Hot Type: How Many is Enough?
US political Columnist Heidi Siegmund Cuda urges every American to search their soul and ask how many people illegally deported to a concentration camp they are willing to tolerate
There’s a profound truth in the conclusion to the 1961 film Judgement At Nuremberg, when a Nazi judge, played convincingly by Burt Lancaster, begs the US judge who headed his tribunal to believe him when he said, “Those people… those millions of people… I never knew it would come to that. You must believe it!”
To which the US judge, in an iconic performance by Spencer Tracy, responds, “It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.”
In multiple reports by members of the American legal profession, who appear to be stricken with the belief that the rule of law still exists, they distinguish between people who are in America legally and those who are undocumented. They cite judges and Supreme Court rulings, and they appear to be suffering from a massive failure to read the already changed strategic landscape.
Donald Trump is a criminal — a convicted felon, who is the celebrity addition to a cell of dictators.
He is signaling the end of the rule of law, while also previewing coming attractions for “home-growns”.
In his recent meeting with Nayib Bukele in the White House, Trump told the Salvadoran president that “home-growns are next” and that El Salvador would need to build “about five more places” to hold American citizens. This comment got laughter from the audience gathered to watch these bullies flaunt their cruelty.
But in conversations I’m having with people who understand the rule of law, they still appear to be clinging to the belief that there’s some magical line between the lawful and the lawless and that only ‘criminals’ will face punishment.
And that’s when I lose my mind.
Dehumanization
How many is enough?
Is it okay in America to rip people from their homes, children from the streets, without due process, regardless of their status? Is it okay to send them into a black hole, only to offer photo ops for Trump cronies to look hard, as undernourished shirtless men are dehumanized in the background?
The cruelty is the point, it’s always been the point.
But does that mean Americans, too, must become cruel?
How many people denied due process in America is enough to spark a revolt? One? A dozen? A thousand? Fifty thousand?
Or will Americans become like Germans in the 1930s, just going about their day as their neighbors disappear and smoke stacks spew out ashes of human remains.
El Salvador
I’ve been to El Salvador. I was there in 2009 directing a documentary on eco-tourism. I saw the guards at the market places with machine guns and my host and translator took a machete wherever she went. I asked her why, and she said: “Snakes.”
I later learned that by “snakes” she meant people.
I felt safe on my trip, however, indulging in some of the best coffee I have ever tasted. I visited Mayan ruins in Chalchuapa and also spent time by the sea, in the surf spot El Sunzal — among the top places to surf in the world.
Under President Nayibe, who was elected a decade after my visit, the country has taken an authoritarian turn, with Amnesty International documenting a “growing deterioration of human rights”.
Images of men in the prison camp known as Cecot look positively medieval, but again, that cruelty is the point. Dehumanization is the point. The photos are designed to strip the men of agency. They are no longer sons or fathers or husbands. We must see them as hardened criminals getting what they deserve, so the strongman leader is exalted for cleaning up crime.
We know of at least one man who was wrongly expelled. Is one enough? Or do we need more to be convinced?
As Viktor Lazlo, the resistance leader in the film Casablanca, said: “If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.”
Do we understand that our enemies aren’t the poor, but the billionaires who are exploiting the poor for their own fascist ends?
‘America Is Now In Fascism’s Legal Phase’
More than three years ago, in a report for the Guardian, Jason Stanley wrote an article entitled “America Is Now In Fascism’s Legal Phase”:
“There comes a tipping point, where rhetoric becomes policy. Donald Trump and the party that is now in thrall to him have long been exploiting fascist propaganda. They are now inscribing it into fascist policy… We are now in fascism’s legal phase.
“Defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, and presenting its enemies as deviously maligning the nation to its children, is a classic fascist strategy to stoke fury and resentment.”
Yale professor Jason Stanley, the author of How Fascism Works, now lives and teaches in Canada.
Read the room. Jason has.
Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs weekly in Byline Supplement. She is the co-host of RADICALIZED Truth Survives podcast and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 88 countries.