And yes, Godwin, blah, blah, blah. But one persistent complaint over the years has been to blame the Jews in part for not rising up violently against the incipient Nazi regime. As if anyone could have predicted in the early stages what Hitler's rule would become for the Jews and others. ("But the warning signs were all there! Hitler even wrote a book about it!"
The unspoken point has been that the Jews would have been justified in doing whatever they could - including riots, insurrection, and other violent resistance - to stop the rise of Hitler.
I'm not equating Trump with Hitler or the present-day United States with Weimar Germany. But, there may be some Muslims, some Latinos, some refugees, who take Trump at his word when he talks the way he does. (Are the warning signs there?) If you think the Jews would have been justified in taking whatever measures they could to resist Hitler, even early on, can you really condemn violence from people today who perceive themselves as having the same bead drawn on them as the Jews had 80 years ago?
There were surely some who counseled patience all those years ago: "Oh no, it may be oppressive, but we can manage. It won't be so bad. Decent people will stand with us and stop any real depredations. Keep quiet, don't stir up more trouble. Do you want things to get even worse for us?"
If people really regard the rise of Trump as an existential threat to themselves, can the culture of the United States, steeped as it in violence, really condemn meeting violence with violence?
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