Currently, the primary targets are said to be undocumented immigrants, but naturalized Americans and legal aliens are getting caught up in the ICE dragnet, and rendered to CECOT. The movement to restrict trans folk access to medication and life activities continues.
This rhymes a lot with the early history of the German Reich. Heydrich and the Chancellery were fully aware of the need for the enemy within rhetoric and the need to capture and contain a growing list of undesirables.
Even though it’s the Tiger Repellant Rock fallacy, when the public sees authorities at work arresting people (and making them disappear into the custody system) it shows the authorities are sincere in their effort to make society safer. The Trump Regime is doing exactly the same thing.
And as the Niemöller poem observes, the list of undesirables continues to grow, including more and more of the marginalize until it starts tapping into the mainstream. Every last one of us who is not a billionaire or a billionaire’s favored sex-puppet is on the list. Some of us are higher on that list than others.
Shortly after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal exploded in 2004, more news showed that this was the first appearance of a larger CIA extrajudicial detention and torture program. Rumsfeld suggested that torture was necessary and waterboarding isn’t really torture anyway, and a conspicuous lot of Republicans fell right in line, saying torture of terrorists (without due process) was acceptable, and waterboarding wasn’t even torture. My dad was among those toeing the Republican line, about which I was aghast.
So I went on deep dives into moral philosophy and dared to stare into the maw of Holocaust history.
::: Of note,
the marks inside the genocide chambers at Auschwitz were victims were clawing at the walls as they died. :::
So when news of CECOT emerged only last week, I lost my mind, and to this hour I can’t think of a proper appropriate, rational response to such news. Alexei Yurchak, survivor of USSR and teacher at Berkeley talks of hypernormalization in which we humans tend to try to just conduct our normal everyday lives as civilization falls apart around us. Is that what people around me are doing? It’s hard to believe I’m overreacting.
I’m still beside myself about these events, and for now I’m distracting and avoiding thinking about them, which is really not a great response.
Currently, the primary targets are said to be undocumented immigrants, but naturalized Americans and legal aliens are getting caught up in the ICE dragnet, and rendered to CECOT. The movement to restrict trans folk access to medication and life activities continues.
This rhymes a lot with the early history of the German Reich. Heydrich and the Chancellery were fully aware of the need for the enemy within rhetoric and the need to capture and contain a growing list of undesirables.
Even though it’s the Tiger Repellant Rock fallacy, when the public sees authorities at work arresting people (and making them disappear into the custody system) it shows the authorities are sincere in their effort to make society safer. The Trump Regime is doing exactly the same thing.
And as the Niemöller poem observes, the list of undesirables continues to grow, including more and more of the marginalize until it starts tapping into the mainstream. Every last one of us who is not a billionaire or a billionaire’s favored sex-puppet is on the list. Some of us are higher on that list than others.
Shortly after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal exploded in 2004, more news showed that this was the first appearance of a larger CIA extrajudicial detention and torture program. Rumsfeld suggested that torture was necessary and waterboarding isn’t really torture anyway, and a conspicuous lot of Republicans fell right in line, saying torture of terrorists (without due process) was acceptable, and waterboarding wasn’t even torture. My dad was among those toeing the Republican line, about which I was aghast.
So I went on deep dives into moral philosophy and dared to stare into the maw of Holocaust history. ::: Of note, the marks inside the genocide chambers at Auschwitz were victims were clawing at the walls as they died. :::
So when news of CECOT emerged only last week, I lost my mind, and to this hour I can’t think of a proper appropriate, rational response to such news. Alexei Yurchak, survivor of USSR and teacher at Berkeley talks of hypernormalization in which we humans tend to try to just conduct our normal everyday lives as civilization falls apart around us. Is that what people around me are doing? It’s hard to believe I’m overreacting.
I’m still beside myself about these events, and for now I’m distracting and avoiding thinking about them, which is really not a great response.