Propaganda Primes for Cruelty

Reading "The Message" by Ta-Nehisi Coates, there is a passage I'd like to share with you:

When I was young, I felt the physical weight of race constantly. We had less. Our lives were more violent. And whether by genes, culture, or divine judgment, this was said to be our fault. The only tool to escape this damnation — for a lucky few — was school. Later I went out into the world and saw the other side, those who allegedly, by genes, culture, or divine judgment, had more but—as I came to understand— knew less. These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie.

They had seen more of the world than I had, but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country's history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall.

James Baldwin comes to mind regarding what would it mean to let go of hate:

I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.

I'm not surprised that there are some people cheering for mass deportations and being very okay with separating children from their families. Those folks who are shrugging at that cruelty have not been personally affected by any those children or families.

And when they see those eyes through cages, or a little girl crying because her dad and mom are taken away from her, they won't see cruelty. They will be very smug and proud of themselves for extracting pain from immigrants. They will say to themselves, "shouldn't have crossed the border illegally," as casually as a mid-40's suburb dad talking about his medical procedure over the weekend. They will smile and casually feel good about a little boy at their elementary school finding out their parents are gone and no one is there to pick them up.

That tariff that Trump wants to place on everything will make their Starbucks coffee lattes far more expensive. Coffee cannot be grown in the States. "It will be worth it," they will say. Mass deportations will make your groceries more expensive. Who is going to pick your food? Who is going to slaughter your meat? Their great propagandist, Tucker Carlson, will scrunch his eye brows forward and plainly tell them, "We have to do this. The Nation cannot survive if we don't do this. We are facing the greatest existential threat to the country, ever." People will nod in agreement. "We have to do this."

Cruelty is the point.

Germans knew what was going on when the Night of Broken Glass happened. They knew the Nazis ordered firemen not to put out the flames on Jewish synagogues. Some were gleeful in that cruelty. Many remained silent, ignored it entirely, or quietly said to themselves, "the Nation will be better without them".

I'm telling you this because when those folks share their rationalizations of said cruelty, you will feel angry. "Don't they know better? Didn't we go through this in the first Trump term? How could you be okay with this?" I want you to know that propaganda has a powerful effect on the stories people tell themselves to feel good about cruel things. People need to feel they are a hero in their own stories. It is a way to avoid feeling the pain underneath the hate.

Let us hope, it will roil enough people to say "We didn't elect you to create a Gestapo. We wanted cheaper eggs. Not child separation." Their cruelty will change them for the worse.