Originally published at: Ice Not Only Looks and Acts Like a Paramilitary Force—It Is One, and That Makes It Harder To Curb - TPM – Talking Points Memo
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published by The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. As the operations of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have intensified over the past year, politicians and journalists alike have begun referring to ICE as a “paramilitary force.” Rep. John Mannion, a…
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So more people resisting these bastards are going to die. All of them are American martyrs.
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Useing our military to mow us down is questionable but a paramilitary force is rightous.
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I have seen this coming for a long time, considering the Republican Fascists” proclivities since the Vietnam-Civil Rights Era: when the Post-Industrial Midwest became the “Heartland, Homeland, (Fatherland), when gun rights replace civil rights, when Republicans perfected political failure into giving themselves more executive power, post 9/11, when I had to take my shoes off to get on an airplane, when all the alphabet agencies were created to protect us from ourselves.
Looking at the pictures of ICE in Minneapolis I am reminded of the “Wild One”, of a motorcycle gang invading a town. The Wild One was a movie a lot of alienated and bored people identified with and you still see black jacketed, Harley-Davidson riders for Trump. The ending of the movie today might be different and the bikers hired for “law enforcement”.
Twisted, Bizarro, Through the Looking Glass, Twilight Zone. How do you negotiate with a crazy grifter, who has no integrity and does not remember what he said yesterday?
Are they “police,” though? Josh touched on this earlier this week, but more focused on the “military” aspect. My (perhaps incorrect) understand is we don’t have any “Federal Police.” Rather, authority for “patrolling” or “policing” is granted by individual states. That’s why the FBI has “special agents” - they are assigned authority to investigate a specific, designated Federal crime. While they can arrest someone they witness committing a felony, my understand is you and I are authorized to do that too (i.e., citizen’s arrest).
To be clear, this is a question not an assertion, would love to read the TPM take on this.
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I fully understand why this well considered briefing on the nature of the problem–like all Democratic office-holders and most of the remaining fragments of legitimate journalism–avoided the word “Sturmabteilung” and its cinematically-linked English translation to the point of conspicuousness. But maybe now would be a good time to reconsider whether a wry “rule” used to shout down proto-gamergate weirdos in arguments about acceptable content in the self-regulated primordial muck of social media known as “Usenet” should still be treated as a general cultural hard limit on civically acceptable discourse in a democracy.
And we should probably start the discussion at the part where we ask a) whether we still are a democracy, b) whether and to what extent the elevation of Godwin’s Law into one of the academic, political and social norms governing Seriousness played a role in democratic decline and, c) regardless, whether continuing to shy away from urgently obvious parallels to the Nazi seizure of power is just a form of anticipatory submission to bad-faith ref-working by authoritarians.
The persistence of the emotional resonance of the SA as a historical touchstone even as understanding of the details fades has long been treated as inherently inflammatory, a self-trivializing appeal to prejudice and guilt by association rightly ignored as an especially toxic form of silliness. Most of the time, I’ve seen that belief expressed in terms of “oh, there’s no need to make comparisons to the Nazis when there are other perfectly salient, less-polarizing historical analogies that are less likely to get you deemed Unserious and Unworthy of Funding.”
This general consensus then finds further, more elevated expression, in two lines of thought whose premise is that, regardless of the merits of the Godwin’s Wisecrack is Actual Law mindset, the mindset is, and is as it is. And therefore, a) it is the fault of all the people to the left of Jeff Flake who urgently warned things were trending Nazi before things actually got really Nazi that have made it impossible to meaningfully warn that yeah, things are getting dangerously Nazi, and/or, b) deplorable though the mindset (and/or wolf-crying) may be, it is tactically futile to engage on that intellectual terrain.
These are legitimate critiques empirically grounded in a deep understanding of the power of stupidity (or perceptual biases, if you’re being clinically polite) in human affairs. You don’t launch frontal attacks into swamps, you go around them. Having to first argue about whether it’s permissible to mention Nazis, then argue about whether the Nazism is sufficiently Nazi for the Nazism to be of independent concern separate and apart from the conduct itself. That’s a rhetorical swamp.
However, I would contend that limiting discussion of the similarities and differences between ICE and CBP and other historical examples of paramilitary thugs to the thugs least familiar to Americans because the emotional resonance of the well-known archetype is so powerful is a categorical error. Rather, I think the reason the image of armed thugs in brownshirts, jackboots and kepis retains cultural resonance in America even after depth of knowledge necessary to distinguish one bunch of Nazis from the others has become the province of historians and history nerds is that Americans have abstracted the SA (along with the Gestapo) into a cultural red line and the very gauge by which the existence and degree of internal conquest by fascists is measured.
This is why leaving the alarming similarities and not-at-all reassuring differences between the SA and the Trumpified ICE and CBP out of the discussion is like trying to use scales without a counterweight.
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I have one pedantic question, does the U.S. Coast Guard count as a paramilitary force? It seems to fit his definitions?