American Nazi

Image by Motojicho

Introduction (added 01/18/2026)

I’ve published this blog before, and it's been three times for the image. I first created the image in 2016 prior to Donald Trump’s first term, and I posted it on multiple social media sites without commentary. I also did not receive any comments back on it.

I felt at the time that the Republican party, the one that I had grown up with, was no longer just a fiscally conservative party, it had become a racist party. The Muslim ban rhetoric started it, and by 2018, family separation had already begun and had become policy.

Policy and cruelty were wrapped in administrative language.

The second time I posted the image was in 2019, after the Chabad shooting in Poway; this time on MeWe and X-Shitter, and again without commentary. But someone on MeWe commented that the image itself was divisive, and that reaction led me to write the blog. I also added the introduction "The Text Behind the Graphic" — not as a defense, but as an explanation of what I thought was already obvious in the standalone image.

I’m re-posting the blog here (with image) because the conditions that produced it in the first place haven’t gone away.

We’re in a second Trump presidency. The rhetoric is familiar: borders, ownership, threats framed as strategy. At the same time, federal immigration enforcement has again intensified — including ICE raids and violent encounters that sparked outrage and protests in places like Minneapolis — while, internationally, talk of taking Greenland “one way or another” has unsettled European allies. Different headlines, same instincts.

The Text Behind the Graphic

May 7, 2019

I posted the above image on the day of the Chabad shooting in Poway, CA, on multiple social media sites. Someone made a comment in one of those postings stating that the image was divisive. I felt the image was self-explanatory but, in retrospect, I guess I can see where the connection to the shooting event might have been missed if someone wasn’t aware of what had just happened in the news that day, so I explained the image from my perspective.

I agreed that the image was a political statement in which I portrayed myself watching through a chaos of the red, white, and blue — America divided by an emerging direction of hate. I’m not sure why I felt the need to explain myself or the image, but I did — or at least I attempted to.

I was affected emotionally by this shooting probably more than I should have been, but in some of the news footage and newspaper photos, there was a road sign that pointed directly to my in-law’s house. That’s how close this event was to my family’s home.

This happening a year and a half after my own city’s 58 killed, 422 wounded, and 851 injured from the ensuing panic of the Las Vegas shooting.

So, I went offline and have been offline for the last week or so while I tried to process.

Anyway, during my offline time I wrote the following to recount some of my personal thoughts.

American Nazi

Once upon a time, my mother told me…

…something she knew nothing about — hate, fear, and the times of war.

I was very young, but I remember seeing segregated drinking fountains at the original Los Angeles Farmers Market in the late 1950's. I remember the Civil Rights Movement. I remember the nightly news segments on television in the early 1960's depicting racial tensions of the time. I remember Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. — both while they were alive and both at the time of their deaths.

I remember riding in the back seat of a car looking out the window watching (and smelling) the smoke in the sky from a burning Watts. I remember Angela Davis and the Black Panther Party. I remember Black Power at a time society grappled with whether to use the word Black instead of Colored — and weren’t both considered acceptable?

I remember my father turning Joan Baez off the radio because he said she was a communist. Communism was very scary, and even famous people like Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were put on “watch lists” for being possible commie sympathizers.

I remember Russia back when it was called Russia the first time around. I remember the Cold War when the neighbors built a bomb shelter in their backyard. Those were the people who lived next door to us during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

I think my parents did a fairly good job raising two kids in those days of turmoil. They were good parents with strong family values, and they did their best, as most parents would.

My parents had views considered old and outdated for the hip 1960's that they tried so desperately to fit in. My mother was one of the first to wear a mini-skirt, but both of my parents were kind of stuck in between two generations — that of the jitterbug and the Wah-Watusi.

It was funny to watch them try to communicate with a Beatnik couple that lived across the street from us. They were cool people, but my parents were completely unable to relate to them. Maybe that’s because they let their daughter start smoking pot at the age of ten.

Questions Without Answers

I was raised by conservative yet open-minded and trusting parents. There wasn’t a topic that couldn’t be discussed. However, it was also understood that there might not be an answer for every question asked.

I asked a lot of questions. I didn’t always like the answers. That led to more questions.

Why, for instance, did we have twenty-five-pound cans of tuna fish and baked beans in the pantry? Nuclear war, I was told. Rations.

I don’t like tuna fish. Or baked beans.

Who would eat twenty-five pounds of it the day after? And how would anyone open the can?

“You’ll eat it,” I was told. “And you’ll like it.”

This logic matched another familiar refrain: There are starving children in the world.

I never believed the nuclear survival stories. At school, we practiced duck-and-cover drills. Crawl under the desk. Cover your head. Don’t look at the light.

What light?

My teacher explained my eyeballs would evaporate.

Evaporate felt specific. Personal.

What about the rest of me?

During the next drill, I didn’t duck. I watched. I wasn’t looking for the light —I was just interested in watching everybody evaporate. I knew in the end we’d all be that toast for my mother’s tuna fish.

Anne Frank and the Unanswered Why

I read The Diary of Anne Frank around the age of eight. I found it on my grandparents’ shelf. It asked more questions than it answered. My parents redirected me when they could. Ask your grandparents. They were either too young themselves, or too carefully shielded to explain.

I questioned how people could ignore Gestapo agents kicking in the doors of their screaming neighbors in the middle of the night; hauling people out of their homes never to be seen or heard from again. I couldn’t understand how or why society didn’t do something to stop that.

It was my mother who initially tried to explain that the reason 6 million Jews were slaughtered in Germany during WWII was because the world didn’t know what was happening until it was too late. Really? Didn’t know what was happening?

Too late is a phrase that pretends innocence.

Didn’t know?

Implicit Prejudice

It’s called implicit prejudice and my mother didn’t have a good answer because she didn’t know what it was or where it came from. All of us have it to a degree and yet few acknowledge or question it within ourselves.

“Although there is some debate among psychologists as to what implicit prejudice is and how best to define it, implicit prejudice is most commonly described as a prejudice (i.e., negative feelings and/or beliefs about a group) that people hold without being aware of it. One can harbor implicit prejudice on the basis of race (implicit racism), sex (implicit sexism), age (implicit ageism), ethnicity (implicit ethnocentrism), or any number of other social groups. Of the various forms of implicit prejudice, implicit racism has probably received the most research attention.” (http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/processes/n131.xml)

Implicit prejudice, it turns out, is quieter than hatred. My mother didn’t have language for it.

Most people don’t.

We all carry it. Few interrogate it.

Psychologists describe it as prejudice held without awareness — beliefs learned before we know we are learning them. Race. Sex. Age. Ethnicity. The mind absorbs long before it questions.

I laid on the living-room floor, elbows propped, a Book of Knowledge open beneath me. The poor man’s encyclopedia. The source of most school reports in the 1960's, but it revealed little.

Why didn’t anyone do anything?

My mother said people were busy surviving. The Great Depression had narrowed attention. Europe felt far away. By the time the truth arrived, it was finished.

My mother would have only been a child herself during the war, and my grandparents more than likely protected her from the evils of the world. She was a teenager during the bombing of Pearl Harbor and those are events that she did remember more clearly.

As with probably most Americans at the time, memory was more focused on the fear of a Japanese invasion on American soil. The U.S. didn't enter the war until close to the end and maybe they (and my mother) didn't pay attention until then.

I was left with my Book of Knowledge and the schoolteachers who evaded answering as well. Wikipedia was decades away. Silence filled the gaps.

Groupthink and Fear

Groupthink is also something we humans adopt. Think of it as an internal survival instinct, but instead of not knowing where it comes as with implicit prejudice, groupthink is something that we voluntarily subscribe to. For millions of years, you either fit in or you get slaughtered – think of it like your current work environment.

Since we all have some amount of both implicit prejudice and groupthink built in us, it isn’t hard to stir it up. You cannot deny its existence within you despite not knowing where it comes from.

We have all met someone in our life for the very first time and without knowing a thing about them have experienced a negative thought of, “I don’t like them.” You don’t exactly know why you don’t like them, but you don’t like them right from the start.

Maybe it’s the freckles on someone’s nose that remind you of the kid who beat you up in grade school, or maybe you locked your doors one night driving through a certain part of town because it made you feel safer.

Whatever it is, it exists and the mind is easily manipulated by what is otherwise an unexplained subconscious thought developed or learned from some other source.

History Repeating Itself

Hitler understood this. He didn’t invent prejudice — he amplified it. Those people. They take. They contaminate. They threaten.

The language hasn’t changed.

Only the accents.

No one seemed responsible. My grandparents spoke of rationing, victory gardens, yellow ribbons. When I asked about the killing, the answer was always the same.

“The Nazis were bad people.”

Pressed further: No one knew.

Implicit prejudice begins softly.

Those people.

It grows without instruction.

My parents weren’t racist, but I do remember being told to lock the car doors while driving through certain neighborhoods. Nothing else was said.

A child fills in silence.

Bad neighborhood. Bad people.

How else is a mind supposed to connect the dots it’s been given?

I hear the critics already. Liberal snowflake, being hyperbolic... I’ve heard it before.

What they don’t know is that I spent most of forty-five years registered as a Republican. I left only when the platform turned unmistakably hateful.

Political loyalty is not moral obligation.

Most of us inherit beliefs in the way we inherit furniture — without inspection — until something breaks.

It holds until it doesn’t.

So, Mom…

...tell me about the Japanese internment camps.

Did classmates disappear?

Did you ask where they went?

What happened to their houses? Their belongings?

Did they come back?

Fear justified it. Protection, they said.

Groupthink is wrapped in patriotism. And you believed it — or didn’t question it — because everyone else did too.

Because implicit prejudice and groupthink exist, it is easy to put people into various boxes we call “us and them.” Maybe my parents (and even their parents) were naive to the atrocities happening all around them.

Somehow, they became blind to the separation of families; placing populations into confined spaces (the ghetto’s); putting people into camps and fenced cages; the division of the races and classes of people into those who are dangerous; those who need to be investigated.

Oh, for goodness’ sake, Nazi Germany and the Japanese Internment Camps were back then – that couldn't ever happen again. Right?

Part 2

The End?

The Turtle’s Diary is a collection of thoughts, insights, and stories based on a turtle’s true life experiences — gained by the misguided trust in others.

There are no reviews yet.