IMMIGRANTS ARE THE NEW JEWS

During the Tsarist-prompted pogroms in the late nineteenth century, District police came into a small village to find and arrest Jews.  This small village (I have forgotten its name) was a farming village with a general store run by and lived in by its only Jewish family.  The store sold groceries, clothing, supplies, hardware, etc.; the owner also provided credit to the residents in hard times.  When the police whisked them away, the town was stricken.  The mayor and other town officials decided to go to the district headquarters some distance away to plead for the family’s return.  In so many words, the mayor said, “we don’t like Jews any more than the Tsar does, but they are our Jews, and we want them back.”  The police released them, everyone returned to the village, and the villagers celebrated.

 

The story is not typical of the Tsarist campaign against Jewish Russians.  Several hundred thousand Jews fled Russia.  In doing so, they gave substance to the Zionist movement for a Jewish homeland.  One result, until recent abominations under Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule, was that these immigrants to the British Mandate (i.e., Palestine), created a thriving, modern state now with an educated and skilled populace, and an economy based on cutting-edge technologies.  Meanwhile, Russia languishes in a past which is always its present: a despotic state, a repressed people, a weak economy, and a reliance on aggression to unify its demoralized population.

 

Thirty years or so later, Hitler exploited the latent antisemitism of most Germans.  He roused the populace by blaming Jews for Germany’s defeat and post-war suffering, the weakness of the Weimar Republic, and the “cosmopolitizing” of Germany.  Although Jews had been residents of German lands for centuries and had been full citizens of the modern German state when its lands were unified in 1871, Hitler roused and made virulent the latent antisemitism of Christian Germans and turned them against Jewish Germans.  By then, Jews had established themselves in the legal and medical professions and the universities.  Many of Germany’s brightest scientists, including Han Bethe, Max Born, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Klaus Fuchs, Fritz Haber, Hans Krebs, John von Neuman, Rudolf Peierls, Erwin Schrodinger, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller were Jews (names italicized).  Had Hitler not attacked the Jews, many of these scientists would have helped Germany develop the atomic bomb which they helped develop for the United States.

 

For Trump, immigrants—he thinks mostly of Hispanics--serve much the same purpose.  He regards them variously as criminals, degenerates, lunatics, animals, and pollutants to American blood (shades of Dr. Strangelove), and claims that they are invading this country, swarming through cities, and eating peoples’ pets.  His purpose is to set immigrants with or without criminal records, with or without documentation, apart from other residents, as outcasts who should be deported, as unpersons (the German word was “untermenschen”) who do not have constitutional rights like due process, free speech, assembly, and petition.  To deport them, he uses state power to arrest in violent ways and “disappear” those who appear to be immigrants regardless of their legal status; separate them from their families, and children from their parents; transport them to places unknown to them; isolate and incarcerate them under inhumane conditions; and deny them access to attorneys.  All of these actions are conducted quite openly, first, to intimidate potential victims and, second, to inure and secure acceptance by others to such abuses of the law and the Constitution.  The last thing which Trump wants is for the country to welcome, accept, advance, and benefit from immigrants and their contributions.  Why?  They defeat his desire for a white, Christian, male-dominated America.

 

But immigrants are not Trump’s only targets for purging from the populace those whom he regards as undesirable.  A special notice must be taken of the LGBTQ+ people, whom Trump is also targeting (as Hitler targeted them in Nazi Germany).  And there are many others: Muslims, Sikhs, those of other smaller minority groups, and, of course, Jews.  Trump also wishes to debase those whom he cannot incarcerate or deport, like women, whose integrity and autonomy he wishes to end, whose participation in society he wishes to throttle, and whose vote he wishes to eliminate.  By requiring an exact match of current and birth certificate names, the SAVE Act might disenfranchise married women who took their husband’s name.

 

Such is the context of the raids and kidnappings by DHS, FBI, and ICE agents happening from coast to coast.  All are thugs, masked, heavily armed, and aggressive; they are provocateurs who intend to prompt violence and permit their greater reactive violence, justify criminal charges, and terrorize communities into acquiescence.  (I would like to have a bumper sticker which reads, “Melt ICE.).  These agencies are also securing the support of state and local police forces.  Two interesting questions about the LCPD are why a recent (30 May) Albuquerque Journal story about sanctuary cities in New Mexico did not mention Las Cruces and why Police Chief Jeremy Story requested City Council to seek state funding for five—five!—SWAT vehicles.  (I asked him about their capabilities and equipment, but received no answer.  When Cassie McClure asked for that information on my behalf, she received no answer—itself a curious fact.  When I asked her why she voted to approve his request, her answer was that she accepted that he must have had a good reason for it.  Due diligence, anyone?)

 

One line of resistance to Trump (and his evil angel, Stephen Miller, ironically, a Jew) is respect for others and a recognition that, as Joyce Vance reminds us, “we’re in this together.”  So the words of Martin Niemöller are worth recalling:

 

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

 

Substitute “immigrants” for “socialists” and “LGBTW+” for “trade unionists,” and you have a message updated to match the current threat to American democracy and freedom.