Speaking of the humanities… » « Not even a wire monkey

There was something we’re supposed to remember, or we’re doomed to repeat it. What was that thing again?

I’m suddenly seeing a lot of contempt for the humanities, goaded on by people like Jordan Peterson, who has said the humanities are not only dead but foully rotten. I disagree, of course, and would like to point out that history is one of the humanities (not to disparage the other branches, though — I’d be happy to write a defense of all of them). That we’ve forgotten, or choose to forget, much of our history is a problem. Case in point: Jeff Sessions’ denial that the policies he supports resembles those of Nazi Germany.

“Well, it’s a real exaggeration, of course. In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country,” Sessions said. “We need to think it through, be rational and thoughtful about it. We want to allow asylum for people who qualify for it, but people who want economic migration for their personal financial benefit, and what they think is their families’ benefit, is not a basis for a claim of asylum.”

Whoa. Sessions is acknowledging implicitly the similarity between Nazi Germany and 21st century USA, and is straining to find some little difference between us, and that’s the one he wants to claim? Perhaps he needs to be reminded of Nazi policy.

Toward the end of the 1930s, and especially from the latter half of 1938, massive Jewish emigration from Germany and Austria became an explicit objective of Nazi policy.

He might also want to learn something about Nazi propaganda. Der Ewige Jude portrayed Jews as parasites, in Germany to prey upon and profit from good German human beings; further, it blamed them for organized crime, generally violent tendencies, and rape. How has Trump characterized immigrants? No differently.

The Nazis did not suddenly burst upon Europe with concentration camps and mass executions. They started with a little seed of anti-semitism and nurtured it until it flowered into the Holocaust. It’s the same here; this is how it’s done, with a gradual ramping up of the offenses against humanity until we get to full blown atrocities. Catch it early. Nip it in the bud. Of course, you can only do that if you’ve studied the humanities.

While the Republicans are hurtling headlong into evil, I can’t excuse the Democrats, either.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who spearheaded legislation to ban the separation of families at the border, also linked the detention policies to World War II Germany.

“This is the United States of America; it’s not Nazi Germany,” Feinstein told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday. “We don’t take children from their parents. Until now.”

Until now? I am reminded of how wrong that statement is every day: located right next to the science building where I work is an old brick building, the last vestige of the Morris Industrial School for Indians, founded in 1887 by the Catholic Church as a boarding school for Indians. We separated children from their parents, sometimes forcibly, sometimes with economic pressure, and we held them captive for years at a time. Approximately two thousand kids were held here over the lifetime of the school.

…like other boarding schools, the Morris program alienated students not necessarily adverse to learning to read and write. Only English was to be spoken; the curriculum emphasized the value of the white man’s way and at least implicitly the evil of the child’s home.

We don’t have a lot of stories about what went on inside the school — control was fairly complete, the administrators had power over what was written by a student body brought in largely illiterate. But some accounts exist.

Methods of discipline at Minnesota boarding schools were harsh. Some schools had cells or dungeons where students were confined for days and given only bread and water. One forced a young boy to dress like a girl for a month as a punishment; another cut a rebellious girl’s hair as short as a boy’s. Minnesota boarding schools recorded epidemics of measles, influenza, blood poisoning, diphtheria, typhoid, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, pneumonia, trachoma, and mumps, which swept through overcrowded dormitories. Students also died from accidents such as drowning and falls.

Boarding school staff assigned students to “details”: working in the kitchen, barns, and gardens; washing dishes, tables, and floors; ironing; sewing; darning; and carpentry. The schools also extensively utilized an “outing” program that retained students for the summer and involuntarily leased them out to white homes as menial laborers.

One of Minnesota’s most famous boarding school survivors is American Indian activist Dennis Banks. When he was only four years old, Banks was sent three hundred miles from his home on the Leech Lake Reservation of Ojibwe, in Cass County, to the Pipestone Indian School. Lonesome, he kept running away but was caught and severely beaten each time. Another student, at St. Benedict’s, recalled being punished by being made to chew lye soap and blow bubbles that burned the inside of her mouth. This was a common punishment for students if they spoke their tribal language.

Another reminder: Adolf Hitler admired and emulated the American methods of genocide.

The idea of a prison camp – specifically Auschwitz, in Oświęcim, Poland – where Hitler’s soldiers could shoot, hang, poison, mutilate and starve men, women and children en mass was not an idea Hitler, the bigot, came up with on his own. In fact, the Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer John Toland wrote that Hitler was inspired in part by the Indian reservation system – a creation of the United States.

“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history,” Toland wrote in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. “He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”

We say, “Never forget”. We’re damned good at forgetting, though, which is why we’ve got a great big sign out in front of that building to remind us.

I haven’t even mentioned the willingness of Americans to enslave people and break up families if it profited them. There has been no end of evil committed by the people of this country, and now Feinstein wants to claim “We don’t take children from their parents”? When have we not? This country was founded on slavery and the slaughter and re-education of its native people.

We can’t change the past. We have to bear the burden of our history forever. The one thing we can do is to move beyond the past, be better, grow and change to never again commit these crimes against humanity, to not be evil. Jeff Sessions, Donald Trump, and the Republican party seem to be committed to the idea that our national character must be one of oppression and persecution forevermore, while the Democrats choose to live in a fantasy past that denies our history…which enables the crimes to continue.

Speaking of the humanities… » « Not even a wire monkey

Comments

  1. fernando says

    Silly PZ…
    Of course their politics doesn’t resemble those of “nOzi” Germany!

    :P

  2. Dunc says

    The only thing we learn from history is that nobody ever learns anything from history.

  4. says

    I often criticize Republicans for wanting to return to the America that we showed in our movies, which never existed anywhere but in the media. From time to time, it’s important to know that I must be at least somewhat guilty of the same thing. I know these things existed. I’ve passed through Indian reservations. I’ve looked at original copies of PM, looking for the enlightened and punchy political cartoons of Ted “Dr Seuss” Geisel, and stumbled over the one where he shows, basically, every Japanese-looking citizen of the US lining up for his bomb and instructions.

    The idealistic US was largely the creation of liberal screenwriters (and directors, etc) who wanted our past to be something other than the prevailing image up to that time of mindlessly hostile ‘injuns’ (And you know who was a crazed bigot about them? Mark Twain.), but the myth they replaced it with—of temporary misunderstandings sorted out by a few enlightened whites who straightened out the recalcitrant few among us who did bad things—is equally pernicious.

    I cringe when I see well-meaning movies like BROKEN ARROW where Jimmy Stewart makes a speech, and our history is all nice again. His character’s actions, even if they’d been real, would have been nothing but a ripple in a stream whose effects barely disturbed the flow of racism. I have some idea (far from comprehensive, I’m sure) of what happened after those events.

    Anyway, my level of knowledge is far from sufficient to lecture anybody who knows a second semester’s worth of our history, so I’ll stop before I really step in it.

  5. timmyson says

    Canada has been doing some thorough exposure of a similar treatment of natives: Church-run schools that forbade natives exploring their cultures and attempting to “kill the Indian in the child” (that was our venerated, founding Prime Minister). Some schools had a 40% mortality rate.
    I thought the root of the development of the concentration camp was Lord Kitchener in the Boer war, rounding up women and children and starving them until guerrillas surrendered.

  6. Rob Grigjanis says

    We separated children from their parents, sometimes forcibly, sometimes with economic pressure, and we held them captive for years at a time

    Canada did the same thing, for over a hundred years, with the last residential school closing in 1996. It was deliberate cultural genocide.

    Over the course of the system’s more than hundred-year existence, about 30% of, or around 150,000, Indigenous children were placed in residential schools nationally. At least 6,000 of these students are estimated to have died as residents.

  7. Mobius says

    I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.

    –Jeff Sessions (on separating children and parents)

    I was thinking it sounded Godwin, but the same (exact same) logic could be used to justify what the Nazis did to the Jews. It was the law in Germany.

    As someone else pointed out, this argument WAS used in antebellum times to justify slavery.

  8. cartomancer says

    It should also be remembered, though it seldom ever is, that the growing numbers of central American refugees trying to get in to the US are a direct result of seventy years of US interference in central and south American countries for its own economic benefit. And by “interference” I mean straight-up theft and murder on an appalling scale.

    Were successive governments of the US seriously concerned with stopping the flow of refugees into their territory then they would stop supporting the terrorism and exploitation in the rest of the Americas that has led to the problem in the first place. Part of which would be a sensible drug policy rather than the abysmal wrong-headed one that has led to the virtual desolation of parts of northern Mexico and Colombia.

  9. davidnangle says

    timmyson @#5, “Some schools had a 40% mortality rate.”

    That sentence stopped me in my tracks. We aren’t talking about Lacedaemon soldier-children…

  10. David Marjanović says

    Toward the end of the 1930s, and especially from the latter half of 1938, massive Jewish emigration from Germany and Austria became an explicit objective of Nazi policy.

    Soon, though, that changed to a policy of trying to keep them all in so they wouldn’t get out alive – not without somebody profiting from it, at least. Exhibit A: the quite hefty Reichsfluchtsteuer (literally “empire flight tax”, “flight” as in “flee”, not as in “fly”).

    But there’s a much bigger difference! Until close to the end, the Nazis recorded everything. The ICE doesn’t give a fuck about being able to keep track of which parents they’re separating from which children.

    There’s a revolt brewing in Microsoft, which has a contract with the ICE. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which supported Trump in 2016, calls the situation “terrible” and predicts doom & gloom for the Republican Party “— and rightly so”.

    The Secretary of Homeland Security already says she’s just following orders and lies about what the orders are, and John Kelly “has told at least one person close to him that he may as well let the president do what he wants, even if it leads to impeachment — at least this chapter of American history would come to a close.”

    Trump, as usual, has found a shiny distraction, sillier than any before, even Reagan’s! So much winning…

    Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) at least finds the right words.

  11. David Marjanović says

    Part 1 of 2:

    Toward the end of the 1930s, and especially from the latter half of 1938, massive Jewish emigration from Germany and Austria became an explicit objective of Nazi policy.

    Soon, though, that changed to a policy of trying to keep them all in so they wouldn’t get out alive – not without somebody profiting from it, at least. Exhibit A: the quite hefty Reichsfluchtsteuer (literally “empire flight tax”, “flight” as in “flee”, not as in “fly”).

    But there’s a much bigger difference! Until close to the end, the Nazis recorded everything. The ICE doesn’t give a fuck about being able to keep track of which parents they’re separating from which children.

    There’s a revolt brewing in Microsoft, which has a contract with the ICE. Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which supported Trump in 2016, calls the situation “terrible” and predicts doom & gloom for the Republican Party “— and rightly so”.

  12. David Marjanović says

    Part 2 of 2:

    The Secretary of Homeland Security already says she’s just following orders and lies about what the orders are, and John Kelly “has told at least one person close to him that he may as well let the president do what he wants, even if it leads to impeachment — at least this chapter of American history would come to a close.”

    Trump, as usual, has found a shiny distraction, sillier than any before, even Reagan’s! So much winning…

    Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) at least finds the right words.

  13. jazzlet says

    I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order.

    –Jeff Sessions (on separating children and parents)

    That only works if the christians are not the Government, if they are the Government they have no excuse for not making laws that match the standard Jesus imposed upon christians of loving others as they loved themselves. Think you failed at bible study Jeff.

  21. David Marjanović says

    Then there are two petitions to Congress to stop this horror, as well as more filler text to escape the spam trap.

  22. David Marjanović says

    Then there are two petitions to Congress to stop this horror, as well as more filler text to escape the spam trap. I’m actually surprised I’m not told to slow down…

  27. petesh says

    Hard as it is to work while crying, we must continuing watching, listening, writing, and even SHOUTING.

  32. David Marjanović says

    I’m giving up on the other petition. It’s on couragecampaign.org.

  33. David Marjanović says

    I’m giving up on the other petition. It’s on Courage Campaign.

  34. mnb0 says

    “In Nazi Germany, they were keeping the Jews from leaving the country,” Sessions said.”
    Does that man aspire to become the biggest liar in history? The nazis didn’t until the war began, ie half of their tenure. And even later.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan

    https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005468

    Especially this is telling:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_St._Louis

    Sessions has exactly the same attitude as the authorities then (btw the Dutch government wasn’t any better) and some worse.
    Only in October 1941 (when the nazis had conquered Europe almost entirely) jewish emigration was forbidden.
    Hadn’t it been for the Sessions of that time 100 000s jews could have been saved.

  35. KG says

    Until close to the end, the Nazis recorded everything. – David Marjanović@10

    Ably assisted by IBM – see Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust.

  36. blf says

    Hadley Freeman, writing in the Grauniad, is clearly enraged, Donald Trump’s child cruelty shocks us, but it shouldn’t surprise us:

    The policy of separating families has the president’s name written all over it. But it also has an awful American pedigree
    […]
    President [sic] Trump’s team is currently reacting to these stories by alternately denying their veracity and defending their effectiveness, and in the case of Kirstjen Nielsen, US secretary of homeland security, doing both simultaneously. The rest of us want to throw up on our shoes and cry. But as horrific as these stories are, they are only happening because casual racism against immigrants has long been part of America’s identity. I am currently writing a book about immigration in America in the early 20th century, and you don’t have to look too hard to find a tradition of foreigner-bashing. The Emergency Immigration Act of 1921 was written to prevent the country being polluted by abnormally twisted Jews, who were deemed filthy, un-American and dangerous in their habits. It passed overwhelmingly, but according to those who wrote it, it did not go far enough. So in 1924 the Johnson-Reed Act was proposed, which effectively banned all Asians from entering the country. It was intended, as congressman Albert Johnson put it, to keep American stock up to the highest standard — that is, people who were born here. It too passed in the House and the Senate without a glitch.

    America is built on racism, but it is also built on immigration, and these are not so much two sides of one coin but a snake eating its own tail. Immigrants have been othered so effectively by politicians that people who talk proudly about seeing their great-grandparents’ names in the books at Ellis Island, or boast about being able to trace their family tree to the Mayflower, will tut anxiously about illegal immigration, as though the Mayflower travellers all had visas. Few who talk about immigration talk about why these people are immigrating in the first place. What are they fleeing from? Who cares?

    My grandmother fled the Nazis. It’s the only reason I was born in America — or at all, for that matter. She had to gain entry by agreeing to marry a man she didn’t know, who lived in Long Island. She couldn’t get her mother, siblings or cousins in, however, and as a result many of them were murdered.

    Analogies with Nazism can be unhelpful, but it is impossible for those of us who are descendants of Holocaust survivors to listen to those tapes of children crying for their parents and not think about the Jewish children in our family who were forcibly separated from their parents. When asked about the comparisons between his detention centres for children and concentration camps, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, described them as an exaggeration — the Nazis were keeping the Jews from leaving the country, he bleated. Attention, all politicians: if the best you can say for your policy is you are not literally killing people like the Nazis did, you are on the wrong side.

    […] Trump promised to deport the bad hombres. Many laughed this off, insisting this was just a figure of speech, but there was one person who took his words seriously. Hillary Clinton said in one debate, “I don’t want to rip families apart. I don’t want to see the deportation force that Donald has talked about.” Tell me again, Bernie bros and third-party voters, about how there’s no significant difference between Trump and Clinton.

    With the exception of the few surviving descendants of Native Americans, every single person in America is there because someone in their family immigrated. [… T]he images of lone toddlers, knee high to the immigration officials taking their parents away, have exposed the bottomless cruelty of the right. They will rage in defence of the rights of the unborn child, but throwing kids in cages is apparently fine. This administration has so successfully demonised non-white immigrants (They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, according to Trump during the campaign), that they are not seen as families but as animals from shithole countries, to use another of the president’s [sic] terms. This is how Republicans like Ivanka Trump and Paul Ryan can tweet cheerful photos of themselves with their children during this saga: they might be, respectively, descendants of eastern European and Irish immigrants, but in no way do they relate their families to the ones being ripped apart.

    […]

  37. blf says

    A synopsis of the wingnutsnazis’s crap, Essentially summer camps: how the right is defending family separations (some minor edits for formatting reasons (not marked)):

    […]
    On Monday, the conservative news site Drudge Report filled its famous, all-caps lead story slot with the headline BORDER BATTLE: USA TAKING IN 250 KIDS PER DAY. Next to the story was a photo of young children holding guns, implying that the children separated from their parents are gun-toting criminals.

    The children in the photo were not traumatised minors who crossed the US–Mexico border with their parents. They weren’t even from Central America — they were Syrians. The photo had been taken in Syria in 2012 by photojournalist Christiaan Triebert, and was a blatantly misleading attempt to try to find some way to make the border policy seem legitimate.

    [… S]taunchest Trump partisans have remained steadfast in support of the separation policy, or dismissive of what they’re calling alarmist rhetoric from the left. Some, such as Ann Coulter, who claimed on Fox News that the children crying in camps are actors, have taken to deception.

    […]

    Another common practice among Trump supporters has been conflating the separation of children of parents lawfully seeking asylum with the news of Paul Manafort, former Trump campaign head, being sent to prison over the weekend. It was an argument pushed forth by Rush Limbaugh, who said on his radio show that Manafort had been officially been separated from his family.

    Fox News [sic] host Jesse Watters compared the adult children of white collar criminals with minors on the border. They want to lock up Eric. They want to lock up Don Jr and they want to lock up Ivanka, and they’ve done nothing wrong. And now they’re upset because illegal alien families are being broken up? he said on his show.

    […]

    Conservative radio host Steve Deace, author of the book We Won’t Get Fooled Again about the Christian right, wondered what differed here from when parents go to war: We separate children from their parents when we send them off to war, or imprison them. So while this is a nice talking point it’s a terrible argument.

    Bill Mitchell, the ubiquitous Trump supporter, continued his string of consecutive days on Twitter by throwing out all manner of convoluted justifications in the apparent hope one might stick: It seems like the border problem is everyone’s fault except for the actual people who are CAUSING the problem.
    The illegals.

    He later followed up with a clarification: You know who REALLY hates illegal immigration? Black voters. He did not indicate where he found this purported fact.

    […]

    A Quinnipiac poll found that while 66% of Americans opposed the policy of enforced separation on the whole, among Republicans 55% support it and only 35% are against it.

    “When does public opinion become a demand that politicians just can’t ignore?” Quinnipiac’s assistant director, Tim Malloy, said in a statement about the polling.

    That question remains unclear, but it seems likely that as the debate over the Trump administration policy continues, we’re going to soon find out. If the recent past has shown us anything, it’s that Trump has a way of getting the Republican party to fall in line with any number of policies they previously opposed. Just ask Kirstjen Nielsen. She was against the separations before she was for it.

  38. kaleberg says

    Cut Feinstein some slack. I’m not that fond of her, but she’s on the right side here. Did you want her to argue against separating immigrant children from their families by claiming that, “Yes, we do take children from their families.”? What’s her follow up line then? “Except maybe not in this case.” That really works as rhetoric, and rhetoric is a key tool of any politician.

    Feinstein was appealing to our aspirations. Yes, we separated a lot of children from their families, but we know that’s wrong now. We should be better than that. Thanks to Donald Trump, now we’re doing something we know is wrong, and he should be stopped.

  39. petesh says

    @23: I agree. As a California voter, I have voted for Feinstein without ever much liking her; but this year (despite the presence on the ballot of a well-regarded Democratic opponent) I shall vote for her with some enthusiasm. Some will say she’s currying for leftist votes, to which my response is: GOOD! She obviously cannot stand the Trump regime, has seniority and a certain amount of clout even in opposition, and has been doing good work on the Judiciary Committee, of which she is the senior minority member.