Luthier Mark

SUBLIME CINEMA #243 - ERASERHEAD

Hey so remember Anne Frank? The Jewish young girl who hid in an attic and was killed by the Nazis? The emblematic person we think of when we think of victims of the Holocaust? 

She did not die in a gas chamber or in a death camp. She died in a ‘temporary’ detention center for the mass deportations which preceded the death camps. She was in that camp because a patriotic neighbor ratted her out to the German deportation force. She died, not of a bullet to the back of the head or choking on gas, but of typhus. She contracted typhus because the Nazis couldn’t realistically deport people at the rate they wanted to, because before the death camps their infrastructure couldn’t handle the sudden influx of ethnic minorities they had decided to imprison, and because they didn’t care about the consequences of that so their deportation detention centers were unhygienic and prisoners were underfed and overcrowded. 

And she was picked up by the deportation force not because she was an illegal citizen but because, just like the US is doing with asylum seekers, she was part of a formerly recognized class of citizens who were legally redefined to lack citizenship by a new administration. 

Anne Frank is exactly like the children who have already died in the United State’s detention camps. Exactly. Down to the very last detail. There. Is. Not. A. Single. Difference. 

At a rally in North Carolina on Wednesday night, Trump lashed out at Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), doubling down on the racist tweets he sent earlier this week, and the crowd began chanting “Send her back!”⁠⁠