Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Roundups and Hate

I wonder what people who were on the wrong side of history later told their children and grandchildren about what they did.
  • What did those who rounded up American citizens who had Japanese ancestry, who stuck them on train cars, who swindled them out of their property, who forced them into concentration camps, who guarded the camps and the judges who said it was all legal-- what did they tell their grandkids when they asked what they did during the war?  
  • What did the cops who turned firehoses and dogs on civil rights marchers tell their kids?  What did the all-white jurors who acquitted racists of murderous crimes later say?  What did the adults who cursed and spat on the Little Rock Eight later tell their families?
  • What did the Germans who did the work of running the camps tell their grandchildren?  What did the French cops, who stuffed Jews into boxcars in France, what did they later tell people?

When the troops are ordered by Trump to go round up immigrant families, what will they later say? That they were "just following orders"? They joined to defend the country against enemies and now they'll be used as immigration stormtroops. Come fifty years later, what are they going to tell their grandchildren when they ask why grandpa or meemaw got a medal or commendation for rounding up kids and sticking them in internment camps?

And if you are going to start bleating about "we're being invaded," go do it elsewhere. I don't have to tolerate your unhinged bigotry and I have no intention of doing so. One doesn't have to spend much time among immigrants, legal or not, to learn that they have come here for the same reason everyone else did, from the First People over ten thousand years ago to visa fraudsters like Melania and Elon: To have a better life for themselves and their children.

Historians will write about the "good little Americans" who voted for Trump and who facilitated his crap.

And let's dispense with any notion that due process will be observed. The immigration courts are already severely backlogged. There won't be any due process of note. If there are any hearings, they will be drumhead hearings that won't last longer than three minutes, at best: No witnesses, no documents, no continuances. A form will be filled out and then people be marched over the border into Mexico at the point of a bayonet. All done by good little Americans.

3 comments:

  1. What happens if the country tRump is trying to send them back to won’t accept them? You know they won’t bother finding out who’s Mexican, Venezualan, Haitian, etc. Will Mexico even let them send them there?

    ReplyDelete
  2. A black classmate (1969) of mine who'd grown up in Louisiana in a civil rights family (even sat on MLK's knee as a toddler) told of being a young child of maybe 6 or 7 when her mother sat down with him at the front of the bus. And was arrested (leaving kiddo in tears alone), tried by a racist judge and jailed.
    And years later Tuffy was apologized to by the crying adult grand-daughter of the judge, who she had only as kindly granddad.
    Tuffy has fought his way through ceilings all his life and is now the head of research developing a plasma replacement and toxic shock drug on contract for the Navy.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuthbert_Ormond_Simpkins

    ReplyDelete
  3. I guess I should add a bit. Billions will be spent, and they’ll all be stuck at the border. Mexico won’t let them in, neither will we. What a humanitarian crisis, and what will become of these border towns?

    ReplyDelete

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