I grew up in the 1950s, when memories of World War II were still fresh, when feature films and documentaries about the war, about Hitler and the Nazis were prominent on television and in theatres. There were magazine articles and books--lots of books.
At the same time, in the 50s through the 70s, we heard, watched and read a lot about the Soviet Union and the eastern European countries they controlled. These regimes--the Nazis and the Soviet Communists--had many things in common, that we were told and taught were un-American as well as being immoral and uncivilized. One of these was the Secret Police.
The Secret Police in 1940s Germany--the Gestapo--and the KGB in the later Soviet Union (as well as similar secret police organizations in East Germany and elsewhere) not only spied on people and collected information concerning their political beliefs or even their ethnicity. They arrested people, pulled them out of their homes and snatched them off the street, without warrants, without judicial process, with no information about them given to their families or anyone, as they disappeared into the prisons and prison colonies and (in the 40s) concentration camps.
All of this we were told was profoundly un-American. Until today.
People are being snatched off the street without judicial process and shipped off to prison, or deported. Right now I'm not even dealing with immigration issues, or specific political beliefs or rationales for the arrests. Even if they were accused of crimes does not pertain. I don't need to deal with Rumeysa Ozturk's nationality or religion or visa status. I am talking simply about this:
A person in America (in this case, in Somerville, MA, just a few miles from where I once lived) was accosted on a public street by individuals in dark hoodies, some of whom wore masks, handcuffed, forced into an unmarked car and taken away. Hours later she was hundreds of miles away in a Louisiana prison, without her medications, treated as we can imagine, without access to legal counsel, without seeing a judge or given a court date.
We know the first part of this because it happened to take place within view of a stationary security camera. We know the rest of it from reporting. Whether she ever saw any identification from her assailants is still a question I have.
We were so proud of our justice system. Police at every level were required to show identification, and arrests were most often conducted by uniformed officers. People were read their rights. They had a right to counsel. They had a right to know the charges against them, and to have those charges read before a judge. It didn't matter if it was a murderer, everyone was due these rights.
What happened in Somerville, and what is happening elsewhere in America, is pretty exactly the definition of the Secret Police. The differences between normal procedures--as imperfectly and even cynically as they are sometimes employed--and what happened to Rumeysa Ozturk is the difference between the police and authoritarian thugs.
Yet these actions have been publicly defended by the American Secretary of State and the President, as not aberrations but official policy. This makes ICE the new American Gestapo, the United States KGB. The plan to Hitlerize America is on track, and it's only two months from the inauguration of Chaos.
