America’s Chilling Reformation: Are We Now an Occupied Nation?

As the ICE Man Cometh, all that is not resistance is collaboration

By Dan Luzadder

There was no crime scene tape in Texas when immigration agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo this month in Houston, nor was there a local homicide investigation in Maine when Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was gunned down by ICE in cold blood. It raises a new and frightening question: are we now an occupied nation?

 Even the Hollywood left-leaners who run Turner Classic Movies seem to address this question recently as they dabble in political theatre, scheduling some socially-anxious black and whites from the days when most Americans agreed fascism was a bad idea, and Hitlerian notions of brutal repression were worth fighting and dying over.

The recent airings of “This Land is Mine” stands out. Directed by Jean Renoir, it was written by Nicholas Dudley, who legend has it crafted all of the 1943 screenplay at night, “under lamplight.” Given the subject and its depiction of freedom’s demise – even  before the horrors of Holocaust were widely known –  it seems appropriate that Dudley would feel safest penning his depictions in the dark, cloaked in the aura of ‘underground resistance’ that his characters so aptly illustrate

That was long ago. But his characters have doppelgangers lurking today at the fringes of our freedom, making for an ominous rerun of this cinema veritas, demonstrating the real price of Faustian bargains with jackbooted marauders.

Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement – the new ICE Man – has created a new police state, drawn from untrained and arrogant zealots of racial oppression, cloaked in masks and pseudo-military gear, racing recklessly through our streets in unmarked cars, exercising unconstitutional police powers, engaging with impunity and immunity in the harassment, shooting and killing our own citizens and other innocent people on American streets.

 It leads to vital questions: Is ICE the gestapo of Renoir’s warnings? Is America now an ‘occupied’ nation?

And, does such ‘occupation,’ with its parallels to fascist tyranny depicted in This Land is Mine, survive only because of witting and unwitting collaboration by those among us who have become the enemy of the democratic ideals on which the country was founded?

History’s Rhymes

As it was in Germany in the 1930s, as it has existed in totalitarian regimes over time, the essential element of such tyranny is propaganda that persuades us to rationalize, justify, even condone such illegal, unethical, unconstitutional and extra-judicial proceedings.

We are not innocent bystanders when we allow – and the term is correct – the thugs of ICE to continue to occupy our streets, under the auspice of the Trumpian brooming of supposedly violent criminals. In fact, it is predominately the tired and poor, yearning to breathe free, who are the victims of this repression. And by remaining silent, we are setting the stage for the kind of denouement we deserve.

Renoir’s film revolves around the occupation of a fictional town in Europe by the Nazis. It  details how citizen cooperation with their occupiers, in the interest of safe streets and under the threat of murder and torture of dissents, destroys freedom of thought and action, leads to suppression of justice, and in the end reveals that brutal evil is never deterred by collaboration.

Charles Laughton plays a passive school teacher who acquiesces to Nazi demands that unacceptable pages in textbooks be torn out. He throws the pages his students remove into a stove. Maureen O’Hara, a fellow teacher, tears out the pages as instructed, but saves them, in hopes they will – at the end of occupation – be pasted back into the books.

The little things matter. And over time, Laughton’s character becomes radicalized by events that turn his cowardice to courage as he stands up to the Nazi overlords and speaks the truth openly in public – at the cost of his life

Propagating Propaganda 

In the days when RKO made This Land is Mine, American censors reviewed all films being produced in Hollywood for acceptable wartime narratives, to ensure that the stories they were telling served the “interests” of America democracy – or more pointedly the interests of the elites of a capitalist empire that had its own ideas about what political independence and the commonweal was all about.

In the U.S., the American newspaper entrepreneur Nelson Poynter, himself a protagonist in the controversies of manipulation of the American press, from WWII on into the 1980s, was one of those censors, along with his friend Lowell Mellett, both of whom had deep ties to Indiana. They shared a history of subversion of a truly free and independent Fourth Estate, in ways largely unknown to the public, shaping ideas and perspectives for the benefit of racial and economic elitism, while adhering to ‘some’ of the constitutional ideas of democratic freedoms – just not all.

Through their promotion of, or restrictions on, film messages, and by their politically-driven influence over the American media, they managed to reverse perspectives of the American public from support for Russia as any ally during WWII, to making the Soviet Union our deepest enemy of the Cold War. Stories told in those frames of film embed in the consciousness of this free nation the idea that the evil empire posed an existential threat to the world, and so could never again be an ally in efforts to establish world peace, and personal liberties.

The story behind all that is unsettling when the truth of it is told, though what sometimes emerged, despite those external controls over writers and directors and their free exchange of ideas, were liberal perspectives on peace and freedom – and on legitimate resistance to the tyranny represented by the murderous regime of the Third Reich. So says Renoir’s film, and TCM’s airing of it.

As This Land is Mine unfolds in its fictional drama, it traces the evolution of its characters toward their realization that appeasement – hoping for the safest outcome by failing to challenge their oppressors, by trusting that the fascist promises of security and peace were  reasonable tradeoffs for the loss of individual liberty – leads instead to loved and respected neighbors being shot dead in the streets.

Its subtext speaks to the self-delusion unfolding now over the dystopia of Trump-world.

The Big Chill

Eugene O’Neil, in his famed play The Iceman Cometh, addresses a similar idea, that the truths we often hold to be self-evident also subscribe to a certain self-delusion, adhering to the notion that illusion is necessary to cope with the realities of  the world, to make sense of the day to day, to survive physically and psychologically.

But these ideas collide – since they are not fictional or mythic perspectives but real and palpable – and their collision is the inevitable result of the Ice Man that cometh now.

And it cometh. Free elections are next.

When the occupation of America is complete, freedom’s demise will become a footnote to the kind of history that the supporters of Trump’s criminal empire have in mind. They are making their own movie.

And when the Trumpers say “This Land is Mine,” they are not talking about the unifying democracy of people whose common goal is freedom, liberty and equality. They are talking about the opposite.

By keeping still, we dishonor those who fought, and died for our freedoms, and are fighting and dying even now on American streets. Will the grass roots of democracy resist, as did the patriots Woody Guthrie described when he sang, ‘…this land is your land.’

Or will we be collaborators?

Dan Luzadder is an American journalist and author whose lengthy newspaper career began as a teenage police reporter amid the hagiographic newsroom characters of the last days of linotypes.  He has written for major newspapers including the New York Daily News and the New York Times, has shared a Pulitzer Prize for general local reporting, and won an American Bar Association public service award for exposing corruption in federal courts. He is the author of two books, The Manchurian Journalist, and Street Talk. He currently resides in Denver, Colorado.