The Yellow Star

September 2006

Sixty-five years ago this September, German Nazis made it compulsory for Jews to wear a yellow Star of David. Holocaust survivor Victor Klemperer, writing in I Will Bear Witness 1933-1941: A Diary of the Nazi Years, recalls the introduction of the mandatory Star as the darkest moment of the entire Nazi regime.

Klemperer suffered countless indignities, saw and endured horrific abuse, and heard of unspeakable atrocities throughout the Nazis’ rise to power and their subsequent subjugation of much of Europe. One of a handful of German Jews who escaped the round-ups and deportations to the death camps (his wife Eva was an “Aryan,” thus deferring his fate), Klemperer miraculously survived the firestorms following the Allied incendiary bombing of Dresden and then months on-the-run as a destitute and starving displaced person. And yet he remembers the mandate requiring display of the “Jewish Star” with singular abhorrence.

W hat was it about a bit of “yellow cloth, at the center in Hebrew-like lettering [the word] ‘Jew,’ to be worn on the left breast, large as the palm of a hand” that seemed worse than beatings, worse than confiscation of all one’s property, worse even than the fate awaiting those who disappeared after a visit from the Gestapo?

The Star was meant to mark its wearer as “other,” a non-citizen. The Star signaled to hooligans and vigilantes that its wearer was a sanctioned target for torment. The Star made it impossible for its wearers to go about any civic life without constant fear of violence and death, for themselves and any of their companions. The Star meant abandonment by employers, neighbors, and friends– all legitimately fearful of what their association with a known “enemy of the Reich” would mean to them and their families. The Star signaled that its wearer was a de facto “outlaw,” fair game for anyone wanting to indulge their sadism or anti-Semitism.

In short, the Star was mean to denote that its wearers were sub-human, deserving no more consideration or legal protection than “the vermin” that they– according to relentless state propaganda– were.

It may be true that those ignorant of history are destined to repeat it, but current events confirm that knowledge of history is no guarantee of avoiding repetition of past tragedies.

Enter a post office, police station, registry of motor vehicles, or other civic office in today’s United States and you will likely be confronted with posters of so-called “sex offenders,” required to register, often for life, with the state. Faces, addresses, and employment locations are all prominently displayed. You will read signs telling you that even more information about these men (and women, mostly garden variety prostitutes) can be found on the internet, part of the new nationwide effort supposedly to protect the Homeland and its children from such “predators.”

But of course, “protection from predators” is not the goal of sex-offender registries, any more than “protection from Bolshevism” (the stated excuse for promulgation of the 1941 Yellow Star regulation) was the Nazis’ purpose. If public safety were truly the goal, why list those whose “crime” was offering a blowjob-for-hire to a willing adult? Or those who were caught masturbating in the woods near a highway rest stop? Or those who never violated another’s consent nor did any physical harm? If “protection” were the real aim of tracking and publicizing offenders and their whereabouts, wouldn’t it make more sense for registries to list arsonists rather than flashers? Why should society need protection from those who suck teenagers, but not from those who kill them?

No, the goal of sex-offender registries is not protection– just the opposite. Sex-offender registries, like earlier Yellow Star regulations, are intended to create outlaws stripped of jobs, housing, family, and friends. Such state-created monsters can then be targeted for vigilantes’ violence and self-serving politicians’ self-righteous invective.

Today’s sex-offender registries signal, as did the 1941 Yellow Star decree, a breakdown in the rule of law. For those fighting to rebuild a US Constitution and Bill of Rights so shattered in these past years, no greater sign of progress will be than the abolition of sex-offender registries and their odious effects.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=7F6E37A0-3082-43F4-80B55D8CC47353D0>