The New Concentration Camps for Americans and the End of the American Republic as We Knew It.

Trump Tells El Salvador’s Bukele: Build More for Our “Home Grown”

When I saw the video of Donald Trump’s meeting with El Salvadoran Dictator Nayib Bukele on Monday, a man who despite his title of “President” is as much of a dictator as Vladimir Putin, and something which Donald Trump is rapidly becoming, I was filled with many emotions. They included anger that an American President and the top members of his Regime (not Administration) would approve of a legal resident of the United States who committed no crime being apprehended and sent to El Salvador without any evidence and without due process. Bukele bluntly told Trump, Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Rubio and Attorney General Bondi that he would not return the man, while Trump agreed and said that he would not obey the orders of a U.S. District Court Judge or the Supreme Court which upheld her ruling.

https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/-as-many-as-possible-trump-says-he-is-open-to-deporting-american-citizens-who-commit-crimes-237348933533

I also felt sadness because I realized that this was the end of our Republic and Democracy as we have known it, at least for years, probably a decade or more and maybe forever. As an American that served this country in the military for nearly 40 years, and the sight and sound of those words were completely disheartening as I never thought we would sink to this. I am ashamed to be an American today.

Prisoners in El Salvador

The pictures of the El Salvadoran concentration camp conjures up images from the Concentration camps of Hitler’s Third Reich, something that I have far too much knowledge about. Since the worst of those camps were located outside of the Reich, the people held in them were beyond what was left of the German legal system, just as the current camp, and the Trump wants built in El Salvador for Americans will be. El Salvador’s dictator, Nayib Bukele has already said that he would not return the legal American resident who was “mistakenly” arrested and deported to El Salvador returned, and he will certainly resist any court orders issued by the United States or the International Criminal Court.

Prisoners at Buchenwald in the 1930s

Trump and the leaders of his Regime responsible for this including Attorney General Pam Bondi, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Immigration Czar Tom Homan are no different than the Nazis leaders of the Third Reich who sent people to their deaths with absolutely no remorse. Any person that is being sent to El Salvador from the United States is being condemned to death. They will never be returned so long as Trump and Bukele are in power. Those enforcing Trumps orders can be compared to the leaders of the Einsatzgrüppen, of whom General Telford Taylor, the American Prosecutor at the Einsatzgrüppen Trial said:

“These defendants are not German peasants or artisans drafted into the Wehrmacht. They are not uneducated juveniles. They are lawyers, teachers, artists, and a former clergyman. They are, in short, men of education, who were in full possession of their faculties and who fully understood the grave and sinister significance of the program they embarked upon. They were part of the hard core of the SS. They did not give mere lip service to Himmler’s atrocious racial doctrines; they were chosen for this terrible assignment because they were thought to be men of sufficient ruthlessness to carry them out. They are hand-picked fanatics; every one of them was an officer of the SS … They are not unhappy victims, unwillingly pushed into crime by the tyranny of the Third Reich; these men, above all others, themselves, spread the Nazi doctrine with fire and sword.”

Brigadier General Telford Taylor prosecuting the accused at the Einsatzgrüppen Trial

Sadly, there are too many in the Trump Regime just like them. They are men and women who know better but have surrendered any moral, religious or ethical values that they once supposedly subscribed in order to carry out Trump’s decrees.

The Nazi Concentration Camps were run by the SS, even in Germany and outside the jurisdiction of the official German justice system. The people sent to them included people who already had served prison sentences but for whom SS men were waiting after their release. Taken to the Concentration Camps their terms of sentence were indefinite, without an end date, and they had no legal recourse for their plights. Many took their lives in despair, just as many in El Salvadoran prisons certainly do. The toll of men and women sent there from the United States will certainly be higher than the El Salvadorans in those camps. Those sent there from here, be they legal immigrants or American citizens will be forgotten by the Regime and all too many American citizens, especially Whites.

Historian Gerhard Weinberg wrote: wrote:

“It’s very, very important for people to get a sense of what the potentialities of people really are, what the dangers of ignorance can be. It is in this context, that a supposedly advanced society risks descending into the sewer, that the Holocaust is a warning to people who think of themselves as an advanced, modern society

It is unfortunate for all of us that so many people never learned the lessons of the Holocaust, especially the leaders of the Trump Regime and his MAGA followers. Because of this Trump’s tyranny will become entrenched and established in our country as institutions that could fight back surrender in advance. Because of that we stand the very real risk of descending into a sewer of moral depravity for which we forever be condemned, and with good reason. The Germans of Hitler’s time had never seen or learned about anything like Hitler, but we have the historical knowledge to know what happens to a nation that follows such a man. Thus we have no excuse.

Such is disheartening to anyone who still believes in the foundational principles of our Republic and the Bill of Rights. But, nonetheless we who still believe must not give up or lose hope. We must resist in every way possible. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was martyred at the Flossenburg Concentration Camp on 9 April 1945, said:

“If I sit next to a madman as he drives a car into a group of innocent bystanders, I can’t, as a Christian, simply wait for the catastrophe, then comfort the wounded and bury the dead. I must try to wrestle the steering wheel out of the hands of the driver.”

The question is, will we have the courage to attempt to stop what is happening to the people who Jesus said were are our neighbors who we are to love?

I wonder. As a retired career military officer my spirit resonates with the words of Major General Henning Von Tresckow who helped plan Operation Valkyrie and died after its failure on 20 July 1944. He wrote:

“It is almost certain that we will fail. But how will future history judge the German people, if not even a handful of men had the courage to put an end to that criminal”?

The time is coming and now is when any self-respecting American who believes in our foundational principles of the Declaration of Independence, our Bill of Rights and the Amendments that strengthened and expanded them, the 13th, 14th, 15th and 19th Amendments, will have to follow the words of Bonhoeffer and Von Tresckow to defend others.

Until tomorrow. Be safe and watch your six.