“Never Again” Is Now
When I was a kid, I was a voracious reader. Unfortunately, my parents were not. So there were precious few books in the house for me to read. I read the ones we did have over and over again. One of the books that affected me the most, however, contained mostly photographs: a compendium of pictures from LIFE magazine up to that point (the mid-1970s) called “50 Years of LIFE.” There were some wonderful, beautiful, truly whimsical photos in the book. But there were also many that chronicled the absolute worst of humanity in the past 50 years and left such a huge impact on me, it totally formed who I am and what I stand for today.
There were photos of children who had been deformed because their mothers took the anti-nausea drug DES when they were pregnant. There were photos from the Jim Crow era — water fountain and bathroom signs that said “Whites Only.” Even worse, there were pictures documenting the awful practice of lynching in the deep south prior to the civil rights era. One particularly surreal, famous lynching photo had me dumbstruck. An all-white crowd is surrounding a dark, partially clothed body swinging above them from a tree. Apparently, in the Jim Crow south, lynchings were a big party. People would even bring their KIDS to watch. (Read more: “The Legacy of Lynching in the Deep South”)
The dichotomy of such an evil death and the glib, even JOYFUL looks of the bystanders and murderers in that photo made me nauseous. Big smiles on their faces, as if they were attending a sporting event. I suppose for them, lynching was sport. I considered them bloodthirsty demons and could not fathom what on earth would make humans capable of such evil.
But it was the photos American servicemen took when they liberated the concentration camps of Nazi Germany that really gave me nightmares. The liberators were met with rows and rows of living skeletons, really. People who’d been starved and forced to labor for months. They also came upon mass graves. The Nazis couldn’t even be bothered to provide a proper burial for their victims..they stacked the bodies they’d assassinated up, like so much trash. I’m nauseous again, simply remembering these pictures.
As a kid, I simply could not wrap my brain around 1) how humans were capable of committing such vile atrocities, and 2) questioning why the people who didn’t participate, didn’t do enough to stop it. I compiled quite a library of books about the Third Reich, just to read as much as I could to try to understand. Even still, I couldn’t get it.
Now, I know. I am seeing daily evidence showing me how people are brainwashed and trained to hate and commit acts of violence. We Americans are currently experiencing a depressing, traumatic, living, seemingly endless nightmare of our country re-enacting Germany in the 1930s. I NEVER thought I would see the same dynamics that played out during the Third Reich HERE IN MY OWN COUNTRY. Not in the country that fucking fought Nazis??? My dad, a World War 2 vet, must be rolling in his grave. Of course, the right wing waited until most of the “Greatest Generation” died off, before letting the Nazis loose to run our government and run amok in our streets.
I still can’t believe that there hasn’t been thousands of people in the streets. We got a million or so to show up for the Women’s March — which, really, let’s face it, was a nice “feel good” event, but ended up being basically meaningless. It’s not as if the Trump administration has used the imagery of all those people marching against them to moderate their policies.
I’m convinced nothing will change until we get hundreds of thousands in the streets. In South Korea, it took millions in the streets for a sustained period before their corrupt president resigned. She was subsequently given a jail sentence of 24 years. In Puerto Rico, about 400,000 are in the streets right now, fighting their corrupt governor.
Why aren’t Americans showing up, en masse, in front of the White House, to demand Trump step down? Here’s my theory — I think sadly, most Americans are only willing to do the bare minimum to enact change. I think they like to fool themselves that complaining on social media is somehow doing something. Unless social media posts are backed up by nonstop pleas to your congressional reps, at the very LEAST, venting on social media is worthless. It may make you feel better for a minute, but IT DOESN’T CHANGE ANYTHING. It’s as useless as “thoughts and prayers” after a mass shooting.
It’s interesting that the people putting themselves on the front lines in the fight against Trump’s policies are Jewish groups. They’re the ones getting arrested by forming human blockades, attempting to impede ICE as much as possible. Why does it always have to be the most vulnerable making sacrifices for others who are vulnerable?
Of course, Jewish people are more alarmed than most because they’ve been here before. They know that they could easily be next. For as much as Trump and his minions want to peg their critics in Congress as anti-semitic, it’s not Ilhan Omar who characterized neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”
It seems that every time there’s been an anti-semitic attack (which have escalated since Trump got elected) like the spray painting of swastikas at Jewish cemeteries, for example — it’s mainly been MUSLIMS who’ve stepped up to help out, by donating money, actually physically showing up to help repair the damage, or providing much-needed security.
WHERE ARE THE CHRISTIANS? Where are the non-Jewish, non-Muslim white people? And I don’t mean, the evangelicals who’ve jumped on the Trump train — they’re sadly exemplifying everything that’s wrong with organized religion — the hypocrisy, the wielding of institutionalized religion like a bat to enforce draconian, authoritarian policies.
Jews, Muslims, and immigrants should not have to fight this evil alone. It’s just wrong. Entitled people need to start USING that entitlement to change things. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke of the “white moderate”:
“First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;” who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a “more convenient season.”
What is the “white moderate” today waiting for? I see people on social media saying “vote blue, no matter who!” I suppose they think everything will be fine, once Trump is voted out of office.
Do you all really think there will even BE an election in 2020? We’ll be lucky if they LET us vote by then. This administration has shown its disregard for democracy and the rule of law in a dozen different ways already. Polls have shown Trump getting trounced by nearly all of the 50 or so Dem candidates who’ve declared. He also knows — and the Mueller Report made excruciatingly clear — that so long as he’s president, he “can’t” be indicted (I put that in quotes because the only reason he can’t is it’s considered “official DOJ policy”; however, legal experts have said there is no real constitutional reason a sitting president can’t be indicted for crimes committed in office.) I’m pretty sure he will hold onto power for as long as he can.
Yesterday, it was announced, without too much fanfare or the outrage an action like this SHOULD have been met with, that the administration will be expanding its “expedited removal system” that should never have been implemented in the first place, because it’s unconstitutional.
Trump is now granting ICE unprecedented power to engage in Gestapo-like tactics of checking documentation, and if ICE determines someone is illegal, they can be deported right away — no court hearing. No due process.
THIS IS CODE RED, PEOPLE. DEFCON 1.
We are now at the “papers please” acceleration of Trump’s fascism. We have gotten to that point because of America’s “ho hum”, ostrich-head-in-the-sand, “look the other way” inaction at continued administration malfeasance. Trump bet that most people simply wouldn’t care enough about immigrant children to get off their asses and do something, and he was right. He’s tested the waters, little by little, to see how much he could get away with before getting to this point. It’s all been very calculated and planned.
They tested out declaring a national emergency because of a manufactured “crisis at the border”. There was no huge outcry.
He tested out the policy that his Nazi Nosferatu advisor Stephen Miller proudly owned, solidifying his place in the canon of worst real-life Republican supervillains of all time: the totally horrific policy of separating kids from their families. And even more horrific, even when ordered by the judicial system, doing its due diligence as a check on authoritarian, unconstitutional overreach, to re-unite these families, it turns out they could not re-unite all of them because..guess what? They never had a plan to do so in the first place. THEY DID NOT KEEP TRACK OF WHERE THEY PUT THESE CHILDREN.
Many of the children simply got swallowed into the system and couldn’t be found. Some of them were farmed out to “Christian” adoption agencies, in a really fucked up harkening back to when the U.S. used to kidnap native American children away from their families forever to put them in “good Christian homes” to strip away their culture and “acclimate” them to their colonial invaders’ way of life.
Still..we failed to see thousands of people marching in the streets.
He tested out putting kids in cages. Once again, protests against this were localized and pitifully small. He tested out forcing kids as young as three years old to represent themselves in immigration court, with no attorney. Once again, people did not gather en masse to demand that these inhumane, racist policies stop.
He tested out using taxpayers’ money (breaking the law to do so, I might add) to build more and more migrant detention centers, even though his “crisis at the border” rhetoric betrayed the fact that the number of immigrants seeking asylum at the southern border is down.
He sent his DHS minion into court to justify the administration’s refusal to provide immigrant children basic sanitary supplies, like toothbrushes and soap. Lawyer Sarah Fabian became the most hated person on social media for a time. However, still..there was not enough ACTION to send a message to this government that we truly give a shit about the terrible things it’s doing.
Don’t get me wrong. There are an awful lot of people who are trying very hard to help these poor people, who only want what immigrants to these shores who have been coming here for 2 centuries want — a better life. There are hard-working attorneys doing what they can to keep these poor people simply seeking a better life from being oppressed by our own government. There are good people putting their freedom on the line, simply to give people crossing the border water, so they don’t die. They’re paying for it with threatened longterm imprisonment. Clearly, the Trump administration is sending a message that if you act humanely and attempt to help immigrants, you, too, will be detained and possibly imprisoned for a long time.
Meanwhile, we’re finding out more and more about just how villainous and racist our own border patrol agents are. America is feeling more and more like the Third Reich, every day.
WHY AREN’T WE MARCHING?
Even if people in this country are too distracted by what the Romans called “panem et circenses”; even if my most pessimistic suspicions about this country are true — that we really are a violently racist lot overall and that even so-called liberals who pretend they care by spending five minutes posting photos of babies in cages to elicit the time-honored “thoughts and prayers” replies simply couldn’t give enough of a fuck to sacrifice their time or their freedom to stop all of this; I appeal to Americans’ selfish nature.
Never forget — the Nazis didn’t start with death camps. Nazis didn’t even start with the Jews. The very first people they came for were their political rivals. Trump is starting with the most vulnerable among us — the undocumented. The nonwhite citizen. The non-Christian. As we know from history, authoritarian fascists never stop there.
Right-wing propaganda has pushed the myth that “libtards” are the mortal enemy of good “patriots” everywhere, for decades. The stage has been set for a cultural civil war, for a long time. Just check out the kind of commercials the NRA had been running, with extreme, violent rhetoric aimed squarely at leftists, before the organization ran into its own karmic justice of fuckitude.
Now the rhetoric is being twisted to suggest that if you DARE criticize this president, you HATE America. And if you HATE America, you should leave. Bots on Twitter, as they tend to do, are repeating this OVER. and OVER. and OVER. This is how they brainwash Trump supporters.
The latest chant to replace “lock her up” is “send her back” — referring to four Congresswomen of color Trump has singled out as the newest “boogeymen” of his base. Send them back WHERE? They’re all American citizens. Are they setting it up so that they can start deporting Trump’s critics, even if they were born here? This is chilling, frightening shit. This is exactly how Hitler pit German citizens against each other. Before you know it, we’re gonna be in fear of our neighbors turning us into the ICE Gestapo for even the simplest acts of kindness towards people the administration labels as “enemies of the state.”
Trump’s MAGA cult would have made good little Hitler brownshirts.
In the Senate, Ted Cruz has proposed labeling “antifa” a terrorist group. Now, “antifa” is really a made-up boogie man to rile up the GOP’s poorly educated base. At every anti-Trump protest I’ve been to, I’ve maybe seen a few people who fit the right’s paranoid portrayal of your typical “antifa terrorist.” Never mind that if you’re anti-anti-fa, you’re basically pro-fascist.
It really makes no sense. No one who is a self-declared “antifascist” has killed anyone. We all know the REAL terrorists are the white supremacists who make up Trump’s violent base. You know — like the alt-right incels shouting “Jews will not replace us”, who got 3 people at Unite the Right killed. Or the 4Chan/Qanon conpiracy nutballs who like to march into synagogues or mosques and mow people down, because they’ve been amped up by nonstop right-wing, racist propaganda like citizen Manchurian candidates to assassinate the “other” they fear. Or just your average citizen who now thinks it’s okay to mow down an autistic black man because he looked twice at their girlfriend. I’m deathly afraid we’re soon gonna see those photos of people being lynched, like the ones I saw as a kid, updated for the modern era, on social media.
It’s clear Trump’s MAGA cult and white supremacists are the REAL threat. Trump has arguably inspired most of the racially motivated acts of terrorism that have occurred in the last three years. His slimy tentacles of hate even reached New Zealand when a Trump supporter entered a mosque and killed nearly 50 worshippers during prayer service. The shooter has been praised as a hero on neo-Nazi sites like the Daily Stormer.
Counties that have hosted Trump rallies saw an astonishing 226 percent increase in violent crime afterwards. (Hey, maybe cities that are considering hosting his Hitler rallies should think twice? He never pays the bills after them, anyway).
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the number of hate groups have reached a record high since Trump was elected. “It was the fourth straight year of hate group growth — a 30 percent increase roughly coinciding with Trump’s campaign and presidency — following three consecutive years of decline near the end of the Obama administration.”
Despite the facts and evidence that Trump himself is our biggest national security threat, the GOP wants to silence antifa, to effectively kill the first amendment rights citizens have to petition the government, in service to a president who writes love letters to dictators who plot our doom, and posts romantic photos of himself canoodling with them in the west wing.
I know it’s overwhelming at times. It’s tempting to just crawl in a hole, put our hands over our ears, and tune it all out. We can’t afford to. This is an ongoing national nightmare that will not end well for any of us, and it should have been stopped long ago.
These people in Nashville have the right idea. They formed a human chain to prevent ICE from taking one of their neighbors into custody. It’s time to ask yourself — are you willing to do this? What will YOU do, to prevent injustice, now that injustice is rampant? Like me, did you read about the Holocaust and think, “well *I* would have never let that happen! I would have been one of the people like Ann Frank’s neighbors, hiding Jews and protecting them, even if I could have ended up in a concentration camp for doing so.”
Oh really? Well, now is the test. Prove it.
As Jewish groups fighting the Trump regime are practically SHOUTING at us — NEVER AGAIN IS NOW.
Copyright 2019 S. Wade
