We’re having a slo-mo Kristallnacht
The parallels have moved on from words to deeds.
- – Targeting racial groups. Then: Jews, gypsies, Slavs. Also: gays. Now: brown people, Muslims. Also: gays, trans. (I know Judaism and Islam are religions, not races. But the people doing the targeting don’t see it that way.)
- Children bullied. Places of worship defaced, burned. Street harassment.
- – Sending members of the groups to their deaths. Then: … well, we all know what they did then. Now: rounding up brown people. Deporting brown people to places where they are killed. The link refers to the murders when Obama promoted such actions. Now the idea is to do much more of the same.
There’s a huge difference of course. The US approach is not systematic. It’s scattershot. And it relies on non-state actors to commit the actual rapes, tortures, and killings. For the most part.
Ask any woman who has to avoid dark streets, subway stations, buses, parking garages, and who has to put bars on the windows and doors of her home how effective non-state terror can be.
Disorganization and using other people to do your dirtiest work does not actually prove you are better than the classical Nazis.
It just proves you’re more dishonest.
Interior of Berlin synagogue after the Kristallnacht pogrom. 1938.
(Abraham Pisarek)
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Burned mosque in Victoria, Texas. January 2017
(Bob Daemmrich)
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And just to underline my point, yesterday the Mango Moron talks about “shithole countries,” those from which the darker brown immigrants come. Classic dehumanizing language.
Then, when people are shocked — shocked! — that he makes his racism so plain, one of the excuses is that his so-called base will like it.
Much like that other base decades ago cheered the same kind of putdowns from another demagogue.
The leaders don’t go to hell alone.
quixote on January 12th, 2018 at 14:06
A few days later, this: “If there’s no immigration deal by the end of February, ICE will start rounding up and deporting 800,000 DREAMers.”
quixote on January 17th, 2018 at 09:42
Also this, of course.
Once upon a time the US stood with the rest of the post World War II countries in recognizing what an abomination the separation of families was. Given the other horrors of done by the Nazis, separating families was maybe not the worst thing they did. But it was right up there.
Too many parallels.
quixote on January 17th, 2018 at 10:13
Every day there are new repeats of history.
quixote on January 21st, 2018 at 06:39