© Unknown
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries sheThese lines from Emma Lazarus' famous poem "The New Colossus" are enshrined at the base of the Statute of Liberty in New York Harbor. Just across the water, the twin towers of the World Trade Center stood against the sky, giving New York the most famous city sky-scape in the world. All that is changed now. And in the ashes of 9/11, the nation lost something far more significant - its soul, its reason for being.
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
Since 9/11, we have engaged in a nonstop orgy of self-pity, wallowing in our grief and shock and horror. We have done things that are antithetical to what it means to be American: torture, murder, renditions, corruption on both the national and international levels, murder of innocent civilians, invading another country and overthrowing its government without provocation, granting immunity to mercenaries for indiscriminate killings of innocent civilians, violation of another nation's sovereignty, officially sanctioned rape and sexual abuse of prisoners of war, abrogation of the Geneva Conventions and international treaty obligation, repeated violations of constitutional and civil rights in the name of security, spying on our own citizens, lies and violations of our word of honor until our word is simply a mockery of truth. Our news media, the guardians of public discourse, have been complicit - as have we, the American people.
Our self-absorbed grieving created such a din within our own minds that we have become oblivious to the world in which we live - and the effect of our own actions in it. We would rather shop than think. We are drunk on our own self-pity and self-righteousness - and we are showing the signs of this self-absorption for the whole world to see.
© UnknownHitler and Brown Shirts
We dismantled long-established law enforcement agencies housed in the various departments whose functions these agencies served, mashing them together helter-skelter into the new "Department of Homeland Security" - a department obsessed with trivial details but totally incapable of getting the big things right - as witnessed by its handling of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath (similar to our handling the Iraq war and its aftermath).
The latest show of such monumental governmental obsession-with-detail-yet-inability-to-get-the-big-things-right is the immigration raid of Postville - a made-for-television psycho-drama of state-sponsored terrorism.
Weeks before the raid, government agents apparently collected school records, culling out students with Hispanic sounding last names. During the raid, black helicopters hovered overhead while black-uniformed flak-jacketed storm troopers armed with automatic assault weapons locked down the packing plant and rounded up Hispanics. After the raid, agents went door-to-door searching for specific Hispanics and tearing them away from their families and children.
One teacher described the experience like a scene from Spielberg's movie of the Jewish Holocaust "Schindler's List". The description could not be more apt.
What Postville and the Hispanics experienced has its genesis in the very DNA mutation that produced Nazi Germany and its main contribution to the rest of mankind: the orderly systemic rounding up of an identifiable segment of the population. We saw it again in Bosnia - and Rwanda - and now Darfur and Iraq.
© UnknownMaricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is doing exactly what President Bush and Julie Myers did in deceiving Congress stating ICE was locking up fugitives but rather was apprehending undocumented persons with no criminal convictions for deportation the same day.
Arpaio has continually lied to Phoenix voters stating his immigration sweeps search out fugitives but rather the immigration sweeps are a flagrant misuse of resources to seek out the undocumented for deportation.
Arpaio has continually lied to Phoenix voters stating his immigration sweeps search out fugitives but rather the immigration sweeps are a flagrant misuse of resources to seek out the undocumented for deportation.
Our nation is engaged on a course of conduct eerily similar to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930's and 1940's. Arrogance and disrespect and using the ends to justify the means are its hallmarks. And its fruits are everywhere: trampling of the Constitution and basic human rights, trashing of the economy, imprisonment of innocent people, mismanagement of civil and foreign affairs, endless war - and the on-going vilification and separation of Hispanics labeled as "illegal aliens".
Like Nazi Germany, the present administration's immigration deportation policy is aimed at one specific identifiable group of people: Hispanics under the guise of "illegal aliens". Like Nazi Germany, the present deportation enforcement is detail-oriented, picking out lists of names from literally millions, and targeting specific people of a specific group for mass round-ups and deportation. Like Nazi Germany, the present immigration enforcement shows no respect for families - indeed, it is remarkably cold-hearted and detached and dehuman.
Like Nazi Germany, the state-sponsored terrorism is very public and well orchestrated. The immigration agency's storm troopers are dressed in black and armed to teeth, arresting an unarmed civilian population - eerily reminiscent of the SS. Even the links between the judiciary and the state in the criminal prosecutions are too close for comfort - just like Nazi Germany.
Like Nazi Germany, the present immigration enforcement is both feed and feeds upon a steady drumbeat of politically orchestrated demagoguery and racial hatred, using the veneer of legality to justify this inhumane violent cruelty - what is known in other lands euphemistically as "ethnic cleansing."
We have learned to disassociate ourselves from the "them" - even though they may have previously been our neighbors or co-workers. The present participants in immigration enforcement are otherwise seemingly normal human beings.
The Nazis did not start out with the extermination of Jews as their goal. Their first "solution" to the "Jewish Problem" was to round up and deport the Jews - not kill them. It was only when other countries refused to except Jewish refugees (most notably the United States, to our everlasting shame), that Hitler and the SS came up with the "Final Solution" - the Holocaust. However, Nazi Germany reached that point in incremental steps.
The most essential step in this aberrant process is the defining of the target group as "them", as less than "us". Once "they" are a separate group, "we" can then see "them" as "other" - and can cease to empathize with them as fellow human beings. And it is this lack of empathy and compassion, this categorical "otherness" and depersonalization, that renders us vulnerable to our own worst character defects - and sets us on the same road taken by the Nazis in the 1930's. (Try googling "empathy evil"...and see what you get.)
Other parallels are equally ominous. While Nazi Germany did the round up of the Jews with amazing precision and detail, it got the big picture items drastically and fatally wrong, as witnessed by its decision to invade Russia - thereby locking Germany into a war it could not win and draining its resources in the process. We have done the same thing in Iraq - for much the same rational. Like Nazi Germany, our government now uses torture and secret prisons. It spies on its own people without warrants. It has corrupted the prosecutors as shown by the reign of Alberto Gonzales at Department of Justice. Like Nazi Germany, it has grown obsessed with border security, regardless of whether such borders actually make us safer. Like Nazi Germany, this administration was elected into office with the complicity of the people.
The parallels grow even more stark. Nazi Germany used the burning of the Reichstag in 1933 as the justification for collecting Germany's various police agencies under a single command. We did the same thing, using the justification of the destruction of the World Trade Center to collect 22 separate federal police agencies and place them under a single command - thereby ensuring uniformity of command - and keeping down any dissension and independence of the various police agencies.
George Orwell's vision has come true: We have willingly submitted ourselves to a police state - and its operators are showing all the classical time-honored traits of such police states: a contempt for human rights and the rule of justice; enforcement of only those laws which are to their advantage (witnesses the president's signing statements); use of secret police and spying on its own people, use of torture as an instrument of state; secret prisons; detention of innocent persons for political reasons; silencing of opposition; labeling of those who dissent from the government's war as traitors and unpatriotic; mismanagement of the economy; use of government to enrich individuals and corporation supportive of the administration; use of war as an instrument of foreign policy and as a distraction for problems at home; high paranoia regarding dissent; and a surreal arrogance and belief in the righteousness of its rule.
Perhaps most frightening similarity - because of its obviousness - is the marriage of business and government, and the use of the military to assist industries and corporations. This is the nightmare that Eisenhower warned against: the "military-industrial complex" - and is exactly what occurred in Germany in the 1930's. Indeed, Hitler did not really run Germany - its business interests did. The huge usage of slave labor - in the millions, especially of Polish and Russians - by German corporations is testimony to this fact. Indeed, this usage of foreign slave labor was perhaps the SS's most notable achievement. Neo-Nazi groups in the United States have long been aware - and publicly flaunted - this anti-immigrant racial connection between America's immigration policy and Nazism. (See the Southern Poverty Law Center's website at splcenter.org.)
Now, with the raid on Postville and the previous massive well-orchestrated immigration raid against six packing plants in different states at the same time in December 2006 (including the Swift plant in Marshalltown), we are seeing the actual fruition of the police state. First, they tagged the Hispanics as "illegal". Then they politically orchestrated the ostracization of those Hispanics into a separate group - a "them". Now they are rounding them up and deporting them. The parallels are growing eerie - and the hour is growing darker. The question is: Who is next - and when will we stand up?
"In Germany, they came first for the Communists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist;
And then they came for the trade unionists, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;
And then they came for the Jews, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew;
And then . . . they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up."
~ Words of Rev. Martin Niemoeller, who spent 8 years in Nazi Germany's concentration camps for speaking out against the Nazis.
Reader Comments
to our Newsletter