Ordinary Men
Some thoughts while reading a new history of the Holocaust, interrupted by BREAKING NEWS
Hello,
It’s hard to shake that feeling that we have seen this all before. And a cousin of that same feeling: most people didn’t see it, until it was too late. Or they feigned ignorance. Or they quietly (and not so quietly) agreed with it. Or, in the end, they went along with the deportation of millions; or, even worse fates than deportation. And one important reason that people go along, or even support such measures, is dehumanization. In fact, according to criminologist Nicole Rafter, “negative labeling is a step in the dehumanization process that often accompanies genocide (2016, 44).”
Leading Republican nominee for president, former president Donald Trump, has repeatedly referred to people escaping from war, drug cartels, state failure, natural disasters, and forced deportation, as people who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” We know his talk of “drug dealers, criminals, rapists” from his 2016 campaign. And he has been boasting that he will reignite Operation Wetback, a grotesquely named mass deportation program that included the deportation of thousands of Mexican-American citizens, not just undocumented people, during the Eisenhower administration in 1954.
Under his first term, Trump’s immigration policies were numerous; they were all bad, and according to a credible award-winning report by Caitlin Dickerson for The Atlantic, the so-called Zero Toleration or family separation policy of the Trump administration, was the worst one. (And was also sympatico with Beijing’s family seperation policy; which is part of their cultural genocide of Uighur Muslims.) The policies of his second term will be even worse; and he and Stephen Miller are bragging about it, basically. Here is an Axios list of some of the proposed policies:
Ramp up ideological screening for people legally applying to come into the country. U.S. law has blocked communists from entering for decades, it just hasn't been enforced. Trump wants to enforce it to reject applicants who are deemed "Marxists."
Send the Coast Guard and the Navy to form a blockade in the waters off the U.S. and Latin America to stop drug smuggling boats. It would be a significant step up Trump's show of force in 2020, when he sent warships to the Caribbean as a warning to cartels.
Expand Trump's "Muslim ban" idea to block more people from certain countries from entering the U.S. As president he banned immigration from more than a dozen countries that are mostly Muslim or in Africa; President Biden rescinded that executive order.
Designate drug cartels as "unlawful enemy combatants" to allow the U.S. military to target them in Mexico. The U.S. has used that designation to justify long-term detentions of 9/11 suspects at Guantanamo Bay.
Seek to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants. Trump considered this as president, but today's conservative-leaning Supreme Court has given his team more confidence about taking on an inevitable legal fight.
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I’m reading a new history of the Holocaust, simply called The Holocaust: An Unfinished Story (2024), by professor of modern history Dan Stone, and it is striking how similar the dehumanization of Jews was across history and peaking in the mid-20th century to that of contemporary rightwing rhetoric regarding migrants. Or minority populations of any kind, especially black people or those with Latin American surnames. Outsiders or deviants, often migrants, are either “invaders” or “super-predators,” to borrow a grotesque term that Hillary Clinton paraded about in the 1990s to boast about a tough on crime bill that her husband President Clinton signed into law in 1994, when the Democratic Party tried to out-evil the Republican Party.
And, boy, just how often people and groups deemed outsiders are painted with the tag of “Communist” would be hilarious if it didn’t have deadly consequences, or if Trump and the Republicans don’t call everyone to their left Communist Marxists socialists incessantly, intentionally dehumanizing those who believe in a government that helps support people have better, more humane, lives. In fact, almost all regulations of guns, cigarettes, alcohol, etc. are deemed “socialistic” or communistic by corporations and their think-tanks, such as those sponsored by the Koch network, or those sponsored by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. And those kind of attacks are dehumanizing because they are often framed as those policies would help…well…anybody who isn’t part of the Team, which usually means white middle class Protestants or Catholics.
Policies that support “public investment”— which Americans since the 1960s read coded as helping black people or other minority groups—is another example of how language is deliberately used to dehumanize and otherize people. In the field that I am in, supporting women who face domestic and sexual violence, fewer Latina women have reported domestic violence in cities such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, and Houston, due to fear and threat and actual deportations. In 2018, Latinos reported that they sought less medical treatment and turned down chances to receive help buying infant formula and nutritional food when news spread that Trump was planing to deny legal status to immigrants who’ve used public benefits. The Trump admin did issue a rule on this which was blocked by a federal judge, but only on the basis that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act for insufficient details provied.
A smarter more strategic second Trump admin will try all of this again. And then some. Scapegoating and spreading fear about migrants absolutely makes their lives worse. It makes the lives of those who are even perceived as a migrant more stressful and increases the chance that all sort of adverse events might happen to them. And remember that citizens got deported last time Operation Wetback was implemented. And people also died.
BREAKING NEWS
As I was writing this newsletter, I open The Washington Post to find this headline:
Trump campaign spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, had this to say:
“Americans can expect that immediately upon President Trump’s return to the Oval Office, he will restore all of his prior policies, implement brand new crackdowns that will send shock waves to all the world’s criminal smugglers, and marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation in American history.”
Read the reporting by The Washington Post, and believe Trump and his campaign of monsters when they are telling us what they want to do. They are braggging about all of this.
I’ll have more to say about what ordinary people can do about all this in due time. Of course, on Nov. 5, 2024 vote Biden or whoever winds up being the Democratic nominee.
In solidarity,
Patrick M. Foran