Open Letter: Stephen Miller

Dear Mr. Miller:

The stench of the new administration is now seeping through the floor boards. But before we have to evacuate the house, I’d like to take us back to 1938, the point of origin for so much of what we are now experiencing. In that year, another authoritarian regime, reacting to its own nativist fears of contamination, decided to remove foreign-born Jews, and shove them across the border into neighboring Poland.

It did so with a combination of ruthless dispatch and inhumanity, leaving children and old people (and many others) to squat in the fields waiting for the Messiah. Needless to say, the Messiah never came.

These were the fatal circumstances that mobilized young Herschel Grynszpan, whose parents and siblings were among the deportees. Overwhelmed by the sickening violence of forced exile, he threaded his way into the German consulate in Paris, and assassinated the first German functionary he was permitted to see.

It was all the pretext the German government needed. It had already tested the German populace for tolerance—that is, tolerance for a high level of violence against Jews. It now quickly organized the event called Kristallnacht, an assault against the businesses, institutions, and persons of German Jews. On November 9 and 10, 1938, all the stars aligned. It was a straight shot from Kristallnacht to the depravity of Auschwitz.

I offer this potted history of German fascism, not because I think you are unfamiliar with it, but because I want you to know what the rest of us know: that you are up to an unprincipled, demonic program to separate children from their parents, dump human beings like refuse, and engineer the “cleansing” of American society. Your loathing for differentness and appreciation for its political uses is painfully apparent to normal Americans, who have a regard for the norms of tolerance and mutuality.

How a Jewish family, descended from immigrant forebears, and luxuriating in the great freedoms of this land, could have produced a beast in the basement of our national house, is one of the great mysteries of this political moment. Its consequences are still unclear, but not hard to predict.

Yours,

Marc Boone Fitzerman