ICE: The New Kapos?

 

Who are these ICE agents, anyway?

"Inbred Cop Excrement" seen on posters held by protestors.

"Imbecile Creep Excretions."

This is clearly not the way the ICE agents see themselves.

Looking into publicly available data, one thing which leapt out at Mad Dog was that 18-30% (depending on the source) are Hispanics, often recent immigrants. Only 6% are Black.  

The large proportion of Hispanic males is striking. The usual explanation is this line of work offers good pay, job stability and a chance to display lots of machismo in a safe setting where mostly only you have the guns and you have an overwhelming number advantage over your victims. (Sort of a safe space for sadists.)

Mad Dog found all this a little disorienting. His idea of immigrant communities is obviously a little dated--the idea of a community of folks watching out for each other, isolated in a sea of sometimes hostile natives.

But, thinking about it, two things popped up in Mad Dog's febrile mind: Kapos and Patty Hearst.

Kapo with Nice Coat in Camp

Kapos were concentration camp prisoners, usually Jewish, who got special benefits working for the SS guards in the camps, relieving the SS of jobs they did not especially want to do, like herding crowds of prisoners into gas chambers, and hauling out their bodies, and a whole range of menial tasks which helped police and keep the prisoners working (if it was a work camp) and dying (if it was an extermination camp.) Another clear benefit of being a Kapo: They didn't kill you right away.

When the camps were liberated, Kapos were, not surprisingly, frequently hanged by the prisoners they betrayed. Kapo lynchings were widely reported.

Patty Hearst

Patty Hearst, the grand daughter of that news baron Hearst, was kidnapped by a group of Black men calling themselves a revolutionary group, who figured the best way to start a revolution was to rob banks, which, after all is where the money is, and if the revolution didn't pan out, at least they'd be rich, and eventually Hearst was photographed participating in the robberies, holding a gun and she recorded some bits condemning her rich ancestors and voicing support for the bank robber revolution.

She was said to have "Stockholm syndrome," which described the peculiar reaction of some hostages to express sympathy or otherwise bond with their captors, seen as a sort of self preservation response: If I tell them I love them maybe they won't kill me. 

This is the subject of any number of crime movies where an attractive woman is first abducted, but then one of the captors falls in love with her, or at least sympathizes with her, and she may demonstrate the zealotry of the convert, or maybe the ravished woman who decides rape was not all that bad and she really loves her abuser. 

Some of this may fit into that whole rape fantasy thing, but really dates back to the time of Genghis Kahn or at least to the Plains Indians where women were carried off and adopted into the nomadic tribe, because, really, what choice did they have? And so the ICE agents might be seen in that light: sort of squaws just making do.

Or something.

In any event, this surprising "I should hate you, but I'll love you if you give me a badge and good paying job" phenomenon may explain those Hispanic ICE agents and few of the Black agents as well. Or, some may abbreviate this as they are the classic "prison bitch" type who needs a protector and gets all into being privileged.