Denton: We can fight hate by battling America's many systemic injustices
Over the span of a month, Portsmouth went from watching the “culture war” spectacle over a $200,000,000 F-22 Raptor shooting down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina, to a $400,000 AIM-9X Sidewinder missile shooting down a twelve dollar Bottlecap Balloon Brigade hobbyist balloon over the Yukon, to fifteen downtown area businesses being spray painted with Nazi swastikas. I take the graffiti seriously because my grandfather volunteered to fight the Nazis, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and almost died as a Jewish G.I. from Brooklyn in a Nazi Prisoner of War camp. That said, we must ensure our response to the recent hate crimes is better calibrated than the response to the hobbyist balloon.
Louis Liebowitz helped raise me and I grew up listening to his war stories, like my grandmother receiving a letter saying her husband was Missing in Action. He was a radioman and in a single battle in the French countryside, half his infantry company was killed and half that survived were captured. Luke was injured by shrapnel and could have retreated, but he buried his radio to ensure the Nazis would not acquire it and administered first aid to his mortally wounded company commander. He spent the next several months as a slave laborer subsisting off nothing but carrots, until a fellow prisoner, not wanting to share the Red Cross care package remnants, ratted him out as a Jew. Luke was immediately ordered to report to an office he had never been in before, a Nazi officer asked if he was Jewish, and he was informed that he was leaving on the first train in the morning. As fortune had it, the Nazis fled that P.O.W. camp in the middle of that night, and their prisoners were liberated by the Russians the following day.
I received a Red Cross message saying my grandfather had passed while I was in Baghdad and returned to attend his funeral. The Nazis, who he almost lost his life fighting over half a century earlier, had seized upon anxieties caused by the German republic’s systemic failures and used propaganda against Jews, homosexuals, and communists to democratically take over their own government, before launching The Holocaust. Deployed in Iraq during the same time-period as me was former Marine Corps Captain Chris Kuehne. We served in the same platoon at Fort Sill’s Field Artillery Officer Basic Course and he went on to be indicted with four other Proud Boys for preventing law enforcement from holding the mob at bay, after the five breached the Capitol Building on January 6th. I do not know why Kuehne embraced white Christian nationalism, but I do maintain that systemic failures in our democratic process, not the “culture wars” being waged over silly balloons, have caused some Americans to consider alternatives to our democracy.
I also maintain that giving too much oxygen to some extremely hurtful, but otherwise minor property damage, only fuels the decades long “culture wars” that are recruitment propaganda for white Christian nationalist hate groups. Hate crimes have increased significantly over the past half-decade, but we need our response to be calibrated. I have seen no evidence to date suggesting that the recent graffiti was a coordinated effort by a white Christian nationalist hate group and there remains a chance it was a punk kid doing something stupid that he will regret the rest of his life. Be rightfully outraged by the vandalism, but we should focus on solving long-standing unresolved issues like income inequality, by reforming the systemic failures in our democratic process like the Civil War era filibuster, gerrymandering, and our current two party primary system that often elects the most extreme candidates. The “culture wars” have hidden these systemic failures in our democratic process that have left so many Americans behind, making them more susceptible to propaganda blaming Jews, homosexuals, minorities, feminists, and socialists for America’s many long-standing issues not being resolved.
Portsmouth’s recent hate crimes appear to be more the twelve-dollar hobbyist balloon than a Nazi Zeppelin, and our response should not be to fire a $400,000 AIM-9X Sidewinder missile at it. Regardless of how bad America’s unresolved issues may make life for some today, even causing a few to openly consider white Christian nationalism as an alternative to our democracy, most Americans are far better off than the Germans that turned to Hitler and my grandfather nearly died fighting. As law enforcement pursues those responsible for the recent hate crimes, our collective calibrated response should be to redouble our efforts to reform the systemic failures in our democratic process to benefit all Americans.
Josh Denton is an Iraq War combat veteran, Commander of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post #168, and a Portsmouth City Councilor
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Denton: We can fight hate by battling America's systemic injustices
