On a related note I saw someone say the point of reading Maus is so "privileged people" can understand what it's like to face extermination and like, no, that isn't it. Even phrasing it like that invites "privileged people" to look at, for example, the rise in antisemitic hate crimes and conclude "that's bad, but I'm not Jewish, so it doesn't directly concern me." It's as if that famous poem ends with "after they came for everyone else they left me alone because I was a white Christian male." But that isn't how it ends, does it? No, because fascism doesn't respect such neat and tidy boundaries as "privileged/unprivileged."
An important thing about reading things like Maus is that fascism can decide, literally at any time, that you are the enemy.
The first quarter of Maus is about Art's dad, a poor Jewish kid, marrying into a rich Jewish family and becoming a captain of industry, at a time when antisemitism in Poland is at such aloe ebb (at least among the bourgeoisie) that the family doesn't even really think of it as something that can alter their social position. Everyone knows their Jewish. They own factories and employ hundred of workers, Jew and Gentile. Vladek and his wife, Anja, have a Gentile Polish house keeper (who later on becomes one of the few gentile who risks their life to help the Spiegelmans). Then war breaks out with Germany, Vladek gets drafted into the Polish army and is taken prisoner by the Germans (where he and other Jewish POWs are kept in inferior conditions to Gentile soldiers of the same rank) and when he's finally released he returns home to find his weathy family has been stripped of it's factories, it's assets confiscated, and they all have been reduced to living in a cramped flat in the ghetto.
This of course seems inevitable to a reader now. If course the Nazis confiscated the wealth of a prominent Jewish family. But a thing that comes across in reading Maus is that, even years later, Vladek still found it shocking. He and his family felt a real sense that their social position would inoculate them to some lesser or greater extent from the full effects of fascism.
There's no sense of fatalism here: to Vladek, the Holocaust was not inevitable, antisemitism turning his formerly kind neighbors and colleagues against him and his family was not inevitable. And as it was not inevitable for him, yet happened, it must only be as inevitable for anyone else.
This sense of non-inevitable inevitability shows how a contemporary reader why it would be foolish (unless they are a dyed in the wool Nazi) to assume fascism could never come for them.
Maus shows, among many other things, just how quickly life can change, how the most basic things we take for granted, our most basic human dignities, can be stripped away in a terrifyingly short instance of time if people who believe we deserve none of them ever hold power. And the nature of fascism is that no one but the fascists (and ultimately only the most purely fascist fascists) are ever beyond the gaze of elimination. No wonder those at the vanguard of American fascism are uncomfortable with Maus.
