Last week was a very long and eventful one in American history, punctuated by, among many other things, the emphatic gestures of Elon Musk to his audience on Inauguration Day. Great passions ensued. Were those Nazi salutes that Musk threw out to an adoring throng? It sure seemed that way to me, but only he knows for sure.
In a different time, the subsequent uproar might have occasioned a clarification from Musk, or even an apology to anyone who might have been offended, however inadvertently. Musk’s response instead was a series Nazi-themed puns.
Over the weekend, Musk spoke by video to Alternative fűr Deutchland, a far-right political party in Germany that downplays the Holocaust. Musk has endorsed the party and otherwise seems sympathetic. “I think there is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that,” he told the group. “Children should not feel guilty for the sins of their parents—their great grandparents even.”
His remarks came two days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day, on January 27, which is the anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz. Writing in The Bulwark on the anniversary, William Kristol quoted German historian Martin Sauerbrey’s reply to Musk.
“As a historian who is confronted on a daily basis with the crimes of the Nazi regime I actually can comprehend why many want to believe that their relatives were ‘good guys.’ I myself only learned in my thirties that one branch of my family were staunch National Socialists.
“And I had to do my own research because nobody told me. They were just ‘fine people.’ The thing is: There is no need to feel guilty about what my great grandfather did. I am not responsible for that. What I am responsible for is how I handle this past.“I can make sure that what happened is not forgotten. I can make sure that I will do everything I can to explain how these terrible things were made possible. I can do that by not denying or sugar coating what my ancestors did or made possible by silent approval.
“I will do everything I can to oppose those who try to make those things forgotten and who capitalize on the Nazi sentiments still prevalent in our societies. The Austrian and German societies should actually be proud that they finally managed—however incompletely and flawed—to engage with this dark past in a serious way.
“So. There is no reason to feel ashamed of what your ancestors did, but you sure as hell are to be ashamed if you won’t acknowledge what has happened and what the role of our ancestors was. You should feel ashamed if you help those who want to get rid of all the achievements made in remembering and processing our terrible past, those who want to get rid of democracy, human rights and basic human decency."
Sauerbrey’s words resonated with me on many levels, in no small part because I have my own considerable experience writing about difficult history—not the Holocaust, but American racial history and atrocities perpetrated against African Americans and Native Americans.In 2001, I published the first edition of The Burning: The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Much more recently, last November, my story about the 1855 slaughter of a Lakota Sioux village by the Army, and the reverberations from that event today, was the cover story of Smithsonian Magazine.
As a white man of a certain age, this work was the beginning of my education about things such as the loss of generational wealth and the pervasive and ongoing impact of generational trauma.
In the last few years, descendants of Tulsa survivors told me about growing up in homes that were haunted by a great but unnamed darkness. For nearly a century, the Tulsa Massacre was a secret kept by white perpetrators and African American victims alike. Yet to this day, that terrible event—hundreds of people killed by a white mob; an affluent Black community burned to the ground—is alive in their hearts and bones of the descendants, and in the two remaining survivors.
In the research for my Lakota piece, a woman named Karen Little Thunder was one of my first interviews. (Her profile graces the cover of Smithsonian Magazine. Read it here: bit.ly/410cHRn) Karen’s great- great-grandfather was the chief of the village ambushed and slaughtered in 1855 by the Army along Blue Water Creek in Nebraska.
“They attacked in very early morning and just slaughtered us, and there was no time for anything except to survive,” she said told me in 2023. “Then the village was burned. Then the survivors were marched away to one of the forts and the women and children were taken and used as pawns. These traumas just kept happening and happening—and we’re still grieving. That’s the way it is, not just for Little Thunder relatives, but for our entire tribal people. We could not do anything except survive back then. Fast-forward 150 years, we’re still in survival mode.”
So try to convince Tulsa descendants that the past is just the past. Or Lakota people struggling to survive on impoverished reservations in South Dakota, those who proudly carry surnames like Little Thunder and Spotted Tail. For them, the wounds are not merely from terrible events like the Blue Water Massacre, but also from the government’s theft of traditional lands, their internment on reservations, from the systematic attempts to eradicate a proud and beautiful culture through assimilation boarding schools and in many other ways. I was stunned to learn that many of the most important spiritual ceremonies of the Lakota and other Indigenous people were illegal in the United States until the 1970s.
This was all new to me until I started researching the Tulsa Massacre, and until, in more recent years, I began to study Native American history. That is because what we learned in our history classes was tragically incomplete, as much myth as reality. It certainly cannot be said of the United States what Sauerbrey says of Austria and Germany, countries more willing “to engage with this dark past in a serious way.”
There has been some progress. In 2001, when The Burning was published, it received glowing reviews in all the right places but was otherwise ignored. The culture wasn’t ready, was my theory. Then, in 2019, the creators of HBO’s Watchmen used my book as source material for the opening scenes of the pilot episode—a stark but accurate portrayal of the massacre—and they were kind enough to say so publicly.
On a spring evening in Tulsa around the 100-year anniversary of the massacre, I was invited to a small dinner with Damon Lindelhof, the producer of Watchmen, and Cord Jefferson, a screenwriter who went on to win an Oscar a few years later. Afterwards, I told them that in the 18 years after The Burning was published, “It sold about 19 copies.” “You’re just damn lucky we bought one of them,” Jefferson replied. A few weeks later, the book landed on the New York Times bestseller list.
But over the decades and centuries, progress and a growing willingness to become aware of these things have always been met with fierce resistance and pushback. That’s where we live now, it seems, but the pendulum will soon swing again toward a more just and equitable society and a greater willingness to come to terms with our past. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Martin Luther King Jr. famously said. I believe that in my marrow.
In the meantime I will continue to share my personal experience with this work. When I first came to the Tulsa story a quarter century ago, I had no real awareness of the painful realities of our race history. Learning about that past was painful. But the learning also changed me for the better, broadened my world, deepened my capacity for compassion and curiosity about the experiences of those different from me.
“It’s much easier to love someone when you know their story,” my friend, Fred Rogers said.
Exactly. For this reason, the work has been one of my life’s greatest blessings. The truth is a good thing, a hard thing sometimes, but ultimately a lifegiving thing. We only deprive ourselves by thinking otherwise.
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find me on Substack at @timmadigan
