Never Forget January 6
It's only been a year, and yet the Republican campaign to downplay the significance of January 6 and recast its story has been effective. That should be of great concern.
Albert Speer was a German architect tapped by Adolf Hitler to lead efforts of Jewish evictions and armament production during World War II. Throughout Hitler’s reign, Speer was a part of the dictator’s close-knit circle, privy to the inner workings of one of the most diabolical minds in modern history. Speer eventually became one of 24 major war criminals charged from the Nazi regime at the Nuremberg Trials after he was found guilty of crimes against humanity. He spent much of his later years attempting to rewrite his own story, denouncing the Holocaust and distancing himself from any sort of culpability in the genocide.
As Speer spun the narrative in his favor, in interviews and in his own autobiography, his words served much more than his own tattered reputation. As Géraldine Schwarz writes in her book Those Who Forget, “In lying about the extent of his knowledge and sloughing off his own responsibility, Speer encouraged a whole nation to forget its guilt.”
There is a reason Never Forget is a phrase so tightly wound to the Holocaust. It is more than a recommendation to honor the lives lost and the men and women who made sacrifices to save others. Never Forget is both a directive and a warning: 1. Know what events led up to the Holocaust. 2. Make sure it never happens again.
This advice extends beyond Germany and the Jewish diaspora, to all citizens concerned about the rise of fascism their country. Understanding the tools used to exterminate 11 million lives is less important than tracing the path to such a dark timeline and the subsequent emergence from the depths of dehumanization.
While drawing parallels from the Holocaust to present-day is a delicate matter — considering forced labor and genocide of that scale won’t replicate itself in our lifetime — there are countless lessons to glean from the early days of Naziism that suggest Americans should be more vigilant than they are currently about the white supremacist domestic terror being simultaneously excused and incited by politicians and public figures alike.
On the first anniversary of January 6, many Republican politicians would prefer America render the assault on the Capitol an aberration, not a warning. Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted Thursday morning that President Biden’s speech acknowledging the events of last year was a “brazen politicization” and Florida governor Ron DeSantis said remembering the Capitol insurrection is “not something that most Floridians are concerned about.” Vice President Kamala Harris instantly became right-wing fodder for comparing the attempted coup to Pearl Harbor and 9/11.
In America, we say Never Forget on 9/11. It’s a reasonable gesture: Continue to honor the lives lost, learn the names of the perished and the heroes who made unimaginable sacrifices, the souls they touched before an act of terrorism cut their timeline short. Remember the bravery of firefighters, EMS workers, law enforcement, boatswains and ordinary people as they sprinted up stairs, drove over rubble and steered into danger.
But there has never been a widespread domestic threat to downplay the events of 9/11. As a nation, we have spent the last 20-plus years remembering, uncovering new stories of heroism, understanding more each year the horror that beset the nation. From CNN to Fox News, media outlets are not attempting to sweep the truth of that day under the rug. Quite the opposite.
Meanwhile, the campaign to erase the memory of January 6 and rewrite its unassailable narrative has been swift in its first year. Republicans don’t want to marinate in the days and weeks leading up to the attack because many of them are implicated in fueling the furor. Fox News hosts and Donald Trump Jr. tried unsuccessfully to reach the president compelling him to act, only to spend the succeeding months defending him and pointing the finger elsewhere, toward Antifa and Nancy Pelosi. As the sixth day of 2021 drifts further into the rearview mirror, Republicans feign to be more and more annoyed about it being brought up. Instead of urging their followers to shift their attention to more pressing issues, GOP politicians have taken a more pugnacious approach. The political incentive to bash Biden and Harris for talking about the attack on Jan. 6, 2022 is an attempt to recast the villains of this assault: It’s the Democrats’ fault for making such a big deal out of Jan. 6, for holding a sham impeachment of Donald Trump after he’d left office, for failing to pass important legislation by instead focusing on a shoddily constructed Jan. 6 commission and for reminiscing on the day a year later like it was a major historical event in America.
The Jan. 6 committee is still uncovering new evidence about that harrowing day. The assault is still fresh in the minds of Americans. With midterms around the corner, many Republicans recognize that in order to gain control of the House and Senate, Trumpist candidates can’t be universally condemned. Trump still holds immense sway in the GOP. While Democrats try to hold those responsible to account, most Republicans are motivated to move on from the American tragedy and debase anyone who refuses to do so.
Ultimately, the coup failed. Every politician under siege that day survived. The amount of lives lost are infinitesimal in comparison to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor. But we are not living in fear of a Japanese bombing. Osama Bin Laden has long been extinguished. Trump, and countless others like him in the Republican party, are continuing to use the same inflammatory language that sparked the insurrection. Their words and actions portend future upheaval to democratic decorum, and it would be foolish to adopt amnesia as the appropriate collective response.
Concerns about the health of our democratic experiment are not unfounded. Fascism can easily upend democracy in an insufficiently wary republic. To look the other way because this is America, the country that repudiated “polarization” on 9/11 and pulled each other from the rubble regardless of political affiliation is an imprudent impulse. Complacency is a poor antidote to wanton authoritarianism. We must confront what happened on January 6, even when (and especially when) Republicans would prefer to change the subject and recast the story.
Never Forget may be an overused slogan, a modest reply to a wide range of global atrocities. Nonetheless, it is the appropriate verbiage to assign to January 6. A democracy prescient of its most potent menace will always outlast one high on its own inherent goodness.