CECOT Is The 21st Century Update of Auschwitz - Resist Accordingly

There were two narrative themes echoing throughout the networks of resistance formed within the Nazi ghetto system of Poland - one was naively optimistic and the other apocalyptically dark. Some victims believed that Nazi secrecy had prevented the Allies from attempting to rescue the doomed souls destined for slaughter. Witold Pilecki, a Polish partisan, bravely sneaked into Auschwitz with the goal of witnessing and informing "the world" about Nazism's murderous program. Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler escaped from the same death camp with the aspiration to expose Nazi crimes to a seemingly oblivious global community.

Kurt Gerstein, a member of "The Confessing Church" infiltrated the very core of the Nazi death machinery. Gerstein was the inspiration for Rolf Hochhuth's play, "The Deputy," that depicted a fictionalized meeting between Gerstein and Pope Pius XII. Gerstein never met the pope, but he did speak to the Swedish Consulate and other foreign officials about his first hand observations of gassings at the Belzec and Treblinka death camps. He delivered Zyklon B to Auschwitz, bizarrely participating in, and exposing atrocities in a seemingly tormenting and confused internal drama of guilt and redemption. Gerstein gave himself up to French authorities at the conclusion of the war, and allegedly took his own life. He remains a shadowy, often romanticized historical figure.

Ghetto diarists like Emanuel Ringelblum left accounts of life in Nazi captivity concealed in buried, metal milk containers, not to summon rescuers, but to leave a vivid, detailed, methodical record of Nazi crimes and Jewish suffering. These diarists imagined a post apocalyptic world in which the murdered victims had been erased, not merely in the most literal sense, but in the realm of historical memory.

It has become rather a cliche that history repeats itself but the ghosts of Treblinka, Belzec and Auschwitz have suddenly cast their reflections upon a former banana republic that has traded fruit plantations for death camps. Trump's evolving nightmare features outsourced mass murder utilizing CECOT Prison (the flagship human warehouse of death in a vast conglomeration of prisons in El Salvador). CECOT allows ICE to offshore crimes against humanity conducted against alleged Venezuelan gang members, campus protesters and, potentially, ordinary US citizens that run afoul of the US fascist regime. Recent satellite images have presented a grainy Rorschach blot suggesting, but not definitively so, piles of stacked bodies resting on blood soaked ground. The opaque photos have inspired a somewhat muted round of cautious anxiety - we scarcely retain the capacity to be horrified. Some pundits have speculatively upgraded CECOT from a mere gulag to a death camp, while others call for restraint until better images, or corroborating testimony emerges.

We deceive ourselves to assume that crimes against humanity can be concealed, or that confirming shadowy acts of "official" violence will unleash a moral firestorm of outrage. The Warsaw Ghetto diarists had no way of knowing the true scope of public understanding regarding the terrible crimes destroying their communities. Wehrmacht soldiers penned letters to wives and lovers detailing the layers of cruelty they had witnessed with inescapable accuracy. Perpetrators took photos of piles of corpses and brashly displayed them for people back home. Secrecy around atrocities may be little more than an atavistic nod to feeble moral remnants that no longer serve to restrain the worst human impulses. Anyone who cared to know could have accurately imagined, in broad strokes, if not fine details, what happened to Europe's Jews in real time. Likewise, the role that CECOT Prison plays in our understanding of US violent intentions hardly requires confirming satellite data to prove that it is a death camp. We know that no one ever is released from CECOT, that people interned there receive no due process and that the incarcerated are crammed into crowded cells like factory processed chickens with no medical care, no bedding, no exercise, no sunlight and no hope. Anyone failing to see this as a death camp has checked their imagination at the door.

If you speculate about the life expectancy of people shoved into crowded cages - up to 80 to a cell - you might conclude that epidemics, anxiety, sleeplessness, fights, depression, medical neglect and despair would create a rolling conveyor belt of premature mortality. At CECOT there may be no gas chambers, scaffolds, electric chairs or lethal injections - this is an elegant, minimalist death camp - the technicians of death merely deploy the absence of meaning, routine, organization or even time itself. Can clocks and calendars be found in CECOT? There is no slave labor, no work shifts, no exploitation for production and profit. You might imagine that those confined there, so many widgets of death, beg their peers to strangle them or fatally beat them to death in order to shorten the torture.

Genocide is a peculiar social event that tiptoes in the strange spaces between flamboyant public theater and secrecy. Politicians loudly build their reputations upon their ability to dehumanize their victims and present fearsome caricatures that hypnotically beguile their followers. It becomes, impossible to not know of the murderous intent toward sub-human "vermin," "poisoners of the blood," "murderers and rapists," and yet public knowledge of political violence scatters into a rainbow of possibilities while passing through the prism of media and propaganda. Victims of persecution cannot be saved with mere transparency. Secrecy may not even be needed to sustain political violence.

Much of the public eagerly devours specious rationalizations for crimes against humanity. Vengeance has become a notable entertainment commodity, with YouTube shorts offering a relentless progression of snippets showing bullies getting their skulls bashed in. The tattooed, shirtless, dark skinned people confined to CECOT and photographed for mass display have become grist for a shadow-play - the time worn American bromides about just violence, cops and criminals, cowboys and Indians, Wyatt Earp and the Clanton gang - that gird the subconscious foundations of CECOT. This is the pornography of revenge - mass death intended to raise national levels of dopamine. The Tattooed men displayed like zoo animals at CECOT are (so we are told with perseverative certainty) gangsters, murderers, barely human tormentors of innocent Salvadorans. There are many other prisons in El Salvador that are not geared for theatrical tourism, and their victims are completely invisible. Recall that the fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising had been labelled by Nazi General Jürgen Stroop as “bandits.” Genocide begins as theater and persists as a product of bureaucratic structures and narrative habit.

Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, in a recent Guardian piece, have labeled MAGA as embracing "end times fascism." They see Trump's movement as an admixture of religious rapture and climate catastrophe, an expectation of accelerationist environmental collapse spearheaded by deliberate corporate profit seeking and government deregulation. As Klein and Taylor see it:

"The governing ideology of the far right in our age of escalating disasters has become a monstrous, supremacist survivalism."

These authors differentiate between the Nazi vision of an endgame - in which a post genocidal world of Aryan hegemony would reward the racially superior masses with an idyllic, agrarian utopia - and the MAGA end times, enjoyed by a tiny number of billionaire survivalists hunkered in underground bunkers or journeying to Elon Musk's Martian settlements. Everyone else dies in the story's conclusion. The MAGA masses with their red caps have vanished in a biblical apocalypse.

Klein and Taylor have written a provocative piece about the billionaire, survivalist mindset, but they have telescoped the narrative too far into the future. Even a "drill baby drill" policy of collective suicide will allow earthly systems to nominally linger for decades - Trump, and even Musk, will not live to witness the rapture. Rather, if US residents and global powers fail to dispose of Trump, we will first suffer through a more conventional genocide with CECOT as the prototype for mass destruction.

When Trump whispered to Nayib Bukele (Salvadoran fascist strongman) on a hot mike that El Salvador must build more prisons, he showed himself to be a visionary of extermination. Climate experts have predicted that environmental ruin in the global south will create a billion refugees within the coming two decades. These starving, desperate souls will be gathering at the borders of industrial nations and it is highly unlikely that politicians ruling over wealthy areas will opt to share shrinking resources. Rather, an extensive system of offshored extermination centers will likely proliferate - facilities that double as backdrops for Kristi Noem's photo-Op shoots as they eliminate the objects of MAGA ire.

CECOT can kill people without the messy need for Einsatzgruppen or industrial crematoria. People will die via bureaucratic patience. MAGA exterminationist tactics need not hurry death along as the Nazis did. The task of "disappearing" climate refugees has no finality and we don't require Witold Pilecki to confirm our suspicions. Climate refugees will be knocking on the door until mass extinction claims them all. The grainy satellite photos are also superfluous. Genocide requires no secrecy - it occurs in plain sight and will gather momentum if MAGA continues to reign. There is, however, a new wrinkle - "Anonymous," a group of politically radical hackers has succeeded in breaching ICE security:

"Hackers targeted one of the airlines the Trump administration is using as part of its deportation efforts, stealing flight records and passenger manifests of all of its flights, including those for deportation, according to a new report.

The hackers targeted GlobalX Air, the charter company that facilitated the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador, and shared the data with 404 Media and other journalists. The information revealed who exactly has been deported on GlobalX flights, when and to where."

It may well be that sabotage of MAGA genocidal aspirations will escalate going forward. The intensity of the resistance will be directly proportional to the anxiety of those with the wherewithal to push back. Resistance and genocide are both driven by narrative force. We can start with basic honesty - CECOT is a death camp. Resistance will take the shape dictated by the underlying story.