Another Glimpse of State Terror in Trump's America - By Andrew Sullivan
Keep a list, they tell you. Notice the little landmarks that tell you that authoritarianism is making headway.
It’s worth making a note, then, when a president goes out of his way to declare he has an “absolute right” to pardon himself, and anyone else, if he so wants, for any reason, including protecting himself and others from possible charges of conspiracy against the United States. Yes, there are legal details here that make this remarkable constitutional claim a little more more complicated than it sounds, as in: Can the Executive branch obstruct itself? Yes, we’re also told that the president has no intention, you understand, of pardoning himself right now, he’s just musing, as he so often does, on various unrelated constitutional conundrums; and yes, he’s pardoning friends and allies, as other friends and allies face a special prosecutor. But just take a note. You’ll be amazed how swiftly this recedes as the latest provocation occupies your soul.
And it’s also worth taking a note when a near-universal norm of human decency is thrown out of the window, with a sudden change in procedure. I’m talking about the idea of a government that reserves the right to separate children from their parents forcibly — and not for interests of rescuing the child from abuse. I’m talking about the 658 children taken from their parents at the border in the two weeks since a new policy was introduced, with the aim of prosecuting everyone who enters the U.S. illegally immediately.
I kept reading Hugh Hewitt’s recent interview with Attorney General Jeff Sessions on the subject to see if Sessions might evince a tiny qualm about this. In May alone, hundreds of children were subjected to this trauma, now counted alongside 11,000 children in government shelters across the U.S. Most are kept in huge detention centers, without their mothers or fathers, and outsiders are barred from entering. Hewitt is not a softy, he’s a hard-line Republican, reliably partisan, often ludicrously so. But even Hewitt was aghast at the sheer cruelty of this and the banality of Sessions’s response to it. Money quote:
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https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/traumatizing-children-is-the-new-weapon-in-trump-arsenal.html
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ELEVEN THOUSAND CHILDREN IN GOV'T SHELTERS ACROSS THE U.S.!!
"..even Hewitt was aghast at the sheer cruelty of this and the banality of Sessions’s response to it
It's a cold heart that treats kids this way
Excerpt, "Life In The Shadows"
Hidden Children and the Holocaust
https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/hidden-children/insideX/
SNIP
Plight of Jewish Children
When World War II began in September 1939, there were approximately 1.6 million Jewish children living in the territories that the German armies or their allies would occupy.
When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, more than 1 million and perhaps as many as 1.5 million Jewish children were dead, targeted victims in the Nazis’ calculated program of genocide.
As Warsaw ghetto historian Emanuel Ringelblum wrote in 1942, “Even in the most barbaric times, a human spark glowed in the rudest heart, and children were spared.
But the Hitlerian beast is quite different. It would devour the dearest of us, those who arouse the greatest compassion—our innocent children.”
Liberation from Nazi tyranny brought no end to the sufferings of the few Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. Many would face the future without parents, grandparents, or siblings.
Persecution
The Nazi persecution of Jews began in Germany in 1933.
By 1939, the country’s Jews had been systematically deprived of their civil rights and property and ostracized from the national community.
German conquests in Europe after 1939 led to the implementation of antisemitic policies in the occupied territories. Though the pace and severity of persecution differed in each country, Jews were marked, vilified, and segregated from their neighbors.
"...HAVING TO WEAR THE YELLOW STAR WAS THE MOMENT WHEN DEEP FEAR AND MISERY FINALLY TOOK HOLD."
— Beatrice Muchman, Jewish child, Belgium
