On July 21, a few weeks before last weekend’s events in Chancelorville, a 97-year-old World War II veteran was murdered in the Baltimore row house he stubbornly refused to leave after more than 60 years. Waddell Tate grew up in Pacolet, South Carolina, deep in the segregated South. He served in Germany before returning to a quiet life, unaware that the warlike conditions on the streets of Baltimore today would take his life, in the twilight of his life.
His shocking murder made the front page of the Washington Post, where it was held up as a grim reminder of how bad things have become in Baltimore. But if street violence has reached a new low in that once proud city, Chancellosrville reminded us of how low the whole country has sunk.
Waddell Tate was African American. He served his country to fight the Nazis. And how did we honor his service? First, he was murdered in a robbery. Then we allowed a ragtag mob of bomb throwers to invoke the language of hate and prejudice as they clubbed African Americans and chanted anti-semitic taunts.
I grew up in the shadow of World War II. So I was appalled to see Americans brandishing swastikas, flashing Nazi salutes, and receiving the tacit approval of the president. But perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. In fact, from a historical perspective, this revival is almost predictable.
That’s because memory only lasts two generations. Those who were seared by the ordeal can’t forget it, and their children hear about it all their lives. Then it passes into history.
There are exceptions. Russians have never forgotten the slaughter of World War II — how could they when they lost over 11 million soldiers and perhaps as many as 30 million civilians (almost one-third of their entire population). And for Jews, of course, the Holocaust is a haunting memory that can never fade or be forgotten.
But here in the United States, a slow-working collective amnesia has reduced all the barbarism and brutality of the Nazis to a neat little shorthand that goes: “Hitler was evil, he tried to kill all the Jews.”
I’m going to steer clear of the hazards of moral equivalency, but at a time when white supremacists are marching under swastikas, it’s vital to remind ourselves that the Nazis were everybody’s worst enemy. Reducing Nazism to anti-semitism flatters this hateful ideology because it fails to capture the full scale of its atrocities.
Nothing can diminish the horrors of the Holocaust, but the evil of Hitler and the Nazis affected us all. After all, it wasn’t called World War II for nothing. And the Nazis went after more than the Jews. They rounded up and exterminated gypsies, gays, priests, people with mental or physical disabilities, communists, trade unionists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic peoples, and resistance fighters.
More than 70 million people perished in World War II and millions more lives were destroyed by the brutality of war. In many countries, an entire generation was nearly wiped out, families torn apart, cities burned, and history left in ruins.
My father served in World War II, running convoys across the North Atlantic, plying the same waters that claimed his only brother, who perished when his battleship was sunk by a Nazi U-boat in the fall of 1941 (Yes, there was a war before Pearl Harbor and Canadians had already been fighting and dying for over two years when America joined in). Despite losing the brother he idolized, my father couldn’t wait to enlist in the fight against Hitler. Like so many Canadians — and men and women around the world — he never thought twice about joining the fight against evil.
I also have two uncles who landed in Normandy on D-Day — one was kneecapped by a German sniper in the hedgerows of France while the other, an infantryman with the Royal Winnipeg Rifles (aptly named the “Little Black Devils”) fought on. Yet another uncle, my mother’s oldest brother, flew bombing runs over Germany with the Royal Canadian Air Force.
Visiting the Allied cemeteries in Normandy, you see neat little rows of tombstones commemorating the sacrifice of their brethren. I have made the pilgrimage to those battlefields, stopping to pay tribute before each grave marker, embossed with crosses and the Star of David, and I was struck by how many surnames I knew from my childhood. Here lay the flower of youth, men of every faith and social standing, buried where they fell, far from home, their lives cut short in the epic battle against fascism.
But we are now three or more generations removed from World War II and the last vets, like Mr. Tate, are almost gone. Donald Trump was born after the war. His father didn’t serve in uniform — his contribution to the war effort was to build housing for the military (by which he no doubt profited).
In the aftermath of World War II, “Never again” became a byword for an ironclad commitment to ensure we never again allow the likes of Hitler to rise to power. But memory only lasts two generations. And extremism is on the march again. Across Europe — and now here in America — a dangerous ideology cast in the dustbin of history has been dusted off and its tenets are being mouthed by people too young to understand their origins.
Once upon a time, the world stood together, shoulder to shoulder, to fight this evil. Dismissing today’s neo-Nazis as a fringe element is to dishonor history. Protecting their hate speech as free speech is an insult to the memory of all those who lost their lives at the hands of the Nazis.
William Faulkner, the South’s greatest writer, famously wrote, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Memory only lasts two generations so it seems we must fight the same battles all over again. Jews and African Americans are standing up, but this is everyone’s fight. If we refuse to act, we’re not simply forgetting history, we’re letting our greatest failing as a civilization crawl back from the abyss and take root all over again. Chancellorsville is a call to arms. And history will remember which side we choose.
