Still from Klimov’s 1985 film Come and See
NYT, “A Raid in a Small Town Brings Trump’s Deportations to Deep-Red Idaho” (dek: “Wilder, Idaho, prided itself on comity. Then federal agents stormed a racetrack outside of town in October, and the reverberations are still shaking the community”; alt link here):
Nikki Ramirez-Smith, an immigration lawyer in nearby Nampa, began receiving panicked calls.
When I answered, it was someone crying,” she said. “The only thing I could understand at first was, ‘They’re here. It’s ICE.’”
Eventually, everyone there was herded to the end of the track. Most adults, including parents caring for toddlers, and many teenagers had their hands bound. Mr. Carter said he saw federal officers pointing guns at people simply for asking questions, and young teenagers being zip-tied, including Mr. Carter’s 14-year-old daughter.
People like to post memes with, like a nazi pointing a gun at a kid and an ICE agent pointing a gun at a kid and say SEE?!?!?! Yes, I see a meme that asks nothing of the viewer but delivers that sweet, sweet caveman grunt IT SAME ME RIGHT. Who doesn’t love that feeling? I sure do. If you do too, maybe try something a bit more demanding like watching Klimov’s film Come and See, Pasolini’s Salò, or maybe something about the Troubles in Ireland, like Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (it’s even got a young Cillian Murphy!) or Steve McQueen’s Hunger. Finding them used to take grit, but now they appear at the click of a button. Even if you’ve seen them before maybe try again. As the waters of fascism rise around us, those scenes — villagers hiding in the morning fog on an island in a bog, the insipid and inbred riche making teenagers bay and bray, gauntlets of cops beating naked prisoners — will bring what more and more people are experiencing right now, all around us, among us, in those cryptic spaces and places we told ourselves were hidden but never really were.
And with this your daily reminder: If you aren’t yet thinking and speaking openly about how the Trump regime can and must be brought to justice, you’re starting to look an awful lot like one of those Good Germans. They were very real and utterly imaginary, an apparent paradox that US culture is starting to grasp more clearly. But it isn’t really a paradox. We see the tides that brought in so many of them rising around us. They’re the sophisticates who scoffed at warnings that Trump & Co would build camps but won’t own up to their mistakes, the centrists who drift along dreaming that institutions heal themselves and last forever, the concerned who quote the only line they know from Santaya or Niemöller or Arendt or Gramsci. Most of all they’re the ones who think the pens of “future historians” will defeat the swords of the present.