I don’t know about you, but personally, I’ve never been a huge fan of the 4th of July. This was a particularly difficult one, though. I’m not going to brightside you on that. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to remember a 4th that felt as bleak as this one, what with flood waters ripping through a church camp in Texas, and Donald Trump going full Lex Luther, gleefully grinning as he signed off on a bill that strips millions of healthcare and literally takes food out of the mouths of babies to give tax breaks to billionaires. Then there’s the small matter of gutting FEMA and the massive boost in funding to ICE that will swell the ranks of the jacket-booted masked agents who seem well-positioned to become Trump’s own personal Gestapo.
If you didn’t catch the part about the explosive overnight growth of ICE until it was too late, it may well have been due to the fact that Democratic party leaders found a perfect way to cap the spectacular party failures that led to the election of DT. According to The Intercept, party leadership, in their infinite wisdom, counseled fellow Dems to focus almost exclusively on cuts to the social safety net, and stay mum on the obvious and growing parallels between ICE and the Gestapo. And if you’re looking for a scholarly source to illuminate the links, you might check out Robert Gellately’s book The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-45 (Oxford University Press, 1990).
The Dem’s relative silence on the massive ramping up of funds for ICE ought to go a long way toward dispelling the myth that the Dem party leadership is in a particularly strong position to defend “Jewish safety.” It’s a given that party leaders seem to have learned little to nothing, from Zohran Mamdani’s spectacular victory over Andrew Cuomo in the New York primary, but what more evidence could we possibly need that they also appear to have learned little to nothing from the Holocaust?
Now millions of Americans are waking up to the fact that per a July 2 headline in Newsweek,“The Ice Budget is Now Bigger than Most of the World’s Militaries.” So if you were wondering how DT could afford to sign off on a bill that so profoundly undercuts his own voters, that ought to pretty much answer the question for you. The long predicted “imperial boomerang,” we are now witnessing, has been a long time coming. And now friends, we are well and truly in a sticky wicket. And we need to be scouring the annals of social movement history right now for lessons on how to gum up the works, how to stop the Furor and ICE from hiring thousands more agents.
I was reminded this past weekend of the first 4th of July I spent in Seattle. The day started out like pretty much any 4th, with me immersed in the annual rite of dodging TNT-wielding frontal-lobe-free teens bent on reenacting an albeit less lethal version of bombs bursting in air. And, all of a sudden, massive jets come thundering out of nowhere. I had not at this point ever heard of the “Blue Angels,” let alone been enculturated to celebrate the sight of carbon and ear-drum blasting-death-delivery-vehicles doing aerial aerobatics so perilously close to neighborhoods and rooftops. Hence, I immediately found myself in the throes of a panic attack and jumped to the obvious conclusion: Ronald “Bedtime for Bonzo” Reagan had declared martial law.
That conclusion may sound like a stretch to you, but to me it seemed fairly logical at the time, given especially that the year was 1984, and a good portion of my childhood was spent listening to stories about death camps and my father’s childhood flight from the Nazis. The latter fact may also go a long way toward explaining why, to this day, I can’t set foot in a Krupp’s elevator without wanting to denazify it. And don’t get me started on their coffeemakers.
My perspective on high tech aerial displays over densely populated urban areas is no doubt also rooted, in some measure, in having grown up listening to my father tell such classic bedtime tales as The Story of the London Blitz. As a 13-year-old boy, he – and his family – narrowly survived a bombing that blew off the top stories of the hotel where they’d taken refuge for the night.
It is definitely a measure of their privilege as wealthy white Catholics that they were, in fact, granted refugee status in England, while an estimated 6 million Jews died in the camps, alongside Roma, Poles, Black people, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, communists, trade unionists, anti-fascist resisters, and so many others the Nazis deemed subhuman and unworthy of the right to life. But had my father’s family stayed in the Netherlands, their history of resistance, together with the fact that the “younger” of my father’s twin brothers – my uncle Pierre – had suffered brain damage at birth, would likely have put the whole family at high risk of being subjected to sterilization, “medical” torture, and dissection at Auschwitz.
After the war, my uncle Pierre moved to the Hague, where he took daily pleasure in the ocean view along with a glass of port or two. He would go on to work for decades as a file clerk, becoming the company’s longest running employee. And who knew until his death, that all that time he was saving up money to leave a bequest to each of his nieces and nephews? The money my uncle left me was enough to liberate me from the student debt I racked up in grad school.
In 1940, when the family arrived as refugees in England, my father’s older brothers Puck and Paul promptly joined the RAF and became fighter pilots. Paul, Pierre’s twin, was all of 21 when his plane was shot down over France. And this family history no doubt explains at least in part why I’m funny that way about military jets and the rooftops of houses. I just don’t think they’re a good mix. And I’m pretty sure a fair number of vets, my lovely spouse included, would agree with me on that.
It’s just a guess, but when it comes to 4th of July rites, I’ll venture that a sizable percentage of U.S. vets – and combat vets in particular– given the choice, would opt out of spending the day being administered IED-like blasts at random intervals.[1] And Trump’s bombing of Iran has generated vocal criticism from the far right. Across the country, where reps still have the temerity to hold townhalls, voters are voicing their preference for food, healthcare and VA benefits over funding for yet more wars. Americans – including the majority of Jewish people in the U.S. – are critical of the U.S.’s role in turning Gaza into a hightech human shooting gallery.
And as for the millions of people who live anywhere near one of the more than 800 U.S. military bases worldwide –from Okinawa and Vieques to Bagram and Pituffik – and you can pretty much assume they are also far less than enthralled by daily displays of the U.S’s “silver gleaming death machines.” But plenty of people living on or around U.S. bases stateside are also less than thrilled with being daily throttled and barraged by noise and chemical pollution, including most notable from “PFAS ‘forever chemicals’ from firefighting foam, industrial solvents used for cleaning, and unexploded ordnance from training exercises.” Anishinaabe writer/organizer Winona LaDuke’s book The Militarization of Indian Country provides a cogent and accessible primer on the impact of nuclear testing and waste on Indian reservations across the country.
In 1984, anyway, it didn’t seem that much of a stretch to imagine that domestically we would be sucked into some version of the authoritarian violence that the U.S. was busy helping to mete out across Latin America and well beyond. As the Brazilian archbishop Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara, famously observed, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a Communist.” From farmworkers and trade unionists to teachers and professors, folksingers, nuns and priests, anyone who took remotely seriously any portion of the Sermon on the Mount (e.g. “You cannot serve God and money” and “Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them…”) was labelled a communist sympathizer, and fair game for U.S.-sponsored and trained death squads.
MLK Jr’s adage “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” has always seemed to me to be a kind of koan, an endlessly refracting moral, religious, political prism. The Reverend Dr. King’s koan is as much an ecological truth, and a basic law of nature, as it is a moral one. According to a study in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, just the first two months of the Israeli bombing of Gaza beginning on October 7, 2023 exceeded “the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations….”
The massive military-industrial-complex that Eisenhower warned of in his 1963 speech has since become even more menacing globally and in the U.S., sprouting more and more tentacles, more poly-hypenates. For far too long, those surplus war toys have made their way back to our own communities and for decades now[2] have been wantonly and routinely used disproportionately against BIPOC brothers, sisters, and trans and nonbinary kin, along with people who struggle with mental illness, people with Downs, people with dementia, with epilepsy and with autism, people in wheelchairs and on and on. And don’t even get me started on the massive web of surveillance and security apparatus that’s been spun out and around us since the passage of the Patriot Act in the wake of 911.
But now Pegasus has come home to roost and the snarling dogs are at the door. We seem to be pretty much at that moment the State Department’s George F. Kennan anticipated when he recommended in a 1948 top secret memo that the government “cease to talk about vague and…, unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off,” Kennan urged, “when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.” In Frank Zappa’s more theatrical rendering, we seem to be at the moment when “the illusion of freedom” is no longer deemed sufficiently profitable, when the leaders are ready to “take down the scenery, …pull back the curtains,… move the tables and chairs out of the way [to expose] the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
But let’s be clear that for overwhelming numbers of BIPOC in this country, and exploited white workers, freedom has never been anything but an illusion. Still, who isn’t chilled by the recognition that the Furor’s enemies of state list seems to be ever-expanding at the same time that so many Americans are finding themselves buried in “AI slop.” That is if they’re not busy dealing with much more literal forms of sludge, as more and more rivers jump their banks, and sea levels go on rising.
What lies ahead of us may well be frightening, but let’s be absolutely clear: burying our collective heads in the sand is the surest path toward getting our collective asses blown off. And in the wake of one of the bleakest 4ths on record, we can take comfort in the results of the NYC primary, and in the fact that all that stuff about “independence,” about rugged individualism was always an illusion. NYC and LA are leading the way, as all around the country, people of good will are doing their best to hold fast to principles so many of us learned in kindergarten if not before – about the Golden Rule, the importance of sharing, of holding each other’s hands and watching each other’s backs when danger seems close – whether it’s a car at the school crosswalk or masked men in unmarked cars bent on disappearing our neighbors.
And everywhere across the country, people across parties are mobilizing to feed and shelter their neighbors, to build stronger, broader, more inclusive coalitions, stronger webs of resistance. People are flooding the streets, daily putting their fragile bodies on the line to demonstrate the essential truth that we are all kin, all connected, and that no one is expendable. The sooner we internalize the fundamental principle, “Never again for anyone,” the safer we’ll all be.
The preceding opinions most definitely do not represent the opinions of my employer Washington State University Vancouver. Thanks are due to Linda Cargill, Mikel Clayhold, and Frann Michel for reading and commenting on drafts. All errors are my own.
1. No doubt survivors of school shootings and other forms of gun violence may also find July 4 fireworks triggering. ↑
2. Case in point, in the course of looking for sources to back up the preceding claim, I stumbled across a company called “Black Ops Toys,” which looks like it could be Kristie Noem’s and MTG’s favorite go-to joint for one-stop Christmas shopping. ↑
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