By: Staff Writer Luke Cullifer
Picture Credit: Google Images
There is a leader who is rising up on the back of aggression and hate. He is calling out to all of the angry voices that lay in the back of people’s conscious and they are responding. He believes that the country has been in decline, that the nation has been suppressed, and that it is time to stick it to those who have made it this way. His plan of course? Deport them, send them out of the country, let them take all of the nation’s problems with them and make sure that any other threats are kept out. These plans corral mass popularity as people from across the nation begin to believe that this is the answer, this is the obvious path towards resurrection, this is how we will make our nation great again. Thus, his popularity grows. He makes speech after speech with little substance but great bravado and the people of the nation can not get enough. They love his fiery rhetoric, how he knows what he wants and how to get it, how he takes nothing from anyone and says exactly what people are afraid to say. They love how he promises to fix the complicated problems with simple answers because that is just how he can do it. Yet, they ignore his lack of policy, they ignore his lack of substance. All is overshadowed by his fiery rhetoric, his mass promises, and his sentiment that many of the nation’s problem’s are the result of one group of people.
Prior to this election cycle, any person slightly educated in global politics or history would have assumed that I could only be speaking of one man, Adolf Hitler. The famous German Fuehrer united a nation of people in the strive to reclaim the age-old glory of Germany that declined following World War One and the Treaty of Versailles. He made promises that they would rise up as a nation, reclaim their dominance, and overcome their struggles. He did this through plenty of fiery, aggressive rhetoric pertaining to the policies that would make Germany great again, and the German people could not get enough. While gaining national attention and support, the removal of the Jews was just one part of his platform, but the resentment towards them was being bred. As we know, this charismatic leader known for his speeches chalked full of bravado, passion, and rage gained the support of a country and rose to power on the backs of their anger toward the government, the system, and those who didn’t belong in it. Following his rise, well, we are most all well aware of what happened: the single greatest atrocity in the history of mankind.
However, what strikes fear into me, is that my first paragraph of text is no longer confined to just the past German dictator, for it also describes my parties very own leading presidential candidate. As I have watched the rise of Donald Trump, I feel as though I have gained a first-hand realization as to how and why Hitler was allowed to rise to power. The similarities speak for themselves as portrayed in the first two paragraphs, but perhaps the most terrifying comparison is their ability to turn one group of citizens on another. For Donald Trump, one of the largest issues in this country is illegal immigration and he believes that each and every one of the reported eleven million persons should be returned to their respective homelands. To clarify, I am not a proponent of open borders nor do I believe that illegal immigrants should be able to enjoy many of the benefits of this great nation without paying taxes, however, I realize when a group of people is being dehumanized and when they are being unjustly called the center of several national problems.
Why are we surprised though? Is this not exactly what happened in pre-WW2 Germany? Did Hitler not make moves to drive all of the Jews from the nation because they were the problem?
I know some are reading this and thinking that the expulsion of illegal immigrants from the United States is much different than the expulsion of the Jews from Germany, but I implore of you to think of the finer details. Let us go through the process of how Trump would go about removing eleven million people from the United States. First, he would have to construct a ground force that would be responsible for hunting out, detaining, and transferring illegal immigrants. This force would, if it were to be effective, have full rights to search houses upon suspicion, question people of their birthplace, and intrude in several different aspects of people’s lives. There is nothing to say that these forces would not come into homes, search rooms and living spaces, in an effort to find illegal immigrants. Further, those who harbored said immigrants would likely be found under prosecution as they were defying the law and obstructing justice. So, not only would these forces be searching for illegal immigrants but also for those who may be hiding them in say their attacks, their basement, secret rooms, etc. For those of you who read “The Diary of Anne Frank”, this may sound familiar.
Let us move on from this striking similarity because frankly the thought of American men and women running around in a Gestapo-Esque fashion is too much to bear for long. Let us think now of how legal immigrants in this country would be dealt with, specifically the Hispanic population. There is no question that Hispanics are most commonly thought of as “illegal immigrants” and thus who is to say those of Hispanic decent, citizen or not, would not be openly questioned and persecuted for their ethnicity. Thus, it is not unreasonable to think that Hispanics citizens would have to wear some kind of signal that would prove to the immigration forces that they were indeed “legal”. Perhaps it would be a special tattoo, perhaps a chip that could be scanned for verification, perhaps a patch on their clothing, similar to that of the Star of David. The men and women in charge of rounding up the eleven million are going to have to have some way of identifying who is legal and who is not. Waiting to check for a birth certificate or a social security card would take too much time, but a simple indicator, that separate the legal Hispanics from those that were not would be the most efficient.
Now, for my largest fear. Let us say that the eleven million immigrants are successfully rounded up. The ground forces implemented by Trump have come, gone through house after house, neighborhood after neighborhood and they have found every illegal immigrant in the nation. Now, it is time to deport them back to their respective countries. While in this process, they notice that Mexico isn’t opening their border very quickly, they notice that their transportation can’t get everyone back “right now”, they realize they have millions of people rounded up waiting to be taken back, but nowhere to put them. Some may say to keep them in the jails, but they are all full, some may say to keep them in some kind of public space, but there aren’t any big enough, so what do we do? “What if we built a space where they could be held until we can successfully deport them? What if we built a few of these ‘camps’, had them all just stay there until we could make the transportation arrangements, and then send them back? While they are there they may as well do some work right? We don’t need to spend too much money on these things though, after all, they have already cost the American taxpayer enough, haven’t they?” Essentially, to deal with the problem of deporting the illegal immigrants, we would likely result to the system of Nazi Germany, and yes, there very well could be concentration camps within the United States of America, within the land of the free.
History repeats itself; this is a fact as common as the rising and setting of the sun, and I am a student of history so that I can see the path my generation is going down with some inclination of where it may lead. I speak out today as a person fearing the fate of this country and the world with a commander and chief such as Donald J. Trump. I beg of those of you supporting him to look past his fiery rhetoric, look past his “doesn’t take anything” attitude, look past the bravado and charisma and see the parallel lines history is drawing for us. Do not allow this man to rise to power, do not allow something like this to occur again, do not allow us to fall into history’s cycle. I ask of you to think through your decision come primary voting season and come time for the general election if this is still an issue. Follow your instinct but consult your better reasoning along the way.