SCOTUS Enables the Ethnic Cleansing of Springfield, OH to Commence

In a 6-3 decision in the case Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump administration is allowed to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for roughly 350,000 Haitian immigrants.

That fact is awful, but seems sterile and anodyne out of any proper context. The preeminent scholar of the global history of genocide and ethinic cleansing, Tim Snyder, in his utterly harrowing updated post, provides that context.

What we are seeing is the culmination of a campaign of the American federal government having plotted, initiated, exacerbated, prepared for, and now judicially authorizating the ethnic cleansing of Haitian immigrants from Springfield, OH (among other communities around America, no doubt), enabled by Nazi lies and propaganda in the filthy, lying mouths of the President and Vice President of these United States.

Snyder begins:

In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are again making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” of Haitians promised by the president. 

Back in February, when I first wrote on this subject, the city was on the brink of a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the Vice-President and American Nazis, in the context of the racially hateful language of the president. The deportation was halted by a district court in February on the correct ground that the decision to deport them was based on race. Ethnic cleansing has now been endorsed by the Supreme Court.

Before the district court and the the Supreme Court, Haitian plaintiffs claimed, with much evidence, that race was one of the motivating factors of the decision of the executive branch to terminate the protected status that allowed them to remain in the United States. The Supreme Court majority just chose, in a ruling that was openly counter-factual, to imagine that what was patently racist might not have been, and that the transparent motivations of the president and his administration “could have” have been different from what they were. 

Self-lying by the powerful is often element of an ethnic cleansing campaign.

The Supreme Court majority rightly insisted that a decision about equal protection depends upon “context.” Context means two two things: the lexical context, the words that were actually said by relevant actors around a matter in question; and the the historical context, the events during which or about which words were uttered. Both point towards the racial motivation of the executive branch. Both were ignored by the majority.

I strongly recommend a full and close reading of Snyder’s essay. It is the first draft of a damning history of how the United States became (once again) the situs of a purposeful and targeted ethnic cleansing campaign. How extensively that campaign is allowed to grow and accellerate will largely be a question of how voters react in the next election.

We have arrived at this shameful inflection point, in which the apparatus of the state has been deliberately, methodically, and openly turned to the project of eliminating a specific disfavored ethnic community from a specific American community, by carefully plotted steps designed to numb Americans to the full horror of what is being done in their names. This is a common technique of deliberate ethnic cleansing; most national communities will not accept such attrocities without careful preparation of the path to attrocity.

All that remains to be seen is whether Trump believes that the brutality and chaos of such a campaign by the forces of federal government will help him, or hurt him, politically. Based on his history and unique psycological pathology, and deterioration in all domainas, I would expect he will conclude that it will a boon to him politically and order the campaign to commence, forthwith.

I believe we are about to watch the utter destruction of vulnerable minority of an American community in real time.

I only hope we will be utter appalled.

Of course, we must remain aware that this is but a small and focused part of the larger project of persecuting and reducing the ethnic populations of Latino and Black and Muslim communities (mainly, among many other considered ‘undesirable’ by this racist and fascist Admin…) across the United States. The wider campaign is more defuse, scattershot, and seemingly haphazzard, but the Trump Admin is learning as they go how to use the full panoply of the American administrative state’s powers in the service of thier fascist project.

The motives and methods of this wider White Nationalist fascist campaign are the same or similar, but I suspect we will now witness the full-octane, and concentrated brutalizing methodology of a fascist pogrom in Springfield, OH. Soon.

If you thought the flailing Operating Metro Surge into MN by ICE to brutalize the Somali community was horrifying, hang on – you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. That was just another marginally failed experiment in brutalizing Americans, as the fascist forces learn to use the administrative police state to crush the opposition. There may not be any courts standing in the way to blunt the assault this time. A lot will depend on how the GOP officeholders in OH respond to Trump’s assault on their people of their state – I have not been impressed by Republican resistance to this President, thus far….