ICE Logic and Language with Laurence O'Donnell -- Timothy Snyder

[erronis]

https://snyder.substack.com/p/ice-logic-and-language-with-laurence

I was very happy to be able to speak with Laurence O'Donnell on MSNOW last night at 10:00pm. I've been interested to observe how his commentary has become ever more informed by history and ethics. His overture last night on moral thresholds for action was very powerful. The video below is our conversation that followed.

We covered a couple of topics that I have been trying to explain here on substack and elsewhere: the political logic behind the ICE deployments in chosen US cities, and the dangers of the use of mendaciou language such as "terrorist" and "assassin" by members of the Trump administration. There is also the more subtle but equally important problem of using terms, such as "law enforcement," in an inverted sense -- in this case, to justify lawlessness.

MSNOW posted the whole conversation, so I am just going to repost it here.

Hopefully this gets across some points in a concise way! Less concisely, if you would like...

The argument about lawlessness and statelessness can be found at enormous length in my Holocaust history Black Earth, in which I also pointed (more than a decade ago) to some of the dangers that have since more visibly emerged. A similar case can be found within the foundational text of Holocaust studies, which is Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hilberg.

. . .

[2naSalit]

1. K&R

[SamKnause]

2. K&R