Musing's musings

Emma Lazarus must be rolling over in her grave

Earlier this week, a little town in Pennsylvania became the latest to prohibit renting an apartment or other living quarters to illegal immigrants. In a classic case of "all for me and none for thee" (or, more crassly, "I got mine, so fuck you"), the mayor of Hazleton who signed the ordinance in question into law is the grandson of an immigrant.

As an historian, I can't help but cringe when I read things like this:

That unlawful employment, the harboring of illegal aliens in dwelling units in the City of Hazleton, and crime committed by illegal aliens harm the health, safety and welfare of authorized US workers and legal residents in the City of Hazleton. Illegal immigration leads to higher crime rates, subjects our hospitals to fiscal hardship and legal residents to substandard quality of care, contributes to other burdens on public services, increasing their cost and diminishing their availability to legal residents, and diminishes our overall quality of life.

You might as well come out and say it folks, because the language you chose for one of the "findings" clauses in the ordinance the mayor signed earlier this week just takes a few more letters than usual to spell "xenophobia." All the usual stereotypes are there: immigrants (whether legal or not) are criminals, out to scam the system for whatever they can get, they take "our" jobs and drain our social services without ever contributing to society.

Why am I all of a sudden flashing back to signs reading "Juden sind hier unerwünscht"? Or, for that matter, "Blacks not welcome after sunset"?

Ignominy

NPR featured a very disturbing story on "Morning Edition" this morning. It documented the movement of the so-called "Minutemen" into the heartland and away from the Mexican border. Given the behaviors displayed by some of the people NPR quoted and talked about in the piece, I'm beginning to wonder if the group's name ought not to be pronounced "My-newt-men," for the size of their brains (and, I'm sure some would say, their membri viriles).

One of the people NPR interviewed for the story is trying to start up a new Minutemen chapter in North Carolina, because he says although the Mexican immigrants he used to work with on the tobacco farms when he was a teen-ager were great guys, hard-working, loyal, the salt of the earth, he now believes that their presence threatens our national culture. To which my shouted response, as I was driving in to work this morning, was that if that attitude properly constitutes part of our national culture, it should be threatened. In fact, it should be extirpated, root and branch.

Another numbskull featured in the story actually stated on-air that illegal immigrants brought "certain types of diseases" with them--even as he made it a point to drive around to local emergency rooms and take photographs of anybody in the waiting room who might be an illegal. I mean, Christ on a pogo stick! That's a three-point shot right there. First, it's eerily reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric about Jews, Slavs, and others they considered to be Untermenschen--and not that far away from some of the things the KKK used to proclaim about the Negroes, either. Second, if you're worried about people bringing diseases with them, wouldn't you want them to be seeking medical care? And third, again, if this is any part of the American culture, I say we should be criminalizing it, not encouraging it.

That's a good one, Denny!

Quoth Fat Denny Tuesday:

WASHINGTON -- House Speaker Dennis Hastert voiced confidence Tuesday that the United States can block illegal immigrants from crossing the nation's borders even though he estimates there are up to 15 million living here already.

"What we need to do is seal our border," he said during a phone interview with "The Don and Roma Morning Show" on Chicago's WLS radio station. "If someone is bleeding to death, first of all, you stop the bleeding. We need to stop the bleeding. We can seal the border."

[edit]

"I always say if we can protect Iraq's borders against Syria and, you know, Jordan, and everyplace else, Iran, we can protect our own borders," he said.

The Illinois Republican has been emphasizing the immigration issue in making the case to voters that they should keep Congress in GOP hands.

Боже мой noch einmal

Once upon a time, I was proud to be a U.S. citizen, and I considered it an honor to be represented by people in Washington like Alan Dixon or Paul Simon. Lately, it seems like every time I turn on a television or go online to read the news and the blogs, I encounter yet another bêtise that makes me want to put a bag over my passport and do my best to pretend to be Canadian.

This kind of dreck is one such thing. I never thought I would live to see the day when the United States Senate would waste its time with this kind of crap, much less actually vote to make it the law of the land:

After a [sic]* emotional debate fraught with symbolism, the Senate yesterday voted to make English the "national language" of the United States, declaring that no one has a right to federal communications or services in a language other than English except for those already guaranteed by law.

The measure, approved 63 to 34, directs the government to "preserve and enhance" the role of English, without altering current laws that require some government documents and services be provided in other languages.

I suppose I can take at least cold comfort from the fact that I had to put a sic in there, in material pulled from a story that will run on the front page of tomorrow's Washington Post. Apparently, 63 senators (each and every one of whom should have known better) have been so busy worrying about whether English should be our national language that they couldn't bother ensuring that our schools have enough money to hire qualified people to teach it. Or else I wouldn't find half a dozen gross errors of grammar or orthography in every newspaper I pick up anymore, and even in scholarly books published by academic presses.

Paging Mr. Godwin, part the second

So the Nazi kerfluffle that I posted about yesterday continues apace. Again, there's no way I'm linking directly to this slime, but you can get a good idea of what's gone down in the last 24 hours by reading dmsilev's excellent diary at Big Orange. Here are the high lowlights thus far: after getting a ton of flak accusing him of being a closet Nazi (not without justification, in my book), "Vox Day" tried desperately to backpedal. And now it appears that the WingNutDaily, in an attempt to salvage what few shreds of something vaguely resembling credibility that it still possesses, has sanitized the original post to remove from it all references to the Nazis. Apparently nobody ever told them about Google caches and this neat invention called the internets, which allows people to link to and quote from all manner of things, even if they are subsequently changed.

The upshot of the aptly initialed VD's argument is that he wasn't really advocating for genocide, just pointing out that there were means to accomplish something that the preznit said was impossible to do. He actually has at least half of a point. Bush was wrong to say that we couldn't possibly round up 12 million people and deport them. And VD was technically correct to point out that the Nazis had proven it could be done.

But, as one might expect from anyone who would make such an invidious comparison in the first place, it totally misses the one and only important point, which is that the only way to do what the Nazis did is to do it the way the Nazis did it. Otherwise, the logistical necessities just aren't available. The Nazis' way, however, is so absolutely, positively, irretrievably, and irredeemably wrong that merely making the suggestion is sufficient reason to question the bona fides of anyone who did so.

The only way to deport 12 million people, in eight years or less, especially from a country as big and as diverse (and with as sucky a rail system--one which, as dmsilev pointed out in a comment replying to something I said, the Bushoviki are actively attempting to disappear), is not to give a shit about what happens to them. It absolutely would mean cramming them by the hundreds into boxcars without adequate food, water, or sanitary facilities. It would of course entail house-to-house sweeps by armed soldiers or auxiliaries demanding to see identity papers from everyone they encountered. No question it would mean the deaths of hundreds or thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) from neglect, malnourishment, exposure to the elements--and of course, overzealous vigilantes wanting to make sure that none of the scarybrownillegalpeople escaped official notice.

All of that is reason enough not to do what VD proposes. I would argue, further, that it is reason enough not even to propose it.

The one ray of sunshine for me in this fetid cesspool of hateful rhetoric has been the opportunity to do one of the things that motivated me to study history in the first place, and to concentrate on the world wars. Someone has to be able to correct the myriad misapprehensions, misconceptions, and outright lies that so often surface, particularly around the Nazis and their murderous deeds. As long as there are at least a few of us who know the truth, remember it, and pass it on to others, it will never disappear from our collective consciousness. That's why people like your 'umble blogger spend months and years reading about some of humanity's darkest hours, plumbing the depths of depravity represented by Nazism and all it stood for: we're trying to understand just how it came to be, how it sucked in thousands of people from a modern, civilized, and cultured society--and trying to make sure that such a thing never happens again.

The are plenty of people whose only criticism of Hitler and his minions is that they didn't finish the job they started. The darkness of ignorance and apathy allows them, like the cockroach, to breed and spread their diseases without attracting our notice. The best antidote is to let the sun shine in brilliantly on all the dank, dark corners of the human psyche.

Sadly, it would appear that those cockroaches have been diligently multiplying--or else they're getting a lot bolder about scuttling out from their dark corners when ordinary decent folk are around to notice them--because it sure does seem to me that I'm seeing more and more of this kind of crap lately. That's OK, though. I know more than they do about the Nazis, and I'm pretty good about conveying that knowledge to other people. I even have a nifty podium here from which to do it. This isn't quite the kind of educational work I had in mind, but it'll do until I can land myself a more traditional teaching job--and maybe even after that milestone has been passed.

Paging Mr. Godwin, stat!

If I had a dime for every time someone had brandished Godwin's law in my face for daring to suggest that certain policies and thought patterns within the Shrubbery resembled policies and thought patterns in Nazi Germany, I could at this moment be sipping vin ordinaire on the terrace of my villa in the south of France and laughing up my sleeve at the idiocies of the Bushoviki while safely out of their reach. So imagine my surprise at learning that the doofi at WingNut Daily (hell, no, I'm not linking to them directly; you can get there if you want from Crooks and Liars, but I recommend a full-body decontamination and a thorough cleansing of your computer afterward) have decided, on the principle of IOKIYAR, to flout their own favorite rhetorical principle:

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society.

Let's start with the obvious fact that the foregoing quote is a not-so-thinly veiled invitation to ethnic cleansing (which is illegal, immoral, and something we've sent troops to other countries to stop), and could easily degenerate into genocide (ditto). To say that this suggestion is repugnant is to faint with damn praise: I am at a loss for words of sufficient strength and power to indicate the depths of my disgust with anyone who could make such an argument and publish it for public consumption.

The wingnuts didn't do any better with the history than they did with the logic or the ethics. Not that we should be surprised at that, of course.

Can we say "Posse Comitatus Act," boys and girls?

Apparently the Bushoviki cannot. Or else this is yet another law that our beloved attorney general, Abu Gonzalez, has advised the preznit that he can ignore if it gets in the way of his plans for achieving world domination the unitary executive peace in our time Republican electoral survival in November.

As reported by the Times and just about every other major news outlet, the Great Decider--who is allegedly still trying to decide just what he's going to say to the nation tonight--is expected to call for "a significantly increased National Guard presence" at the U.S.'s border with Mexico. Quoth the Grey Lady, "Officials have indicated that Mr. Bush could call for a force of thousands but that it would not be as high as 10,000, a number that had been rumored late last week."

My first question, and one that even Republicans in Congress (à la Chuck Hagel) are already asking, is "Where the hell are you going to find the troops, Georgie?" The military is scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel, as evidenced by the outrageous signing bonuses recruiters are offering to virtually any warm-blooded breathing human being that even looks like he might be thinking about enlisting, and a recent Pentagon decision to deny reserve officers' resignations when they have completed their eight year terms.

Color me disappointed

Unless you're a full-blooded descendant of the First Nations (to borrow a term from our neighbors to the north), you are, ultimately, an immigrant to these shores. And while I generally frown upon looking at historical events through the distortive lens of our modern world, I have to say that there is little question but that people like some of my distant forebearers were "illegal immigrants" to what eventually became the United States, as we would use that term today.

Consequently, I was disheartened (to say the least) when I took Eric Zorn's web poll on immigration today and got a look at the results. Obviously, given these results, the Republican Noise Machine has successfully framed the terms of this debate. Here are a few of the highlowlights of the poll (as of about 1245 this afternoon; results will change as more people take the poll--let's hope they change for the better):

• 34% of respondents think we should deport illegal immigrants, and 35% think we should grant them "guest-worker" status.
• 81% of respondents feel that we should take "whatever steps are necessary" to secure our borders against "major influxes of illegal immigrants."
• Nearly 83% of respondents would strip illegal immigrants of public education, hospital care, welfare, and other forms of public assistance.
• Roughly 57% feel that illegal immigration has an overall negative effect on life for U.S. citizens.
• Respondents are evenly split on whether or not to amend the Constitution to deny U.S. citizenship to children of illegal immigrants, even if those children are born on U.S. soil (which currently entitles them to U.S. citizenship).