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Turning the Corner Toward Fascism in the US |
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Written by Xiuhcoatl
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Mar 27, 2006 at 10:46 AM |
Brown Skin / Yellow Star:
Turning the Corner Toward Fascism in the US
by
Juan Santos
The color of our skin will mark us as suspects, as felons, as threats
to "the homeland." Any cop will be free to stop us at any time, under
any pretext, to check -- not for dope -- but for our "papers."
At first it won't seem like much. Quietly, at first, a few of us will
begin to disappear, just like some 60 thousand immigrants of Muslim and
Arabic descent have disappeared since the onset of the Patriot Act;
without a word. Like them, we will become targets of the so-called "war
on terror."
First it will be dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands.
Mothers will disappear walking to the corner store. Fathers will never
come home from work. Children will be left behind, sobbing in
apartments empty of food, warmth, money and life. The neighbors will be
afraid. The tens of thousands could readily become millions.
The picture painted above is nothing but hard headed realism.
Legislation now before the US Senate would make every undocumented
person in the US a felon and authorize every police department in the
country to arrest people on immigration charges.
The size of the Border Patrol would, in effect, increase by 60 times,
from the current 11,000 Migra agents to 663,546 enforcers. If each
authorized officer in the US arrested one undocumented migrant once
every three months, within five years over 11 million migrants would be
gone an ethnic cleansing without parallel in US history.
This is the future they have planned. Certain neighborhoods -- the
Gulfton District or the North Side in Houston, Pico Union and Boyle
Heights in LA, the San Francisco Mission District -- will be targeted.
Almost everyone in them will be considered a "felon," or someone who
has aided the "felons." They won't be able to be able to tell us apart.
"A Mexican is a Mexican," is what they will say.
In certain neighborhoods concrete barriers will block the streets.
Police and La Migra will arrange themselves in hunting parties
together. Like clockwork, a police cruiser will turn the corner near
your place, once every 60 seconds. No one will breathe. The children
will have nightmares.
This isn't just emotional rhetoric. It's happened before; in the
Gulfton District in Houston in 1990 and '95, and in Pico Union in LA in
1990. This is how it's done. The barrio will be besieged, taken over
from within.
They want to build detention camps for us. They are debating it now.
They want to label us felons, but deny us a trial. They're debating it
now. They want to build a wall -- they want us to die, tongue swollen
and hallucinating, without water in the desert. They are debating it
now.
These are the human impacts of planning already underway. New border
fences are an integral part of current legislative initiatives.
On Feb. 6, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that
the Fiscal Year 2007 federal budget would allocate over $400 million to
add 6,700 additional detention beds for migrants, part of a10-year
Homeland Security strategic plan, code-named ENDGAME.
According to a Homeland Security document on the plan, ENDGAME aims to
carry out goals "articulated in the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798."
Homeland Security is seeking the ability to "remove all removable
aliens," including "illegal economic migrants, aliens who have
committed criminal acts, asylum-seekers or potential terrorists."
Mr. Bush and the Christian fascists in power have found their scapegoat
and it is us. We are the new Jews in a new Germany in a new century.
They call it the New American Century, a New World Order, a "unipolar"
Reich a White America over all.
E Pluribus Unum: the many eradicated; reduced to One. White. Nation.
This is the pretext. They call us "invaders." We represent a
"destabilizing factor" for the "nation." They say we are dirty, just
like they said the Jews were dirty -- and disease ridden.
They say our neighborhoods and our culture are "cesspools." They want
to keep their culture "pure." They say we "steal" the jobs that they
have in fact shipped overseas, and that are nowhere to be found. And
now they're calling us "terrorists," just like they called our
ancestors "savages."
After decades the nation's long-suppressed racism is finding an open
voice once more, and they are openly strategizing about how to best
appeal to the unconscious racist sentiments just beneath the surface
among a broader public.
US Congressman Tom Tancredo warns about us: we (Mexicans and migrant
peoples) "need to be found before it is too late. They're coming here
to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren."
It's a matter of "spin." One strategist on the right wing web site
RedState.org tells them how to spin it. He says that to deal
effectively with us our enemies must "focus on terminology."
"People who are in this country without proper documentation," he
writes "are foreign infiltrators. These foreign infiltrators operate
clandestinely within our country. They are no different than the
foreign infiltrators who destroyed the world trade center and attacked
the Pentagon. Except that they haven't done anything yet."
"ÉOnce you have the terminology correct," he continues, "it is easy to
define a solution to discourage foreign infiltration. First, treat any
foreign infiltrator as a prisoner of war. Turn them over to the
militaryÉ No hearings, no public defenders, no backlogged courts, no
squandering of American tax dollars protecting the non-existent civil
rights of foreign infiltrators."
The strategizing isn't empty: these Minutemen fantasies are on the verge of becoming national reality.
Republican House Judiciary Committee Chairman Sensenbrenner's HR 4437,
The Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control
Act of 2005, recently passed the US House of Representatives. Its most
extreme and punitive provisions are being upheld by the Judiciary
Committee of the US Senate.
This legislation would do just what the RedState strategist ordered.
Key elements of the Sensenbrenner bill include:
~Making it a felony to be in the U.S. without legal documents. Under
current law this is a simple civil violation. Millions of us would be
classified as "felons" and subject to immediate detention and
deportation, often without so much as a hearing. Access to the courts
will be severely restricted if legislation currently under
consideration is approved.
How can they tell who's a felon? The felons will have brown skin. Fifty
million of us. All of us will be suspects. What will they stop us for?
Anything they please. After all, they already stop us for anything they
please.
~ Making it a federal crime to "assist" our people who are without
documents. Those who leave water in the desert to save the lives of
migrants would become felons. Millions of teachers, doctors, priests,
nurses, attorneys and others who give any kind of help or services to
undocumented people will also become felons overnight - and could
face five years in prison and have their assets seized by the
government.
Giving a ride to someone without the proper "papers" could lead to
felony charges. It remains unclear if renting an apartment or selling a
car to someone without "papers" would become a felony.
Cardinal Mahoney of the 5 million member Los Angeles Diocese of the
Catholic Church has declared he will order his priests to defy this
law, if it is passed.
~Expanding police powers over immigrants. Police departments would be
granted greater power to check legal status, a move that would increase
the number of immigration enforcement agents by 60 times the current
number. Local law enforcement agencies would be paid for detaining our
people and turning us over to federal authorities.
These provisions will turn police into bounty hunters, the moral
equivalent of Cazamigrantes, and highlight their role as a modern
version of the Night Riders that once terrorized communities of color.
~ The construction of five double-layer border fences--totaling 698 miles--in California and Arizona.
Over 4,000 people have died trying to cross the US/ Mexican border
since fences in California forced people to cross at points in the
Sonora desert into Arizona.
~ Requiring employers to collect Social Security numbers and other data
on workers and turn it over to the Department of Homeland Security,
which would then verify worker's "legal status" and store the data. All
workers would, in effect, need a government clearance before they could
have a job, any job.
~ In a related development, the U.S. government announced in February
2006 that it plans to pay Halliburton $385 million to build new
"detention centers" to imprison us.
This is a chilling and potentially deadly development in a nation that
kidnaps and spirits captives to secret prisons in Europe and which runs
torture centers in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo torture
centers which are condemned and denounced the world over.
In concert with the specter of mass deportations, pogroms, and
widespread, race-based scapegoating, new "detention centers" strikes a
chord eerily close to concentration camp.
As one writer questioned "Just what will happen in these detention
centers, built to lock away undocumented people whose legal rights have
been disappeared, and who have been cast as "hordes," "invaders," and a
threat to national security? "
On the ultra-Right, anti-Mexican shock groups such as the National
Policy Institute, Minutemen leaders, and others are calling for our
mass deportation.
The Minutemen's Jim Gilchrist has called for the National Guard to be
deployed at the Mexican / US border. Gilchrist's partner and rival in
the Minutemen, Chris Simcox, makes the agenda clear, saying, "Oh,
Jesus, it is unbelievable. I mean, we need the National Guard to clean
out all our cities and round them up. They are hard-core criminals.
They have no problem slitting your throat and taking your money or
selling drugs to your kids or raping your daughters and they are evil
people."
While there is no mention of using the National Guard under the federal
legislation currently under consideration, clear steps leading toward a
police state for people of indigenous descent are being advanced and
the record shows that when the Euro-colonialist leadership of the US
chooses to attack us, mass deportation of migrants and Chicanos alike
is the weapon of choice. It can happen here. In fact, it has.
Over 1 million of us were deported during the racist "Operation Wetback" in the year 1954, alone.
Before the mass deportations during the Great Depression a Congressman
from Texas testified in formal hearings that a strict quota system
should be imposed on Mexicans because we are "germ-carriers,
inassimilable, a people who are with us but not of us, and not for us."
We are, he said "É incapable of development away from" a condition of
"moral and financial pauperism," and that our influence was causing
"the breaking down of [the] social fabric...."
If this rhetoric sounds familiar, it should. It is the unchanging rhetoric of white nationalism.
That such rhetoric is being used again by the highest authorities in
the US should be cause for deep alarm, especially in the context of the
Patriot Act and other dramatic moves toward legalized fascism in the US.
That the State is acting on this rhetoric to create a felonized,
legally scapegoated racial and cultural under-caste calls for
uncompromising action aimed at our self defense as a People.
Juan Santos is a writer and editor in Los Angeles.
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