In 1933, the population of Jews in Germany numbered around 505, 000. Across Europe, it was around 9.5 million. The Nazis quite infamously thought those numbers were too high, and perpetrated a crime so barbaric that it has forbidden comparison to Nazis ever since because no other crime could ever equate to its astonishing horrors. 6 million of those Jews across Europe were systematically eliminated in industrialized slaughter. The thing is, the Nazis didn’t start with genocide. Despite the long-entrenched dehumanization and vilification of the Jews embedded in German culture at the time, the Nazis were people too, and as a species, people try to avoid murder as best they can. The Nazis wanted to approach the final solution to the Jewish question in a humane way that was a win/win for everyone, so their first attempt was to institute what they called the Madagascar Plan.
The Madagascar Plan was developed to forcibly relocate European Jews to the island of Madagascar where they could live out the rest of their Jewish lives in nasty, brutish, and short conditions under the watchful and compassionate gaze of the SS. The plan ultimately failed because the Nazis didn’t have the logistics or resources to deport millions of people from the European continent, and decided to try another approach. The elimination of Jews from Europe was the goal, and there were many methods under consideration to achieve that goal. The Holocaust happened through process of elimination since it was the most feasible “solution” under the circumstances provided. The problem is that the goal of ethnic cleansing is always impossible outside of genocide since it is driven by a hateful ideology that does not care for things like reason or logistics, so whether the Nazis could have had enough resources to afford a mass deportation, the result would always have been the same.
Today, Donald Trump has promised to deport 21 million “illegal aliens.” To be clear, the estimates show only around 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States, but it seems that logistics are not under heavy consideration this time around either. He is currently trying to ship all those “illegals” off to El Salvador to live under the watchful and compassionate gaze of the “world’s coolest dictator.” The Republican party seems rapaciously intent on repeating the objectively worst part of history. The absurdity of Trump’s comments about Haitians eating cats and dogs ape the cartoonish depictions of Jews in Nazi propaganda. He mimics the language of Mein Kampf directly when he says that immigrants are poisoning the blood of the country. The parallels to the rise of the Nazi party in the 1930s and the rise of Donald Trump today are not trivial, and portend horrifying disaster.
Trump and his sycophants would say this is about justice; illegal aliens are by definition criminal, and they are responsible for horrific violence against old grandmothers and other symbols of American pristine innocence – just don’t ask for any evidence. But, per this administration, the definition of “criminal” is someone with tattoos. Or the Trump administration might just deport someone by accident, and then laugh it off when they’re called out on it. Or they’re deporting legal residents with green cards or international students because of charges of “antisemitism.” The party that “brought back free speech,” and aligns itself with someone who openly Sieg Heils at the president’s inauguration are worried about antisemitism on university campuses? This is clearly not about justice because Republicans and their devotees are pooh-poohing due process as an impediment to their agenda. They’re telling citizens to self-deport, ominously telling them, “the federal government will find you.”
Trump does not seek justice for Americans, he’s advancing the goals of white nationalism. Look at the names of the green card holders that are at risk of deportation, or the demographics of the students being kidnapped out of their universities. Pro-Palestinian protest is useful because targeting that group allows you to grab a lot of Muslims. If a white person was accidentally deported to El Salvador, do you really think that Donald Trump would hesitate in bringing them back? Do you really think that ICE would have even grabbed them in the first place, wearing masks and chucking them into a panel van? I’m not alone in recognizing this pattern. They’re not being subtle.
I don’t think the 21 million deportations that Trump promised during his campaign was an exaggeration of undocumented immigrant numbers; I think he was suggesting even at that time that he was going to use deportation as a tool of repression of religious and ethnic minorities, and that that number was more what he had in mind as to what was needed to be purged from his country in order to make it pure. The criminality and immigration status were the veneer he was using to sell his ethnic cleansing to the rubes.
Donald Trump wants to deport more than double the amount of Jews that were in Europe at the time of the Holocaust; what happens next if the logistics of his plan fail? What if El Salvador can’t accommodate 21 million people being abducted and shipped off to its torture prisons? What happens when America’s Madagascar Plan fails? Elon Musk wants to “save” civilization by abandoning empathy, just as Hitler said that his followers need to “close [their] hearts to pity” in order to achieve their own ideological goals. Why would we need to harden our hearts in order to tolerate what is come?
Utilitarians have long debated whether it would be ethical to travel back in time to kill Adolf Hitler as a baby, positioning the moral scales as a balance between the Holocaust and World War 2 against the murder of a helpless infant. This is of course absurd because why wouldn’t the time traveler kill Hitler after World War 1 when he was an adult and in jail, as if one needs to murder an infant when a well-placed shank in a prison yard would be equally easy and efficient, and a genocide is prevented either way.
When we ask the question about what happens next, when the economic war Trump declared on the world fails, when misery exacerbates at home, when everyone is more angry than they’ve ever been before and is looking for someone to blame, we also have to ask what is needed in order to prevent the worst from happening. There are those who believe murdering a baby would be worth it to prevent what happened after the failure of the original Madagascar Plan. Perhaps our modern time traveler only managed to graze an ear.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for more assassination attempts against Donald Trump. Personally, I think violence tends to beget more violence, and a successful assassination could precipitate a civil war – that’s bad! What I am suggesting is that holding up a sign saying you disagree or trying to align with the “good” billionaires is embarrassingly far from what dissidents need to be doing to in order to repudiate the very real potential for an American genocide. YouTube’s first and only News Man Cody Johnston facetiously suggests that Democrats need to start taking shits on the congressional house floor, and while this is clearly a joke, his and my point are essentially the same: resistance needs to be extreme. I’m also suggesting that Republicans need to recognize that the team they’re on is well-past the point of being comparable to actual Nazis, “Roman” salutes and all. As a Canadian, I worry about my own country’s ambivalence toward helping refugees fleeing Trump’s America, as if denying the MS St. Louis entry into our country was a time in our history we ought to emulate. We all need to do better, regardless of our nationality, in how we respond to refugees and immigrants. Fascism is on the rise globally, built predominantly on the vilification of invading immigrants. We all have our part to play, and really, it’s easy enough to start by just being honest in our language about what it is that we’re facing: this is the beginning of an ethnic cleansing driven by the agenda of white nationalism.
Hannah Arendt didn’t write about the banality of evil as it was applied in the context of the Holocaust; Adolf Eichmann was in charge of the Madagascar plan. This is where going through the motions, following the rules, and punching your time card in and out at the murder factory has already brought us. What needs to be disrupted is the very normalcy that engendered this situation before we need another Nuremberg Trial to sift through the ashes once it’s all over. With hindsight, how do we wish the Germans had responded to their government’s crimes against humanity? What level of extremity do you think we would have tolerated? What needs to be done to prevent an American holocaust?
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