, and other allies (US and UK) a couple of days later.

**Jeff Burns’ FB post:

Why Cutting Indirect Rates Means Cutting Medical Research

Medical centers aren’t just buildings—they are the foundation that makes research possible. They provide specialized lab spaces, maintain infrastructure, ensure compliance with safety regulations, and handle the complex financial and regulatory requirements that keep research running. None of this is cheap, and none of it is optional.

The NIH is one of the most powerful vehicles for turning ideas into reality—funding research that directly improves lives. Securing an NIH grant is an ultra-competitive process and a gold standard for top notch research. When researchers like me win a grant, the funding covers the research itself (“direct costs”), but the university also receives “indirect costs” to support everything that makes the research possible: the facilities, oversight, administration, and ecosystem that allow scientists to do their work. Without that support, it becomes harder to do the work that advances medicine. And, NIH funding isn’t just about research—it’s an investment in people and communities, with significant downstream effects on the economy.

Cutting indirect rates doesn’t just trim a budget line—it makes research harder to conduct, slowing scientific discovery and the development of treatments that help people. For my own work in Alzheimer’s disease, this means fewer studies, fewer discoveries, and fewer opportunities to change lives. I work alongside hundreds of clinicians, scientists, students, and staff who have dedicated their careers to tackling this disease. But dramatically and suddenly cutting indirect support shakes the very foundation that allows us to take on these big scientific challenges.

This isn’t about cutting waste—it’s a massive, across-the-board budget cut to science. And the hardest hit won’t be the elite universities with massive endowments; it will be the institutions where every NIH dollar is critical. Less investment means less medical research—period. Cutting indirect rates isn’t just bad policy—it threatens innovation, economic growth, and the future of medical discovery.

"Cabaret" and "Inherit the Wind": Will we again reap what is being sowed?

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Last year at this time, March 31, 2010, I wrote a piece about Obama and the Seder: Freedom and Multiculturalism, trying to capture the importance of the concept of freedom, and the historical relationship between African-Americans and Jews in this story of emancipation. In addition to enslavement, ancient for one and much more recent for the other, the two groups share both oppression, and, to a large extent, empathy for the oppression of others, and Passover is a good time to remember this. This weekend it is also Easter (after all, the Last Supper was a seder), during which Christians celebrate the resurrection of a prophet who preached against oppression and for peace.

Recently, I saw a very good performance of “Cabaret” at the Kansas City Repertory Theater. Of course, I had seen it before, or rather, had seen the Bob Fosse film version of this Kander and Ebb musical starring Liza Minelli. It has a long pedigree: the musical is an adaptation of the 1951 play “I am a Camera”, by John Van Druten, which was also made into a film in 1955 (both starring Julie Harris). It, in turn, was based on the story “Sally Bowles”, written by Christopher Isherwood and published in 1941. In 1972, when the movie “Cabaret” came out, it was a period piece, portraying the libertine “degeneracy” of Weimar Berlin set against the rise of the Nazis. The horror of this was not lost on me, or on the rest of the audience; for my generation, born soon after WW II, with fathers who had fought in the war, it was not that far away. For those of us who are Jewish, whose grandparents were immigrants, whose grandparents entire families were wiped out in the Holocaust, the story was more bitter than sweet. After all, 1972 was much closer to WWII than it is to the present; it was only 27 years after the end of the war, but it was 39 years ago.

Despite the pain, however, the events that were portrayed, we knew, were in the past, bad memories. 1972 was really still part of the “‘60s”. We believed that this was all behind us and we were in a new world, a new era. “Cabaret” was there to remind us of how bad things had been; most of us did not see it as a warning that it could happen again, to us. I’m not sure that this is still true. I am not sure we will not be seeing it again. I mean Nazism. Not as an accusation made as often by the right against those to their left as vice versa, but for real.

Let’s see. We have very serious, financially well-backed efforts to reverse not only the social changes implemented beginning about the time of “Cabaret” by the New Deal, but of even earlier changes, from the “Progressive Era” at the turn of the 20^th century. We have attacks on government and taxation, funded by billionaires but apparently bought into by regular people. (Question: How will they – the regular people, not the billionaires -- hire their own police and build their own roads?)  We have attacks on collective bargaining and the very existence of unions. We have increasingly restrictive laws about who we can be in relationships or have sex with (“gay marriage”), whether we can control our own bodies, whether we can use contraception or have abortions. State, and sometimes the federal, governments, led by those who say are against any kind of government regulation, are dictating how people should carry out the most personal of acts. I guess they are only against regulation of what they want to do; they’re into regulating things they don’t like. We have a tax breaks for billionaires and policies (pro-finance, anti-regulation) that have essentially transferred everyone’s wealth to those billionaires. Since they and their corporations don’t pay taxes, and those who are left no longer have enough money to pay enough taxes, we are getting cuts in essential services. And we are fighting several unfunded wars, we have demagogues demonizing “the other” (currently Muslims), and we are pretty far down the road to a religiously-driven, corporate funded, hypocritically moralistic military state.

OK, fascism. That’s where we’re headed. A state that is geared toward the interests of corporate power, that regulates people’s lives, that is militaristic and intolerant. But surely not Nazism? After all, they are not calling for the extermination of the Jews.

Yet.

“Cabaret” is not the only musical that may be more literally relevant now than when it first appeared. A few years ago I saw a wonderful production of “Inherit the Wind” on Broadway with Christopher Plummer and Brian Dennehy. When the play was written in 1955, and later (1960) made into a movie starring Spencer Tracy and Frederic March (with several versions since then), it was conceived of by its authors, Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, as a metaphor for the McCarthy era. The actual topic, the Scopes “monkey trial” in which a high school teacher is found guilty of teaching evolution, was not really the topic; after all, that had been nearly 40 years earlier. By the late 1950s no one doubted evolution. It was settled. But it made a great allegory for the close-mindedness and repression of that period.

They thought. But a few years ago, the state school board in Kansas, where I live, branded evolution a “theory” and mandated teaching “alternative theories” – such as creationism. The supporters of that policy were defeated in a later election, but turnout is light in school board elections and they could be back. No one doubts it could happen again. Powerful interests are questioning science; leading politicians attack those who question “American exceptionalism” – that we are different from everyone else, and programs that work in other countries are not for us. Is this different from the righteous xenophobia of the Master Race?

I do not mean to imply that the only or greatest racist threat is to Jews. Clearly, in this country the oppression of African-Americans is built into our very fabric. The great post-911 hostility is to Muslims. Jews are “our friends” (well, Israel is). Jews are powerful in Washington, as the American Israel Political Action Committee. Some Jews are even right-wing leaders. To the extent that they worry about oppression of Jews, they try to isolate anti-Semitism and oppose it, separating it from anti-Muslim hate (as the Israeli government is so good at), from racism.

They are a minority of Jews and they are outside the tradition of a people that has always recognized its own oppression in the oppression of others. Who were the majority of the international volunteers who fought in Spain against Franco and fascism. Who, way out of proportion to their numbers in the population, were active in the civil rights movement in the US and in the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. Who are disproportionately represented among scientists and human rights attorneys and advocates for social justice. They are also disproportionately represented among the leaders of the rapacious finance industry that led us to the Great Recession.

What a combination! A small number of people, tiny in comparison to white Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Blacks, Asians. Who have the poor judgment to both be out-front critics of racism and oppression, members and leaders of every progressive movement from unionism to socialism, and to have among them the leaders of the financial class that has wreaked havoc on the world’s economy. What a great target! No wonder Hitler could demonize them!

But it couldn’t happen here. At least we don’t think so now. Like Herr Schultz, the fruit merchant in “Cabaret”, who says “I am Jewish, but I am also German!” as he minimizes the significance of the broken windows in his store, who stays in denial for a long time. A lot of good it did him.

We have to fight all forms of intolerance, of racism, of know-nothingness. All forms of oppression and repression. All forms of “we are better than them” which can lead to “let’s kill them” pretty quickly. The memory of the Holocaust is “never to forgive, never to forget”. And to not forget that Jews can still be victims, and that they will never be safe as long as anyone is a victim. It is never too early to oppose bigotry, hate, and the loss of human rights.

Or we will surely inherit the wind.

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