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We know, after only a few days, that some of the shaved, white-clad deportees, forced to stoop, shackled before their anonymous masked warders and guards on air transports and in their El Salvadoran prison, are fathers and brothers with legitimate professions, honest lives and families in the U.S.
We know an ancient, exceptional wartime law has been posited to justify their detention and exile. Only a fine distinction separates the rest of our population from similar justification and treatment.
Knowing all this, we are quiescent.
Images of these prisoners, humiliated in zombie-like garb, shaved and bent, recall the Jews, gypsies and “deviants” herded and stripped at Auschwitz nearly 90 years ago or, more recently, the humiliation of Israeli captives and hostages, as well as thousands of Gazan men indiscriminately taken from their families and held by the Israeli Army.
The description of these “others” as enemy vermin or criminals has been Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justification for indiscriminate murder of Ukrainian innocents, tens of thousands of children during the past three years. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s disproportionate revenge for the horrible Hamas attack on innocent Israeli civilians has likewise killed more than 15,000 children in Gaza.
This has all happened before and does not end well.
Richard Lawrence
Brunswick
