Conjuncture is a Poison: Why What Happened to Gina Carano Matters
A troubling symptom of an unjust society is one which decries a lack of free speech yet also seeks to silence any speech which counters the popular voice.
Gina Carano is an actress in Disney’s Star Wars series The Mandalorian and an MMA fighter who was condemned by some account users for posting an “anti-Semitic” repost. What was this post? Was it a anti-Zionist post? A swastika? Was it a depiction of a Jewish man looking like a rat? As a Jewish person (and a Star Wars fan) I was concerned.
Actually it was a post declaring:
“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors.... even by children.
“Because history is edited, most people today don´t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews.
How is that any different from hating someone for their political views?”
She deleted the post after it was met with vehement backlash.
What Carano shared is a little too ambiguous for my taste and I think it could use some clarifications into its meaning. But to say it is “anti-Semitic” (full of Judenhass, Jew-hatred) is to misunderstand it entirely.
First (before the holocaust could be possible), the Nazi’s turned neighbors against neighbors, but “history is edited” (meaning, we aren’t taught about the way National Socialism dehumanized the Jewish people through propaganda before they built ghettoes and concentration camps in history class)... “how is that any different than hating someone for their political views?” Meaning: this principle of hating people, hating your neighbors, co-workers, and childhood friends for their political differences is a lot like the WWII era Germany (and other Nazi-sympathizers) hating their neighbors, co-workers, and childhood friends merely because they were Jewish.
Although it emphasizes the Jewish people and not the other peoples who were silenced by the Nazi Propaganda, such as the Blacks, Roma, Communists, and LGBTQ+ (then known as Sexual Deviants), the Nazi party also defamed and tried to silence any opposition to their political party, attacking Germans who believed that Hitler was wrong or that it was wrong to hate the Jewish and other oppressed peoples.
These defenders of the oppressed or moral critics of the Nazi’s were then treated with contempt, boycotted by their neighbors and fired from their jobs (at best) and beaten, shot down in the streets, and ultimately sent to concentration camps.
One such man was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Christian pastor who opposed the Nazi party. He was murdered by the Nazis in Dachau a concentration camp which I visited with my college’s study abroad program. We walked through the empty ground and barracks that were once overflowing with prisoners and the dead bodies of people betrayed by their neighbors and rounded up by their countrymen.
What Gina reposted was not unlike things my Jewish grandmother has posted. Bubbe is also a conservative in many ways and although she has criticized liberal politics and the choices the government made in the last year, my Bubbe is certainly not termed as “anti-Semitic.” Actually the Conservative party has shown great support to the Jewish people, and toward Israel. I do not mean to say that all conservatives and republicans are supportive toward the Jewish people, undeniably there are some who are very hateful towards us (Jews). But this goes for both sides of the political spectrum.
Gina Carano questions the popular voice and thankfully her being silenced or disciplined for this is limited by the current number of unpopular questioners. She doesn’t stand alone, and although popular pressure has its power, that is limited. We aren’t to the point of Stasi, (secret police of Eastern Communist Germany) bribing neighbors to turn in one another to their imprisonment or death. For now you may just lose your job if you are in the public eye.
Personally I think the repost of Gina Carano was messy in its message, but it was not minimalistic toward Jewish suffering in the Holocaust as she was condemned for, rather it asks “why are we allowing hate to rise up between us? History tells us that’s where very bad things begin.”
The comparison of the post was on the beginning, not the ending. And when we see neighbors behaving as they have toward Trump supporters and Trump supporting neighbors toward Biden supporters, with no small degree of hatred on either side, then the question is an important one to ask, especially when your job is terminated for asking it.
This past year has been a very difficult one for all of us, we have been encouraged to seek solitude for the well being of one another, to help one another survive a common enemy, although invisible. Perhaps we should also reflect on other invisible enemies, and I don’t mean political ones, but spiritual ones.
People will always have a fear of the dark, of being in the dark, of not knowing what is happening in the places they can’t see. This makes us doubt the humanity of others when we focus on how we can’t know what is going on in someone else’s head, whether that someone is the government, the leaders of the CDC, Gina Carano or any other neighbor.
“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
Is there evil in the world? Absolutely! Even in ourselves! And we should certainly investigate that before we execute judgement on anyone else. First let’s turn on the light responding in love and grace, not in fear or in anger reaching for our baseball bats.
Closing with this passage: Ephesians 6:10-18 (CSB), which was written in the early birth of Christianity while Rome was highly intolerant of it and Christians were treated brutally by their pagan neighbors, the writer himself, the Apostle Paul would later be imprisoned and executed for his beliefs,
“Finally, be strengthened by the Lord and by his vast strength. Put on the full armor of God so that you can stand against the schemes of the devil. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this darkness, against evil, spiritual forces in the heavens. For this reason take up the full armor of God, so that you may be able to resist in the evil day, and having prepared everything, to take your stand. Stand, therefore, with truth like a belt around your waist, righteousness like armor on your chest, and your feet sandaled with readiness for the gospel of peace. In every situation take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit—which is the word of God. Pray at all times in the Spirit with every prayer and request, and stay alert with all perseverance and intercession for all the saints.”
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