What do you think would happen if one day you looked out your window and saw a box truck pull up and park outside your house, and a bunch of armed men wearing windbreakers got out and knocked on your door and presented you with a piece of paper and then put you in the truck and took you away? Or worse still, they put you and your entire family in the back of the truck and took all of you away?
Do you think any of your neighbors would come out of their houses and ask the men with the truck what’s going on, who are they, and why are they taking you and your family away? Would anyone on your block call the police?
If someone called the police and they bothered to show up – the likelihood of which is another issue entirely, of course – what do you think they would do? Would the police step in and interfere with the men bundling you and your family into the back of the truck? Would they ask to see the authority by which the men in the truck are acting? Would the police demand to know where you are being taken or with whom they can get in touch to confirm your whereabouts and legal status?
Or would the truck simply drive away with you and your family in the back without anyone knowing where you had been taken or for what reason?
There is a term for what I have just described: being disappeared. It’s a term that has been used in certain South American countries and in Northern Ireland and probably elsewhere, but stuff like that isn’t supposed to happen in the U.S.. People here aren’t just grabbed off the streets or from their houses and taken away.
Or are they?
This is my bi-weekly column in Salon. Link to the full column below:
The go-to for dictators who do not accept criticism, spoken outright or implied.
Anyone who likes his suggested policies believe they’d be immune - until they’re not, of course. He likes the poorly educated, this is why.
Being incapable of critical thinking or knowledge of history.
Lucian,
I don’t think that you are being paranoid at all. Trump’s followers and “Christian Nationalists” are salivating for the chance to do this. I am reminded of the series “The Man in the High Castle”, a show that imagines a dystopian future where the Nazis win and the United States becomes a part of the Greater German Reich, and Americans are the Nazis running it.
I don’t think that what you say is out of the realm of possibility.
Peace,
Steve Dundas