To the editor:
It took Hitler 53 days to disable and dismantle Germany’s constitutional republic after he became that country’s Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Within two months he had completed the concentration camp, Dachau, and rounded up prisoners: first political opponents, then trade unionists, gypsies, artists and Jews. It is not dissimilar to Trump’s roundup of both legal and illegal immigrants sent to Alligator Alcatraz, or sent off to countries where they don’t speak the language, in violation of Due Process as set forth in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is infamously quoted as saying: “Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.” Like Hitler, Trump is repeating the Big Lie: that undocumented immigrants (read Jews) are the cause of all of America’s problems, and that they are “criminals, rapists and gang members.”
Nazi ideology was based on the strategy that when people are made afraid, they will give up their rights and allow an authoritarian dictator to take control. The U.S. Congress, the media and universities have already caved to his revengeful retribution.
Hitler’s Brown Shirts, and later the S.S. (Schutzstaffel), were the primary instrument of security and terror to eliminate rivalry to Hitler’s authority. Under Trump’s administration, [up to] $50,000 bonuses are being paid from taxpayer’s money to recruit up to 10,000 new ICE agents [over several years] to create his own army of goons ready to do his bidding.
The middle-of-the-night ICE raid in a Chicago apartment building recently, where doors were illegally smashed open without search warrants (contrary to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution), and women and children in pajamas were zip tied and driven away in U-Haul vans, is not dissimilar to the S.S. tactics used against Jews in Nazi Germany.
President Trump’s federalizing the National Guard and illegally sending them and Marines into Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and now Chicago and Portland, is a first step in creating a police state to quell anything he considers an emergency, even if there is none. This can include peaceful protests or civil unrest, even though local and state law enforcement are tasked with that responsibility.
Is Trump’s use of force red meat for his base? Or, is he creating a police state to deal with the increasing protests against his complete disregard for the law, our constitutional democracy, our rights outlined in the Bill of Rights and the separation of powers on which our democratic Republic has survived for 250 years? ICE already plans to increase its surveillance on social media by adding a new targeting center in Williston, here in Vermont, a tactic similar to Hitler’s Gestapo.
Wake up, people! Protect our fragile democracy! Join the “No Kings Day” second protest rally on Saturday, October 18, and sign up to get active with Indivisible.org or Leanleftvt.org.
Bob Hawk
Walden
