The Moment of Truth: First They Came for the Latinos

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/columns/article/33931/first-they-came-for-the-latinos

<snip>See, all you really want to do is make sure anyone who’s going to complain is Latino. That way, anyone from the rest of the population watching TV who sees people complaining about Gestapo tactics will see only people who look like brown immigrants. And they’ll say to themselves, “There go all those brown immigrants who come to take our jobs, complaining about America again. If they don’t like it, why don’t they go back where they came from? You know, to that other, not as good America.”

The Nazis tried to avoid dramatic scenes where regular Germans could see them harassing Jews right in their midst, at least early on – they didn’t throw cordons around high-society balls just because a couple of Jews were attending. It always worked out better for the Nazis when they harassed Jews in the Jewish neighborhoods. That’s why they put them in ghettos, silly! Even European anti-Semites could be annoyed by being cordoned off in a block of cafes at tea time, even if it was in the name of ferreting out the dirty Jew, and don’t get me started with your dozen or so less-than-rabidly-anti-Semitic Germans – they had no stomach for that stuff whatsoever. snip

Anti-immigrant Nationalism has never really gone out of style in the West – or anywhere. It’s just that with the leader of the Free World pushing discourse so far to the right – if you can call monarchy “right” – all right, pushing discourse so many centuries back into the pre-republic past, back to the days before Italian Humanism, back before Machiavelli saw a market for his ideas – it’s made scared, angry majorities nostalgic for the days when you could just round up the troublemaking outsiders and massacre them. It’s like when white people in the USA start singing songs about watching the darkies picking cotton, or when a group of Germans start singing “Deutschland Uber Alles” or the “Horst Wessel” song, they get all misty-eyed and long for the good old days.

When a government can’t rule competently, it has to rule by fear, or risk being thrown out by the people. So, in all fairness to everyone on Earth, the internal enemy is the best friend an incompetent government can have. And since humanity has never been plagued by an epidemic of competent government, we should hardly be surprised to find so many enemies in our midst.

I guess citizens of the US are spoiled. They should stop deluding themselves that their Constitution can somehow prevent their government from abusing human rights. How is the US supposed to compete in the new competitive global marketplace if they’re hamstrung by government regulations that protect their citizens from unreasonable search and seizure? China doesn’t have to follow due process – that’s how they got to be such an economic powerhouse.

In order for oppression to be stopped, it needs to be seen.