Why Americans Want People Tortured Today at Alligator Auschwitz
From the Indiana fields to the Florida swamps ...
Last month, we sounded off in two pieces about the creation of a concentration camp to house immigrants before deportation built in the Florida swamps, which Sally argued would result in human rights abuses and eventually deaths:
David followed up by calling out the racist authoritarian author of the "mass deportation" efforts to send immigrants to third-world gulags and hot, inhumane concentration camps here: Stephen Miller.
He is an evil man who wants to see people he hates suffer. We know now, too, that it was his hand behind the moves to incarcerate anti-Israel student activists.
Then together, we announced in this piece here that, in light of this serious escalation, the line had truly been crossed and it was morally necessary to begin comparing what is happening now to what the Nazis did in the lead-up to the Holocaust. The difference now is that it's brown people (both Middle Eastern and Latino) and the one leading the charge is a Jew himself, whose own family was fleeing persecution.
But there's another blueprint here that's also being followed, and not enough people know about it.
Florida has built a storage unit for humans, where they're stuck inside dog kennels, where the lights never go off, where the toilet backs up when it rains, where the food is rotten and the water is fresher off the ground than from a kitchen faucet.
Many people want to think that these unconstitutional, inhumane practices are some sort of departure from what's supposed to be in America. Indeed, one might hope they were! But they're not. This is normal. For instance, pick just about any prison around the country at random and you're likely to discover all sorts of abuses.
And let's talk straight for a moment: Alligator Auschwitz is in the South. The greatest history of torturing oppressed minorities is in the South. The movement that is Trump's base are a bunch of fucking fundamentalist Christian nationalists more upset by pronouns in email signatures than they are with people living in concentration camps.
What we are seeing happening right now is simply a continuity of American Southern culture, religion, and moral values. This is America, or rather, a huge chunk of it.
And Alligator Auschwitz is what you get after 180 of years of Southern Baptist Christian fundamentalism. This is how fucking divorced from Christ's teachings these people are, that they feel torture is an appropriate response to immigration without paperwork.
But there's another chunk of the country whose culture is making a much bigger contribution than you realize.
You can't build and use a facility like Alligator Auschwitz without your way being cleared by a lot of apologists. To wit, the many religious Republicans who find room in their faith for this sort of treatment, shoulder to shoulder, as it is, with other “Christian” priorities that aren't exactly Christlike, let alone godly.
Yes, this is another installment in the tedious and vapid Protestant vs. Catholic war. What? Who cares about that anymore? Well, plenty of people.
Simply open a newspaper or website, and you'll soon see that Southern Baptist fundamentalists, who have captured both the presidency and the entire Republican Party - the party of God and faith, not like those heathen Democrats! - are trying to put a bunch of brown Catholics into concentration camps on domestic soil or ship them off to Africa to be flat-out tortured.
Where have we seen this before? For us, the answer lay smirking just outside the front door, for decades.
You might be surprised to learn that the second Ku Klux Klan - headquartered in our shared home state of Indiana during the 1920s - got out the vote and became a juggernaut on the idea of hating Catholics, as well as Blacks (and Jews, and anyone who wasn't white).
In fact, German immigrants, whose most troubled brothers and sisters back in the Vaterland would just a decade later cast themselves as the world's Ur-white people and racial ideal, were frequent Second Klan targets, due to their tendency to be Catholic and to brew beer at home.
The Second Klan would've been much the poorer without, however incredibly, the assistance of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union: That Old World beer being brewed at every farm was terrifying to both the KKK and the WCTU, who painted vivid and often fictitious pictures in the press of a populace too drunken to work, intent on beating their wives and children, if not starving them outright by spending all their money on alcohol.
(Incidentally, this is why American beer is swill: The KKK scared the bejeebus out of everyone who was brewing anything decent.)
So common, so ordinary and relatable were these views at the time that the female pastor of Sally's family's Quaker church was also the Imperial Empress of the Women's Ku Klux Klan. She started out as part of the WCTU - which makes sense; Quakers are teetotalers - and ended up working closely with the KKK’s Grand Dragon.
So if you're wondering, “Didn't we get beyond this a couple centuries ago?” unfortunately, the answer is no.
No, of course not, because that religious war between Protestants and Catholics was just replaced with a race war - one set of theological BS replaced with ideological BS. And who's been on the losing end, time and again? Black and brown Catholics.
And ever, one might conclude, was it thus.
So mighty and feared was Indiana's Second Klan that being its leader, or Grand Dragon, was a political position. And this wildly normalized hate organization only fell from power due to the insidious fecklessness of one previously-untouchable, “I alone" leader who went too far.
D.C. Stephenson, head of Indiana’s KKK, which set the template for the organization in other states, was a big, tall, fair-haired guy - physically imposing. He was a lifelong con man, an inveterate liar - including in regard to the evasion of military service - an abuser of women, and absolutely unwilling to follow any of the laws or norms he espoused or tried to shove into law. Stephenson ruled with a cocksure, iron fist until his exploits with an unwilling young woman crossed the line, and his supporters said, “Enough is enough."
Ahem. Anyway.
In the name of banishing shameful actions to the dustbin of history, this story has been mostly erased. And now, the twin hatreds of race and religion have mutated together yet again: both a racial superiority and a theological supremacy, expressed now as a "culture war."
And while Stephen Miller is the architect and fist of the federal government now, he's only been empowered to do what he's doing because there is a broad network of others who want this and enable it.
The same could be said of D.C. Stephe - oh, whoops! - Donald Trump himself. And a whole lot of those same enablers are Christian fundamentalists who embrace hideous distortions of the Bible, which lead them to reject rationality, science, and even modernity - including our very human rights.
Yes: The road to Alligator Auschwitz and the suffering of the human beings within it was paved with Bible verses yanked out of context and with an ignorant "faith like a child" rejection of intelligence forming the sidewalks.
Folks, it's not about pronouns. It's not about living in the city or the country; on the coast or amidst the plains. It's not about having green hair or being trans. It's about a driving desire in some of our countrymen to force the nation to conform to some truly blasphemous Biblical bullshit.
What did in D.C. Stephenson was murder. He forced himself on a young secretary, Madge Oberholtzer. In the course of carrying out his rape, he injured her, and she died. As slippery and charming a glad-hander as Stephenson was, he couldn't beat a murder rap.
But it's been a hundred years, and we ought to have something to show for that as a nation.
Let's not let it go that far this time.
what a passionate call! thank you both! Yes you are 100% right and not enough people acknowledge that what is happening is not being imposed by a tiny minority but reflects what has been going wrong for a very long time. Still, for the Quaker leader to be part of the KKK was truly shocking. (and I'm glad to finally understand what went wrong with the beer).