GOD FORGIVE US

“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph…”

It’s likely that Trump’s mass deportation flights will one day be likened to trains that transported people to Nazi concentration camps, about which many Germans claimed at the end of the war: “We didn’t know! We didn’t know!” And they were told by Eisenhower what we will be told: “Well, you should have known.” It can take a lot sometimes to face what’s right in front of you.

It’s not just Kilmer Garcia. It’s also Andry Hernandez Romero, Merwil Gutierrez and hundreds of others, innocent of crime, who have been picked up, thrown on planes, and delivered to a prison that from what we can tell is little more than a torture chamber. Remember when we were told they were only going after the really bad guys? The gang members and so forth? Yeah, we bought that. Silly us.

One of the most salient features of America’s ruling elite is naivety. Anyone with the most rudimentary knowledge of history is aware of the nightmare that’s now upon us, but part of the nightmare to me is how many people are still not screaming. Jews? Uh, didn’t this happen to us once? Latinos? Do you really think it will only be Venezuelans? Everybody else? Are you out of your fucking mind?

Maybe people are making calls in the background, and they think that will help. Or perhaps they never saw The Garden of the Vinci Continis so they feel confident it couldn’t happen to them. Or maybe watching Katy Perry go into space was all the proof they needed that life is proceeding normally.

But it is not proceeding normally. It is proceeding in the direction of pure evil, which is why, by the way, they’re using that word to describe the rest of us. Remember, every accusation they make is a confession. Where all that comes from, I cannot tell you except in part. But where it’s all going, only a fool would doubt. We’ve got to interrupt this pattern, and interrupt it soon.

The ICE deportation raids are a test of Americans’ tolerance for having government “disappear” people. It’s well established that the majority of men put on those planes had no criminal record. How in God’s name do we get off thinking that the right to deport people means the inherent right to deport them, regardless of who they are or what they have done, to an El Salvadoran dungeon? The fact that any of us can think this is acceptable shows the extraordinary power of totalitarian propaganda.

Scapegoating people is a common technique of authoritarian powers; the public has to be convinced certain people are the problem in order to buy into the idea that they deserve punishment. Trump demonized immigrants for years in order to make us vulnerable to this. The administration’s ultimate goal isn’t just getting rid of immigrants; it’s getting rid of anyone who gets in the way. All this is partly a test to see if that’s possible, and so far things are working as planned. The President has already mentioned that “homegrown criminals” might be next, and he was videotaped telling El Salvadoran President Bukele that he should probably “build four or five more.”

What they can do to anyone, they can one day do to you. The President, and also J.D. Vance, are quite transparent about who they hate and who they plan to come after. CNN “hates America.” The press is “the enemy of the people.” The ruling class of people in this country “needs to be replaced,” though Vance admitted that that “might sound harsh.” And don’t think it’s an accident that their term for Democrats is “radical left-wing monsters.”

Dehumanization is always where it begins, but that’s never where it ends. How did the genocide in Rwanda occur? For weeks on end, people heard on television and radio 24 hours a day that people they had grown up with, lived with and loved their entire lives, were in fact “cockroaches.” Chinese soldiers were drugged, then motivated to massacre peaceful protestors in Tiananmen Square by telling them repeatedly that protestors were enemies of the country. Do not kid yourself. This is not playtime. The U.S. government is knowingly sending innocent men to torture chambers. Men with lives. With families. With children. With loved ones. Men who have tried to escape the worst situations imaginable, who came to America - sometimes across the Darien Gap, for God’s sakes - in hopes of a better life. And we are responding by sending them to the pits of hell.

God forgive us for all of this. Edmund Burke was right: “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for enough good men to do nothing.” And so far we’re not doing enough.