PLEEEZE READ:
The Emergency is Now
By Siri Hustvedt
Jan 27
Early in the Nazi occupation of Norway, my mother joined a protest. She and a group of students from the gymnasium they attended sang protest songs outside the houses of known Nazi sympathizers. Later, after she was arrested, she was given a choice to pay a fine or go to jail for nine days. She chose jail. Her jailer was a Norwegian Nazi. My mother was eighteen years old when she served her sentence. She always said that only a few months later, no one dreamed of organizing an open protest. All opposition went underground.
In Minneapolis, forty-five minutes by car from my hometown, Northfield, Minnesota, ICE is terrorizing the city. While some people are more vulnerable than others—anyone who is Black or Brown or speaks with an accent—no one is safe. Children have been taken. ICE is threatening schools. Every person who leaves their house is afraid of being stopped. ICE has been given license to kill people, as the Vice President said, with “absolute immunity.”
Brutality is the language of authoritarianism. Paramilitary groups enforced state power in fascist countries in the 20th century. The RSS in India is a paramilitary force that cultivated close relations with European fascism and is now allied with Modi. ICE is the paramilitary enforcer of Trump 2. Comparisons to the Brown and Black Shirts are not exaggerated or extreme. The parallels between what happened in Europe in the 20th century and what is happening in the United States now are real and frightening.
While the tech industry, banks, law firms, universities, corporations and far too many Democrats in Congress have rolled over to the new regime, ordinary people are pushing back. Continued pressure on government representatives and senators is vital, but it is not enough. Mass, noisy but peaceful protest, walkouts, strikes, and aid to people in danger of being deported, fired, silenced, or murdered is the way forward. The Trump regime wants violence from protesters. The ICE mission in cities is intended to foment violence that can then be used for media propaganda to scream insurrection and invoke the Insurrection Act. A single viral video of a single violent encounter is enough. Non-violence is crucial to the resistance because it has genuine power. It will increase our numbers.
My father, who was born in a log house in Minnesota in 1922, liked the word “neighborly.” Neighbors in the small, rural Norwegian American community where he grew up helped one another with farm work, barn raising, canning, and quilting. They fed the grieving and tended to the ill among them. Neighborliness runs deep in Minnesota. I see it now in the Minneapolis resistance. People are dropping off groceries to those who can’t leave their houses. They are monitoring ICE movements. They are filming and bearing witness to cruelty. They are protecting their neighbors.
No one can predict with any precision what will happen next or how many more people will die, but it is time for those who care about human rights to mobilize now because this is an emergency. If the republic isn’t lost already, it is clearly in its death throes.
It is time to end delusional talk of “Is this a constitutional crisis?” and hand wringing about “polarization.” We are way beyond that. When the Supreme Court gave broad immunity to a president for “official acts,” it effectively undermined the U.S. constitution and created a crisis that many in media treated as just another ruling to be analyzed. We are living in a country that fought a civil war over slavery. The current administration wants to institutes a white, Christian nationalist, autocratic state. We are polarized for ETHICAL reasons.
Hate speech and racist, misogynistic, xenophobic propaganda does not wait for a considered answer from the people it has targeted as “low IQ,” “criminals” from “shithole countries,” and “radical left lunatics.” ICE is not occupying the streets of U.S. cities, threatening, deporting, and killing people with whom they hope to have a friendly chat to reduce “polarization.”
Memory is important, historical memory of the genocide of tribal peoples, of slavery, Jim Crow, women’s suffrage and women’s liberation, the Civil Rights, anti-war, LBGTQ and disability rights movements. Personal memory also counts. I am remembering my parents. My left-wing father’s evocation of neighborliness and my mother’s decision to go to jail. It is painful to say, but I am glad neither of them lived to see Trump in his second incarnation.
The Nazi party in Norway, led by the notorious Quisling (whose name has come to mean traitor in English), welcomed the invasion of the country. I am not arguing that Norway under occupation is the same as ICE occupying U.S. cities now, but the moral choice between accepting fascism and opposing it is the same. The choice for my young mother then and for many Norwegians was stark: collaboration or resistance. That is the choice we are facing now.
Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poetry, three collections of essays, a work of non-fiction, and six novels, including the international bestsellers What I Loved and The Summer Without Men. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won The Los Angeles Book Prize for fiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. She has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weil Cornell Medical College in New York. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.
Bill Ayers 