The Neo-Nazification of the USA: Part I: Bush, and the Demonization of Hispanic Immigrants

Any doubt that the USA is being neo-Nazified can be erased just by making a careful, point-by-point comparison between what the Nazis did in the 1930s and what Bush and the fascist Republican Right are doing now.

At some point, a stream of coincidences becomes something else. It becomes evidence of deliberate replication. We’re there.

This is the first in a series of posts that I hope will help to make that clear.

I'm not writing this because I enjoy slogging through this mire. I'm writing this because I can't can't can't understand why Americans aren't in the streets as one, in protest. I'm writing this because maybe, by making ourselves, one by one, see our denial for what it is, we might find the strength to stop the madness.

I'm writing, now, specifically, because I am appalled by what I'm seeing in Arizona and across the USA, and what I'm hearing across the mainstream media about immigrant Hispanics.

I can't can't can't understand why Americans of my generation and older, at the very least, aren't seeing that America is behaving just like Germany on Krystalnacht. And condemning it!

I just don't see the difference. I. Do. Not. See. A. Difference. Sure, I hear the justifications. They're "illegals." I also hear the dishonesty, hypocrisy, and fraud in that formulation, as well. For decades, we've been happy to use undocumented workers, happy to exploit them, happy to extort them, happy to sneer and denigrate them, too, but nonetheless happy to ignore why they came and how. (Not to mention that there are far worse crimes that we routinely ignore when powerful white people commit them.) There's a parallel here, too. Germans were quite comfortable to use Jews for centuries in a similar quid pro quo, wrapped similarly in racist rhetoric.

Meanwhile, what I see is human beings being dehumanized, demonized, rounded up like cattle, separated from their infant children, dragged from their workplaces, detained, and deported. I hear them being vilified and cursed, and I hear credible reports from eye-witnesses that they are also being beaten, and that some have been killed in detention. And I hear with my own ears exhortations on American airways to kill more of them!

I can't believe this is happening in my country, except that I know we have been carefully prepared for just this kind of pogrom--let's call it what it is--by a barrage of divisive, brutal, hateful rhetoric over many years directed at several targerts. More later about that. Well, guess what? The Reich also didn't spring whole overnight from barren soil. It grew up over a decade or longer, depending on what you count, and it fed on exactly the same excrement: Fear, division, resentment, economic concerns, hate, and a language carefully crafted to dehumanize.

What I'm not hearing, however, is a loud and irresistable demand from the clergy and the governor and the people--much less the president and the Congress==to stop this right now. In fact, I'm hearing the opposite! Poll after poll tells us that Arizonans want Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his thugs to do exactly what they're doing as he and others like him rush to profit from the crudest, cruelest kinds of demagoguery.

Poor working human beings ought not be the target of anything, and are only the target of cowards and thugs. We have other means for addressing legitimate problems in border security and legitimate problems in workforce provision.

The real target ought to be a corrupt, duplicitous, and disintegrated immigration policy, a greedy corporatist economy, and a complicit public that wants its lettuce and landscaping cheap.

OK. End of rant. At least today.

About the neo-Nazification of the USA: I want to begin with a couple of observations about Hitler taken from the USA Office of Strategic Services' 1943 report by Walter C. Langer, “A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler, His Life and Legend”:

At the time of the reoccupation of the Rhineland, Hitler made use of an extraordinary figure of speech in describing his own conduct. He said,
"I follow my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker." (p. 4)

[Hitler’s] primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or a wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it. (p. 219)

I’m a little unnerved. I just found these an hour or so ago, and from what I’ve observed, they apply just as aptly to George W. Bush. That proves nothing, of course. But, lacking any contradicting patterns in his behavior, I will add this bit of information to a growing pile of similarities between the Nazification of Germany and what I believe to be the Nazification of the USA.

Again, at a certain point, a stream of coincidences becomes something else. It becomes evidence of deliberate replication. As I see it, if there’s a credibility problem, it doesn’t lie in pointing them out. It lies in refusing to see them.