Razzias in Minneapolis
fascism, society, united states
Apart from all the other terrible things happening, Minneapolis is showing us what descendance into fascism looks like. The Minneapolis major was on the Daily Show with a very clear story and message, which should raise those gun-totin’ Americans in an uproar, one would think. I listen to the Heavyweight podcast, whose main lead lives in this city, and who’d be telling exactly the kind of stories you’d expect are now plentiful there. The latest episode is about the events, and the way his wife tells here experience, just one word popped into my mind: razzia.
In Dutch, this sort of “raid” would be (but isn’t much) translated as “razzia”, which means a very specific kind of raid, namely the sort of raids ICE are conducting. Looking to find people with a certain status and ethnicity, people who’ve almost always settled here ages, generations ago, are part of their communities but can be distinguished if you insist by having some customs or skin color that never was a problem in their communities but can be made into a problem if you have an army of brownshirts looking for something to do, something to hate.
The ascendance of Trump and the extreme-right in the US have made it hard to avoid Godwin’s like the word “razzia”, so let’s try the following. Imagine we are living in Germany late thirties, and let’s take stock of how the government, public discourse and the national conversation have changed in recent years. Fascists, or if that’s too strong a word for you, fascist-admirers have taken control over the government. Not quite through elections, which then were cancelled because why would they now me necessary? A clear vision on who is desirable (white Aryans) and who isn’t (the rest, with a certain hierarchy) and who can be freely blamed instead of solving problems is established. Most aren’t part of the undesirables, but many are, and certainly in more urban areas do people know, interact, live with, marry with the undesirables. A new quasi police force is not really there to dispense justice but to harrass, bully and even “accidentally” murder the out-group. They sometimes do that by way of raids, or razzias: a group will attempt to discover and “arrest” all out-group people present in a certain area, street or block. First, things happen far away, then, they happen in your street.
How can you possibly ignore the huge commonalities?