What Would You Have Done In 1941?

The American descent into fascism is so rapid and comprehensive as to suggest its architects are indeed students of history. The expression “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” appears to be truncated when confronted with reality.

This well-known quote should, perhaps, be updated to read: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it by those who can.” In the United States today, the administration has been following the lessons of the several totalitarian regimes that rose in Europe during the interwar period, most notably Nazi Germany.

The biggest difference is that in Germany, Hitler was the leader in all respects, not a mere figurehead. Trump is far more a useful idiot, there to obtain power on behalf of others and to sew chaos to distract from its application. The underlying policy is being driven by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 team, and Trump has increasingly little clue of what is being done in his name.

Are you familiar with Project 2025?

This past week, he pushed the Republicans over the line of passing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which slashes two of the three sacred cows Trump told them to protect: medicare and medicaid. And when did he tell them to protect those? While telling them to vote for the bill that destroys them.

While also increasing taxes on the poorest, slashing them for the richest, and throwing the United States deeper in debt than at any time in the country’s history, the new law also turns the entire country into a full-on police state, facilitating arbitrary detention, doing away with due process, and terrorising its citizens.

The pseudo-police agency known as Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the biggest beneficiary of this now-passed Act. ICE’s annual budget goes from $10 billion to nearly $40 billion, with $45 billion over four years earmarked for the construction of new “detention facilities”. The opaque agency reports directly to Trump’s Homeland Security director Kristi Noem.

ICE has gone from a relatively focused immigration enforcement agency to become nothing less than Trump’s own secret police, combining the SS’s concentration camp system with the Gestapo’s intelligence and arrest powers under a budget that would make that single agency the fifth largest member of NATO by spending.

They are responsible for building and operating the nation’s new network of concentration camps. With a budget increasing four-fold, it is clear that this work is just beginning. They will also need to recruit thousands of officers, and one can only imagine who they will be targeting to hire.

An American Concentration Camp

Alligator Alcatraz — yes, that’s its official name — a tent-based concentration camp built in a marsh for which its cheerleaders can buy branded merchandise, has already flooded as the first prisoners arrived. When Democrat lawmakers went to the site, they were unlawfully denied entry. It is only the first of several of these camps to be built across the country.

Many have compared Alligator Alcatraz to Auschwitz, but this is not a fair comparison. Auschwitz was a death camp, not strictly a concentration camp. Alligator Alcatraz is more akin to the earlier and longer-running Dachau, near Munich, which opened within weeks of Hitler taking power in 1933, initially to house only 5,000 political prisoners. It operated as a prototype for the camp system, and, early on, offered the theoretical possibility of release for its prisoners.

It took several more years to get to the mass deportations and massacres of those they did not want in the Third Reich. Kristallnacht did not take place until 1938, five years into the process, and the full scale death camps did not start in earnest until after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. The Holocaust was nearly a decade in the making, it did not happen over night.

The fascist leaders of the United States are students of this history. They don’t want to wait a decade to get rid of their undesirables; they already intend to. Trump and his administration have openly spoken of the “bloody story” and they are moving as quickly as they feel the American public will let them.

Who are they after? Latinos, mainly. Trump’s close supporter Laura Loomer tweeted that the alligators around Alligator Alcatraz will have “at least 65 million meals”. There aren’t 65 million illegal immigrants in the United States, but there are 65 million Latinos.

For now, anyway.

On July 1st, Trump declared on video that his next project is to deport American citizens, which no media outlet has picked up:

We have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time, people that whack people over the head with a baseball bat from behind when they’re not looking and kill them. People that knife you when you’re walking down the street. They’re not new to our country, they’re old to our country, many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that’ll be the next job that we’ll get to work on together.”

Americans in general love their World War II movies, but seem to have gleaned few of the lessons from the period. Their leaders, however, have read and understood the roadmap. And for those who think this is a passing interest in observing our southern neighbours, that roadmap runs straight through Canada.

The concentration camps have started. The history is clear. The Republican government is repeating it play by play, and it’s getting awfully close to 1941.

Many people insist that had they been in Germany or its neighbouring countries in the 1930s, they would have ‘done something.’ It’s time to put that to the test.

What would you have done then? Are you doing it now?