Commentary: Symbols of fascism and genocide don’t have a place in Alaska

When I was in ninth grade, my parents sent me to counseling. The reasons were twofold. One was severe depression, the other standard teenaged snootiness about how unfairly I believed that the world was treating me. 

The depression was something I could only be offered tools for managing, but the snootiness was more easily resolved. 

You see, the counselor was a Holocaust survivor. So after I rattled off my list of petty grievances, he calmly began telling me of his own teen years. Of the horrors he lived through and witnessed in the camps. And of his many family members who simply did not live. 

It’s too long ago for me to recall the details now, but the impression remains. It was my first direct encounter with what Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party had done. It would take time for the lessons to fully sink in, but they did.

These lessons were bolstered by my mother, whose father and brother were career Navy men who served in the Atlantic during World War II. I never met my grandfather, but I knew my uncle well. Both he and my mother stressed to me that my job was to speak out any time I was confronted with Naziism. 

As my adult life proceeded I met others who were irreparably tied to the Holocaust. Who lost family members. Had parents and grandparents who were imprisoned. The occasional survivor. It’s something I have known about since childhood. And there is but one conclusion I have ever drawn. That there is nothing more evil than Nazis and their flag.

Thus we come to the recent Fairbanks No Kings Protest and the two men who arrived with swastika bands on their arms, waving that flag. I was not present, but video of what occurred can be found online. Both individuals have been identified. One is quite young, something clearly visible from footage of him being chased off by two women dressed, quite appropriately, in chicken costumes. The other is old enough to have no excuse. 

On one hand, the pair were fully within their constitutional rights to make the statement that they did. In the video it appears that someone took a swing at the younger one. It’s unclear if the fist connected, but in the absence of violence being committed by the man, it was an emotionally understandable but nonetheless improper response. Hitting people for their political positions is not a precedent we want. It’s a reaction too easily returned. 

On the other hand, condemning the two is not simply acceptable, but by all standards of basic morality, an absolute necessity. What they did crosses any line that a civilized society aware of history will abide. 

I’m old enough to have had parents who lived through the era of the Nazis. The two men aren’t. Time and distance have caused our culture to lose touch with the gravity of the worst crime ever committed by and against humanity. One unfortunate result is that younger people are now being seduced into embracing the ideology, often by online provocateurs. Nazi symbolism is now appearing on American streets. 

This should horrify us all. Regardless of where any of us fall on the political spectrum, this cannot be normalized. 

Our democratic society has long condemned the extreme fascism and genocide the Nazi flag and emblem stand for, and they are not welcome in Fairbanks or anyplace else in Alaska or America.

I’m sorry to have to write this. But I owe it to Dr. Reicher, who shared with me his story when I was 15, to insist 47 years later that we never forget the Holocaust and the unforgivable evils of the Nazis. And that we never, ever, turn a blind eye to those who act as if we should.