Speak Now, or Never: Stopping Sensenbrenner

If you've been reading LA Indymedia or listening to KPFK, you've heard about the March for Immigrants' Rights that will be taking place tomorrow, starting on Olympic and Broadway. But if you're limited to English, you probably haven't heard the non-stop promotion by virtually every popular local and nationally-syndicated Spanish-language DJ in Los Angeles. Low-ball estimates from media insiders are that 200,000 people will turn up. March organizers are scrambling to accommodate three times that many and busloads of people from across the state, from Reno and Las Vegas, from Phoenix, from Texas, from New Mexico, from Denver, from Tennessee, and from Chicago. As I write this, high school students in East Los Angeles have walked out and reportedly are pummeling the police with fruit against proposed immigration "reform." Tomorrow promises to be the biggest march in Los Angeles history.

What this means is that downtown will be closed by 10:00 a.m. What it doesn't mean is that white people, in particular, should watch the March on TV.

Because next week, the Senate may institute the final piece of a Fascist regime.

The Fascist Conscience

Claudia Koonz, in The Nazi Conscience, writes of the Nazi youth leader who watches his friend being marched off to the death camps. A few years earlier, the youth would have decried the persecution, but on that day he merely thought, "How unfortunate that Heinz is a Jew." As an adult he recalled, "I accepted deportation as just."

Koonz proposes that it was a steady message of racial superiority combined with subtle legal and bureaucratic rule-making that disposed the Good German to turn an uneasy blind eye to the Holocaust. Once he held power, Adolph Hitler dropped his public anti-Semitic rhetoric, referring only to the superior German race, and leaving the "other" in the shadows.

The Left today widely acknowledges the emergence in the United States of three fundamental principles of Fascism: corporatism, imperialism, and repression. What is forgotten is the fourth, equally critical prop to a Fascist state: scapegoats. Without them, even "good" citizens will question themselves and their government. With it, the frustration of the volk can play itself out on the scapegoats, without threatening the state.

With the emergence of punitive immigration laws like Sensenbrenner (HR 4437) communities of recent immigrants have, understandably, recognized the Fascist implications of scapegoating with far more clarity than most European-descent people in the U.S. It took LA Indymedia days to recognize what Juan Santos was telling us in "Brown Skin/Yellow Star" and move the story to the center column. Counterpunch turned the same story back into a "Latino" concern when it added the headed it "Making Latinos Illegal" and dropped the subtitle, "Turning the Corner Toward Fascism in the U.S."

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army is stepping up plans for prison labor camps. The Department of Homeland Security has a standing contract with Halliburton for emergency detention prisons for immigrants. DHS has issued Operation Endgame to "provide the endgame to immigration enforcement and that is the removal of all removable aliens.... We must strive for 100% removal rate."

The minutemen and their ilk attach every conceivable failing to immigrants, chiefly those from Mexico. To hear the minutemen tell it, Mexican immigrants are responsible for failing schools, inadequate health care, unemployment, gangs, inner city slums, inflation, overpopulation, tuberculosis, and AIDS.

That's scapegoating. The U.S. government, in authorizing labor camps, detention centers, and "immigration reform," has added its imprimatur. A proto-Fascist government needs a scapegoat, an "inherently" evil population to take the blame, and the minutemen have handed them Mexicans on a plate.

The truth is, nobody can make a decisive case against undocumented immigrants. Perhaps they pay less in taxes, but even in 1995 they received proportionately less in benefits, according to the Cato Institute. The right-wing Heritage Foundation establishes that on both the high and low ends of the economic scale, immigrants with and without papers aren't taking anyone's job.

That's where Sensenbrenner (HR 4437) comes in. And that's why Mexicans, Chicanos, and other immigrant and immigrant-descent communities across the nation are rising up in a groundswell as great as the civil rights movement at its peak.

HR 4437, along with its Senate siblings (crafted to make the poison pill more palatable), will not only criminalize most of a national group in this country. They will encourage police harassment of entire ethnic-descent communities, regardless of immigration status, and they will legitimize every accusation the minutemen have made of Mexicans and Chicanos. The Senate will debate "immigration reform" next week.

All anti-racist, anti-Fascist people must be in the streets tomorrow.

Sensenbrenner and the Nazis

Only those who are our fellow countrymen can become citizens. Only those who have German blood, regardless of creed, can be our countrymen. Hence no Jew can be a countryman.

HR 4437 has no refuge for undocumented immigrants already in the U.S., no path for becoming legal. No matter that immigrants have been pushed here by NAFTA and CAFTA, and pulled here by available jobs. No matter that they have worked and contributed to U.S. society, many for decades, and they have earned the right to be here, often through back-breaking labor. No matter that they have raised families, built homes, become part of communities. No matter that their Indigenous ancestors traveled across the continent tens of thousands of years before the European invasion. They will all be illegal and without appeal, by their very existence in the U.S. Under HR 4437, eight million to twelve million people would be subject to immediate arrest and imprisonment.

Those who are not citizens must live in Germany as foreigners and must be subject to the law of aliens.

On 24 October 1941, the head of the Order Police [local law enforcement] writes that the Security Police will expel 50,000 Jews, and continues, "According to what has been agreed with the head of the SD and the Security Police, the Order Police undertakes to guard the deportation trains by posting an escort....The duty of the escorting guards ends with the handing over of the transports in due order at the places of destination to the competent authorities of the Security Police."

Local police forces will receive "inherent authority" and funding to turn over immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. If local law enforcement has responsibility for immigration violations, every darker-skinned person--Meso-American, Southwest Asian, Middle Eastern, African--will become suspect just for walking past a cop. Whole communities will fade into an underground culture and economy.

Two hundred non-felons were rounded up for deportation in a joint effort by the Border Patrol and local police in El Paso a month ago.

We demand that the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood. If it should not be possible to feed the whole population, then aliens (non-citizens) must be expelled from the Reich.

A Reich citizen is that subject who is of German or related blood only and who through his behavior demonstrates that he is ready and able to serve faithfully the German people and Reich.

All undocumented immigrants, all immigrants with visa violations, 1.5 million of their children, their families, their lawyers, their doctors, and the good Samaritans who aid them will become guilty of an aggravated felony. So if you give your co-worker a ride home, or you provide medical aid in your capacity as a health care worker, or you buy dinner for a friend who can't prove their citizenship, or you put a bottle of water in the desert to keep someone from dehydrating, you're a felon facing prison. Not to mention the person you assisted. Everyone arrested would be incarcerated. And, just for good measure, legal residents would waive their right to a hearing if their visa is in violation.

All this because of a supposed "unemployment" problem in the United States, virtually non-existent in the U.S. except for the effects of racism.

Any further immigration of non-Germans must be prevented. We demand that all non-Germans who have entered Germany since August 2, 1914, shall be compelled to leave the Reich immediately.

700 more miles of border wall. Think one and a half times a completed apartheid wall in Palestine. In California, the current border wall is 66 miles long. Since 1994 when it was begun, more than 4000 people have died trying to cross the brutal deserts and raging rivers, up from fewer than a dozen annually before the wall. The net effect of 700 more miles of the proposed 3-layer wall can only be death, hundreds of corpses scattered across the desert and floating in the river.

The object of Operation Endgame is to deport all undocumented people by 2012.

We demand the abolition of the regular army and the creation of a national (folk) army.

The U.S. interior will be militarized. One minuteman leader has proclaimed, "Oh Jesus, it is unbelievable. I mean, we need the National Guard to clean out all our cities and round them up." Another has called for the deployment 36,000 National Guard and State Defense Force personnel along the border. Under pressure from her legislature, the governor of Arizona last month authorized additional National Guard troops to assist the Border Patrol.

HR 4437 would double the number of border police, add 1000 ICE agents, and 25% more dogs. President Bush has proposed equipping the Border Patrol with extensive high-tech, military surveillance equipment, including a fleet of unmanned drone airplanes based just 150 miles south of Los Angeles. So much for posse comitatus, the law against posting military troops within U.S. borders.

--quotes from the the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and the Program of the National Socialist German Workers, adopted by Adolph Hitler for the German Workers Party in 1920.

Standing Up and Being Heard

Last month, 1000 Oaklanders protested the current proposals for immigration reform, in a Spanish, Chinese, and English program. In Houston, 1500 Mexicans, Chicanos, Hondurans, Salvadorans, Caribbean Islanders, and labor representatives protested the current proposals for immigration reform. This month in Washington DC, the NAACP and the American Friends Service Committee teamed up with the National Council of La Raza to bring 20,000 people into the streets. In Milwaukee, 30,000 people marched. Add thousands more in Phoenix, Trenton, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Tucson, Las Cruces, and Atlantic City. People are hunger-striking in San Francisco. Polka dancers, Irish immigrants, and Chinese bands joined 300,000 Spanish-speaking protestors in Chicago. Tomorrow, Los Angeles, Denver, and New York will march.

Regionally, the cities of Maywood, Huntington Park, Pomona, Pasadena, Coachella, and San Francisco have gone on record opposing the Sensenbrenner bill. The Catholic Church is poised to defy the law if if passes.

It is no longer enough to mumble support for "their" cause. It is no longer enough to "work on your racism." It is no longer enough to "outreach," keep up with politically correct nomenclature, or "get educated." Tomorrow is the day to stop the racists and Fascists. Meet me on Olympic and Broadway.