In America, first they came for the women …

In Germany, first they came for the women …

In Pastor Niemoller’s famous quote, the Nazis came first for the communists, and he didn’t speak up because he wasn’t a communist. I’m not one to disagree with Pastor Niemoller, and I’m not an expert on the chronology of Nazi persecution, but he left out several groups. Very early in Hitler’s reign, the Nazis targeted women, and specifically women’s reproductive rights. So when our new regime sets out to defund Planned Parenthood[i] before Trump is even inaugurated, warning bells start clanging loudly in my head.

In May 1933, just after taking power, the Nazis updated a law banning abortions, including punishments for the woman and her doctor. (In an interview with Chris Matthews last summer, Trump advocated something similar.[ii]) The Nazis also expanded the law to include prison sentences for anyone who advertised abortion services or recommended an abortion.  A few months later, the Nazis went on to pass a law authorizing forced sterilizations of those deemed “unfit.” They also passed laws which offered special loans to newlyweds if the women gave up their jobs to dedicate themselves to being wives and mothers, and later celebrated Mother’s Day as a national holiday and created a special award for women who had more than four children.[iii] Other laws marginalized single women as wards of the state, banned all women from the professions and drastically limited opportunities for women in higher education. The Nazis even attempted to influence clothing and hairstyles to encourage femininity.[iv]

Forcing Aryan women to reproduce and banning non-Aryan women from reproducing both fit into Hitler’s view of racial engineering. His other policies regarding women can also be “understood” in the general framework of his master plan. In similar ways we can “understand” China’s one-child policy in the face of over population, and we can “understand” pro-reproductive policies in France after the devastation of World War I.

But what about our own country? In the United States today, what is the interest of the state in controlling reproduction? Seriously … think about it. Don’t get distracted by the false narratives of the culture wars. Why should the government of the United States be interested in controlling reproduction?

I don’t have the answer, and my speculation leads down some admittedly crazy roads. We live in a world which is overpopulated, so it would make sense to discourage reproduction. We live in a country in which there are more people than jobs, in which resources are already stretched, so it would make sense to discourage reproduction ... IF you want everyone to be properly housed, fed, educated, and able to find employment.

So to have a government which is actively trying to limit access to not only abortion, but also birth control and sex ed? That is counterintuitive. Unless you want that overpopulation. Unless you want a working class which is struggling just to survive. Unless your goal is to keep people so desperate, to make their lives so tenuous, that they will do whatever you want just to live, just to keep their families alive.

Of course, if that’s what you want, you would also want to eliminate the minimum wage; reduce the power of labor unions; destroy the social safety net (unemployment, social security, food stamps, etc.); defund public education; and probably build a wall to keep people from escaping.

But first, you’d come for the women ….

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[i] http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/01/republicans-confirm-planned-parenthood-will-lose-funding.html

[ii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1Jpoecf0xY

[iii] J. Llewellyn et al, “Women in Nazi Germany”, Alpha History, accessed Jan. 9, 2017, http://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/women-in-nazi-germany/.

[iv] Ibid.

 

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall"

In case you don’t recognize the title, it’s the first line of Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall.” In a tenth-grade English class, I was quizzed on the first and last lines of the poem. I did not remember them for the quiz, but have not forgotten since. It ends with “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Frost’s poem keeps coming back to me as I hear more and more about Donald Trump’s proposed wall. Now all along he has said two things: 1) that he would build a wall along our southern border and 2) that he would force Mexico to pay for it.

Trump has now, of course, co-opted the name “Great Wall” for it, while he’s also admitted that it may be more fence than wall, and American taxpayers will have to pay for it. To be clear, that means you and me, because Trump and his super-rich buddies barely pay taxes and he’s already planning bigger tax cuts for them, so we get to pay extra.

But lost in this was another announcement about the wall, and that was that there might be a northern wall as well, apparently to protect us from big, bad Canada. Now facts are regularly lost in this hype about a wall, including the fact that illegal immigration from Mexico is down considerably in the last eight years, and that the 9/11 terrorists entered the country legally through Canada. So it’s unclear what, exactly, this wall is supposed to do aside from adding to our national debt.

That’s where Frost’s poem comes in, because the message in the poem is actually the opposite of that last line. Good fences do not make good neighbors. Frost asks his neighbor why they worry about mending the stone wall, saying:

“Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
And to whom I was like to give offense.”

The frightening truth is that Trump (and/or Putin) may be more concerned with walling us in than in walling anyone else out. Human rights scholars acknowledge that one of the first signs of trouble under totalitarian regimes is the restriction of freedom of movement. Dictatorships cannot survive if everyone is allowed to leave the country at will. That’s why the United States was so opposed to the Berlin Wall, why Ronald Reagan so famously demanded “Tear down this wall,” why freedom-lovers the world over celebrated its demise. It’s why Castro wanted to keep people from fleeing Cuba, why Jews were restricted to the Warsaw ghetto. Our own history includes restriction of freedom of movement in the form of Indian Reservations, Internment Camps, and, of course, slavery.

So all of this talk about a wall is scary. But even scarier is the current proposal in Congress to defund the United Nations. Since 1948, the United Nations has, through its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserted that freedom of movement, including the right to leave your own country, is a fundamental human right. And right now Donald Trump and members of Congress are threatening to withdraw financial support. To do so would cripple the United Nations, and its ability to serve as a watchdog over our rights.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall? It’s called freedom. Freedom doesn’t love a wall. And neither should we.

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