This Ain’t America

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• Super! Thanks for sharing.

• Kate,
  Thak you for sharing that, what a great song and unfortunately very true!

  Richard

• This song is great!

• Wow, excellent words and moving video.

• If Everything Is Nazism, Nothing Is

  Regarding the song by Rags Rosenberg and the video that accompanies it.

  It is a good song and it expresses much of what I feel. The images circulating—arrests, the killing of two citizens, physical confrontations, frightened families—are very difficult to watch. They should be.

  But something troubles me.

  To take images of U.S. immigration enforcement and splice them together with the Gestapo or the SS rounding up Jews is not just provocative. It is a distortion.

  The Gestapo and the SS were not harsh law enforcement agencies. They were instruments of a state built on racial extermination. They operated outside the law, without restraint, without recourse. Their purpose was not to enforce policy but to erase entire categories of people.

  They shot, gassed, and burned millions.

  To place that alongside modern America—however flawed its immigration policies, however questionable certain enforcement practices, however fucked up it was to shoot—is to flatten the distinction into something almost meaningless. History becomes a set of interchangeable images. Meaning drains out.

  When you call ICE agents “Gestapo,” you are no longer criticizing a policy. You are assigning an identity. You are saying: these people are Nazis. Not mistaken, not misguided—Nazis.

  That shift matters. Once a person is placed in that category, ordinary limits begin to loosen. The language does not stay rhetorical. It licenses something—contempt, intimidation, sometimes worse. This is how hatred is manufactured. Do we need that?

  None of this requires defending ICE. A democratic society should be able to argue—forcefully—about immigration policy, enforcement, limits, and accountability. It should be able to say that certain practices are wrong, even intolerable.

  But it should also be able to distinguish between a contested policy within a constitutional system and a machinery of genocide.

  If everything becomes Nazism, then Nazism becomes just another metaphor. And once that happens, we lose more than historical accuracy. We lose the ability to think clearly about the present.

  We need moral restraint: the discipline of holding language in check, even when emotions run high. Not out of politeness, but out of respect—for history, and for the consequences words carry in the world we are still trying to live in.

  • Excellent points, Magnus. Thank you for pointing out our need to be purposeful in our use of language…of words…of comparisons…even when presented in a visual representation rather than the words themselves. It is easy to lose the intentions when we are caught in a whirling dervish-like set of world-wide circumstances artificially created by those who wish to destabilize our country and our world for personal gain of money, power, and ego satisfaction. I still like the song, however.

• May peace prevail on Earth

• This Ain't America is such a powerful song. It was sent to me so I don't know how much circulation it is getting but I think it is terribly important. I was tempted to send it to Rachel Maddow but decided it wasn't my place to do that. Maybe you could do so if you think it is a good idea. Hopefully it will at least be on YouTube.
  Thanks so much for sharing.