Dehumanization & Separability - Part 1
The Tradition in America
*NOTE: My 2020 book, Enough With the Talking Points: Doing More Good Than Harm in Conversation, makes various arguments in favor of its subtitle. Among them are avoiding insults, labels, sweeping generalizations, and lies, and embracing curiosity, deep listening, learning, and empathy. In this post, I may exercise my authorial privilege and temporarily suspend my commitments to avoiding insults and labels. (Do as I say, not as I do).
The Individuality of Each One
In his 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, historian Timothy Snyder tells us:
“Of the fourteen million civilians and prisoners of war killed in the bloodlands between 1933 and 1945, more than half died because they were denied food…. After starvation came shooting, and then gassing…. No matter which technology was used, the killing was personal….The sheer numbers of the victims can blunt our sense of the individuality of each one.”1
Donald Trump’s Stephen Miller (Stephen Miller’s Donald Trump?) wants 3,000 humans a day rounded up and jailed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, aided by other federal, state and local officers in the United States. Under the fiction that those targeted are “the worst of the worst,” Trump, Miller, Noem, Homan, Bondi, and the White Christian National movement2 that fund them are leading their literal and metaphorical loyal soldiers on warrantless raids that target people based on how they look—including immigrants at courthouses who are registered, and keeping their scheduled appointments; immigrants who hold Permanent Resident (Green) Cards; immigrants who hold visas; and U.S. citizens.
This is what it looked like for the mother of a 15-year-old leaving her “scheduled court appearance at Federal immigration court, at 26 Federal Plaza in New York” on June 4, 2025. She was not named in the article that featured this photo.
This is what it looked like when Florida Governor DeSantis (appropriately cropped below), Trump and Noem, pandering to Americans who like to see brown-skinned people locked up, inspected the new prison they built for more of the same. They laughingly refer to it as “Alligator Alcatraz”:
As far as we know so far, Trump, Miller, Noem, Homan, Bondi, and others like them have not directly ordered the killing or torture of those rounded up, but they have sent them to countries where what happens is “beyond our control” as in the case of “Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador in March, [who] was beaten, deprived of sleep and psychologically tortured during the nearly three months he spent in Salvadoran custody, according to court papers filed on Wednesday evening by his lawyers.”
As we noted last week, Mahmoud Khalil is a graduate student, legally in the U.S., who was imprisoned for more than three months because he expressed his desire to stop the slaughter in Gaza. In this interview with him and his wife, Dr. Noor Abdalla, he calmly makes the case that the Trump administration used the false flags of criminality and immigration in an attempt to violate his right to speak freely. Khalil’s explanation of why he came to the U.S., why he intends to stay, and why he and his wife want to raise their newborn son in America puts to shame the dehumanizing rhetoric spewed forth daily by Trump, Miller, Vance, Noem, Bondi, and others—along with anyone who dances to their tune.
To paraphrase Snyder, the sheer number of the detentions and deportations can blunt our sense that each is an individual human being with friends, family, and a life—and some thirty-to-forty percent of the time, not a criminal life.
Brief Exercise of Authorial Privilege (as noted above) #1:
If a voice in your head is beginning to protest (unlikely, I know, for most folks who read this newsletter) that it’s ridiculous and disingenuous to compare the slaughter of millions in 20th-century Europe with the detention and deportation of what is not-yet-millions in 21st-century Christian America, well, shut up, sit down, and keep reading—or just give up on reading altogether. Those starved by Stalin and those starved, shot, or gassed by Hitler were first dehumanized, arrested, and detained.
The latest reports available unanimously agree that Jesus was against all dehumanization, detention, deportation, and slaughter, and he had firsthand experience of each, and that separability (which we haven’t addressed yet) is delusional.
One World at a Time
As noted in this newsletter in November 2024, just twelve days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Rabbi Marc Gellman, among many others, spoke at the September 23, 2001 Prayer Service at Yankee Stadium. His remarks include the following:
“On that day—on that day—6,000 people did not die. On that day, one person died 6,000 times…. We say 6,000 died, or we say six million died and the saying and the numbers explain nothing except how much death came in how short a time.… The real horror of that day lies not in its bigness, but in its smallness. In the small searing death of one person 6,000 times, and that one person was not a number. That person was our father or our mother or our son or our daughter or our grandpa or grandma or brother or sister or cousin or uncle or aunt or friend or lover, our neighbor, our co-worker, the woman who delivered our mail or the guy who put out our fires and arrested the bad guys in our town. And the death of each and every one of them alone would be worthy of such a gathering and such a grief…. The dimensions of last week’s horror only become fully drawn when we enter each murdered world one world at a time….”3
If we learn anything from the language of “…the killing was personal,” “not a number,” and entering “each murdered world one world at a time,” we are ethically bound to translate and comprehend that each physical battery, arrest, and imprisonment—whether of an undocumented immigrant, a documented immigrant, or a U.S. citizen—is personal, not a number, and must be entered, understood, and engaged one unique human life at a time.
On July 4, 2025 Donald Trump signed into law a bill that passed in the Senate by one vote and in the House by four, in which “Congress allocated $45 billion to spend locking up immigrants over the next four years — more than the government spent on detention during the Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations combined.” The bill also made it more difficult for folks who qualify for Medicaid and SNAP to access those services. Said differently, it reduces the availability of medical and food-related assistance for those in need in the U.S., as did, in a different context around the world, the shuttering of USAID earlier in the year.
To summarize: tens of billions of dollars more to imprison people; hundreds of billions of dollars less to help those in need. (And not on our list for today’s extravaganza, an additional $3-$4 trillion in debt over the next decade).
As Adam Serwer wrote in the Atlantic during Trump’s first term, “the cruelty is the point,” and that said, it’s worth remembering whence that cruelty emerges. Donald Trump would not have become president of the United States in 2016 without the money and organization of the White Christian Nationalist’s Council for National Policy (CNP), whose agenda and network have been active for forty-plus years. They dropped any hint of Christ or Christianity from their behaviors and used Trump as “God’s wrecking ball” to create the white christian nation they believe God wants America to be. Trump used them to become president. Together Trump and the CNP revel in cruelty toward and the dehumanization of anyone they see as not fitting into their beliefs about God’s and Trump’s will.4
Brief Exercise of Authorial Privilege (as noted above) #2:
In their historically ignorant and bigoted attempts to make America great again, they are too logically and ethically stupid to see that if they succeed in locking up, removing, or killing everyone they hate, what will remain is a nation of their stupidity, hate, ignorance, and bigotry. They are not making anything great, but are Keeping America Stupid, Hateful, Ignorant, and Bigoted (KASHIB), which, ironically, has Middle Eastern origins.
I tend to resist and refute simpleminded binaries, but I’m willing to exercise my unpredictability and offer this one. Each of us is faced with choosing to be either for against dehumanization and separability.
The polls are open.
Next week we’ll take a look at the myth of separability, how it catalyzes and reinforces dehumanization, and how the Bible has been used as a foundation for those who are working toward a world of us vs. them.
Thanks for being here.
We’ll return this week to Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee,” this time performed by Ani DiFranco and Ry Cooder. The song has been covered extensively over the years.
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, (Basic, 2010), xiv-xv.
The 2024 documentary, Bad Faith, is available on several platforms. Much of its content, from 1980 through 2018, is grounded in the research provided by Anne Nelson’s Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right (Bloomsbury, 2019)—highly recommended. The film exposes the myth of the Founders’ desires for a Christian nation and the origins of White Christian Nationalism, and completes before the 2024 election.
Rabbi Gellman’s remarks begin at about 9:00. It is worth listening to his voice.
As with note 2, Anne Nelson’s 2019 Shadow Network provides a detailed accounting of the emergence and evolution of the CNP and its network from the late 1970s forward. The 2024 documentary Bad Faith, though necessarily less detailed, provides audio-video footage of many of the principal players.