Dear Friends,                                                                                                  Kill them all

At the siege of Béziers, during the Albigensian Crusade, the crusaders asked the papal legate attached to their army (something like a commissar) how they could distinguish between the heretics and the true believers. He replied: “Kill them all. God will know his own.” In the massacre that followed, 21-22 July 1209, the crusaders killed almost the entire population of the city. The Crusade was not against Saracens and Infidels, people of another faith, but against fellow Europeans, mostly French, condemned as heretics; the soldiers of the crusader army were also mostly French.

The papal legate’s words embody a view of the world that does not depend on any particular faith, all it requires is an absolute and all-powerful certainty of the difference between friend and enemy. But the absoluteness of the enmity of the enemy will often enough put friends in danger. If there’s any doubt, kill them all. So there must be another distinction: friends, yes, but then also us, those who decide, and who decide on the life and death not only of enemies, but also of friends.

You know where all this is going. ICE agents apprehended a teenager, and then realized he was not the one they were looking for. After conferring with superiors they decided to detain him anyway. Yes, not as bad as what happened to the people of Béziers, but as far as I know he is still in a detention center.

Never forget the papal legate’s words, the words of July 1209. Never imagine that those words belong to a particular faith or doctrine, or to some particular or local event – Béziers, 1209; any town USA, 2025. The words are, once and always, the words of raison d’état, the “reason of state” that supersedes all other reasoning, customary, ethical, political or religious, and that justifies the death of any person, and any number of persons.

Remembering Béziers, 21-22 July 1209, is simply to remember, right now, that what we face now has a long and ugly history, and it is the history of force, “that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing” (Simone Weil). Killing is the ultimate force. But force is the same, it is force, whether or not it kills, it can even be quite mild – forcing a child to finish its spinach – it’s still force. When masked, un-uniformed men, at night, with nothing identifying them as agents of the government, force a young woman who is not accused of any crime into a van and take her to a detention center, where she is still detained today,* that’s force.

Force is force, and that means that the mildest and the ultimate – spinach and killing – are joined to each other. Whenever force is claimed to be legitimate it opens the door to more, more forceful, force. Most parents don’t go far beyond the spinach situation. But the danger is always there, once force is allowed there’s no simple way to forbid it.

Force “turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing”, it turns a body, a someone, into a thing. How can someone, some body, be turned into a thing, a nobody, nothing? Well, I just said it, by force. So force is always the negation of some body, someone, some individual (or many).

Modern society is founded on the sanctity of the individual, the juridical person free and equal among all others. It doesn’t thereby interdict the use of force, but it allows it only in cases where there is probable cause to suspect that some person or persons have themselves used illegal force against others. (On the whole parents forcing their children to eat spinach is not seen as illegal.)

Ok, this isn’t supposed to be a treatise on force, though everyone should read The Iliad or the poem of force by Simone Weil. Nor can it be an account of the use of force, so abuse, over the historical existence of the USA.

We’re here, right now, that’s where we are (and believe me, it’s not where I want to be).

The force threatened by agents of the Trump administration, especially ICE, is always potentially deadly, not only immediately, but in the destinations to which those detained are sent. And this has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual standing of individual detainees. We have no idea at all of what those who have been deported to the Salvadoran gulag have done or not done. We have a pretty good idea that many have done nothing illegal; it is entirely possible that every one of them was wrongly deported; at least it is clear that none were accorded the right of due process. The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia illuminates the entire nightmare.

Look at the pictures of those arrested and deported, in detention, herded onto planes, incarcerated in El Salvador. This is force. These men, now, are no possible danger to anyone, but they must be shown shackled, bent over, on their knees. Why? To show that they have been subjected to that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. The display of force has always been a simulacrum of power, the pictures put forward by US and Salvadoran authorities seem almost deliberately to invoke the defeated in a Roman Triumph (though it’s hard to imagine that any US authorities, at least, could have been thinking of this).

 Trump and members of his administration repeatedly describe all these people as murderers and rapists, the worst in the world. It is, abstractly, possible that they are, all of them, and MS-13 and Tren de Aragua are murderous gangs. But Trump has not provided any evidence at all against any one of them.

Alleged murderers and rapists still have the right of due process. Individuals can only be charged with murder and rape on the basis of evidence. Trump and the Republicans have been remarkably successful simply by repeating over and over that these are the worst people in the world. Maybe, but Trump sure hasn’t done anything to prove it. We have clear evidence that some of them are not. Even if they are they have rights.

Whatever their incompetence over all, the one thing that Trump’s minions are doing very well is exploiting the executive advantage against judiciary and legislature. They can do things right now, things that are clearly illegal, but the judiciary must always act slowly and carefully, by the time that it rules against the executive the case is already settled in fact. Forget about the legislature, Republican majorities guarantee rubber stamping of the executive’s illegal actions.

Force unchallenged is absolute. But what can the challenge be? The proper course should be the law, which is as clear as day on all of the Trump regime’s edicts. But the law takes a long time, as Trump triumphantly demonstrated in evading all but two of the how many, I can’t remember, cases against him. He’s doing it again.

The legislature is utterly corrupted by the Republican majority. The judiciary is really doing pretty well, but it takes time, and in that time the Republicans can go on and on lying about the place of the judiciary, and some of the lying will rub off on people.

So what now? Civilian action, obviously. But civilian action in the US has so many barriers against it. Current efforts – the Bernie, AOC road show, particularly – are a beginning, but only a beginning.

Back to Béziers, we must proclaim over and over and over: MAGA is a death cult, Trump is its skull-crowned leader. The MAGA faithful don’t even try to hide their love of malice, cruelty and killing, nor does their leader. The thirst for death is always pressing towards satisfaction, in the immediate resumption of the federal death penalty, and Trump’s repeated demands for extending the death penalty to non-fatal crimes, and in the endless repetition of vile and baseless accusations against immigrants, they are murderers and rapists, vermin and scum: why would anyone object to their extermination? Viva la muerte! Or, in the words uttered by the papal legate at Béziers long long before those of José Millán-Astray and the Spanish Legion: KILL THEM ALL!

Love and solidarity,

            Bobby

*Rümeysa Öztürk has now been released on bail – to repeat, she is not charged with any crime.

For The Iliad or the poem of force: https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/simone-weil-the-iliad-or-the-poem-of-force-4.pdf