Staring into the abyss
by Tom Sullivan
Several commentaries this morning would have weakened my knees had I not been sitting down.
Digby pointed Saturday to a New York Times op-ed by Roger Cohen that throws a spotlight on the acting president’s inability to exhibit a flicker of humanity. Donald Trump faced a Yazidi woman once held in sexual slavery by ISIS. She pleaded for help for what is left of her family and refugee community. Donald Trump sat stone-faced and indifferent at his desk — he wouldn’t even stand to greet her. Someone scheduled this Oval Office meeting for him. Trump is not even listening.
“They killed my mom, my six brothers,” Nadia Murad tells him. Trump responds: “Where are they now?”
In a mass grave, she replies. Murad shared last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for her “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.” Trump was probably wondering why she received the prize and not him.
“Where are they now???” Cohen writes, continuing:
Why this extraordinary attitude from Trump? Well, at a guess, Murad is a woman, and she is brown, and he is incapable of empathy, and the Trump administration recently watered down a United Nations Security Council resolution on protecting victims of sexual violence in conflict.
ProPublica reports on the psychic numbing of a Border Patrol agent at the agency’s McAllen, TX detention center:
The Border Patrol agent, a veteran with 13 years on the job, had been assigned to the agency’s detention center in McAllen, Texas, for close to a month when the team of court-appointed lawyers and doctors showed up one day at the end of June.
Taking in the squalor, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the poor health and vacant eyes of the hundreds of children held there, the group members appeared stunned.
Then, their outrage rolled through the facility like a thunderstorm. One lawyer emerged from a conference room clutching her cellphone to her ear, her voice trembling with urgency and frustration. “There’s a crisis down here,” the agent recalled her shouting.
At that moment, the agent, a father of a 2-year-old, realized that something in him had shifted during his weeks in the McAllen center. “I don’t know why she’s shouting,” he remembered thinking. “No one on the other end of the line cares. If they did, this wouldn’t be happening.”
Asked to comment on Vice President Mike Pence’s dismissal of reports of inhumane conditions, the agent called them “more substantiated than not,” but thought “concentration camp” was overstating things. “Gulag felt too strong. Jail didn’t feel strong enough,” Ginger Thompson writes:
He came around to this: “It’s kind of like torture in the army. It starts out with just sleep deprivation, then the next guys come in and sleep deprivation is normal, so they ramp it up. Then the next guys ramp it up some more, and then the next guys, until you have full blown torture going on. That becomes the new normal.”
The agent shared a journal entry he made to help process his work there:
“What happened to me in Texas is that I realized I had walled off my emotions so I could do my job without getting hurt,” he said. “I’d see kids crying because they want to see their dads, and I couldn’t console them because I had 500 to 600 other kids to watch over and make sure they’re not getting in trouble. All I could do was make sure they’re physically OK. I couldn’t let them see their fathers because that was against the rules.
“I might not like the rules,” he added. “I might think that what we’re doing wasn’t the correct way to hold children. But what was I going to do? Walk away? What difference would that make to anyone’s life but mine?”
When asked whether he simply stopped caring, he said: “Exactly, to a point that’s kind of dangerous. But once you do, you feel better.”
But the agent continues doing the work in conditions he describes as a “scene from a zombie apocalypse movie” because he needs to feed his family and maintain their health coverage. He couldn’t dwell on why the children are so filthy and lethargic. He has a job to do.
At Quora, Mike Jones finds parallels between the agent’s psychic numbing and what happened to camp workers in Germany. Those camps didn’t start in 1933 with Jews, but with other “undesirables.” But by 1937, there were hundreds of camps. “Many prisoners died there from abuse or simply from being worked to death,” Jones writes, “but they still weren’t places people were specifically sent to die; it was just that no one cared whether they died or not.”
The mass killings came later, eventually growing to industrial scale. Locals cooperated or looked the other way. They had jobs to do, families to feed. Jones includes black-and-white photos of seemingly normal Germans going about their seemingly normal lives working as cogs in a genocidal machine.
“These people didn’t think of themselves as ‘evil,’ any more than the people chanting at the Trump rally do,” Jones explains. People elected the Nazis “out of fear of the communists” or in response to appeals to “true Germans.” There evolved a helplessness to change the system even among those inclined to change it.
Jones comments on the border camps here and now:
I know, there are a thousand reasons why we can’t change this. They broke the laws. The President says so. What will we do with all of them if we don’t do this? It will encourage others if we don’t do this.
Know this: those are all justifying inhuman behavior. I’m not saying the people running the camps or the people in the government are Nazis; every historical moment is different. But they’re using many of the same tools the Nazis used. And the same tools are being used against the Uighur in China. And the Rohingya in Myanmar.
They claimed the Rohingya were illegal immigrants, rapists, and terrorists. If I mentioned a Rohingya they actually knew, they would sometimes acknowledge maybe *that* Rohingya person wasn’t a criminal. They often argued that the Rohingya should be deported as a group anyway.— Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) July 21, 2019
It was heartbreaking. I was there just after Trump had declared his candidacy in the US, and it was the same rhetoric, almost word for word. A little over a year later in Myanmar, the military drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya over the border amid terrible atrocities.— Andrea Pitzer (@andreapitzer) July 21, 2019
Same story, different countries, different disfavored minorities.
Reading those stories brought back a chilling story David Neiwert (Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump) recounted in 1997 from his college years. One of his professors told his German class of serving with the occupation forces in Europe after World War II. As part of his assignment to assemble information for the Nuremberg tribunals, he had spent time speaking with villagers who lived adjacent one of the concentration camps:
The villagers, he said, knew about the camp, and watched daily as thousands of prisoners would arrive by rail car, herded like cattle into the camp. Even though the camp never could have held the vast numbers of prisoners who were brought in, the villagers knew that no one ever left. They also knew that the smokestack of the camp’s crematorium belched a near-steady stream of smoke and ash. Yet the villagers chose to remain ignorant about what went on inside the camp. No one inquired, because no one wanted to know.
“But every day,” he said, “these people, in their neat Germanic way, would get out their feather dusters and go outside. And, never thinking about what it meant, they would sweep off the layer of ash that would settle on their windowsills overnight. Then they would return to their neat, clean lives and pretend not to notice what was happening next door.”
“When the camps were liberated and their contents were revealed, they all expressed surprise and horror at what had gone on inside,” he said. “But they all had ash in their feather dusters.”
The professor looked out over the class, which now was more stunned than bored into silence. “We all like to think that what happened in Nazi Germany was something that occurred far away to people different from us, that it couldn’t possibly happen here,” he said. “But you’re wrong. The German people are very much like us. If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is look at yourselves now.”
Silence fell over the class. Some of the students wore looks of disbelief, and a few shook their heads. The professor sighed, picked his book back up, and returned to his explanation of conjugation of verbs. When the lesson was over, I heard my classmates complain about Professor Reed’s history lesson while exiting the room. “Why did he waste our time with that story?” one wondered. “That’s not what he’s paid to do,” said another. “Who gives a damn about his opinion anyway? What a joke, comparing us to Nazi Germany.”
I listened briefly and walked on my own way. The students may not have understood the professor’s point, I thought, but they certainly were living proof of it.
Image National Memorial for Peace and Justice “dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching …”
Jones concludes:
Send her back. Send them back. We’re really not racists. Jews will not replace us.
Do you honestly believe it can’t happen here?
Another piece of turkey, dear?
[h/t S.R.]