First They Came for the Stateless
The Ethnic Cleansing Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Right before I was hit with the flu, I read about another immigrant here in the US being ripped apart from his family and sent to another country. Note that the usual POTUS-led tripe about MS-13 — nevermind his policies only help criminals in this gang by enforcing fear and silence in the communities around them — or major criminals did not apply, as it rarely does, since he was a professor of chemistry and had a family who would be devastated should he leave.
But the far-right definition of a criminal is anyone who is illegal is a criminal.
Even someone brought here via adoption at the age of one can find themselves deported decades later. Decades. By this time they have become Americans in all but name while with no knowledge of the language or culture of the country they’re being sent to. It’s cruel and unusual punishment .
But what gets to me is the absolute lack of empathy that some fellow citizens show (screenshots above and this Kimmel video here) these people and their kids, who are usually American citizens, is what really digs at the soul. It’s cruel, this reaction. It’s evil. That some people are pleading not to be sent to their deaths, but being sent anyways is another stain on our national conscience.
What it reminds me of is a documentary I saw about WWII and how when Jews fleeing Germany were turned around there was glee in Germany at their misfortune of not being wanted anywhere (while here and elsewhere they were deemed “threats”). To think that a similar mindset has developed that repeats the worst mistakes of that war troubles the mind.
And having just read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, I’m reminded of how the Nazi exterminations started with simply kicking out non-German Jews. Just ripped them out for no reason. Arendt makes a great point that the stateless were the first to be targeted. The others came later.
And even if many of these people have passports, they are stateless in the sense of power and so are the easy marks. It’s up to us to help protect them, help turn our nation from this troubled path.
Because if reading Arendt helps is that she highlights how if people stood up for the stateless (people from the majority groups who weren’t being targeted) the Nazi genocides were stopped. However if they were stopped or delayed things turned out better.
What we do, how we react matters.
