“Men are driven by two principal impulses, either by love or by fear” —Niccolo Machiavelli Those driven by the will to dominate seek to control others. The easiest, quickest way to control others is with fear.
Love is difficult to evoke and maintain. Fear is easy to evoke and persists. Machiavelli’s advice to men driven to dominate—still widely consulted— is to rule with fear unless one is universally loved.
To use fear to gain control, every bully needs to create an enemy. History is full of examples. For Nazis, it was the Jews. For communists (think Soviet and Chinese), it was party dissenters. For theocracies and states merged with religion, it was “heretic” dissenters. For Europeans, it was native peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. For the enslavers in the American South, it was “uppity” Negroes. Later, for white men, it was any prosperous Black person.
Today in America, it’s immigrants.
Propaganda can paint any enemy as subhuman, fit only to be ruled or eliminated like vermin. When power is used with a will to control, manufacturing an enemy is a sure way to begin. This is the situation non-white immigrants now face in the USA.
Inevitably, unless the rest of us rally around them as our friends, family, workers, and neighbors, some of “us” will be next. As events in Nazi Germany demonstrate, a bully who is successful in dominating one victim doesn’t stop with one.
Like the Jews in Germany, immigrants in America are not to be feared. They are integral to our communities. Germans looted their Jewish neighbors, but they also suffered the loss of all that the Jews had contributed. Today’s immigrants to the USA would be sorely missed. They are builders, not takers. In 2022, eleven million undocumented immigrants paid $97 billion in taxes (https://itep. org/undocumented-immigrantstaxes- 2024). Such immigrants also pay into Social Security but receive no benefits, nor are they eligible for Medicare.
President Trump promised to exile criminal invaders. Instead, masked men in unmarked cars are now acting more like gestapo than American ICE agents. At the President’s behest, they are ignoring the constitutional right of anyone physically located in this country to due process.
Due process means that the government cannot seize you without charges and send you to an undisclosed destination for an unknown length of time. Losing due process is a national nightmare that should wake all of us up screaming.
If history is any guide, the freedom to read, speak, and congregate will be next. History suggests that our best chance to rally around our constitutional rights is right now.