On Puerto Rico, and the value of human life

In case you’ve missed this, the President of the United States decided to dodge blame for nearly 3,000 deaths in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico by claiming those people “did not die”.

I wish this was a joke, someone’s satirical take on Trump’s indifference to human lives. But no, the reality is, this is entry into a new and more dangerous stage of fascism. This is where the killing begins, if it hasn’t already.

The following is one reaction that’s been making the rounds on Facebook, republished here. It’s long, but important:

In case you wonder why I mostly just rage against fascists in public rants these days, it’s because of Trump’s tweets this morning. It’s because I assumed this was coming, and I knew what it would mean.

They’re going to start killing people. And I might be one of them.

I shouldn’t be, supposedly. Citizenship is supposed to be sacrosanct, and I was born here, in a hospital in Texas. I have a Texas birth certificate. I was born a United States citizen, I was raised to only speak English, I was taught to be a model American, I was taught all about the greatness of America.

But I’ve always known what was possible, here, because of my father. My father grew up in Argentina. He was dark skinned, bronze partly from his days in the field, but only partly. I inherited brown eyes, brown hair, a vaguely brown skin tone that stays pale from my aversion to sunlight, and a vaguely brown surname. From those characteristics alone, I learned (rather quickly after 9/11, actually) that I could easily be branded something else, something “un-American”, by someone looking around for “un-American” people.

I considered from time to time trying to apply for my Argentine citizenship, to have a backup plan, to have somewhere else to go like he did all those years ago. Especially now, if I was no longer welcome here, I don’t know where I’d go. But despite my father’s beginnings, I am not Argentine. I am an American, through and through. This is my home, my only home.

But I inherited something else from my father: A deep well of knowledge about early-stage fascism. The lessons were not direct, it took many years for me to unpack them, to figure out the right lessons from what he had lived through and what he had done and what that meant for me. But gradually, I came to decide that my legacy is to speak out against him. I came to understand the way a person can be twisted, the way even a dark-skinned young man can be manipulated with faith (and money) to aid a fascist dictatorship with ties to former Nazis.

That was my father. He fought in Argentina, the CIA paid him to fight in Argentina. For the fascists.

With that background…

Today, the President of the United States crossed a particular line he can’t uncross in my mind: He tried to erase the deaths of 3,000 Americans. He tried to deny that 3,000 people had died, that the reason they had died was part of a connected event, to cover for himself. It was a feeble first attempt, but there it was.

What Donald Trump says on Twitter, it’s not just tweets, not just words. The words of the President of the United States are never *just words*. The President’s supporters will support his narrative. The *government* will go into action to support his narrative. Some because they support him, some because he’s the President, some because they’re too afraid for their jobs to not go along. They’ll start undermining death counts using “official” records. They’ll start erasing people from existence to cover for the President, and to support whatever the President says.

That is what happens next. That is what WILL happen next.

If you’re going to deny the deaths of thousands of hurricane victims, why not deny the deaths of people trapped in your immigration detention centers? Once you’re comfortable covering up the deaths of people you don’t want in the country anyway, why wait for them to die? Once you’re OK with arresting, killing, and disappearing immigrants, why not do the same for people who protest missing people? Once you get comfortable devaluing one mass of human lives, why stop? Why stop before everyone you want to devalue is gone?

Which gets me to what happened in Argentina. Thousands of people, across an entire country, just disappeared. Not all at once, mind you. Randomly, over several years, people were taken and just gone. The government denied arresting them, denied detaining them, denied having any involvement in or knowledge of their disappearance, even while stuffing them into cargo planes and hurling them still alive into the ocean. The Argentine government gaslit an entire country, and the country went along with it for awhile, too afraid to do anything else.

The gaslighting was so powerful that no one can even tell now just how many people disappeared. The government killed at least 9,000 people that way, but no one knows how many more; some estimates are as high as 30,000. That’s possibly 21,000 people that they didn’t just kill, they erased their deaths completely, on top of the 9,000 people who get to be remembered as victims.

Which brings us to today… where Trump just tried to gaslight America on the existence of a mass casualty event. And he won’t face repercussions, not real ones. Congress protects him, his party protects him, the right wing media protects him. Even if Republicans lose control of Congress, no one will attribute it to this, to Trump’s remarks on Puerto Rico. And in the meantime, they will learn that Trump can gaslight people this much and continue to get away with it. Even putting more Democrats in Congress won’t stop it now. That might even accelerate things, temporarily, if Trump and his people start to think they just have two years left and they need to make the most of it.

The disappearances are coming.

You may think that I’m overreacting over a few tweets. That’s fine. But remember, the first time I said that Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States, it was 2015. I knew what I was looking at then, and I’m sure I know what I’m looking at now.

And this isn’t just tweets, it’s a confluence of events. Redirecting FEMA funds to ICE, redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars from all over DHS to ICE, refusing birth certificates as proof of citizenship, disobeying judicial orders to stop deporting people or locking children up in cages, and now denying the deaths of 3,000 Americans to cover for yourself… this is it. It’s here.

You know the Martin Niemöller quote, “First they came for the Communists”? That’s really good for understanding that they’ll come for people in some sort of order. Fascists prioritize who they need to get rid of most, and work their way down. You could ride it out, hope that 2020 saves the survivors before they get to you, but someone else will take your place. Once they start coming, they won’t stop, not until they’re deposed by the masses. Someone has to go first. Once they start killing people, people will die.

So, I volunteer as tribute.

My father was an immigrant, I have brown hair and brown eyes and a brown surname. Once they empty the current camps of bodies and start rounding up the next wave, they might come for me anyway. Who knows. If they come, I can’t stop them from coming. But I have no interest in disappearing.

I am afraid of death, any healthy person should be, but I am finally realizing that I fear something else more. I am afraid of disappearing, of being erased. I have endured too much pain to get here, just to leave nothing behind. I won’t hide, I won’t ball up in fear. I will not erase myself to avoid being erased by them.

To say I oppose fascism is the only meaningful thing I have left to say, and I will not stop saying it. I will leave a long trail of dissent against the fascism descending upon us. And when they come for me, someone will remember that I was here, and I wanted to warn people, and that’s why I am gone.

I will scream, louder and louder into the night until the night is over. And if the night consumes me, the silence will announce my departure.