Unprecedented? Debates on historical parallels of the regime
Photo courtesy of CBP Photography/Wikimedia Commons
Pictured above is Greg Bovino, former Commander-at-Large of the Border Patrol. He gained public attention for his involvement in ICE operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
If you have been paying attention (and I certainly hope you have), there is a good chance that you have noticed by now the overt, racially coded cruelty and systemic lack of accountability on the part of the Trump regime.
The Department of Homeland “Security” (DHS) has become a significant arm of the regime, having been handed billions of dollars of funding for the purposes of violently detaining undocumented immigrants, legal residents, and citizens alike without any meaningful oversight, accountability, or restraints. Detention centers have been rapidly constructed, both home and abroad, to contain the targets of the regime and inflict upon them the horrors of calculated neglect, humiliation, and uninhibited violence. We find now that everything is malleable, moldable; anyone can fit the definition of a domestic terrorist, so long as they are not armed and employed by DHS.
The words we use to describe what we are currently experiencing as a nation, to capture the disbelief and outrage, are of particular interest to me. One blanket adjective I find particularly striking is “unprecedented.” It is easy to reach for this word when the present circumstances seem so confounding, but what I find remarkable is how this word is often thrown around alongside historical comparisons to Nazism and slavery—clearly, historical precedent does not elude us entirely.
Looking to history to make sense of what’s happening now, many people reach for the models of Hitler’s particular brand of authoritarianism: state control of the narrative, concentration camps, gestapo, the Schutzstaffel (SS). These comparisons are pertinent, of course, because of obvious surface-level similarities in the function of the Trump regime and even more so because of its pointed references to the slogans, symbols, songs, and aesthetics of the Nazis; see former U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) commander Greg Bovino’s touting of a long overcoat reminiscent of the SS uniform in Minneapolis; or the use of the slogan “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage” in a video posted by the Department of Labor which The Atlantic connects to a Nazi slogan, translating to “One people, one realm, one leader”; or DHS’s repeated use of the term “remigration,” which has notoriously borne the connotation as “a euphemism for the expulsion of nonwhite immigrants from Western countries, potentially including naturalized citizens and their descendants” and remains firmly rooted in Nazi ideology.
As people rightfully furious with the regime have become more liberal with the use of terms like gestapo to describe Trump’s paramilitary troops, some online discourse argues that we need not look to Europe for the closest historical representations—rather, they contend that DHS agents function more like slave patrols.
One history buff in particular, Khalil Greene, points out that in the United States—before the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which the Trump regime is now trying to gut for the purposes of ending birthright citizenship—Black people were not considered citizens. Moving freely required paperwork: “Unless you carried papers declaring your freedom or authorization for travel, you were, effectively, ‘undocumented,’ and any undocumented Black person was subject to arrest and punishment,” reads one of Greene’s posts. He then points to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 as the birth of “one of the most aggressive federal enforcement regimes in American history…the first time that the national government established a local law enforcement presence.”
The parallels Greene draws make Immigration Enforcement and Customs (ICE) and CBP almost indistinguishable from the enforcement machine of the 19th century: collusion between federal and local law enforcement; the arrest and penalization of those who interfered; the profiling and hateful categorization of those “without papers” as a credible threat to life and safety. Do these arise as more fitting comparisons than those of the Nazi regime? That is up to you to decide. But when you do, do not forget: the slave patrols came first, and the American system’s calculated racial exclusion and oppression was a noteworthy inspiration for Hitler. In an article published by the Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, a review of scholar James Q. Whitman’s work on the subject quotes him: “the U.S. was ‘not just a country with racism,’ but was ‘THE leading racist jurisdiction in the world’ — ‘so much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration.’”
Debates like these are important because they remind us of the scope of systems of oppression, the import and export of racism and authoritarianism. All of these comparisons have value because they all play a part in the tactics of the current regime. And given the United States’s campaign of genocide of Native Americans and vicious imperialist agenda, it’s worth noting, too, the concept of the imperial boomerang which Aimé Césaire theorizes as such: “a nation which colonizes … a civilization which justifies colonization … is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is already morally diseased, that irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another … calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.”