People don’t get that Buchenwald was a place specifically built for the murder and burning of innocent human beings. Nazis planned a massive facility to eliminate human beings who did nothing wrong.

Think about that. Think if you were an engineer in a room full of other engineers and you were trying to figure out how much fuel was needed to burn X amount of humans in X amount of days.

Women and children. Burned alive for being born a non-Christian. Remember Nazis were cultist Christians.

That is some really sick shit. And fascist Americans are the legacy of THAT.

Having visited the Holocaust museum in Washington DC - something I’d recommend everyone do if possible, though you’ll need a lot of time to recover emotionally - I know that the big thing that allowed all that to happen was dehumanization.

During my visit, I walked through one of the train cars used to transport Jews to the death camps. The plaque said how many people were crammed inside, but I couldn’t picture that many people in that tiny train car.

Then, I realized my problem. I was trying to fit PEOPLE. Even if the people I was trying to fit in the train car were imaginary, I was still treating them like people. I switched to trying to fit human shaped luggage and suddenly I had plenty of room.

So when Republicans dehumanize groups, for example, by calling LGBTQ people “child groomers,” then I recognize it as Step 1 in doing some really bad things to them. Once you’ve convinced enough of the public that a certain group of people aren’t really people, you can do anything to them.

It’s extremely scary and it’s happening here. We’re not at the “LGBTQ/Jews/political opponents sent to death camps” stage yet, but we’re on the path to that and need to turn around quickly. The further we go down the path, the harder it will be to get away from that horrible ending.