Ripping children from their mothers’ arms is a moral atrocity of historic magnitude. It is torture of children as policy. The adjective “Hitlerian” is not too strong. WE are morally obligated to put a stop to it, using every known tactic of peaceful protest, including chaining ourselves to the gates of those evil camps. If we lead, our elected officials will follow. If they don’t, we’ll deal with them at the voting booth, in a little less than five months.
1) Hitlerian:
The Holocaust (capital T capital H) stands as the supreme evil in human history. The Third Reich, the entire apparatus from Hitler on down to the guys who ran the trains to the death camps, was composed of monsters. There have been other historic atrocities with larger numbers of victims: Stalin’s purges and gulags, Mao’s Cultural Revolution. But what makes Hitler and the Third Reich the supreme evil, is the combination of two things: One, genocide: the explicit goal of rendering Jews extinct as a people, down to the last man, woman, and child. Two, systematized sadism: the use of all of the methods of then-modern industry and management, in service of the kind of deliberate and gratuitous cruelty, violence, and murder, that words can barely begin to describe.
If there is ONE thing that’s sacred in every human society, it’s the bond between children and their parents, particularly young children and their mothers. So many other animals are ferociously protective of their young that it’s become a cliché. One of the most dangerous things you can do in the woods is get between a mother bear and her cub.
Taking a baby or a child away from his or her parents is torture. There is no other word for it.
Torturing children is the epitome of evil, the domain of true monsters.
Contemplate this: the abject terror of a child, particularly a baby or a toddler, upon being separated from his or her mother, with no way of getting in touch, and no way to know if they’ll ever see each other again. Contemplate the anguish of mothers not knowing where their children are, or if they are safe, or if they will ever see them again. Contemplate trying to eat or sleep amidst the terrified wails of babies or the muffled sobs of mothers. Contemplate it until it drives you to the brink of the same terror and grief that those children and those mothers must be feeling. Then resolve to act.
This has become the policy of this administration, this Regime, to do exactly that thing: to violate the core parental protective instinct held by all of humanity and numerous other species, for the clear and obvious (even if not explicitly stated) purpose of “discouraging” undocumented migrants trying to enter the US.
In other words, “don’t come here, because if we catch you, we are going to torture your baby.”
That is systematized sadism, using all of the tools of the administrative state. And that is why it truly does bear use of the adjective “Hitlerian” and the comparison to the Third Reich. To add yet another horror, parents and children are being told, “they’re only being taken for a shower.” Good God!, that’s the very same language the Nazis used to herd Jews into the gas chambers!
Do you ever wonder how the people of Germany managed to “look the other way” and even support the Nazi regime? Wonder no more: we are there, and there is here, and then is NOW.
Americans who tolerate this atrocity in our midst, and especially those who support it, are the “Good Germans” of the 21st Century. True. Inescapable.
2) Bombing the tracks to the concentration camps:
In the aftermath of World War Two, it became common to ask: “Why didn’t we just bomb the train tracks to the death camps?” I don’t know the correct historic answer to that, but I imagine it must have been either that we didn’t have decisive intelligence, or that we expected to need to use those same tracks for Allied troop train movements to finish off the Nazi regime.
If we knew, today, that a foreign foe was committing atrocities of Hitlerian magnitude, we would hope our elected leaders would send in the Air Force, to take out the tracks and railroad bridges, stopping the trains to the death camps long enough for infantry to fight their way in and save those innocent peoples’ lives.
If we would send the military to stop such an atrocity elsewhere, then we ourselves are morally obligated to take the necessary steps to stop this atrocity here. Fortunately we are not at war. Fortunately we still have all of the tools of peaceful protest and nonviolent civil disobedience at our fingertips. We have something else that earlier generations did not, which is the ability to generate mass publicity in minutes. If the pen is mightier than the sword, the keyboard is mightier still, the video camera even more so, and the ultimate power of the people still resides in the voting booth and the court room.
3) What we must do:
Every day that this goes on, is another day of abject terror and grief beyond words, for thousands of defenseless babies and children, mothers and fathers. Every day that this goes on, is another day of Hitlerian atrocity. This is an emergency of the highest order. Not even a Constitutional crisis rates this high on the scale, because even that does not entail tearing families apart and torturing babies and children as policy. If you’re safe in your home, if you are safe with your loved ones, you are better off than those families in those evil camps.
So: This has got to go to #1 priority on our agenda. As follows:
a) Let your elected officials know in no uncertain terms. Call and write (postcards get through quickly and get immediate attention). Go to their offices in person. Even our fellow Democrats need to understand that this must take priority over all else until it is dealt with. And they need the strength of knowing that their voters have got their backs. See (5) below for demands.
b) If your elected officials are Republicans who support this policy: Go to their offices and sit down and do not budge until either they issue a statement supporting the basic demands, or until the police come and ask you to leave (save the civil disobedience trespass for subsequent action). Take video of the whole thing and post it.
c) Form affinity groups (small groups of friends who study & rehearse nonviolent tactics), make plans, and go to one of those evil camps. Sit in the roads outside the gates, chain the gates closed, chain yourselves to the gates. Do whatever you can that is peaceful and direct and decisive, to stop all traffic going in or out, until this Hitlerian policy has been repealed. This is where to use the civil disobedience tactics. Those who can’t risk a trespassing arrest for whatever reason (medical etc.) can at least line the roads with signs and make noise.
(Note: violence will NOT solve this. One: it’s immoral and evil. Two: it backfires spectacularly. A single violent incident is all it will take to digress the entire focus of the public from the mass horror to the violent act. Right-wing provocateurs may try to encourage violence. Do not fall for it.)
It’s summer: high school and college students are on vacation. Many of them have the free time to go do this. It’s summer: working adults conventionally go on vacations. Use that vacation time to do this instead: it’s an emergency, innocent children are suffering unspeakable anguish, stopping it is more important than “vacation.”
It won’t take a million people to do this. A few hundred, a thousand, are more than enough. Take photos, take videos, post them far and wide until the internet is saturated. Lead, and our elected officials will follow (or we will vote them out of office).
4) First steps:
Someone needs to take the lead on this. We can start right here on DK, organizing local meetups in public settings. Any front-pager or person who’s frequently on the Rec list can take the lead in their geographic area: pick a place and a time, and post a story, with appropriate tags. Someone needs to aggregate all of those into one place where everyone can quickly look up what’s going on in their own areas.
The public settings need to be all-ages venues where teenagers are welcome (in other words, not bars or “adult” clubs), because hopefully we’ll also bring in kids who are associated with the Parkland/ Stoneman Douglas movement. All of these local groups can hook up via DK, with additional publicity on the usual “social media.” However, participation should not depend on signing up for Faceborg, Google, or any of those things that require legal names.
It will take more than one meeting to organize this, but we’re all capable of going to more than one meeting and then to a protest if needed. After the first meeting: phone calls and postal mail to elected officials. After the second, local rallies or protests as the case may be, at elected officials’ local offices. Somewhere amidst this, plans for nonviolent direct action can be made.
5) Demands:
a) The Administration and the relevant agencies will re-unite every child with his or her parents immediately and without delay, and provide a full accounting to the Red Cross, including names and contact information for follow-up. The agencies will work three shifts if necessary to identify and process the cases. The Red Cross will be allowed to report aggregate data to the public, and take up unaccounted cases with appropriate lawyers.
b) NO further “separations” of parents and children will occur. When people are picked up crossing the border, children will be housed with their parents, period, full stop, zero exceptions.
c) The Red Cross and Amnesty International will have FULL access to ALL locations where undocumented migrants are detained, including the ability to interview detainees in private: and they will be able to issue public reports as needed.
d) The same rules will apply to immigration raids in cities and towns across America: Parents will not be taken from their homes without their children (who may be at school), and children will not be taken (such as from school) without their parents. Even if that means that a Border Patrol agent or local police officer has to sit there until the kids or parents come in.
e) Toward these ends, a bipartisan bill will be introduced into the House and the Senate, having identical language so there is no need of a reconciliation step to hold it up. The bill will be 100% clean: NOTHING on it except re-uniting the families and prohibiting breaking up families.
f) There will be exactly NO negotiating on this, NO “deal-making,” NO “attachments” or any other damn thing: a clean bill “or else,” and the “or else” will be massive nonviolent protest at the Capitol building, including nonviolent civil disobedience if needed.
Do not back down. Do not compromise. This is one of those times when any sort of compromise will be seen through the eyes of history as making a deal with the Devil.
Think of Neville Chamberlain, think of Quisling, think of Pétain, and all the Nazi sympathizers and excuse-makers in the last century. How does history treat them now? The very name Quisling has become a generic noun for abject cowardly collaboration with absolute evil. The phrase “Nazi collaborator” earns well-deserved disgust and contempt.
This is where we are today: facing historic evil and deciding what to do.
After WW2, there came a time when children asked their parents, “what did you do in the war?”
When this issue comes up, what will you tell your children or grandchildren?
Now go out and do it.
(I’m publishing this early but I’ll be around later to reply to comments.)