Sociopaths Who Publicly Revel in Their Crimes Against U.S. and International Law

Kristi “Puppy Killer” Noem at Work

Friends, yesterday after a full day of teaching I celebrated my 65th birthday at our local watering hole. I needed it. A nice meal with an excellent corned beef sandwich that was far too large to eat half of, two large mugs of Kilkenny Irish Crème ale, and a number of, I am not sure just how many Tullamore Dew Irish Whiskey did me good after all the bombardment inflicted on our country and the world by the criminal regime of Donald Trump.

If you want to help me continue my birthday celebration, and buy puppy treats for my Papillon dogs, please become a paid subscriber for as little as $5 a month. You’ll be glad you did, as will my spoiled pups.

I had originally planned to write more regarding the lawlessness and criminal irresponsibility of Trump’s National Security Team of Stooges in what has become known as Signal Gate. I will do that in a few days. The weekend will be busy finishing the first unit of my current doctoral class and then renew the color of Judy’s hair.

However, as I read and say the video of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem speaking outside a large cell in the El Salvadorian prison where DHS and ICE flew hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants, as well as legal permanent residents of the U.S. to last week in defiance of a court order. None have been named and no evidence has been presented by DHS and ICE officials themselves being part of a Venezuelan criminal gang, and the extraordinary and spurious use of the Enemy Aliens Act when we are not at war with Venezuela is troubling.

Instead of obeying court orders, DHS, ICE and Marco Rubio’s State Department are continuing to disobey more court orders. In the midst of that, Noem, best known as the Governor who took her puppy to a secluded location and shot him, even bragging about it in her book, flew to El Salvador to record a message in front of one of its most notorious prisons. There she posed for a photo op in front of prisoners and film a propaganda message threatening other immigrants to the United States.

This kind of public action was something that even Heinrich Himmler’s Nazi Schutzstaffel or SS refrained from doing, and why Himmler and other SS Leaders would never speak of their actions to exterminate the Jews in public.

Himmler’s deputy, SS General Reinhard Heydrich insisted on the absolute secrecy regarding the Wannsee Conference in which he and 14 high ranking government officials and Nazi Party leaders discussed the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem. Himmler discussed the need for secrecy with senior SS officers at Posen on 4 October 1943 after the tide of war turned against Germany.

“I shall speak to you here with all frankness of a very serious subject. We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race.

It is one of those things which is easy to say. 'The Jewish race is to be exterminated,' says every party member. 'That's clear, it's part of our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we'll do it.'

And then they all come along, the eighty million good Germans, and each one has his decent Jew. Of course the others are swine, but this one is a first-class Jew. Of all those who talk like this, not one has watched, not one has stood up to it.

Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet - apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness - to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written…

We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.

Altogether, however, we can say, that we have fulfilled this most difficult duty for the love of our people. And our spirit, our soul, our character has not suffered injury from it.”

The SS when in absolute power over its victims and as it became apparent that the war was lost never bragged about its crimes, which they considered heroic in the defense of their country. Instead, they remained, even after the war to be keepers of secrets.

Unlike Himmler’s SS men, who wantonly led the extermination of the Jews and many others, killing millions, Trump’s officials revel in their criminal actions in public. They joyfully ignore court orders which will eventually lead to a Constitutional crisis. The thing is, once people in such power know that they can disobey the laws of their country, its Constitution, and International law by violating the legal and human rights of their victims: they how long will it be before they begin to move past depriving them of legal rights, imprisoning them without legal representation, and deporting them to criminal nations, or countries from which they fled persecution to murdering them?

That is not a hyperbolic statement, or a theoretical question. It is happened before. Once that thin line of knowingly violating long established law and precedent, once the line of disagreeing with a judge’s decision a filing appeals to higher courts to flagrantly disregarding them has been crossed, the more easily the line between mass imprisonment, deportation, or evacuation to mass murder can follow. Even by normally law abiding, decent people. How easy it becomes for normal citizens to become perpetrators or bystanders.

In the great film Judgment at Nuremberg, Spencer Tracy, who played the chief judge pronounced sentence on the Nazi Judges in the dock, one of whom was an esteemed legal scholar by the name of Ernst Janning, played by Burt Lancaster:

“Herr Rolfe further asserts that the defendant, Janning, was an extraordinary jurist and acted in what he thought was the best interest of this country. There is truth in this also. Janning, to be sure, is a tragic figure. We believe he loathed the evil he did. But compassion for the present torture of his soul must not beget forgetfulness of the torture and the death of millions by the Government of which he was a part. Janning’s record and his fate illuminate the most shattering truth that has emerged from this trial: If he and all of the other defendants had been degraded perverts, if all of the leaders of the Third Reich had been sadistic monsters and maniacs, then these events would have no more moral significance than an earthquake, or any other natural catastrophe. But this trial has shown that under a national crisis, ordinary — even able and extraordinary — men can delude themselves into the commission of crimes so vast and heinous that they beggar the imagination. No one who has sat at through trial can ever forget them: men sterilized because of political belief; a mockery made of friendship and faith; the murder of children. How easily it can happen.”

Likewise, the American historian Timothy Snyder wrote:

“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.”

Christopher Browning wrote in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Holocaust in Poland:

“I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization, and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners.”

Once the first steps have been taken by a government, even by one like ours can was founded upon, can cross the line from the violation of people’s rights, to murdering them. Some of our ancestors did that to African Americans and Native Americans, the latter of which we committed genocide against.

So anyway. I will keep writing and I will resist. Thank you for your readership, and especially my paid subscribers.

Until next time, please be safe, don’t give up, and watch your six.