Strange Irony of Fate

 In his immortal collection of concentration camp stories, This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, the Polish writer and Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski recounts one episode of attempted resistance. As a group of people were being herded into the gas chambers, one woman made a lunge for one of the guard's holstered weapons. Freeing it from his belt, she waved it around and fired several shots into the commandant's gut. 

As he lay expiring on the ground, the commandant seemed genuinely shocked and indignant about what had just occurred. What could have made the woman want to do such a thing? "Oh God, my God," he reportedly said, "what have I done to deserve such suffering?" (Vedder trans.)

I am reminded of this episode whenever the Trump administration speaks with self-righteous fury about the "violence" and "threats" supposedly committed by "detainees" caged in their sprawling system of detention camps. 

On the one hand, administration officials appoint to themselves an unbounded right to terrorize, kill, torture, maltreat, and brutalize any asylum-seeker or immigrant who falls into their hands. 

The New York Times quoted yesterday a statement from a DHS spokeswoman warning: "if you come to our country illegally, you could end up in Guantánamo Bay, CECOT, or Alligator Alcatraz." These are internment camps where men and women have been tortured; choked to death; incarcerated without access to their families or attorneys; shackled outside in the hot summer sun; beaten until they couldn't stand. 

The administration is proud of these atrocities, and the terror they are meant to inspire. They openly boast of them. They deliberately try to put fear into the hearts of their victims, telling them of the violence and horror they will meet if they ever fall into the government's hands. 

And then—after threatening people with torture and murder, for which they claim "absolute immunity" under the law, regardless of the circumstances of the killing—they nonetheless appear genuinely shocked and self-righteously indignant when the victims of this horror put up the slightest resistance to this fate. 

A report from the Associated Press this morning recounts two episodes when guards at Florida's "Deportation Depot" sprayed chemical agents in the faces of "detainees." Officials described an October 29 incident when these men—in the telling of the guards—"attempted to barricade themselves inside their housing unit while inciting violence and causing significant damage."

In another reported incident—according to the guards, "Several detainees refused orders to return to their bunks and began advancing on staff."

Note the tone of surprised outrage in this statement; the sense of sincere, self-righteous indignation at the thought that these detainees might dare to "advance on staff" or "barricade themselves" in their cells. 

The government believes in its own right to kidnap, murder, and torture these men and women with absolute impunity. But it seems genuinely astonished that they do not submit eagerly and meekly to this fate. 

The Trump administration seems chronically wracked with self-pity, in their every statement. They can't believe that their masked goons occasionally get sandwiches thrown at them. That grand juries are not exactly getting the violins out because they heard an ICE agent got his finger scratched while wrestling a mother of four to the ground. That people go around filming ICE agents on their phones. 

How mean! How intrusive! How rude! Can't these people just let some masked, heavily armed thugs kidnap and brutalize people in peace? 

They are astounded that their own "detainees" would be so cruel and heartless as to barricade themselves and "destroy" government property, merely to avoid being abducted to a torture prison in El Salvador or Eswatini where they will be incarcerated for as much as the rest of their lives. 

They are very much like that commandant lying prostrate on the ground. "My god, my god," they say, "what have I done to deserve such suffering?" 

They will never know the answer to that question. They are cursed with such bottomless narcissism and racism and stupidity that they will go to their graves not realizing that other people, regardless of nationality or skin color, are just as real as they are. They have brainwashed themselves so fully with their own dehumanizing rhetoric that they appear genuinely surprised when the men and women in these detention camps behave as human beings. 

"Wait, they have a problem with being tortured and shackled and mauled in these concentration camps, upon which we have bestowed such cutesy alliterative nicknames? They object to this treatment in some way? How strange! Don't they realize this is all just for the social media clicks? Don't they know that their role is to suffer and die in isolation and silence, so that we can crow about it online and get re-posts from right-wing influencers?" 

"What on Earth did we ever do to them, to make them so mad?" Like the concentration camp guard bleeding out on the floor, they say to themselves, "What have we ever done to deserve such suffering?"

"That man didn't understand even to the very end," as Borowski's narrator puts it. "What strange irony of fate."