“Then They Came for the Jews, and You Did Not Speak Out, Because…”

There’s a lot going on in the world these days, both overseas and here in the United States, and a lot of people are getting their eyes opened to a couple of universal truths. The first is, no one is coming.

At the end of the day, your personal safety, security, and prosperity is your personal responsibility. Governments can set conditions to improve all of those things, which is why we give up some of natural rights in favor of the social contract. But in situations where seconds count, security forces are minutes away. So it’s up to you, and yours, to protect yourself and the that which you hold dear. There are a whole lot of people who see the current political landscape and are now arming themselves, figuartively and literally, for their own self defense. They should have done so years ago.

The people of southern Israel likely knew that no one is coming long ago, but it was definitely brought home in October of 2023 when hordes of Hamas terrorists burst out of Gaza to rape. murder, and pillage their way through thousands of Israelis, Americans, and others unfortunate enough to get caught in their way. Despite the presence of militia, neighborhood self-defense forces, the police, and even the military, the civilian death toll on the Israeli side of the border was catastrophic. Many died waiting for Israeli Defense Forces to save them. The forces eventually arrived, and despite heroic efforts all around, for far too many it was far too late. “When seconds count, the police–and the IDF–are only minutes away.” No one is coming… at least not in time to save you. You are your own first, last, and often only line of defense. Prepare accordingly.

Another universal fact is that if you tolerate mob rule long enough, it will eventually turn on you.

One of the best recent examples of this phenomenon is how Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) went from a feminist icon to a “genocider” in the span of one 45-minute compilation video over a super-innocuous tweet about the Hamas attacks. But I want to focus this article on a historical example that is not only more relevant, but also serves as a warning for the future.

It comes from a German priest named Martin Niemoller. I’ll explain his historical significance shortly but the most important thing to know about him is that like many Germans in the 1930s, Niemoller was happy to jump on the political bandwagon with a political structure that made him feel superior, and gave him something to hate. In short, he became a Nazi. Nazism did not work out for him, or, as it turned out, for the rest of the world. Similarly, extreme leftists in America were content to hitch their political wagons to the big blue donkey of the Democrat party, which provided them the illusion of superiority and a whole bunch of people to hate. That also has not worked out well for America, or for the world.

Hatred is nothing new in the human condition, and it is very useful to demagogues of all stripes. If you can give a group of people another group of people to hate, and wrap it in the mantle of self-righteousness, and take away all meaningful consequences, you can get them to do almost anything. We’ve seen that time and again inside the U.S. over recent years, and now it has come to a head after Hamas’s terror attack against Israel in October of 2023. Much of the language used to describe the attack, and its aftermath, was deeply disturbing. Worse yet were the violet protests launched around the world–not to show sympathy for Israel, or for the hundreds of people killed, wounded, and kidnapped by Hamas–but to show solidarity for the Hamas cause. Many of these protests have a distinctly anti-Jewish taint, contributing to skyrocketing anti-Jewish acts and incidents.

For any social contract to work, the people–ALL people–have to be protected and treated equally under our law. Right now in the United States, that’s not happening. Our country has frequently mistreated different racial, ethnic, and religious groups over the years. The list is long, and I’m not going to try to name every transgression. Nor am I seeking to downplay or excuse any of them, or to hold up one group’s grievances as more important than any others. But I have watched with trepidation as it has become more and more socially acceptable to attack–virtually and physically–certain groups of Americans. Watching the ongoing targeted attacks against Jews in America, I feel the way that Niemoller claims he felt after the war, when it comes to the consequences of not speaking out when injustice rears its head.

Martin Niemoller eventually came around to the fact that Nazis are bad people, an assessment that was likely reinforced when he was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1937. He remained in prison for the entirety of what became World War II, and was eventually released when the Allied powers defeated fascism and liberated much of Europe, thus restoring Western democratic values where they could and attempting to re-establish the worldwide social contract. The reason I bring him up now, in the context of the Israel/Hamas war, is for the timelessness of his words. There have been different variations of Niemoller’s statement over the years, but a summary of them generally goes something like this:

Because fascism was allowed to metastasize in Europe, because certain groups were held above others and some reviled as scape goats, because no one “spoke out,” it cost the world more than 50 million lives. America’s fascist-equivalent mob, currently typified by (but certainly not confined to) the far left, has been allowed to run rampant for so long, and to “come for” so many different groups of people, that the left is beginning to eat its own members. The hatred that the far left directs to anyone who dares be guilty of the crime of “wrongthink,” or who is simply not willingly to bend the knee and publicly flagellate themselves before the new gods of wokeness, are leading the country down the road of the French Revolution, which also saw the revolutionaries “burn it all down” before eventually turning on themselves.

The woke mob regularly attacks capitalism, and America specifically. It attacks the very idea of “whiteness.” To them, the very idea of Western civilization is “colonialism.” Very few people push back on these attacks, because it is currently socially acceptable–encouraged, even–to express hate towards the wealthy, the white, anything “colonial,” and even America itself. And now, the woke mobs are coming for the Jews. Yet there there is still little interest, much less outrage, from mainstream America.

It was not too long ago that social media, and even houses on my own street, were awash with the symbolism of the cause du jour. BLM banners. LGBT rainbows. Ukraine flags. The “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign. But after the worst terror attack on the West since 9/11 I’ve seen… almost nothing to indicate support, or at least sympathy, for Israel, at least not on the scale as we did for recent leftist movements. It’s… interesting.

I’m not Israeli. I’m not Jewish. There is no Israeli flag outside my home, or on my social media, because I don’t engage in vapid, empty social media virtue signaling. But I do think it’s very interesting that the people that I know who do engage in those activities, aren’t doing it in this case. I wonder why that is. And I wonder where it will take us.

Martin Noelmiller’s above verses were written about 1930s Germany. In 2023 America, keeping in mind no one is coming and if you tolerate mob rule long enough, it will eventually turn on you, a update to it might go something like this:

First they came for the Capitalists, but you did not speak out,
because the rich are easy to hate.

Then they came after “Whiteness,” but you did not speak out,
because you didn’t want to be called racist.

Then they came after everything that made America, America. But you did not speak out, because you believed the lie you’ve been told since childhood that America is irredeemably racist, corrupt, and colonizing.

Then they came for the Jews, and you did not speak out, because you’d rather side with the literal worst of humanity than the Jews, because you think Jews are capitalist, racist, corrupt, colonizing, and worst of all, “white.”

Then they came for you–and then you wondered how it got to this point.

Either the rule of law applies to all of us, or none of us are truly protected. Martin Noelmiller learned that, eventually. It is my sincere hope we don’t have to learn that than lesson the same way that he did.

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Scott Faith is a veteran of a half-dozen combat deployments and has served in several different Special Operations units over the course of his Army career. Scott’s writing focuses largely on veterans’ issues, but he is also a strong proponent of Constitutional rights and has a deep interest in politics. He often allows other veterans who request anonymity to publish their work under his byline. Scott welcomes story ideas and feedback on his articles and can be reached at havokjournal@havokmedia.com. 

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.