Facism from inside out
When the allied troops fought their way from the beaches of Normandy and Leningrad moving towards Germany, they encountered the German empire from the outside in. As they stumbled upon the concentration and death camps in Poland and Germany they were seeing the end result of Germany’s mass roundup of Jews, dissidents, labor unionists, homosexuals and other perceived enemies of the state. As I watch the roundup of immigrants and the escalation of attacks on various groups across America, I now realize that that is not how the German people saw it at all. They saw it from in inside out. German citizens experienced the rounding up and disappearing of people, with many supporting it, without a clue to where they were going and what was happening to them. That is our situation now. As ICE grabs people off the street and disappears them, no one has a clue about what is happening to them. From our perspective it all seems somewhat banal. We assume they are just being detained. It might take a force stumbling upon an ICE detention facility in the future to uncover the horrors that might be happening under the Trump administration. By then, the world will ask, “How could you let this happen?” I think we have the answer. We were experiencing the roundup of various groups from the inside out not outside in. We turned away, refused to contemplate the unthinkable, continued with our daily concerns and tried to stay out of harm’s way. We must do better.