This may shock some of you, but Anne Frank is not a Democrat on Twitter.
The Diary of Anne Frank is easily one of the most famous non-fiction books published in the 20th century. The author, a Jewish girl who died at age 16 way back in 1945, never lived long enough to have an opinion about the issues of the LGBT political movement of the 21st century. How could she? Although gay people existed in 1945 [and they were targeted by the Nazis] gay rights were not a huge issue in 1940s Germany. Nobody in Nazi-Germany was trying to organize a gay pride parade or distribute condoms outside of LGBT-friendly dance clubs. They were far more concerned with a slew of other issues.
But strangely, whoever runs the Twitter account for the Anne Frank Center, a non-profit group that fights anti-Semitism and bigotry in the name of Anne Frank, seems to think Anne Frank would agree with the 21st century progressive-liberal perspective for gay rights in the western half of the world and that she would be adamantly opposed to US President Donald Trump.
On August 9th, 2017 the Anne Frank Center issued the following statement on Twitter:
The post was in response to Trump's recent "fire and fury" comment directed towards North Korea's nuclear program. Trump was taking a firm stance against North Korea’s development of nuclear weapons, a position with which some American leftists took great offense. The social media director at the Anne Frank Center seems to resemble one of these people. Whoever runs the Anne Frank Center Twitter account is clearly not a fan of Donald Trump. Of course, this statement does beg the question, if Anne Frank was alive today would she approve of someone using her name for their own political agenda? Going even further, does the person who wrote this Tweet not realize the difference between a figurative war and a literal war? A figurative war, in this case, is the kind of "war" where one competes politically, not violently, to advocate for public policy positions. If a Republican politician disagreed with his or her opponent, one might run for office to compete against a Democrat politician, for example, instead of actually forming a militia and invading said Democrat politician’s house with guns and missiles. That's not actually a "war". War is what's happening everyday in Afghanistan or Iraq for the better part of the past two decades. War is when you wake up and dodge landmines so you can get water for your family. War is when you need to duck and run for cover because a sniper is shooting at your home. When Donald Trump criticizes Black Lives Matter and gives police the benefit of the doubt in response to viral news stories, that's not actually "War". When Donald Trump says we need to vet refugees before we allow them into the United States, that’s not technically “war” either [although the two topics may relate to one and other]. And when Donald Trump says transgender individuals can't serve in the armed forces because their healthcare bills are too costly for the US Military to fund, that's also most certainly not war. Comparing Donald Trump’s political disputes with opposing Democrats to “war” is marginalizing to victims of actual war.
This should all be pretty obvious to most people, especially the social media director for the Anne Frank House, who also posted a diatribe that suggests it's distasteful to compare North Korea to the Nazi German holocaust. In response to a comment made by White House deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka [who compared North Korean prison labor camps to the concentration camps of the German-Nazis] the Anne Frank Center issued a scathing response that suggested such a comparison was inaccurate and insensitive. In Gorka's defense, North Korean labor camps currently hold about 120,000 people and in the past between 600,000 and 2,500,000 individuals have died in these places from malnutrition, torture or execution. While the situation doesn't perfectly mirror what happened in Nazi concentration camps, the horror is similar [more similar than, say, Donald Trump’s opposition to American Democrats and nuclear war with North Korea in 2017]. If the social media director for the Anne Frank Center thinks it's tasteless to compare North Korean labor camps to Nazi concentration camps, surely they can acknowledge the equally tasteless position of comparing Trump's figurative "war" on American Democrats to actual nuclear war with North Korea. I'll assume if you're not a leftist the obviousness of all of this isn't lost on you. Right? Hello? Is this thing on?
But getting back to Anne Frank, let’s not kid ourselves, folks, whoever runs the Twitter account for the Anne Frank Center is exploiting the image of a dead child to suit their own agenda. Anne Frank had no opinion about Donald Trump or the 21st century's perspective of gay rights. How could she? Gay rights weren't a frequently discussed topic in that era. That's not to say that there were no gay people in Nazi-Germany during World War 2. Between 1933 and 1945, about 100,000 men were arrested for being homosexuals and roughly half of them were officially sentenced. Of those 50,000, about 5,000-15,000 were sent to concentration camps. The number of these men who died in concentration camps is believed to be about 60%. And while homosexual acts among men were deemed a criminal offense, lesbianism (homosexual acts among women) were not criminalized by Nazis. However, the public outcry about all of this anti-gay oppression was overpowered by the far more pressing issue of antisemitism, anti-Catholicism and anti-everyone-who-wasn’t-a-Nazi. It’s hard to have a thriving gay rights movement when virtually every ethnic and religious group in your community is already being targeted by an authoritarian regime.
Now, if you scour the internet for long enough [which I don't recommend] you'll find people who claim Anne Frank was bisexual. They’ll say she was an early pioneer of gay rights and she paved the way for future bisexuals to help spread gay rights around Europe and the planet. And, of course, there's little proof to suggest any of this is true. She never officially identified as anything. She was just a kid. Besides being purely anecdotal, making assumptions about the sexuality of a dead teenager isn't just weird, it's downright creepy. Don't do it.
The bottom line is that, while there is a highly valuable lesson to be learned from the life of Anne Frank on how bigotry, war, genocide and authoritarianism have drastic negative consequences, the desperate attempt to use Anne Frank's image to politically attack the American President in 2017 is nothing short of tasteless exploitation.
To the staff at the Anne Frank Center, something tells me Anne Frank would be rolling in her grave if she knew what you’ve been saying on the Internet. Take a step back and reexamine your agenda. You’re not Anne Frank. You’re just an angry Democrat on Twitter. Know the difference.