There have been several books that have dramatically altered my outlook on life. One of them is Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning. The book is a masterpiece of historical research that focuses on a relatively small contingent of German soldiers. But in doing so it reveals some very disturbing universal truths. Recent events with ICE agents brutally attacking U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike in Minneapolis have caused me to ponder once again the profound lessons I learn from reading "Ordinary Men."
Reserve Police Battalion 101 was comprised of middle-aged working-class men who were drafted into service in the latter part of WWII. Their job was to go through Poland, village-by-village, round up the Jewish residents, and execute them as part of Hitler's "Final Solution." The men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 were not rabid Nazis or even particularly antisemitic. They were just "ordinary men"--one might even say "mediocre men"--following orders and doing their job. They killed tens of thousands of Jews.
There is a quote, falsely attributed to filmmaker Werner Herzog, that goes like this: "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches." Although the origins of the statement are murky, the statement itself rings with clarity. As the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated, a lot of people will go along with evil and injustice if it is mandated by "the authorities." And there can always we found a cadre of mediocre, ordinary men (and women) who will actively commit atrocity and utterly misuse civic power that is placed in their hands, if told to do so. In times of authoritarian crisis, only a minority, it seems, possess a strong enough internal moral compass to enable them to refuse to participate.
U.S. history is filled with atrocity, if one chooses to not gloss over it. More often than not it has been against non-white people. The perpetrators of atrocity usually do their best to keep their actions out of the general public view. Germans who lived in the lovely village of Dachau claimed that they had no idea of the depravity that was occurring at the concentration camp on the outskirts of town.
Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries we average Americans have generally remained ignorant or apathetic about the atrocities in Central and South America, the Middle-East, Africa, Asia and elsewhere, committed with our government's backing, but now we are witnessing a new expression of atrocity within our own borders, and it is in plain sight. The Trump administration is intent on terrorizing immigrants and silencing citizens throughout the U.S. The level of atrocity does not compare with what was perpetrated by Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Poland, but the underlying psychology is very much the same. The men and women of ICE and the Border Patrol would, and will, commit greater atrocities if ordered to do so.
Hannah Arendt, who reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, coined the term "the banality of evil." Eichmann, and others like him, she observed, tended to not be sadistic arch-villains but rather "terrifyingly normal" bland bureaucrats who managed to disassociate themselves from the reality of the evil they were responsible for. Eichmann, Arendt observed, was actually a rather shallow person, a joiner, a follower rather than a leader, an unimaginative and somewhat ignorant person more concerned with job security than with ideology. This description also applies to the men of Police Battalion 101 and, I suspect, to many of the men and women in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol and their parent bureaucracy, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
When this present dark time has passed, and Trump is gone, and the United States is once more in sane hands, there will need to be a reckoning of Nuremburg-style trials. J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Gregory Bovino, Karoline Leavitt, and the rest of Trump's minions will need to be investigated and held accountable. ICE and BPS agents (and any other law enforcement agents) accused of committing illegal acts will need to be investigated, tried and, if found guilty, punished to the full extent of the law. And these agencies, such as ICE, Border Patrol and Homeland Security, that have been so utterly corrupted by the Trump administration, will need to be torn down and replaced with something that serves the American people (and those aspiring to become American) rather than terrorizes them.
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