ICE isn’t just like the Gestapo. They’re closer to slave catchers. Once that clicks, a lot of people get real uncomfortable, real fast. Every time ICE comes up, someone reaches for that Gestapo comparison. I get why they do it — raids in the middle of the night, neighbours disappearing, families gone before breakfast.
That’s the kind of terror that people were taught to recognise, as long as it happened to people that look like them. But that comparison is doing a whole lot of emotional work that it just doesn’t deserve. Because structurally, historically, ICE does not move like the Gestapo.
They move like slave patrols. The reason nobody wants to say that out loud is because slave patrols aren’t foreign. They’re not exotic, they’re not evil, elsewhere. They’re American, home-grown.
Slave patrols were legal, state funded, community supported. Their job was simple: Stop people, demand proof, and decide — on site — who belonged and who didn’t. No crime required, no trial, no explanation. Just papers, accent, skin, and presence. That’s it. That’s the blueprint. They weren’t hunting ideology, they weren’t fighting enemies of the state. They were enforcing status.
Who’s allowed to move? Who was allowed to stay? Who could be taken and who can be returned? And here’s the part people really don’t want to sit with: Slave patrols are the history that a lot of white families don’t talk about because it’s not abstract, it’s not distant, and it doesn’t end with: „and the bad guys lost“.
It sounds like something someone’s great-great-grandfather may have done on a Tuesday afternoon. So, people grab the Gestapo instead, because the Gestapo says: „That could never be us“. Slave patrols: „This is exactly us“. The Gestapo comparison lets you condemn terror without interrogating lineage.
Slave patrols, however, force you to admit that American terror didn’t need a dictator. It needed law, it needed paperwork, it needed permission, it needed neighbours that said: „Well, that’s just how this works“.
That’s why ICE feels so familiar to some and shocking to others. Because some of us recognise the pattern immediately: —civil enforcement, administrative power, „we’re just enforcing the law“, you know.
Paperwork treated like morality, and families treated like inventory. Different uniforms, different century, same logic. That’s why the Gestapo comparison keeps circulating. Because it centres fear, once it touches people that look like the ones telling the story. Slave patrols force a deeper realisation, right?
What if the terror wasn’t imported? What if it was foundational? What if it never actually ended, it just learned a new language? ICE is not an accident, it’s not a deviation, and it isn’t new. It’s old power doing what it’s always done, just with updated branding and better PR. Once you see that, yeah that’s the „Oh shit!“ moment.
Ashley Barron, US American Commentator
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
Elie Wiesel
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.
Fr. Richard Rohr
For reasons not exactly clear to me now, German became one of my subjects when, at age twelve, I began Secondary School (High School). It was probably influenced by the fact that Ireland had just voted to join the EEC (now EU), and many people saw great promise in closer relations to the economic powerhouse of Europe, West Germany.
I liked German from the beginning. For starters, we had a great teacher. Hillary Moran was a petite woman, freshly qualified as a teacher, who took no nonsense from the brats at this all-boys Jesuit school, boys who were beginning to exhibit the first effects of testosterone surges on their banter and behaviour.
Our teacher was calm, stern, and had a very structured approach to a very clearly structured language.
A side effect of learning a language — another window on the world — is the familiarisation with the culture and history of the country or countries where the language originated. Among other things, the dark shadow of the Shoah, the holocaust, began to permeate my conscious awareness. It was a sobering realisation that such brutal evil, as I then understood it, could manifest in human behaviour.
I remember thinking, in those early teenage years, that being a German in the late 20th century must be the worst fate of all. I felt for the poor children and children’s children of both the perpetrators and victims of this most abominable crime of modern history.
Fast forward fifty years. I have been living in Germany for many decades now. My arrival was preceded by the NBC mini-series on the Holocaust which had been broadcast on German TV over four consecutive nights in January 1979 and coincided with public interest in the third instalment of the Majdanek trials, the longest Nazi war crimes trial in history, spanning over 30 years.
Members of the main government party, the Social Democrats, had seen the original — English language — NBC series some months earlier and urged its broadcast in Germany, dubbed in German, of course.
Broadcast on WDR State TV, the viewership was estimated to have comprised up to 15 million households or 20 million people, approximately 50% of West Germany’s entire adult population. The public interest was „enormous“. 32% of all West German televisions tuned into the first episode, and 39% the last.
Trade union meetings were cancelled „so that people could see it, because otherwise they would disappear at nine o’clock anyway“, a spokesperson for the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) said. University seminars discussed the series. Individuals gathered to watch it together „because they would not have been able to stand it alone at home“, a pastor told the WDR journalists.
Before the first episode of Holocaust, education departments distributed brochures and organised seminars. After each episode, a companion show was aired in which a panel of historians answered viewers‘ questions by telephone. Thousands of shocked and outraged Germans called the panels. The German historian, Alf Lüdtke, wrote that the historians „could not cope“ because thousands of angry viewers asked how such acts had happened.
Despite the late broadcasting times almost half the audience of the mini-series stayed on and watched the panels, and 30,000 callers — four times the amount during similar programs in the United States — overwhelmed stations‘ telephone lines. It was a rude awakening for the German public which had successfully distracted itself from remembering, by engaging in the Wirtschaftswunder (Economic Miracle) — the frenetic rebuilding, from scratch, the once-imperious German economy which had been utterly destroyed by May 1945.
During an introductory documentary, Final Solution, that preceded the first broadcast of the series in Germany, German neo-Nazis bombed TV transmission stations in Koblenz and Münster in an effort to prevent the airing of the series.
American neo-Nazis had initially demanded that NBC cancel the series from airing (calling it „libellous“ towards German Americans) and then requested that the network give them the same primetime slots and hours to provide an „alternative“ (pro-Nazi) view of WW II. NBC ignored both demands, but after some newspapers reported on neo-Nazi claims that the violent and harrowing material of the mini-series would cause harm to young viewers, a „parental discretion advised“ warning was included before each of the four episodes.
This is the Germany I landed into for the first time in the early summer of 1979. There were other things going on too, of course. Keith Jarret had just played the Köln Concert, the recording of which has become the top-selling jazz record of all time.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show was all the rage. Wohngemeinschaft culture (communal living models, or WGs) was the default choice of many post-1968 students, joints were in continuous circulation around kitchen tables, well-paid job opportunities abounded, and „Made in West Germany“ was the hottest brand in the global economy before the term „Globalisation“ was even coined.
That deep sorrow which had first flooded my consciousness at secondary school, has stayed with me to this day. My perspective has changed, though, for several reasons.
Living and loving among the Germans has taught me that, in most respects, they are just like everybody else. When propelled by love, they can be bright, kind, funny, resourceful, conscientious, creative, and compassionate.
When driven by fear, their behaviour can be problem-orientated, cruel, ignorant, arrogant, destructive, and prone to hubris.
My personal situation has also contributed to my change in perspective. I have two wonderful Germanic-Hiberno (Hiberno-Germanic?) children, now adults starting their own families. To misappropriate Shylock’s outburst in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: „If you prick them, do they not bleed, if you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them, do they not die? And if you wrong them, shall they not revenge?“
In other words, the Germans are „a mixed bag“, like all the rest of us.
I have participated in roughly fifty Family Constellation Workshops (á la Bert Hellinger) over the decades, all of which very palpably demonstrated the effects of the generational trauma stemming from three major wars fought on European soil, and in European psyches and souls: The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 – 1871. World War I (1914 – 1918), and World War II (1939 – 1945).
This realisation led me to examine other facets of human history. The history of my own people over the past two thousand years has held centre stage in my own reflections on generational trauma and recovering. About fifteen years ago, I heard a lecture by a fellow recovering alcoholic, the psychiatrist Dr. Garrett O’Connor, entitled: „The Role of Endemic Shame in the Rise and Fall of the Celtic Tiger“.
This „Trauma with the Big T“ is eclipsed only by the „small-t Trauma“ (Gabor Maté) as in the wounds inflicted on children growing up in environments they experience as unsafe, threatening, chaotic, or even abusive.
In 2003 Garret O’Connor was appointed Chief Psychiatrist at the Betty Ford Centre in Palm Springs, California, and, in 2007, he became President of the Betty Ford Institute for Prevention, Research and Education in Addictive Disease. In this role he developed new pioneering policies and programmes for the entire family system affected by addiction.
For the final three decades of his life until his death in 2015, he examined the role of malignant shame as an emotional consequence of extreme cultural and familial trauma, focusing on the ways in which this destructive form of shame may be transmitted unconsciously to future generations. In this work he has relied upon evidence from research on the intergenerational cycles of dysfunctional behaviour in families, manifested as child abuse, alcohol, and other drug addictions, domestic violence, marital conflict, and family breakup.
In the ultimate phase of his life’s work, Dr O’Connor attempted to apply these intergenerational models of dysfunctional family behaviour to further understand the impact of culturally inherited malignant shame on larger populations such as, for example: Holocaust survivors; enslaved peoples, victims of the Native American genocidal colonisation; and, in the case of the English colonisation of Ireland, the Irish people as a whole.
Which brings me back to slave patrols. The immature ego will always project the shadow onto „the other“. As long as this form of denial is maintained, true recovery will remain beyond our reach.
The breaking through of denial is brought into motion by taking the first of the Twelve Steps, formulated in 1938 by the initial members of what was to become Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) and initially published in the so-called „Big Book“ in 1939. „We admitted that we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable“.
The focused remit of AA was very clearly stated: „To help other still suffering Alcoholics recover from alcoholism.“
Forty years after its inception, the Twelve Step movement, after a very slow start, had become a global phenomenon, with a wide variety of dedicated communities (Al Anon for family members, NA for narcotics addicts, OA for over eaters, CoDA for those suffering from relationship difficulties, etc.) with millions of members worldwide. These all follow the basic spiritual programme of the Twelve Steps, summarised as: „Trust Higher Power, Clean House, Help Others…!“
One fellowship is unique in that it is the progeny of two already existing fellowships. As such it is the only „Next Generation Twelve Step Fellowship“ in existence. This is ACA, Adult Children of Alcoholics, founded in New York in 1979, a spin-off of a spin-off of Al Anon, the „female spouse“ of AA.
While called „Adult Children of Alcoholics“ , it is intended for anybody wishing to recover from growing up in a dysfunctional family. Childhood adversity, indeed, childhood „small-t“ trauma (or Complex PTSD), is very common among those of us who grew up in such surroundings.
In the „Welcome to ACA“ section of the Big Red Book of ACA, first published twenty years ago this year, the greatly expanded remit of Twelve Step Recovery is stated as follows: „Adult Children are committed to halting the generational nature of family dysfunction for the greater good of the world“. Here we can see the evolution of a movement that has much to offer humankind!
Whether in Minneapolis, Cologne, or Belfast, victims of violence do matter and should be honoured, as do all those who suffer disadvantage and poverty („the worst form of violence“ – Gandhi) due to the inequitable nature of the societies we have created.
Standing up to corrupted power, in the form of peaceful protest and civil disobedience, is essential. „We have a moral obligation to refuse to obey unjust laws“, as Gandhi pointed out. We break them in a peaceful manner. Here it is essential for the success of the healing process to interrogate our lineage and draw aside the veil of denial, to look at the facts of centuries of injustice, and to make amends.
These outward-focused elements, however, are not the substitute for but rather should augment the core practice of human recovery, namely the essential inner work of making peace with ourselves, other human beings, and the circumstances of our lives. We each have a lot of work ahead as we manifest the awakening of our species. As a South African proverb so astutely states: „If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together!“
