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Roger Cottrell's avatar

That ICE are now an American Gestapo should now be recognised as a given but while America has never actually been under a fascist regime before the ground-work for this was layed by Donald Rumsfeld and others during the war on terror when they IMPOSED the policy of extraordinary rendition on a besieged CIA that had been caught asleep at the wheel during the 9/11 attacks. At the time I pointed out that Hitler had established most of the Nazi death camps OUTSIDE of Germany in order that they be beyond the reach of the German legal system and this was clearly Rumsfeld's template. That the same policy would later be directed against asylum seekers and refugees and even settled immigrants the moment that immigration was framed as a problem category by the new rules of the manufacture of consent, and thus by the new fascism was only a matter of time. I believe Australia was the first nominally democratic country to go down this route and was eagerly copied by Britain's Suella Braverman, the fascist Home Secretary in Rishi Sunak's lame duck Tory government. At the time and subsequently, Kier Starmer's counterfiet Labour leadership and subsequent continuity Tory government, and Yvette Cooper in particular, opposed the grotesque Rwanda scheme purely on the grounds that "the numbers didn't add up." This didn't stop Scab Starmer, who has taken his lead on immigration from the fascists of Reform UK from looking to the fascist government of Georgia Meloni in Italy and its grotesque re-interpretation of the anti-Mafia laws (which were effective in a completely different context) as a role model and template for dealing with the immigration issue citing Albania as a possible "safe country" to which asylum seekers can be deported. All Trump has done is to strip this latent fascist policy of all mystification and semblance of humanity and render manifest its rotten content as yet another final solution. The photo opportunity in which a member of Trump's government, in fascist MAGA baseball cap, posed in front of human beings in small cages, due to be deported to the Project 2025 Hell Hole that is El Salvadore, spoke volumes and the arrest of a Judge shows where all this is headed. Meanwhile, such is Starmer's commitment to a fascist inspired racist immigration policy, alongside discredited economic policies of austerity and neo-liberalism, that he'd rather suck the cock of Adolf Hitler's stunt double in the White House and accept the terms of a trade deal with Trump's fascist US (tax breaks to big tech, privatise the NHS, extend the purge of the public sector by DOGE to the UK) than rejoin the Customs Union and accept free movement of people within Europe.

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Frank Spengler's avatar

Excellent piece! This should be required reading by all Trump Administrators and Trump acolytes. They can all use the education in one of the Constitution's most important basic rights. Well done!

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