With stories like "Armed Immigration Officers Drive Away With Toddler After Detaining Father" is it any wonder people like me think of the Gestapo and SS? By Hal M. Brown

Nazi parents might have told their children that if they studied hard they might grow up to be like Dr. Mengele. MAGA moms might tell their kids to learn to be cruel so they can be like Tom Homan.

Last night this was a trending story on HuffPost:

When I read the following I am hesitant to tell you what I thought…

An agent could be heard telling the man, whose hands were restrained behind his back, that he had failed to identify himself. A brief struggle ensued, prompting immigration authorities to steer the detainee to one of their trucks while two other associates entered the vehicle where the little girl had been waiting and drove away with her.

In the interest of candor, so my readers know how just how grimly pessimistic I’ve become, I will tell you what grim comparison came into my mind. By now regular readers know this. New readers:

and review

I know the following is an overreaction, but what I thought about wasn’t just that the father may not see his about to turn two year old daughter for a long time. It’s that she would be spirited off so a modern day version of Dr. Josef Menegle could experiment on her.

I asked AI about whether the Nazi Concentration camp doctors adhered to the Hippocratic Oath knowing full welo what the answer would be:

As a Jew, whose father was in the Army during World War II serving as a corpsman on troop ships in the Atlantic, my sister and I grew up living in a primarily Jewsh community and learning about the Holocaust at home, school, and at family gatherings.

The term “never again” resonated throughout my childhood. I don’t remember how old I was when I learned about Dr. Mengele, but I expect it was at the latest in my early teens. Other children I knew also were taught about the Gestapo and the SS and how Jews were sent to death camps.

This background shapes how I experience what Trump is doing as he demononizes immigrants.

Above is from The 10 Stages of Genocide.

I see immigrants as new versions of the Jews of Nazi Germany. They are, to Trump and his minions like Homan and Noem, like vermin. They are like the Jews were to the Gestapo, Donald Trump referred to immigrants as “vermin” during his speeches, suggesting that they pose a threat to the country. This characterization led to his being condemned, but he didn’t care and he used it repeatedly. Of course today the “vermin” can’t be exterminated, so they do the next best thing by brutally rounding them up to deport them. So what if people who are here legally get caught in the net. They probably look like they could be immigrants.

As most of you know (or ought to know) Mengele conducted inhumane medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz. He was particularly interested twins and people with physical abnormalities. His experiments often resulted in severe suffering, permanent injury, or death for the victims.

There were others doing this in the Nazi experiments on people, but Mengele, who came to be called “the Angel of Death,” is the most infamous. At the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camp he was a member of the team of doctors who selected victims to be murdered in the gas chambers.

Okay, I know this is extreme. Like I said it was what came to mind.

One must note that the people who were members of the SS and who worked at the concentration camps were ordinary Germans. They looked like this:

See more in this article here.

Nazi parents might have told their children that if they studied hard they might grow up to be physicians like Dr. Mengele. MAGA moms might tell their kids to learn to be cruel so they can be psychopaths like Tom Homan or Kristi Noem and grow up to work for one of the deportation agencies where they could be rewarded monetarily for doing what they enjoy doing.

The all A report card would cover behaviors like these:

• Enjoys bullying other kids

• Shows no remorse when hurting classmates

• Likes to torture animals

• Glibness / superficial charm

• Egocentricity / grandiose sense of self-worth

• Proneness to boredom / low frustration tolerance

• Lying and deception

• Conning / lack of sincerity

• Lack of remorse or guilt

• Lack of affect and emotional depth

• Callous / lack of empathy

• Short-tempered / poor behavioral controls

• Impulsivity

• Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

If you’re in the mental health field you might recognize some of these since most of them are on the Hare Psychopathology Checklist (here).

Not all members of the Nazi SS were psychopaths. Studies like “Hitler’s SS: How do ordinary people become sociopathic Nazis?” have shown that many were ordinary individuals. They participated in atrocities due to a combination of social, political, and psychological factors. Certainly, some of their behaviors would have justified the diagnosis of psychopath though many or even most had normal personalities before the rise of the Nazi regime.

Today either bening a hardhard core psychopath or having many psychopathic traits would be a plus for being hired and succeeding as an ICE or Homeland Security agent.

So, MAGA girls and boys, don’t mind your Ps and Qs in school and make sure you get all A’s on your psychopath report card. Make MAGA mommy proud.

Addendum:

These are from a video posted here on Reddit of ICE taking people from a day care center, presumably dragging them away in front of children. Who does this?

One has to be a psychopath to engage in such behavior.

I just posted this and then it was covered on CNN. They reported that the woman was, indeed, taken away in front of children.

Update:

Sabrina Haake, who writes The “Haake Take” on Substack, made a comment which alerted me to the ICE add which is decribed in this HUFFPOST article:

Here’s a link to the video:

I certainly don’t need to elaborate on why I added this here.

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Below are Portland area articles about issues related to ICE and similar stories.