Showing posts with label Hannah Arendt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hannah Arendt. Show all posts

Saturday, September 6, 2025

‘Homie’: DHS Ridicules Dad They Plan to Deport to Tiny African Nation; The Daily Beast, September 6, 2025

 , The Daily Beast ; ‘Homie’: DHS Ridicules Dad They Plan to Deport to Tiny African Nation


[Kip Currier: This is unacceptable aberrant and abhorrent behavior for U.S. government leaders and agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to demean and torment human beings in this way. But as has so often been said of the Trump administration, the cruelty is the point: these actions are part of a broader stratagem. This behavior is an authoritarian tactic to dehumanize specific individuals and groups of people. The objectives of this systematic, intentional dehumanization are to (1) normalize cruelty, (2) undermine the rule of law, and (3) break down our democratic institutions. Political writer Hannah Arendt explains these strategies in her seminal 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism. The book is freely accessible through the Internet Archive via https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism .

Remember, too, that DHS Head Kristi Noem is the same person who told us in her 2024 autobiography No Going Back that she shot and killed her own 14-month old wire-haired pointer dog, Cricket, with premeditation and deliberation. This is not a good person, a positive role model, or someone who exercises sound judgment and well-reasoned decision-making

And this is clearly not someone who should be influencing policy and leading a government agency.]


[Excerpt]

"Maryland dad Kilmar Abrego Garcia has learned where the Department of Homeland Security has decided to deport him next. 

In an email obtained by Fox News, lawyers for the DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement informed Abrego Garcia’s legal team on Friday that his new intended destination is the tiny African nation of Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland. 

Ridiculing Abrego Garcia’s legal claim of fear of persecution or torture—a core asylum principle—in many of the nations the government has considered deporting him to, the DHS wrote on social media that “Homie is afraid of the entire western hemisphere”."

Monday, June 2, 2025

Parks, libraries, museums: here’s why Trump is attacking America’s best-loved institutions; The Guardian, June 2, 2025

 , The Guardian; Parks, libraries, museums: here’s why Trump is attacking America’s best-loved institutions

"Why would any politician – especially one as hungry for adulation as Donald Trump – go after such cherished parts of America?

It seems counterintuitive, but this is all a part of a broad plan that the great 20th century political thinker Hannah Arendt would have understood all too well.

Take away natural beauty, free access to books and support for the arts, and you end up with a less enlightened, more ignorant and less engaged public. That’s a public much more easily manipulated.

“A people that can no longer believe in anything cannot make up its mind,” said Arendt, a student of authoritarianism, in 1973. Eventually, such a public “is deprived … of its ability to think and judge”, and with people like that, “you can then do what you please”.

That’s what Trump and company are counting on."