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.

And WHAT is Wrong with this Picture?

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. 

Georgie Porgy/Pudding Pie/
Kissed the Girls and Made Them Cry

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.

But when the Boys Came Out to Play/
Georgie Porgie Ran Away

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.

ICE "DEFENDS LIBERTY" MAGA STYLE

 Historical analogies are never perfect, but history can instruct and lend perspective by allowing for some distancing--sometimes you can see the whole picture more clearly if you take a step or two back.

Defending Liberty, MAGA style/The Sanctimonious Goon Squad

So the analogy of today's ICE agents hustling off people to Alligator Alcatraz or worse, without due process to the internment of Japanese Americans during in 1942, at the outset of WWII is not perfect. The Japanese Americans were, in fact, for the most part citizens, or at least "legal" residents--they had not overstayed visas and had committed no misdemeanors, while ICE arrests, at least until recently are said to be directed against "criminals" (who are not, technically felons) who have jumped the line and overstayed their visas.

As I understand it, only a vanishingly small number of those now being arrested without warrant and hustled off by ICE are even known to have overstayed visas or come in without permission, but they are simply being rounded up for not looking like they come from here. Nothing much is known about them; they just look wrong.

But even if they have overstayed a visa, they would be guilty not of a felony, but of a misdemeanor, and so wrestling them off to a van would be like doing that to somebody with an unpaid parking ticket or even an overdue library book.

They are not the rapists and murderers Trump is always pointing to as the "illegals" he wants to arrest to protect white American womanhood.

What is appalling, then, is the indiscriminate nature, the complete disregard for due process and the obvious criterion for arrest: They are not white. You never, ever see an ICE agent hustling off a blond, blue eyed Norwegian, or, for that matter a blond South African.

And then we get to the self righteousness of the cowardly ICE agents, who mask themselves, not because they fear ultimate justice at the hands of some Nuremberg trial, but because they fear the "drug cartels" will seek retribution.

And that MAGA piety is summed up in that image of a MAGA ICE man who is wearing a mask, if you look closely, even though you see only the back of his head, but there is an ear loop, and his T shirt says, "We The People"  and "Defend Liberty" and "FREEDOM" as he manhandles a man toward the opposite of freedom: incarceration. 

That this round up is based on race (appearance) can hardly be denied.  Well, it is denied, but that is a bald faced (not a masked faced) lie, apparent to all who see it. 

In the case of the Japanese in 1942, there was panic after Pearl Harbor that the West Coast would be invaded and that unveiled the underlying fear of "people whose eyes are oddly made" and so anyone who looked Japanese was hustled off to a concentration camp. And as the signs show, this was, ultimately if not entirely based on racial animosity, it was surely fed by it.

The same is true today. Brown skin bad. White skin good. Blond best of all. And that's without even getting into who has the best genes/jeans.