Is It Happening Here?

Quick Question: Did Jews actually pose an existential threat to Germany in 1933?

It seems an offense to even raise the point, but I’m doing so anyway. I believe we citizens of the United States need to give ourselves a hard look right now, and this is one way into that challenging conversation. So I ask again:

Did Jews actually pose an existential threat to Germany in 1933?

If your answer to that question is yes, then I invite you to head off to the other side of the lawn immediately. You are, assuredly, what you seem to be. You are also my enemy and perhaps we will meet soon in conflict. I’m guessing, however, that for most of you, the answer to that question is a resounding no.

I presume that you understand that Jews were a maligned minority in Germany between the wars. A minority that was unfairly castigated, hounded, separated and ultimately subject to an attempted extermination by a nation that had lost both its mind and its soul. If so, then the rest of this essay is addressed to you.

Having established that Jews did not pose an existential threat to Germany in 1933, we arrive at the next question: Did a significant percentage of the German population — perhaps thirty or forty percent — believe incorrectly that they did?

Very clearly, that is the case.

One of many sad truths for Weimar Germany is the fact that a near majority of the German people believed the wild delusion of a Jewish menace in 1933. Here’s some evidence to the proposition. Although the Jews did not, in fact, pose an existential threat to the German state or German culture in 1933, close to half of all citizens who participated in the election that year believed they did. Just under forty-four percent (43.9 to be precise) of the German population voted for the Nazi party in the 1933 parliamentary election, and the Nazi platform was well known to be one of xenophobia and anti-Semitism. It was also decidedly anti-Liberal, anti-multicultural, anti-Progressive, and anti-Socialist, but the motivating energy of the movement was always racial and religious bias based on an irrational, delusional fear of the non-existent menace posed by a beleaguered minority who, we will again bang this drum, did not actually pose a threat.

Thus, we can conclude that there is historical precedent for a modern nation losing its mind to hate and unreason in a search for a nonexistent enemy within. We can see that it is not only possible, but provable, that democratic republics can — through collective anger, fear and hatred of a racially distinct other — tear themselves apart in a quest to root out a subversive element that simply does not in any way exist. As the Germans of Weimar proved, they can even do so while listening to Beethoven, celebrating scientific achievement, and singing opera.

Next question: In Germany in 1933, was there a special branch of the police who were specifically tasked with routing out that illusory enemy within? Did members of that police force adhere to and advance their mandate with particular zeal, while still claiming only to be neutral enforcers of the law?

Those answers, as you can clearly see, are “Yes and Yep.”

The Geheime Staatspolizei, better known to history as the Gestapo was formed in 1933, as a special branch of the Sturmabteilung — or the SA. The SA was a police force that began as a paramilitary unit of former soldiers in the Germany Army during World War I, and so it had a particularly martial bearing from its inception. The Gestapo, while always maintaining a façade of adherence to legal order, had an internal culture that celebrated the aggressive enforcement of their mandate to find, corral and — in the first several years — deport members of the racially distinct minority whom they perceived (delusionally, remember) to be an existential threat to their nation.

They not only enforced the law, but they were made to feel righteous in its enforcement by their delusional belief in the existential danger posed by Jews.

That’s scary, right? Having a police force that not only enforces law but does so with a martial spirit while maintaining the public posture that they are actually defending the nation from an existential scourge that hides amongst the general population and must, for the security of the state, be routed out.

I think it is terrifying, as would the Jews of Berlin in 1933, I’m quite sure.

In Germany in 1933, was there a political leader who actively fanned the flames of this delusional belief? Did he have a party structure around him that refused to challenge his extremist rhetoric? Did that leader criticize in over-the-top diatribes his political opponents, castigating them as liars who only wished to aid the Jews in their destruction of the German nation? Did that leader rely on encouraging violence and a lack of reflection amongst his followers in the general population and the police in their quest to discover and destroy the (non-existent) enemy within?

It’s worth pausing and reflecting upon, yes?

Does history offer us any lessons as to what can happen when a sizable percentage of a nation’s population, encouraged by an inflammatory leader, believes that there is an enemy within that threatens the state?

Does history further offer any counsel as to whether having a police force that accepts that delusion puts the nation in even greater jeopardy of losing its collective mind and soul?

With all the heat and rage over what the Trump Administration is doing both on the frontier with Mexico through the Border Patrol’s separation of families and the detention of children, and the actions of ICE throughout the nation with officers setting up roadblocks and checking people’s citizenship, it is easy to lose focus on a centrally important question.

Is there any reason to be doing any of this?

Is illegal immigration actually a threat to America or its culture in 2018?

I ask that because it sure as hell is being treated like one. It is being treated as if our very existence depends on routing out illegal immigrants and sending them home. And yet . . . why? Why are we doing any of this? There have always been illegal immigrants in every nation. Always. So why has this become such a pressing concern to the United States of America?

That question — when soberly posed — should give us all great pause.

It sure seems that nearly forty percent of Americans in 2018 have fully embraced the notion that illegal immigrants are a proximate terror that needs to be excised from the body public by any means necessary. In fact, the majority of Americans favor a radical reduction in the amount of legal immigration according to a recent Harvard-Harris poll.

But again, good god, why?

Moreover, there is a federal police force with a culture that supports aggressive action against that racially distinct minority while maintaining a veneer of respectability and claiming that they are only neutral arbiters of the law. Their aggressive actions are being supported and championed by a fiery political leader who has never once been bound by a fact or caged by a sense of fidelity to the truth.

We must, we just absolutely must, see the parallels to when this has happened before.

With all this in mind, I beg you to look inwardly and answer one hard question: Do you personally believe that illegal immigrants are an existential threat to the nation? Is illegal immigration such a terrible problem that we need to be tearing children from their mother’s arms? Stopping traffic on our highways to ask for papers? Really?

Do you believe that despite the fact that the economy is near full-employment and farmers throughout the nation are allowing crops to rot in the fields for lack of a labor force willing to do the work?

Do you actually believe that illegal immigration poses a profound danger to you or your family?

If you do, and you’ve made it to the end of this essay, then I’d argue that the burden is on you to explain exactly how.

Is it crime? I know that there are some gang problems around the country and it is beyond tragic that violence has, in fact, been committed by illegal immigrants against anyone, but the notion that illegal immigrants are leading a scourge of rapes and murders across the nation is no more true than were claims of Jewish blood libel in the early 1930s.

Add to that inflation of hatred against immigrants, President Trump’s unwillingness to go more than three Tweets without mentioning MS-13, a dangerous but tiny gang in the United States. What he doesn’t ever mention, however, is that while they have some roots to El Salvador, they are, in fact, a homegrown criminal organization.

They do certainly have a presence in Central America. In fact, their terror in Latin America is so great that they are often the cause of peaceful migrants fleeing north to the United States in the first place.

They are scary people. Yet, even given the danger that Central American gangs pose, it is well-researched and little disputed that, by and large, immigrant populations are less prone to violence and lawbreaking than the general population — likely because they have a greater fear of prosecution and expulsion from a country they have worked so hard to enter. So, not unlike what happened in Germany in 1933, all this is so much racist smoke without any actual fire.

End of the day, if you do think that illegal immigrants pose an existential threat to our nation, then I’ll invite you to join your intellectual and moral peers on the other side of the lawn. Just as in Germany in the 1930s, you have been sold a bill of goods by a dangerous demagogue who is leading our republic to moral ruin. You have embraced, by any obvious metric, a complete delusion based on xenophobia and racial animus, and you’re doing so in the grand and terrible tradition of the millions of Good Germans who long ago believed that Jews were the cause of all their woes. Your belief that MS-13 members are representative of the general population of illegal immigrants is as fatally screwed up as were the beliefs of those who consumed Nazi caricatures of Jews in the early years of the Reich without realizing their own culpability in the destruction of their nation.

Back then, a sizable minority of racists — with an assist from an overzealous police force who shared their beliefs, and a political strongman leading the national charge — brought a great nation through the gates of hell and into the pit beyond . And all of it was based on a delusion.

Is it happening again here? From my side of the lawn, it sure as hell seems to be. The end result is still up in the air, and it depends very much on your answer to this fundamental, seldom-asked question:

Do illegal immigrants actually pose an existential threat to the United States?

I hope to God you say no, because I have enough enemies already and I beg you again to pause, reflect and reconsider the proposition in the light of the profoundly freighted history before us. But if your answer is still yes, then head to that side of the lawn and let’s get this thing going.

How many of you believe in the delusion will ultimately determine “If it is happening here.”

I’m fearful of the answer, but ready for the fight.

We all should be.

Michael Tallon is an independent writer from Upstate New York who lives in Antigua, Guatemala. He is currently working on a nonfiction book detailing his experiences with a rare genetic disorder than nearly cost him his life in 2015. Follow him atTwitter.com/MichaelXTallon.