https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/29/speak-its-name-yes-this-is-naziism/
"History never repeats exactly the same, which is how it can be hard to
recognize when it is indeed repeating—too many little things may be different
the second time around for subsequent events to be a perfect twin of the
previous. But it’s the big things that often reappear in similar ways that are
meaningful. As they are here, which is why it’s time to recognize: for all
intents and purposes, how the government of the United States of America is
behaving is just like how the German Nazis behaved. It is doing to the people
within its national embrace exactly what the Nazis did to theirs. The
comparison to 20th Century Nazi Germany is not something that 21st Century
America is still working up to; it’s where we have already arrived.
That we have not (yet) set up an Auschwitz-Birkenau, replete with crematoria,
is not evidence to the contrary. After all, the German Nazis didn’t just
suddenly start killing millions in the 1940s; their crimes against humanity
began years earlier, in the 1930s. Even Hitler himself referred to the mass
murder Auschwitz facilitated as the “final solution,” because it was the tactic
deployed only after he had already committed plenty of other atrocities
first—atrocities that look an awful lot like the ones we are inflicting now
upon the human beings in our own national midst.
In the case of both nations the atrocities began, as such horrors often do,
with the “othering” of people, as if there were those who, by virtue of
something about their own humanity, were somehow disqualified from being part
of our national community. While the Trump Administration may have begun by
ostensibly focusing on “illegal immigrants”—which itself is a grotesquely
deceptive label (an immigrant cannot be illegal; an immigrant can only
immigrate illegally, and, for the most part, such illegality is but a civil or
misdemeanor offense and not the heinously lawless act the administration paints
it as)—like the German Nazis it has also stigmatized racial, religious, and
ethnic groups comprising America’s cultural tapestry, as well as LGBTQ+ people.
The rhetoric it espouses is all about conditioning the public to believe that
there are some people who belong in America, and some who need to be expunged
from it, so that the public will get on board aiding, supporting, and even
celebrating the expunging that will soon follow.
The horror in both countries then continues by upending the law such that the
targeted people cannot legally belong anymore. In Germany we saw how Jewish
families who had been in the country for generations suddenly lost their rights
as citizens. Here in the U.S. denaturalization has so far only been threatened,
albeit palpably, but for non-citizens whose presence in the country has so far
been entirely lawful, the Trump Administration has been unilaterally changing
that status, moving people from welcomed additions to our community to accused
interlopers who must be expelled and, per the government, right now.
But before the expulsions can happen, first the targeted people need to be
rounded up. And so a force of federal police has been showing up at people’s
homes, schools, jobs, health care providers, bus stops, and anywhere American
life takes place to arrest people, without warrants or due process, for no
crime at all other than existing. Even if not yet officially prisoners,
everyone targeted by the regime has already been made to be, by forcing them to
withdraw from life in fear. Governor Walz is absolutely right: there is some
child writing a new diary about what it is like to have to hide from a lawless
regime incapable of respecting the law and liberties that are supposed to
protect them, just like the German Nazis refused to respect any of it either."
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
