Another Sunday, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between. Coffee is always black.
Sting’s “Nothing like the Sun” came out in 1987. I had the vinyl. Among its songs was “They Dance Alone”. It immediately struck me for what it was. I had experienced a fascist dictatorship first hand as a child and witnessed fear in the eyes of grownups. The fear of disappearing.
Back then, before the military coup turned popular revolution of 1974, the entity in charge of controlling and crushing dissent was the infamous PIDE (the hated Portuguese acronym for State Defense International Police). Their station in Porto, where I was born, was situated next to one of the city’s largest cemeteries and rumor had it there was a tunnel between the two, along which the bodies of arrested dissenters were taken to unmarked graves in the dead of night.
Renamed DGS (Directorate-General of Security) in 1968, PIDE/DGS is to this day remembered for its cruelty and fanaticism. On April 25, 1974, the day of the coup that ended 48 years of fascism in Portugal, the only fatal casualties were four civilians shot by PIDE agents who opened fire from inside the secret police headquarters in Lisbon, surrounded by the armed forces movement. One agent was also shot dead. I can’t help to think about our country and what’s happening with ICE.
More than any other agency connected to Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has that same nasty sound that Directorate-General of Security had. Very euphemistic and ominous. And more and more ambiguous, overreaching, and secretive. While it is true that immigration requires lawful control and management, the fact that ordinary law enforcement agencies, from the border to our cities, were deemed ineffective to deal with it always worried me.
The creation of ICE in 2003 was a direct consequence of 9/11. As many of the provisions of the Patriot Act, the ones in the Homeland Security Act were far too ambitious, inadequate, and open ended. We suffer to this day from those laws allegedly unintended consequences. I don’t believe they were unintended. They were stepping stones to reach the point we’re at today and by not recognizing them as such, and correcting them when we could, we opened the door to this reality.
Like many other extreme measures supposed to increase our “security”, ICE’s birth was made possible out of fear. Someone really bad was plotting our destruction, from within and from outside, and somehow the existing law enforcement agencies (which in our case were already some of the largest and well equipped in the world) were not enough to handle it. “Special measures” were required. Since its inception, many have called for the extinction of ICE. They were correct.
Like the defunct Portuguese “State Defense” police, initially meant to keep bad actors away from our borders, I predict ICE will morph into a broader “Directorate-General of Security”, whatever they choose to call it, to try and hide its revealed euphemism and unlawful acts in a new coat of paint at the same time its mission is expanded from immigration control to actual population control, regardless of status. The “enemy within” will in fact be us. All of us.
As expected, the people being taken off the streets as they go about their lives, going out to meet friends or taking out the trash, went from immigrants to legal residents and pretty soon naturalized citizens. Their common traits are not where they are from; they’re from everywhere, from Latin America to the Middle East, from Canada to Russia. They only have one thing in common: dissent in any form. Real or perceived dissent. It doesn’t matter.
We’re not Pinochet’s Chile yet, or Salazar’s Portugal, but we’re moving fast towards it. The rule of law is already gone from the actions taken by ICE; there are no warrants, no probable cause brought to a judge that justifies them. The proof is some of its arrests are foiled by mere bystanders who choose to oppose them and defy them. Fear is not great enough yet, but it’s growing. We can’t allow it.
The images of people being snatched off the street are meant to grow that fear; to make us run our blinders shut and stay home, hoping they won’t knock on our doors, and thankful they don’t. They don’t have warrants, they have screenshots or copies of words spoken against the government’s authority. It doesn’t matter what the words really mean, there is no process due to establish it. The mere perception is enough. The message is clear: mind what you say.
In the mix of these words are some that cause us repulsion, some that we sympathize with, others we have no particular feelings about. But they all have dissenting qualities and that is why they are mixed together, regardless of who wrote or said them. Soon the fear will grow into what we allow ourselves to say or write. Don’t let it. Each word left unsaid is a light that goes out and permits darkness to expand. Keep talking about it; writing about it. It’s important.
The changes we need will only happen if we keep fighting for them; if we deny fear to take hold. Don’t let it get to the point Chile or Portugal once did. We still can stop it. We must stop it. Don’t be afraid.
“One day we'll dance on their graves; one day we'll sing our freedom. One day we'll laugh in our joy, and we'll dance.”
April 5 is coming.
