Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
– Karl Marx
“We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”
– Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
“So it goes.”
– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The writing has been on the wall for over a decade, defiantly staring us in the face. Still, for those paying attention, the past seven months should come as no surprise. What perhaps few anticipated, however, was the mass capitulation to tyranny from the Supreme Court, Congress, and mainstream media.
It couldn’t happen here – but it has.
Donald Trump wasn’t joking. He was dead serious about committing a murder and not losing any support, though the crime scene isn’t Fifth Avenue. He is killing democracy – not, as The Washington Post’s slogan warns (ironically, given its current ownership), in darkness, but in broad daylight on Pennsylvania Avenue. And while his approval ratings are falling, they still hover around 40% – a staggering 83% among Republicans.
What most Americans weren’t prepared for was that our vaunted institutions would allow him to do it, and bury its corpse beneath the concrete, paved-over cenotaph that is now the White House Rose Garden.
American exceptionalism at work.
Still, what is happening in America is not a carbon copy of Nazi Germany. No one is rounding up communists and trade unionists. There are no trains filled with deportees. Our “detention centers” aren’t equipped with gas showers or ovens. And the trains still don’t run on time. (It’s all Brandon’s fault!)
Sure, a few American-born and naturalized citizens have been “mistakenly” rounded up and deported, especially those who just happen to be brown and black,[1] who speak the languages of the Global South or accented English. And, yes, something must be done about crime and the homeless, especially now that the “Big Beautiful Bill” will inevitably swell their ranks.
So what if Nazi Germany once passed a law targeting “habitual and dangerous criminals,” which led to the internment of beggars, the unemployed, and the homeless in concentration camps. We’re not Nazis. We set our own agenda.
As part of that agenda, and in keeping with the eugenics movement, we passed similar laws in the early 1900s, so we’d have “good genes” like Sydney Sweeney.
Germany also passed a preventative policing bill that allowed police to search, arrest, and incarcerate people deemed criminal without judicial review. The German Supreme Court, didn’t challenge it. Sound familiar?
But hey, you can’t make America great again without breaking a few rules of law. Or writing new ones.
When it comes to our own “homegrown,” fast-food-fed violent criminals, we’re going after those who rape children and women and spit on police – unless they’re cop-bashing insurrectionists or presidents adjudicated of sexual-assault.
We’re not targeting the gays (some of our best treasury secretaries are gay). Or the blacks (some of our best HUD secretaries are black. Who knows more about urban issues than the “urbans” themselves?). Or the Jews (some of our best deputy chiefs of staff and secretaries of commerce are Jews). Or so we are led to believe, even as black and LGBTQ+ histories digitally erased from government websites and Judaism and American Jewry are conflated with Israel.
No, we’re just targeting the drag queens and trans people. But it’s not like we’re handing out pink triangles or anything, just calling for genital inspections and banning books, not burning them. We’re merely “protecting women’s spaces” – though not the ones inside their bodies. Minds must be shielded from the “woke virus,” which, one imagines, according to the track record of RFK Jr., our new health czar, probably believes causes autism and can be treated with ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and pureed baby chick-and-mouse smoothies – the same delicacy he reportedly fed to his pet hawks.
We’re not Nazis. It’s just a coincidence that Kennedy is anti-vaccine and “Alligator Alcatraz” is teeming with disease-spreading mosquitoes and respiratory viruses, and ICE concentration camps nationwide are breeding grounds for tuberculosis. We’ve learned from history: no Hugo Boss uniforms, no paper trail. No gas bills. Just enough plausible deniability to dodge war crimes tribunals, if only because we’re not technically at war. Yet.
And should anyone attempt to hold us accountable, we’ll simply blame the fatalities on incompetence and deny the existence of victims. If a list surfaces, we’ll dismiss it as a Democrat hoax, fabricated by the same people who believe climate change is real, black lives matter, museums should not whitewash history, sex traffickers should be punished, and labor statistics should reflect reality. And if tribunals do come, the architects of our democracide can always flee to Israel for safe haven. You scratch my genocide, I’ll scratch authoritarian take over.
No, we’re not Nazis. We outsource our genocides to others – those who, as the former victims of one, are intimately familiar with its mechanics. Meanwhile, we whitewash America’s own atrocities, thinking we can “honor” the memory of indigenous populations we relentlessly slaughtered by naming sports teams, cars, and other products after them as the nation pursues policies that diminish their descendants
Had Germany won the war, would it now be sending the Berlin Juden, the Munich Yehudi, or the Frankfurt Redhairsto the Olympics to compete in baseball? And, like their contemporary Native American counterparts, it’s not as if any actual Jews would be on those teams, though for reasons that differ in degree, not kind.
America calls itself a “free-speech democracy,” yet that freedom increasing shields historical distortion. The president condemns “woke” museums for explaining “how bad slavery was,” while fitness trainers are invited onto news panels, where they cavalierly minimize and distort its horrors. Neo-Nazis deny the Holocaust; right-wing commentators, clinging to the good ole days, don’t deny slavery – they minimize it and its enduring legacy. Because outright denial would make it impossible to resurrect Confederate monuments, restore treasonous names to public spaces and military bases, or boast about slavery’s supposed “benefits” to the enslaved, thus sparing fragile young white minds the trauma of truth. And while Holocaust denial will keep you off those panels, slavery minimalization will ensure you get invited back, or, in the case of Scott Jennings, get a regular seat at the table.
Some Americans have forgotten the fact that white supremacy isn’t a relic of the past. Worse still, some of those most afflicted by this amnesia come from the very groups that were once – and in some cases still are – its target. This is what happens when people historically denied whiteness openly embrace white supremacism and are conditionally welcomed into its ranks, if only as performative tokens.
The list of such tokens is a long and growing one:
· Stephen Miller – erstwhile chia-pet-coiffed Goebbels clone
· Laura Loomer – Trump-whispering “DEI Shaniqua”-detector and rabid Gaza genocide enabler
· Jillian Michaels – biggest slavery minimizing loser and unrivaled “woman, Jewish, Arab, gay” anti-“woke” “victimization poker card” holder
· Candace Owens – White Lives Matter (WLM) fashion icon, somnolent anti-white racism warrior, and transphobe
· Kanye West – slavery-was-a-“choice” “black Nazi” and fellow WLM clothes horse
· Mark Robinson – another self-proclaimed “black Nazi,” this one allegedly hoping for the return of slavery so he can “buy a few”
· Bryon Donalds – Jim Crow appreciation society spokesman
· Vivek Ramaswamy – white supremacist virgin, who, despite a nasty encounter with Ann Coulter, apparently still believes he had never met the “unicorn” of white supremacy and assiduously avoids right-wing social media’s take on him and his vision of the American dream
· Nick Fuentes – neo-Nazi incel “straight man”
· Enrique Tarrio – self-described “pretty brown,” pardoned Proud Niño leader
· And, most recently, Sara Gonzales – “everybody’s favorite spicy Latina,” who called Rep. Jasmine Crockett a “fake ghetto hoodrat” and “spoiled…rich kid from Missouri.”
Which only goes to show that every generation – and every marginalized group – has, in its own terms, its kapo, house negroes, *Tio Tacos (*no, not that TACO), or Malinchistas, which makes fighting white supremacy all the more difficult.
This is a reflection of an American pathology: marginalized people in America – citizens and aspirants to citizenship – want to be white. Not because whiteness is intrinsically better, but because it grants access to privilege, a privilege savored only when it excludes others.
In 1878, the Ninth Circuit Court for the District of California ruled that Asian residents were ineligible for naturalization, which at that time was limited to “free white persons” and, after passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments, free and formerly enslaved persons of African ancestry. Other non-white groups were excluded.
In re Ah Yup, AhYup, a Chinese resident, petitioned the court that Chinese should be considered white. The court ruled otherwise.
In 1922, Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant, and in 1923, Bhagat Singh Thind, an Indian Sikh, each petitioned the Supreme Court to have their respective groups be legally recognized as “white” to qualify for naturalization. The Court struck down both. Ironically, while the Court ruled that Japanese were disqualified because they were non-white, it ruled that Asian Indians, though racially “white” by the standards of contemporary “race science,” weren’t white “in the understanding of the common man.”
These cases weren’t about challenging white privilege, they were about accessing it. The goal was not to dismantle America’s racial hierarchy but to climb it.
The power of such privilege is evident in the fact that, although the 14th Amendment recognized the citizenship status of both whites and blacks, no one petitioned the courts to accept their naturalization because they were racially “black.” Whiteness was the price of admission. To petition for whiteness was to seek fundamental rights, a pursuit that acknowledged the locus of power and privilege.
Not much has changed. Today Trump’s immigration policies offer carte blanche to white immigrants, especially white “refugees” from South Africa.
But sometimes even being white wasn’t enough. In 1954, Hernandez v. Texas, the Court ruled that although Mexican Americans were legally white, they couldn’t be treated as equals. Despite their legal status, they faced – and still face – systemic discrimination.
Mexicans remain legally white. Yet the 14th Amendment, which protects all residents regardless of race or ethnicity, is under executive assault, as Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship makes clear.
It may be only a matter of time before Trump issues his own version of the Nuremberg Laws.
If he can declare who is biologically male or female by fiat, what’s to stop him from deciding who is black, white, brown, or yellow, or who can or cannot naturalize, and prescribing how each is to be treated?
We may soon find out.
The Nuremberg laws were passed on September 15, 1935.
And so the countdown begins.
History, as they say, rhymes.
Note
[1] I have chosen not to capitalize “black” until there is substantive reform of American police enforcement and the criminal justice system that results in the criminal prosecution of those who use excessive force and a systemic, long-term reduction in the number of police killings and brutalization of black people.
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