Who Is a Criminal?
'It was the spring of 1936. My grandmother, Ilse Stanley, had just returned from a theater tour that had kept her away from Berlin for almost the whole winter, only to discover a city in which “more and more friends were missing.” Soon after, a cousin arrived at her home. The Gestapo, her cousin told her, had taken her husband away to a concentration camp. In her 1957 book, “The Unforgotten,” my grandmother describes asking her cousin about the reasons for her husband’s arrest. Her answer:
“Because he was a criminal with a record. He had paid two fines in court: one for speeding and one for some other traffic fine. They said they finally wanted to do what the court had missed doing all these years: to get rid of all Jews with criminal records. A traffic fine — a criminal record!”
The first half of my grandmother’s book is a careful accounting of the years after Hitler’s rise to power. In it, she documents how difficult it was to get the German Jewish community to understand the peril they faced. Reporting on a conversation in 1937 in which she unsuccessfully urged a family member to leave the country, she writes:
“What distressed me most about the conversation was the further proof it afforded that the Jews around me had scarcely any conception of what was going on. A concentration camp, for those on the outside, was a kind of labor camp. There were whispered rumors of people being beaten, even killed. But there was no comprehension of the tragic reality.”
After all, most German Jews did not think of themselves as “criminals.”
Fast forward to February 2016, and move one country south, to Switzerland. The far-right SVP (the Schweizer Volkspartei) had just introduced a referendum to expel “immigrants” that could include even second- or third-generation Swiss-born residents found guilty of a few parking tickets. The referendum seemed sure to pass. It was only because of the efforts of Operation Libero, a liberal progressive group founded by Swiss students, who organized to change the narrative of deporting “criminal immigrants,” that the referendum was defeated.
In the United States, Donald Trump rode to victory with a call to expel “criminal aliens.” In his announcement of his run for office, he spoke of Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” Since he has taken office, he has harshly targeted immigrants in the United States; at his rally on Saturday in Harrisburg, Pa., he compared immigrants — as he did last year — to poisonous snakes, to great applause. It is worth noting that this tactic of dehumanization — referring to humans as animals — has historically been used to foment hatred and violence against chosen groups. In the lead up to the Rwandan genocide, for instance, Tutsis were regularly described as snakes.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/opinion/who-is-a-criminal.html?
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