The most important decision ever made by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe during World War II, was to ensure the atrocities of German Nazi extermination camps was documented, in photos and film.
Those images and films are preserved at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and 2-of-my-5 daughters have seen them with me.
Today, everyone has a camera through their phones, and it’s increasingly difficult for someone to say, no, I didn’t do that.
Not that facts matter. Americans did elect Trump.
But as the KKK plans a victory parade for North Carolina, video is circulating of a Saturday speech to 200 attendees at the National Policy Institute’s – make that white nationalists — annual conference at the Ronald Reagan building celebrated the rise of Donald Trump as president-elect and promoted a conquer-or-be-conquered mentality.
“America was, until this past generation, a white country, designed for ourselves and our posterity,” Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist. “It is our creation. It is our inheritance and it belongs to us.”
A video published by The Atlantic, which is working on a documentary on Spencer, shows clips of Spencer’s speech for the National Policy Institute, an independent research organization “dedicated to the heritage, identity and future of people of European descent in the United States,” according to its website. The Atlantic reported that Spencer envisions “a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans,” and supports “peaceful ethnic cleansing.”
Members of the D.C. Antifascist Coalition protested the conference and an anti-Semitic dinner hosted at Maggiano’s on Saturday. Some held banners and posters outside of the Italian restaurant, while at least one protester was seen outside of Trump International Hotel.
Toward the beginning of his speech, Spencer said, “Hail Trump. Hail our people. Hail victory!” and the room broke out in applause. Some raised a hand in a Nazi salute.
Spencer also slammed the press, calling members “genuinely stupid” and promoted a philosophy of “conquer or die” among attendees. “To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer and a conqueror.”
According to The Atlantic, for most of the day, a parade of speakers discussed their ideology in relatively anodyne terms, putting a presentable face on their agenda. But after dinner, when most journalists had already departed, Spencer rose and delivered a speech to his followers dripping with anti-Semitism, and leaving no doubt as to what he actually seeks. He referred to the mainstream media as “Lügenpresse,” a term he said he was borrowing from “the original German”; the Nazis used the word to attack their critics in the press.