By Bill Watanabe
In the fairytale movie “The Princess Bride,” the evil king has a gang of thugs called “The Brute Squad” whose job it was to intimidate the local citizenry to obey the king. Among the Brute Squad in a classic movie role was Andre the Giant, who stood 7’4” tall and weighed over 500 pounds. He had a kind heart but was not very smart and just doing his job beating people up.
During the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany, Hitler unleashed the “Brownshirts,” another version of the Brute Squad, whose job it was to arrest or beat-up political opponents of the Nazi party and to intimidate the German population into silence and acquiescence. After the Nazis gained total power came the Gestapo, the secret police, the concentration camps and finally the death camps.
We now have our own American-style Brute Squad or Brownshirts on our soil, sponsored and funded by the administration to the tune of multi-billions of dollars. It has become a huge paramilitary force overflowing with money to build incarceration centers that can detain tens of thousands of people – many, perhaps most, held without any trial or due process. (While this sounds familiar to the JA experience in 1942, at least there was a real war taking place, instigating war hysteria).
These American Brownshirts are masked, carry military weapons, ride in tanks and personnel carriers, and whisk people off the streets or from public gathering places, even from schools and churches.
We now have a president whom the Supreme Court has ruled can do anything he wants without being held accountable as long as he is acting in an official capacity; he can ignore the laws, the Congress, the courts, even the Supreme Court itself! The American Brownshirts can act without any regard for people’s rights or well-being because they are being led by a person who is now above the law.
The administration sent ICE agents, the Border Patrol, the National Guard and even the Marines to Los Angeles on the false premise that Los Angeles was overrun with criminals; the head of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, claimed that this intervention saved L.A. from being destroyed, but those of us who live here know this is a blatant and manufactured lie.
A large group of administration Brownshirt thugs invaded Little Tokyo recently to arrest a single delivery person (I assume based on his physical appearance). This has nothing to do with making our community safer or arresting criminals and gang members, but serves primarily to intimidate and create fear and division amongst the masses.
How do we know our democracy is being dismantled and tyranny is being imposed? The appearance of our American-style Brownshirts should be a red line in the sand, our Rubicon, that has been crossed. Vigilance and action are required from all of us to stand firm.
Bill Watanabe writes from Silverlake near Downtown Los Angeles and can be contacted at ybwatanabe@gmail.com. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of The Rafu Shimpo.