Gnats

The history of denigration is long and sordid, a necessary corrective to theories of progress. I wish I could believe in Martin Luther King, Jr. and his famous notion about the arc of justice, but then I’d have to account for the twentieth century, the bloodiest, most murderous in human history. All I see is the circularity of suffering. If it’s not the homosexuals, then it’s the Armenians. If it’s not the Armenians, then it’s the Jews, and dozens of other persecuted minorities.

For the nazis (lowercase by intention), the preferred language was biological. Enemies of the regime were detestable parasites who had to be eliminated from the body of the state. They were organisms who destroyed from within, insidious invaders who had no value to their hosts, but instead sucked at their marrow and hollowed them out.

This was especially true of hook-nosed Jews, who could not establish a nation of their own, but rather attached themselves to the anus of Europe and crawled up into the viscera of their betters. That is the language of National Socialism. Zionist theorists, especially A.D. Gordon, internalized this judgment and saw a new state in Palestine as the only corrective, a project to rectify this unnatural condition. But to hold him culpable would be blaming the victim. The nazis were relentless in pressing this ideology. The Jews, they argued, were invidious potato beetles who had to be squashed before they laid waste to the fields of Europe.

Just in case you missed the Quantico Catastrophe, Donald Trump has now gone full nazi. In his dangerous, meandering address to “my generals,” he called attention again to the enemies of the state. The Big Lie this time was federal dollars for the undocumented. In the president’s feeble mind, immigrants are parasites. They suck at the teat of health care benefits that properly belong only to citizens. Of course they do nothing of the kind, except perhaps when they are bleeding to death and have to be treated—by law—in hospital emergency rooms.

But the one really responsible for this unforgivable sin is—of course—the Democratic Party. At Quantico, the president called them ignoble insects:

“We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats.”

At that point he flicked his stubby little fingers as if to indicate what the military should do. It takes very little to kill a gnat. All you have to do is flick it.

Forgive me if I am being reactive, but we have reached the point of real emergency. In a matter of weeks, we have gone from the Big Brutal Bill to public round-ups in the streets of the country. Defcon One is just a block away, certainly in places like Memphis and Portland. It’s coming soon to a city near you.

If the Hitlerite regime leaves any legacy at all, it is a warning about the relationship between denigration and death. Auschwitz was full of designated gnats. Xyklon B was the regime’s preferred insecticide.