We don’t have to tolerate terrorism to protect free speech | Opinion

Nearly a century has passed since the events of the Holocaust, yet the shadow of the SS — the Schutzstaffel — assigned to organize and carry out the Holocaust and the Nazi project of enslavement and extermination still hangs over us.

In this case, over the Vineyard Drive freeway overpass in Templeton, California, near where I reside.

On May 15, I awoke as many Central Coast residents do, got my coffee and checked the Facebook feed that we have all become so familiar with. “Embrace White Pride” read the text, flanked by Odal Runes (American Neo-Nazi Symbol popularized in the 2010s) on the banner hanging over the freeway in the first photo to appear in the feed.

Upon examination, a second photo taken April 29, when two men held up a white pride banner on the same overpass, revealed that one of them was wearing a shirt with the Black Sun, the insignia selected by SS Reichsführer Heinirich Himmler to adorn the Schutzstaffel Offices at Wewelsburg Castle and the Wewelsburg Mosaic.

One could spend hours explaining the history of the SS, Nazi symbology, the ideology of Hitler and the war, the way the Holocaust was conducted, etc. However, I believe this quotation from a member of the SS Einsatzgruppen (Extermination Squad) will encapsulate some of the essence.

“We combed the woods a second time. Only then could we discover the individual chimney pipes sticking out of the earth. We discovered the Jews had hidden themselves in underground bunkers here. They were hauled out... The Jews were shot on the spot.... Some fifty Jews were shot, including men and women of all ages, because entire families had hidden themselves there. The shooting took place quite publicly.”

-Georg Leffler, Third Platoon, SS Reserve Police Battalion 101 Oct. 1942, Parczew Forest, Poland

What can we do?

This dark and difficult-to-read quote may not only help us understand the beliefs and intent of the individuals standing on the Vineyard Drive overpass, but it may also help answer the questions being discussed on Facebook.

Those discussions centered around questions like, “What can we do about this?“; “Can we do something about this?“; and (to the great concern of someone who studies Nazism and the Holocaust) “Should we do something about this?“

I’ll address the last of those questions first.

Yes, we should do something about this.

The quotation above describes the nature of the day-to-day killings of the Holocaust, but how did it get to that point?

Well, it started with the very open, very public, very not-at-all-quiet calls for extermination of groups in German (and indeed global) society. The opening act of any genocide is the introduction of the language that allows that genocide to occur.

Jewish author Victor Klemperer wrote about the evolution of the language of the Nazis. In his work, “Language of the Third Reich,” Klemperer tells a story of a German youth who lived in his home prior to the war and during the rise of Hitler. At the dinner table, Klemperer questioned the youth about his opinions on and infatuations with the Nazi party and Hitler.

“I began to have serious doubts about the extent and strength of his common sense. I tried a different tack in my attempt to make him more skeptical. ‘You have lived in my house for a number of years, you know the way I think, and you have often said yourself that you have learned something from us and your moral values accord with ours. How in the light of all this can you possibly support a party which, on account of my origins, denies me the right to be a German, or even a human being?’“

To which the youth responded, “You are taking it all much too seriously Babba (a term of endearment).The fuss and bother, indeed the whole discussion of the Jews, is only for propaganda purposes. You wait, when Hitler is at the helm, he’ll be far too busy to insult the Jews.“

The ‘essence of Nazism’

We in the modern era somehow have managed to find ourselves in a similar place.

We, however, are having the same debate with the hindsight of history on our side. We live in a world where volumes of first-hand and scholarly studies of the Nazis have been made available for decades and yet when representatives of Nazism, bearing the Black Sun of the SS and the language of the Third Reich appear in our hometowns, we have these discussions, as though the answers and the histories haven’t existed for our entire lifetimes.

American First Amendment protections on the freedom of speech and expression do not protect calls for extermination, nor do they protect the advocating of violence.

The Black Sun is both of those things. It is a call for genocide, it is the insignia of the most famous perpetrators of genocide in human history, it is the hieroglyphic manifestation of a demand for the extermination of fellow human beings and fellow Americans. It is an announcement of allegiance to and active participation in the ongoing project of Holocaust that is part of the essence of Nazism.

We are under no legal or moral obligation to stand for it, to listen to it, or to tolerate it any more than we would tolerate confirmed ISIS terrorists recruiting new fighters in Templeton or promoting the extermination of their ideological enemies and the perpetuation of their terrorist attacks in the streets of San Luis Obispo.

States across America, including California, have worked to use the existing legal framework to criminalize the display of nooses “with the intent to terrorize.”

Similarly, a Supreme Court ruling upholding a Virginia law against the burning of crosses — another unambiguous statement of murderous and repressive intent —shows us a path that supports both established First Amendment protections and gives the American people legal recourse against extremists and terrorists.

We already have the tools to act against these types of ideological calls for extermination, violence and terror and the actors who push them.

We need not repeat history to learn its lessons, we need not live under the Black Sun debating the intent of the shadow it casts, we can choose a future without it.

Ian Wood, a lifelong SLO County resident, is a self-taught historian and Cuesta College student.