This diary about the CBP chief’s explanation for detaining US citizens based on their ethnicity alone (which explanation is condensed in this diary’s title) was posted yesterday afternoon. I just wanted to focus this diary on the word “overzealous,” which was the excuse that was bestowed on those agents’ fascist behaviors. I made the following observation in the comment section of that diary:
...the mere use of the word 'overzealous' is a harrowing tell: “zeal” itself in a government agency tasked with border security is a feature of totalitarianism — whether it's excessive (as in “overzealous”) or not.
(I slightly edited the sentence.)
Zeal is what the Brownshirts exhibited on Kristallnacht. It’s what Nazi and Fascist crowds exhibited when gathered for rallies by Hitler and Mussolini (and what Trump crowds exhibit). It’s how zealots behave. An excess of zealotry isn’t the underlying problem with border agents detaining US citizens because they don’t fit their idea of “Americans;” zealotry itself is the problem.
It’s all wrapped up in the fascism we are watching, in real time, express itself every day, both in official government behavior and in public displays (including RW domestic terrorism) in Donald Trump’s America.
The fact that the head of the Customs and Border Protection agency has “zeal” baked into his concept of normative behavior for his agents is, itself, an example of American Fascism in action. It’s a sign, along with many others, that American Fascism is in the very real, often violent, process of establishing itself.
The comment I posted in that other diary, btw, was a response to a user who objected to comparing the CBP behavior with Nazi Germany. Here’s my response to that, in full:
Read the Hannah Arendt quote in demacratos' post above. This is exactly how fascism presents in its nascent form.
What's more, the mere use of the word 'overzealous' is a harrowing tell: zeal itself in a government agency tasked with border security is a feature of totalitarianism whether it's unchecked or not.
This administration has all the hallmarks: disdain for domestic and international law, racist nationalism, inbred paranoia, affinity for other fascist regimes, horrific abuses of target minorities (including LGBTQ), and sabotage of domestic election processes.
What? We should wait for actual gas chambers before calling a spade a spade?
And here’s the Arendt quote that demacratos posted:
Even before the [totalitarian] movement seizes power, it possesses a secret police and spy service with branches in various countries.
-- Hannah Arendt. The origins of totalitarianism. 1967. iBooks
For the nation-state cannot exist once its principle of equality before the law has broken down. Without this legal equality...the nation dissolves into an anarchic mass of over- and underprivileged individuals.
Laws that are not equal for all revert to rights and privileges, something contradictory to the very nature of nation-states.
The clearer the proof of their inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police
-- Hannah Arendt. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1967. iBooks.
We are in a fight for the very existence of our democracy, and for the future of the planet, and that fight is being brought to us by American Fascism.