Editor's note: as I mentioned in a recent post, Facebook's fascist-enabling decision to ban anarchist and antifascist pages has put me in the awkward position of having to transfer all of my unique content to another website; including older, archived material. These two article analysis journals (both concerning fascist U.S. immigration policy) were originally published in the fall of 2019 and are presented here with only minor formatting alterations.
Cuccinelli Wants Power To Reveal Personal Information Of Refugees Accused Of Crimes
Today's article analysis features an incredible important Buzzfeed news story that is sadly still a prime example of mainstream media framing a discussion in favor of establishment power - even when that establishment is a bunch of rabid white supremacists driving the country towards something quite akin to Mussolini's Italy, if not Nazi Germany itself.
The first half of this article is a mumble jumble of alphabet soup call signs in which Ken Cuccinelli is allowed to frame his plan to "unilaterally publicize personal information about asylees, refugees, and their family members in the US who are being prosecuted for certain crimes" as an issue of "law and order."
Only once you get halfway down the page does Buzzfeed provide an expert opinion by John Sandweg (Obama era former US Immigration and Customs Enforcement head) on what the real motivation is for this brazen and objectively fascist grab at power:
“This is 100% about the media. This memo is in the guise of a public safety matter, but it’s really to publicize cases where asylum seekers were arrested or prosecuted for a criminal offense,” he said, after being told about the memo. “They are trying to undermine faith in the asylum and refugee system to suggest it is a public safety threat and the data does not support that.”
Look folks, they don't call it "creeping fascism" for no reason and there is a clear historical record of what happens when a society allows itself to constantly accept "just a little bit more fascism" in the name of "peace, order and profit." As I've argued time and time again elsewhere, treating these incidents in isolation while failing to register the bigger picture because it's too horrible is a pretty good way to end up on the back of truck headed for "Happy Patriot Labor Camp 17" in the not so distant future.
This story of course must be examined in the context of Trump's objectively white nationalist government, that government's war on brown migrants and the long and shameful bipartisan U.S. history of locking poor brown people in cages because they crossed an imaginary line to escape war and neofeudalism our society has imposed on them.
Furthermore, this news must also be considered in relation to the Trump administration's already existing policy of allowing ICE to publish a weekly list of "immigrant crimes" to demonize migrants in the eyes of the average American voter. I'm certainly not the only one to note the haunting echoes of Der Stürmer in this policy or Cuccinelli's terrifying grasp at power here (see below) but you'd be hard pressed to find any mention of it in the article Buzzfeed just presented.
I think at this point it would be wise for Americans to remember that Nazi Germany and the horrifying "Final Solution" didn't come about overnight - it took more than a decade of grooming by the reactionary German right in all levels of society to sculpt the kind of nation that would embrace the death camps. Along the way there were thousands of little but horrifying stories, so many that they could not all be remembered, about the creeping rise of antisemitic fascism. What we have learned since then, but seemingly forgotten at the worst hour in our collective history is that fascism doesn't care who it hates, it just needs someone to hate. There will always been another other, another leftist threat, another treachery to the good volk who must be protected for the honor of the fatherland.
If you aren't starting to see enough terrifying parallels here to actively name the beast, then I hate to tell you that you're already well along the path to being a "good German."
- nina illingworth
Trump administration to expand DNA collection at border and give data to FBI
One of the more frustrating aspects about analyzing the fascist creep in "Trump's America" and how it's covered by a largely complicit, but still fully politicized corporate media is learning to walk the line of truth and accountability; to avoid having to choose between absolving a fascist society for the obvious fascist consequences of its open embrace of fascist ideology and absolving a clearly fascist leader and his clearly fascist administration for making things demonstrably worse because "well it's always been like this."
I mention this because in today's article analysis we're looking at a brief October 3rd, 2019 update in the Guardian about the Trump administration's (still theoretical) proposal to "expand the collection of DNA from migrants who cross US borders, and to include the information in a vast criminal database operated by the FBI."
Now the first thing most people are going to notice about this description is the word "expand" which implies that the U.S. government is currently collecting DNA records on migrants. If you read the whole article however you'll discover that this is at best marginally true; the government currently does rapid DNA testing to detect adults "falsely posing as parents" of migrant children at the border between the United States and Mexico. Although on the surface this discrepancy might seem fairly minor (after all, it is covered in the article) the ultimate effect here is both extremely dangerous for society at large and openly advantageous to architects of the fascist creep slowly strangling the entire "West" as we speak.
In The Guardian's defense, they are one of the few major outlets that reports on the bipartisan nature of America's nightmare fascist immigration policies but the idea that cataloguing the bio-metric data on millions of migrants and turning it over to the FBI for criminal enforcement purposes has any real relation to a genetic paternity test used to identify potential child trafficking victims at the border crosses the line from "fair minded" and into an objectively "false balance."
In light of the fact that almost all of the undocumented migrants who pass through the southern border are Mexican, Central American and South American, what the Trump administration is proposing here is nothing short of a high-tech version of an ethno-nationalist or Nazi watch list; a necessary precursor to apartheid, mass deportations or open ethnic cleansing. While The Guardian does not make the effort to connect these dots, they do point out that this proposed plan fits in neatly with the Trump administration's attempt to associate migrants with criminal behavior and that such a genetic record would provide identifying information about the families of migrants, regardless of their individual citizenship status. The fact that turning the list over to the FBI happens to help generate the narrative that brown migrants are dangerous criminals is really just icing on the cake however; this DNA list makes the dystopian, police-state possibilities of Bush Administration's objectively racist and Islamophobic "no fly list" look like joke by comparison.
This policy is not an expansion; it's new (DHS secretary Janet Napolitano refused to do it in 2010), terrifying and when combined with the fact that we *already* have concentration camps housing people whose only crime is crossing an imaginary line to escape U.S. sponsored violence, poverty and environmental destruction, this proposal is a rather obvious sign of America's descent into open fascism - a topic the Guardian doesn't even remotely address in this article.
Look, I'll be the first person to tell you that the Democratic Party of the past half-century has been just as brutal, repressive and xenophobic towards brown migrants along the southern American border, as their sh*thead Republican counterparts. We didn't get here overnight. Trump didn't make undocumented migrants a class of people it was okay to violently persecute and lock up for profit. Downmarket Mussolini's administration didn't even build the concentrations camps that Trump's fascist lapdog Stephen Miller is using to create space for the "white ethno-state" of his dreams. Healthy societies don't elect fascists and America has spent a very long time embracing the principles a man like Trump embodies with every monstrous action he undertakes.
But in our quest to recognize that it is important that we still understand that Trump is crashing our society through barriers and taboos that exist for a reason - he might not have battered the gates down, but he's happily steering the nation towards something that looks eerily more like Nazi Germany every single day.
If you forget that simple truth, you end up writing articles that accidentally leave out the important part of the story and strongly suggest that one of the most terrifying potential policy decisions in the history of U.S. immigration enforcement is merely an "expansion" of policies we already have.
Articles like this one.
- nina illingworth
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!
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