“[ICE] is just doing their job.”
<This is a FB comment turned brief blog post, and is not meant to be an exhaustive comparison of Hitler’s Brownshirts to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. It is intended to provoke both thought and action.>
In 1933, the year that Hitler took power, he created paramilitary goons known as Brownshirts to terrorize populations of people that were coming and going from Germany. The targets were based on race and ideology among other things — not only Jews were targeted, but so were the Roma people (Gypsies), folks coming from the Mediterranean regions who didn’t fit the Aryan profile. Among these were communists, blamed for a fire at the Reichstag actually perpetrated by Brownshirts. That gave Hitler a “reason” to take over the reins of not only the executive branch, but also the legislative branch. Shortly after, rules started appearing that targeted people of particular people groups, Jews included.
Each of employee in Hitler’s executive and legislative branch were ‘just doing their jobs.’
Each of the Brownshirts were just doing their jobs.
This is also our world in 2018, and ICE are Brownshirts.
Trump created a crisis by implementing a policy that targets specific migrant populations, effectively a blank criminalization their entry into the United States. Using the grotesque act of taking children away by force at the border, in some cases even ripping babies from the breasts of their mothers, they’re sent to detention camps, which, not surprisingly, didn’t look like the concentration camps at the end of the war. Just like the first Nazi “detention centres” they have some of the comforts of home, without any of the freedom of movement. Nazis too used family separations as a tool to dehumanize and degrade people, making them think their situation was hopeless. As it is, we know that hundreds of children are Already lost in the American system, never to return to their parents.
Even Trump’s ‘reversal’ of the family separation policy is, itself a significant policy change. It turns on a significant 1997 case known as the Flores Settlement, which prohibits the federal government from holding family units together for longer than 20 days. In seeking to end his own cruel policy, AG Jeff Sessions will need permission from a judge to run afoul of that law, ostensibly keeping families together, in detention, indefinitely.
And in case my Canadian friends don’t think this could happen here, it did, not that long ago, in 2011, under Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. I wrote about it in a column for the Waterloo Region Record here:
The current Trump movement is absolutely a repetition of the rise of Hitler’s Germany, and it is long past the starting point. I have absolutely no regrets in making the comparison. I only hope those who support ripping children from the breasts of their mothers will not find themselves in the same position one day.
For a fantastic overview of Hitler’s first year in power from four distinct perspectives, check out the book “1933” by Philip Metcalfe.
