In my novels I have often included exposure of social and cultural evils; in That Dog Don't Bark it was sex slave traffickers; in BETWIXT, the madness of religious cults; in Leaving Wonderland, the bigotry and violence against our LGBTQ+ community. Even in my latest WIP; Mark'd With Blood - Devil Brigham's Case Files, I highlight the collective trauma of soldiers returning from the meat-grinder of the Great War, and the struggles of those trying to survive the Great Depression. Horrors all, if one was the victim.
There is a current horror being perpetrated by the Republican Party in the United States and right-wing governments in countries across Europe. It is the erasure of history and the fostering of cruelty and eradication of compassion and empathy.
In Poland, the right-wing government is erecting statues of Poles they proclaim as heroes of WWII, being saviours of Jews being sent to the genocide factories like Auschwitz where systematic murders were carried out to the tune of 1.1 million Jews in that site alone. The reality of Poles at that time was that there was deep-seated hatred of Jews in Poland, and the majority happily betrayed any Jew they knew, KNOWING they would be sent a concentration camps that were nothing less that factories designed to murder people en masse and dispose of the bodies.
In the United States, 37 states have introduced bills that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism.
Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and West Virginia have recently passed laws to disallow the teaching of the American genocide of First Nations people; the 246 years that African people were kidnapped from their home countries, chained, and beaten as slaves by American "the land of the free"; the social crimes of the Jim Crow Era against former slaves; the bigotry, hatred, and murders of LGBTQ+ citizens that carries on even today, and the most shameful of all; Teachers are directed to avoid teaching about the Holocaust, and if the subject arises they are to present counter arguments to support Hitler's extermination camps.
Yes, you read that correctly. Teachers are mandated to offer arguments that the systematic murder of 6 million Jews was justified.
Why would any educated and responsible lawmaker promote such a horror? Because political parties like the Republicans want to whitewash their history and raise a generation of children who have no knowledge of historic injustices and no empathy or compassion toward ANY minority that isn't wealthy, white, and christian. The banning of Maus, the graphic novel by Art Spiegelman is a dead giveaway on the aims of Republicans.
There have been so many dystopian novels written as warnings about horrors such as this. It Can't Happen Here, (1935) by Sinclair Lewis, and 1984 (1949) by George Orwell come to mind. But this is no novel, this is a living nightmare perpetrated by right-wing parties like the Republicans and it is happening across the world today.
How long before we've hit that slippery slope and moral people must go to war, or civil war to right this inhumane injustice?
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