Trump's Vicious Immigration Policies' Willing Accomplices

While the Trump/Pence regime's Stephen Miller physically resembles Hitler's Joseph Goebbels, the cruel immigration policies he is pushing - and which Der Trumpenführer is gleefully embracing - are more akin to the policies of Heinrich Himmler's - the man who oversaw the "Final Solution" and the murder of millions of Jews across Europe. Like Hitler and Himmler, Miller and Trump see no common humanity in the immigrants their policies abuse, including small children in some cases wrenched from their parents. There are other parallels to the horrible Nazi past alive and well in America in 2019: the portion of the population that supports such horrors and, even more so, the personnel implementing the policies and abusing immigrant families.  No doubt the latter justify their conduct in the same manner Nazi death camp workers did: we were just following orders.  As if that excuse washed away any responsibility for the harm they did to others.  A column in the New York Times looks at Trump and Miller's accomplices - individuals who deserve to be damned by history.  Here are excerpts:

As President Trump continues his mad purge of the Department of Homeland Security, a sinister figure is emerging as the driving force behind all the chaos: Stephen Miller, the president’s top immigration adviser. . . . Mr. Miller seems to have rarely met an immigrant he didn’t want to deport. He is among the hardest of hard-liners, known for spurring his boss to pursue ever more draconian measures.

Not that Mr. Trump needs much encouragement. He did, after all, ascend to the White House on an immigrant-bashing, ethnonationalist platform as dishonest as it was divisive. Many of the administration’s uglier policy ideas have been a result of Mr. Trump’s failure to deliver on his signature campaign promise of a “big, beautiful” border wall. Small wonder Mr. Miller has emerged as his favorite consigliere on such matters.

He [Miller] was a chief architect of the travel ban on citizens from Muslim-majority countries. He favors the building of tent cities at the border for warehousing asylum seekers. He’s agitating to end the 20-day limit on detaining migrant children. And he wants to reinstate the practice of snatching migrant children from their families — though this time he’d like to give parents a “binary choice” of having their kids taken from them or held with them in detention indefinitely.

Mr. Miller is being credited with the blood bath at the Department of Homeland Security. Since Friday, a handful of top leaders have been, or are soon to be, shown the door, including the head of the Secret Service, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who was never quite ruthless enough for the president’s or Mr. Miller’s taste. More firings are expected as Mr. Miller moves to remake the department in his image.

Bottom line, Stephen Miller is a man whose anti-immigration zeal remains unfettered by concern for the law, international norms or basic humanity. . . . And yet. The portrait of the 33-year-old policy adviser as a figure of singular evil is both overly simplistic and counterproductive.

But no matter how much of the administration’s immigration agenda Mr. Miller has been responsible for, it’s taken a village to make that vision a reality. Giving too much credit to any one person builds up Mr. Miller, undeservedly, as a Machiavellian genius and lets many other folks off the hook.

A society does not fall because of a small coterie of bad actors. Widespread rot requires legions of enablers, many of whom are driven by varying blends of personal ambition, ideological expedience and the self-aggrandizing delusion that, through their invaluable counsel, they can save the state from total destruction.

Expect increasingly to hear this last rationalization from former administration officials starting redemption tours as they resume life outside the Trump bubble.

Advisers like Kellyanne Conway, lawmakers like Senator Lindsey Graham and the former House Speaker Paul Ryan, party apparatchiks like the Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel and a whole host of Trump-friendly media personalities may not  personally share the president’s views or policy aims. But their willingness to swallow some of the administration’s cruelest acts renders them complicit. Neither their reputations nor their consciences should be wiped clean.

Take Ms. Nielsen. . . . . Throughout her tenure, stories bubbled up about how she incurred Mr. Trump’s wrath by dragging her feet on policies that would have run afoul of the law or thrown the nation into chaos. But she still carried out and aggressively enforced her share of atrocities.

Now, defenders are portraying the woman who was in charge of caging migrant children as a hapless victim of the administration’s more unhinged forces.

It’s tempting to see Stephen Miller as the archvillain of the Trump administration’s immigration policies. But there is much guilt to go around, and even reluctant collaborators cannot be allowed to absolve themselves of responsibility for the administration’s continuing outrages.

Those who quietly allowing the Trump regime's abuses to continue are little better than the "good Germans" who did nothing as millions were murdered. These people deserve no respect and deserve to be treated as pariahs. They are morally bankrupt no matter how frequently they park their asses in church pews.

Ivanka Trump Prototype Dies at 88

There continue to be parallels between 1930-1940's Germany and 2018 America.  One is that both Germany of that era and America today had/have their "blonde princess" who brazenly refused to admit the ugliness and evil of their fathers.  For Germany, it was Gudrun Himmler, the true-believing daughter of Heinrich Himmler (for Fox News viewers, Hitler's second in command).  For 2018 America, it is Ivanka Trump Kushner.  The Washington Post looks at the death of Himmler's daughter who remained unrepentant to the end and denied the existence of the Holocaust and helped provide money and comfort to former Nazis convicted or suspected of war crimes.  After a visit to Dachau, Himmler's daughter described the experience as :very nice."  Under the regime of her father, Ivanka looks the other way as toddlers are ripped from their parents and now are being hauled before deportation courts alone and unaccompanied by adults known to them. Here are highlights from the Post coverage of the death of Himmler's daughter:

Gudrun Burwitz, the true-believing daughter of Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust and Nazi Germany’s highest-ranking official after Adolf Hitler, died May 24 in or near Munich. She was 88.

 Mrs. Burwitz, who was sometimes called a “Nazi princess” by supporters and detractors alike, remained unrepentant and loyal to her father to the end. Although she had visited a concentration camp, she denied the existence of the Holocaust and, in later years, helped provide money and comfort to former Nazis convicted or suspected of war crimes. 

At the time of her birth in 1929, her father was consolidating power as leader of the elite Nazi paramilitary corps known as the SS. Himmler also commanded the German secret police, the Gestapo, and established the system of prison and concentration camps in which more than 6 million people — primarily Jews but also Roma (or Gypsies), homosexuals and others — would perish.The only person who outranked Himmler in the Nazi hierarchy was Hitler himself.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the bespectacled, undistinguished-looking Himmler enjoyed having Gudrun at his side, as a blond, blue-eyed symbol of Aryan youth. In a diary later seized by Allied authorities, she noted that she liked to see her reflection in her father’s polished boots. She attended Christmas parties with Hitler, who gave her dolls and chocolates. 

When she was 12, Gudrun accompanied her father to the Dachau concentration camp, which was the site of Nazi medical experiments and the execution of tens of thousands of people.Gudrun recalled the visit in her diary: “Today we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau. We saw everything we could. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvelous.  “And afterward we had a lot to eat. It was very nice.”

Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Himmler was born Aug. 8, 1929, in Munich. Except for a brief interview in 1959, she is not known to have spoken in public about her father or her later life.

She did, however, often wear a silver brooch given to her by her father, depicting the heads of four horses arranged in the shape of a swastika. She was also known to be active in a group called “Stille Hilfe,” or silent help, which was formed in the 1940s to help Nazi fugitives flee Germany, particularly to South America, and to support their families.

The organization is “closely linked to a number of outlawed neo-Nazi movements and actively promotes revisionism — the notion that the Holocaust never happened and Jews caused their own downfall,” Andrea Roepke, a German authority on neo-Nazis, told Britain’s Daily Mail newspaper in 1998.

Among followers of the group, Mrs. Burwitz was “a dazzling Nazi princess, a deity among these believers in the old times,” according to German author Oliver Schrom, who wrote a book about Stille Hilfe.

Mrs. Burwitz attended underground reunions of Nazi SS officers, often held in Austria, possibly as recently as 2014. . . . Mrs. Burwitz also provided support, through Stille Hilfe, to convicted Nazi war criminals, including Klaus Barbie, an SS officer dubbed the “Butcher of Lyon,” and Anton “Beautiful Tony” Malloth, who was convicted of killing prisoners at the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

Am I being too harsh on Ivanka?  I don't believe so.