Commenting in The Indian Express on the shocking violence, clearly green-lit by the government, Pratap Mehta wrote:
The targeting of enemies—minorities, liberals, secularists, leftists, urban naxals, intellectuals, assorted protestors—is not driven by a calculus of ordinary politics….When you legitimize yourself entirely by inventing enemies, the truth ceases to matter, normal restraints of civilization and decency cease to matter, the checks and balances of normal politics cease to matter.*2
The Indian Express, January 7, 2020
………fascist politics creates a state of unreality, in which conspiracy theories and fake news replace reasoned debate.
How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley
When the truth ceases to matter, humanity is slipping into a quagmire of fear and loathing. Hate rhetoric becomes acceptable and feeds on itself. Speeches by people who would once have been despised suddenly are hailed as ‘truth evangelists’. Where safety and comfort should be the human response to frightened and fleeing migrants, instead there are cruel barbs and increased and continued hostility.
In America:
Wall Street gives billions in loans to facilitate the profits of companies who run detention centers; large companies make profits by selling their wares to them, and former high-ranking administration officials serve on their boards. On the local level, county jails bolster their budgets by housing those detained by ICE’s massively broadened mandate. The legal, material, and economic structure of these camps is evocative of Nazi Germany’s early concentration camps……….
ICE is a novel American institution—it was created in 2003 by the Homeland Security Act in the wake of September 11, at a time when rights and liberties took a back seat to concerns about safety. The same act created the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection, tasked with policing the border and staffing migrant detention centers. In ICE, we have a special force, created in an anti-democratic moment in American history, authorized with police-like power and directed at political outsiders inside our borders. The institution itself is tied politically to the country’s leader. Trump is the first president endorsed by a major union representing ICE’s employees, and Trump has repeatedly called himself its chief defender. ICE is an organization that is like the police but is not the police. The job of the police in a democratic society is to keep communities safe. In practice, ICE collaborates with conventional American criminal justice institutions, including local police departments, but often ends up working at cross-purposes with them by creating fear in immigrant communities, whose members become less likely to report crime. As a result, some police chiefs have aligned themselves against ICE raids. The goal of ICE is not to make communities safer. ICE’s mission is to reinforce a distinction between “us” and “them.”
How Fascism Works by Jason Stanley
Saudi Arabia has become a key ally of the US, but recently a horrifying report of Saudi security forces committing mass murder of migrants on its borders, has emerged:
Border guards in Saudi Arabia, armed and trained by the imperialist powers, especially the United States, have committed sadistic crimes against humanity, according to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) released Monday. The report documents the systematic murder of hundreds of migrants, mainly from Ethiopia, at the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/08/22/ewke-a22.html
Every day we hear of smugglers overloading inadequate boats with desperate humans which set off with hope in their eyes to either drown in the crossing of dangerous waters, be deported back to their homeland after reaching Europe or detained in overcrowded camps.
In 2015, 5 maps were drawn up to show migration routes:
Yet migration has always been a natural activity since we, as evolving humans, originally left Africa, and which I have referred to in many of my earlier blogs. Migration adds so much to our evolving knowledge and education. Hate subtracts. It reduces us to non human hating machines with brain reduction through lack of use.
The dangers of fascist politics come from the particular way in which it dehumanizes segments of the population. By excluding these groups, it limits the capacity for empathy among other citizens, leading to the justification of inhumane treatment, from repression of freedom, mass imprisonment, and expulsion to, in extreme cases, mass extermination.
How Fascism Works, by Jason Stanley
borderslynn 