Suppressing the historical record of a people does not only deny their participating humanity; it strips the entire nation of the civic navigation tools required to recognize the signs of grave communal danger and inhibits even the enfranchised from comprehending, and thus resisting, their own depersonalization.

I recently read an excellent book on the history of post–WWII East Germany (Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany by Katja Hoyer); and so, watching the daily growth of Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD party, and then reading that the AfD movement was making its greatest growth spurts in those parts of Germany that were formerly East Germany (“Germany’s nationalist AfD party hopes to take power in 2026” — Washington Post, 1/13/26), was quite surprising, since I imagined that these were the Deutsche Volk who were heavily exposed to a solid public educational system that held the anti-fascist principles of Marx, Lenin, and Engels as the underpinning philosophy of their pedagogy. What happened?

I thought: how could so many in this part of the German nation enthusiastically embrace the neo-Nazification of the AfD? And further, how could AfD supporters ignore the history of how both West and East Germany suffered terribly from the interrupted process of national development (how did that Nazism stuff work for you’ll the last time)?

But (back to my book) it seems that East Germany suffered the most from an entire nation losing its way and choosing to follow the sick and twisted mind of a Make Germany Great Again (MGGA) leader. And I thought about the AfD’s sister proto-fascist/retro-confederate organization in the U.S., the Make America Great Again (MAGA-GOP) movement. And then, it made sense why, it’s the intoxicating, but not soul healing, ideology of resentment and anger.

So, despite decades of communist ideological scaffolding and indoctrination, the poorest parts of Germany, the communities left out of the West German “economic miracle” and deprived of any stable sense of place or purpose in this world, would revert, as their 1930s political ancestors once did, to their most primitive tribal limbic defense mechanism:

“We were great, and we could be great again if not for the presence of the racialized ‘other!’”

Genocidal acts perpetrated anywhere in the world can be conveniently-contextually redefined, selectively applied, and politically justified based on the race, religion, and nationality of the beaten-down “other.” The Somali community in Minnesota fits all three categories and, therefore, like enslaved African victims of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, they have no human rights that need to be respected by ICE or the Department of Homeland Security, after all, they are not considered humans.

And so, I would recommend that the decent people of Minnesota and other parts of our nation that are negatively impacted by ICE/DHS, particularly those wonderful and compassionate opposing slave-catching modern abolitionists like the late Renee Good — study the work-actions of movements like the Underground Railroad and how they helped Africans escaping from bondage to realize their innate right to freedom.

“A strong man will deliver us,” until he doesn’t. And only then do his followers discover that they have surrendered both their humanity and the good promises of their future history.

History is a great teacher, but denying and hiding history is a grave mistake. Movements like the AfD in Germany, Ms. Meloni’s right-wing alliance of parties in Italy, England’s Reform UK party, and America’s own homegrown MAGA/GOP movement should study how these types of proto-fascist movements have never served their nation’s or their followers’ best interests; things always seem to end badly, because they are movements based on a lie. That lie is that the only way their members can realize their humanity is to physically oppress, traumatize, and try to snuff out the physical and spiritual humanity of the darker, or not-like-us “others.” And yet, ironically, this denial of historiography and the denial of humanity to the disenfranchised and oppressed “others” eventually pushes these reactionary citizen-actors further and further away from the meaningful and purposeful humanity that they so desperately seek.

*Slave Catching 1.0: The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 transformed the entire nation, both free and slave-holding states alike, into an extension of the slave states’ justifying and policing apparatus. The law compelled all citizens and public officials to detain and return escaped enslaved people to bondage, and it criminalized any act of refusal. This statute stripped African freedom seekers of even the most basic human rights and legal due-process protections, including the right to contest their fate. In effect, the Act nationalized slavery’s vindication and enforcement and made the entire nation’s citizens, and the federal government, its guarantor and enforcer.