Moreover, since there are limits to how quickly they can transform our society into an authoritarian despotism, most of those people whom they have regurgitated are still at liberty, still hanging around, and now—increasingly—granting interviews to the press.
It is no surprise that, as they do so, one of their chief goals seems to be to disassociate themselves as much as possible from the worst of this administration's atrocities. Thus is born the "rehabilitation tour." Let the "ceremony of innocence" begin, to borrow a phrase from Yeats.
First we had a New York Times interview with former acting DHS secretary Elaine Duke, who inherited the job and can—with some degree of plausibility—claim to have been inwardly conflicted about the policies she was ordered to carry out—such as issuing the memo to rescind DACA and canceling Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for several countries.
It strains credulity rather more to hear a version of the same story from former DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen: who, in a recent conference appearance, claimed to be an ardent supporter of a legislative solution for DACA holders, and—with still greater chutzpah—to have never implemented a "family separation" policy.
What can she possibly mean, unless we are to deny some of the most plain facts of the recent historical record? Well, in part she's just lying. DHS did separate families under her watch—end of story. But she is also passing the buck. Family separation followed inexorably, in her telling, from Jeff Sessions' pledge as AG to criminally prosecute everyone who crossed the border without inspection.
There is obviously a strong element of truth to this. The fundamental problem was the fact that Sessions aimed to prosecute everyone making unauthorized border crossings on illegal entry charges, even if they were seeking asylum, and even if they were traveling in a family unit. Since children cannot be held with parents in criminal custody, family separation must necessarily follow from the pursuit of such a policy.
All of which is a blatant violation of international law. The UN Refugee Convention is clear that asylum seekers must be exempt from criminal penalties for border-related offenses, under most circumstances. But the Trump administration, of course, which has proven willing to entirely override U.S. asylum law, is not about to be halted by mere international treaties our nation has pledged to uphold.
So, yes, the so-called "zero tolerance" policy of the Sessions Justice Department is where that particular travesty began. I therefore buy the argument that Sessions is the greater villain in this piece, if we were forced to pick between the two. But for the head of DHS—who collaborated openly in the implementation of the policy—to claim innocence on these grounds is risible.
We are in the presence of the hoariest of excuses for collaborationism: It wasn't me. I was just following orders. I didn't want to do it, but my hand was forced by a power above me.
I was recently reading that the intellectual and jurist —and Nazi collaborationist—Carl Schmitt was fond of citing—however implausibly—a passage along these lines from the famous Melville short story, "Benito Cereno," in seeking to exculpate himself for his role in the regime after the war.
In the course of Melville's story, an American sailor encounters the titular Spanish captain at sea. Struck by the man's strange behavior, the American entertains suspicions that Don Benito Cereno may be hiding piratical designs upon his ship.
It eventually turns out—to the contrary—that Cereno's ship was in fact the site of a mutiny. He himself is among the last survivors of the original crew, and is being kept alive by the mutineers solely because they need his help in navigating. Though he appears to be acting independently, he is in truth utterly at the mercy of the people who have taken over his ship.
Such at least was the spirit in which Schmitt seems to have read the story. The implied parallel with his own case was therefore meant to be as follows: the Nazis were the mutineers. He himself was being forced to act out the motions of support for their regime, because they in effect had a gun pressed against his back. He had simply been faking it, because the penalty for doing otherwise would have been death.
It's a poor choice of literary parallel for someone seeking to acquit himself of the charge of complicity in a racist regime—if in fact that was his goal. From a modern perspective, after all, the "mutineers" of the tale are in fact no lawless brigands at all. They are enslaved and kidnapped Africans who have succeeded in a just revolt against their captors.
However that may be, Schmitt's point nonetheless was clear: one should not condemn a person for miming complicity with a regime that they inwardly detest. One should understand that people are sometimes forced to act out a part that is revolting to their nature and moral compass, because, as Benito Cereno puts it, "death, explosive death," would be the instant consequence of any slight move toward independence.
It is on this basis that Cereno forgives the American seaman for harboring suspicions against him, when first he boarded his ship. "So far may even the best men err," he tells Captain Delano, "in judging the conduct of one with the recesses of whose condition he is not acquainted." And by this same logic, Schmitt mounted the tortured plea for his own moral acquittal.
Such an argument has, perhaps, a certain inherent plausibility when one is operating in the face of absolute tyrannies, against which there is no possible appeal or escape other than to accept death. We might say that a person should be willing to tolerate their own demise rather than collaborate in a genocidal regime, but it is hard to ask that of others when we have never faced such a choice ourselves—when, in the story's words, we are unacquainted with the "recesses of [their] condition."
But this case for the defense breaks down when one examines earlier stages of the collaborationist process. Perhaps we should not judge Schmitt and his contemporaries too harshly for not throwing themselves upon the Gestapo and being led away to the guillotine, once the Nazi regime was wholly in power and had dismantled all systems of lawful opposition. But no similar logic can excuse Schmitt's decision to join the Nazi party as early as 1933.
To come back to Kirstjen Nielsen, she has none of the same excuses to appeal to. She cannot point to any such dire penalties awaiting disobedience, apart from a career setback. (Though reports from inside the administration indicate she was subjected to relentless sexist bullying from the president.) She would have been fired, surely, or forced to resign, for refusing to collaborate in the family separation policy. But the same ultimately happened to her regardless, and she has lived to attend other conferences and seek to rehabilitate herself.
Moreover, there would have been far less that needed rehabilitating—if anything—if she had courageously left the administration in protest over its actions.
It may be true, to Schmitt's point, that it requires taking on risk to resist tyranny, and we should none of us rush to judge those who find that the risk is too great to bear. It may in fact be that some penalties that tyrannical regimes can inflict are too horrifying for any of us to dare bring down upon our own heads, even if it means collaborating in a policy revolting to our conscience (as the philosopher J.M.E. McTaggart once wrote, "it is not certain that nothing could be a greater evil than to lie and to be degraded.")
However: it is in the nature of the risks it takes to confront tyranny that they tend to increase over time. If one is not willing to take on relatively minor risks, such as losing one's job or salary, then tyranny will only grow in power, such that eventually, it is able to threaten one with far more than that. This is why we must show courage first of all in the smallest of things, where the stakes are low, because such courage will only be more difficult to sustain, and the threats we face that much greater, if we delay action to another day.
The reason we do not take that step at the very earliest stages of tyranny cannot be that we fear death—for in these first steps of the process, tyranny lacks the power to inflict it. It can only be that we do not want to lose our jobs, we do not want to lose our status. And thus, we find a more apt analysis of the nature of Nazi collaborationism in the words, not of Melville, but of Klaus Mann, who had diagnosed the nature of collaborationism among contemporary German intellectuals as early as 1936.
In Melville's story cited above, there comes a part near the end in which Don Benito Cereno describes "how hard it had been to enact the part forced upon [him]" by the "mutineers." And in Klaus Mann's 1936 novel Mephisto, the lead character Hendrik Höfgen makes a similar appeal for sympathy, in describing his plight as an erstwhile communist who has been adopted by the Nazi regime as one of its favorite actors.
Höfgen claims, in effect, that he has been faking it, just like Don Cereno was faking it. And what a titanic effort of actorly ability it required! He pleads to a former comrade: "how hard and painful it was for him to dissemble his real feelings [about the Nazi regime] so consistently and over such a long period." (Smyth trans.)
To this, Mann, in the role of omniscient narrator, appends the following wry observation: "How brilliantly the actor dissembled! It was a performance truly worthy of a great actor. One might almost have thought that Hendrik Höfgen cared only for money, power and fame instead of the undermining of the regime."
Could it be that Nielsen's apparently astonishing ability to disguise her true feelings about DACA, asylum, and family separation while in office might have sprung from a similar source? Could it be that the great enabler of collaborationism—especially in the early stages of tyranny's ascent to power—is not so much fear and the terrible weight of coercive force—as ambition?
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