I can’t believe I have to say any of this stuff. I shouldn’t have to. Nobody should have to say any of this. But I want to be on record. I want the world to know where I stand.
When I first started writing this, there were two points I wanted to make. The first was that Donald Trump, based on his stated positions, is not just conservative. He’s not just Islamophobic, or racist. He’s an out-and-out fascist.
I thought that was going to be a hard sell, so I started lining up citations and references. But over the past few days, everyone else has come to the same conclusion. I’m not the only one to call Trump’s ideology fascism. Fast Company did a well-researched and -cited piece on just that topic. A writer at Quartz called Trump an “American moral emergency”. And Slate’s Jamelle Bouie did a detailed analysis on what makes Trump’s ideology fascism, citing a tweet by one of Jeb Bush’s advisers that also called Trump fascist.
So I can dispense with the defense of that first point and concentrate on my second, more important one:
The scary thing isn’t that Trump is a public, blatant fascist. He’s just one man, after all. The scary thing is that huge numbers of Americans agree with him. Huge numbers of Americans would happily re-enact the opening steps of the Nazis’ “Final Solution“. That terrifies me. And it sickens me.
Eighty years ago, millions of Germans went along with a program of “let’s force the Jews to wear an identifying patch on their clothing.” There isn’t a lot they could say in their defense afterward[1], but one thing they could have said was “we had no idea it was going to go that far after we made them wear the patches.” Today, we Americans have no such excuse. We know exactly where this path leads. We have grown up on tales of the Nazis’ ruthless genocide, and our own heroism in defeating them, and on lines like “once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will…” And yet millions of us will blithely cast that aside, and vote for a man who wants to slap an identifying badge on all Muslims — in the nation we claim to be “the land of the free”?
I am disgusted.
There’s no way to tell for sure if the firearm-bearing, anti-Islamic protesters who circulated a list of names and addresses of “Muslim[s] and Muslim sympathizer[s]” in the town where Ahmed “Clock Boy” Mohamed used to live are also Trump supporters or not. But a friend of mine saw that article and pointed out, “These are Brownshirt tactics.”
Protesting with shotguns and semi-automatic rifles in front of a minority religious temple? Publicizing the names and addresses of people who either are, or support the rights of, members of a particular religion (and one with strong ties to an ethnicity and culture)? These are tactics that are specifically intended to intimidate people.
This is leading up to the next Kristallnacht. In America this time, not Germany. If it doesn’t happen in Irving, Texas, maybe it’ll be in Dearborn, Michigan, or in Paterson, New Jersey. And after storefronts are smashed, mosques burned and houses plundered… then what?
People have already spoken approvingly of the internment camps we sentenced American citizens to, back in World War II. That’s the next step on the dark path. Here, in America, people are laying the groundwork for a genocide.
I am sickened by how many of my fellow Americans are going along with this. I am disgusted. Our country has no right to call itself “the land of the free” when it does things like this. And nobody who supports it can call themself a good American — this is about as un-American and flat-out anti-American as you can get.
Nine years ago, the last time I heard a call for putting “identifying marks” on Muslims, it turned out to be a hoax — one that drew a disgustingly high number of supporters out of the woodwork. At that point, 39% of people polled supported the idea. I can only hope the percentage has dropped since then, but it obviously hasn’t dropped far enough.
And the number should be zero, dammit!
If you support this, you are not an American. You are a would-be Nazi.
[1] And, to give them credit, they mostly didn’t even try to justify it afterward. As a nation, they owned up to their crimes, and took their lumps, and have vowed to never again allow such a thing. You’ll note that Germany is the single nation in the EU that’s taking in the most refugees, the most eagerly. ↑↑