2002-12-21 - 9:07 p.m.
The F Word
The other day, I had to ask one of my colleagues if it was okay to use the F word yet. See, I had just finished an LA Times article reporting that the federal government had detained several hundred men of Middle Eastern origin who had volunteered to cooperate with a new rule requiring them to register with immigration authorities. They went to the immigration office in good faith, and nevertheless were summarily arrested and detained. While the feds blamed the men for violating the terms of their immigration in some form or another, the men's families and friends unsurprisingly dispute such claims.
Even if the men had violated their immigration requirements, did they deserve incarceration? Why not a fine? What if their "violation" amounted to a delayed signature or a forgotten document submission? How many people of Anglo origin can say they've never forgotten about or messed up important paperwork issued by the state -- for instance, IRS forms? And if the men were aware that they were violating a law, would they have willingly appeared before law enforcement? It seems that if you were intentionally commiting criminal activity you'd hide from the cops, not pay them a visit.
Several times I've been told by my elders and superiors that using the F word is vicarious and shows my philosophical and political naivete. "This is America," they say. "Fascists ruled in Europe. We just have amoral corporate executives." They tell me that the occasional, mass round-ups of innocent civilians that take place in this country -- for instance, the Houston Kmart incident -- are just freak accidents, completely not indicative of any trending towards a police state society. I wonder if the men arrested in LA would agree.
"People who come from these countries - this is what they expect from their government. Not from America," Sabiha Khan of the Southern California chapter of the Council on American Islamic Relations told
Yes, yes, trotting out the dictionary to reprint a definition is a convention many writers have used to cover their behinds during arguments about words and meanings (and to bump up their word counts), but I'll use it because it's gonna be necessary to commit the F word's definition to memory in order to combat the still-comfy liberals who like to think the U.S. is somehow immune to Total Totalitarianism. According to Merriam-Webster, fascism is:
"a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2 : a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
We've definitely got exalting the nation over individuals going on here ("America Rocks"), individuals being suppressed and now incarcerated based on their nationality, forcible suppression of political opposition (when was the last time a protest did not attract cops wearing paramilitary riot gear?), increased centralization where it counts (aka the "Homeland Security Dept."), a president who probably wouldn't mind the nickname "il Duce Dubya" if he could avoid slurring "douche bag" by accident, and severe economic and social regimentation a-plenty. We've got the largest per capita rate of incarceration in the world, a drug war that pits citizens against each other, a budding "Free Corps" (Nazi Germany had a Frei Korps), a well-established snitch culture, attempts to increase citizen spying via publicly-funded programs, and increased militarization. So we don't have concentration camps yet, but Attorney General John Ashcroft has already shared with us his belief that maybe they wouldn't be such a bad idea. How much worse do things have to get before the F word becomes appropriate? Somebody please tell me before my top incisors bite off my bottom lip in anticipation.
Fa ... FAHHH... FASHION! FASCISM!
Fascism didn't happen overnight in Germany or Italy, and it hasn't happened overnight here -- though Sept. 11 certainly sped up the process of persecuting various ethnic and religious groups who already weren't too popular or understood in America. The Nazi regime was able to perpetuate their brand of fascism by incrementally demonizing Jews, then forcing them into ghettos, then hauling them off to the gas chambers. In contemporary America, we're witnessing an intensifying, state-sanctioned persecution of Middle Eastern people. We ghettoized Japanese Americans during WWII, so there's already a precedent for treating Middle Eastern people in the same way. Though I don't see firing squads or gas chambers on the horizon here, the Germans probably didn't, either. Given our extremely violent and vindictive culture, anything's possible.
That news of the mass arrests in LA has already disappeared from the major headlines only three days after the incident occurred certainly does not bode well for any of us who hope that such government actions receive swift and fierce condemnation by the American public. Are we going to become desensitized to mass round-ups of people based on ethnicity?
By the way, it's pretty interesting that this round-up occurred at the same time that everyone on both sides of the (outdated, increasingly irrelevant) political spectrum were giving the segregationist smackdown to Sen. Trent Lott. We Americans have a lot of trouble seeing the big picture, really.
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Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse. � Lily Tomlin |
