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.
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| 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.
