Arbeit Macht Frei (German: “Work Sets You Free”), the same phrase imposed by the Nazi command at several concentration death camps, a protester held at an angry rally against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s “stay-at-home” order intended to help reduce the spread of the disabling and deadly Covid-19 virus.
Though the Nazis understood completely that Arbeit Macht Frei was a fiction, a lie, an ironic attempt intended to extract as much slave labor as possible out of prisoners without a care for their physical and emotional health, did this Michigan demonstrator not comprehend this historical propaganda fabrication?
How “free” are workers at our nation’s meat processing plants, like at Tyson and Smithfield, where people are compelled to work in unsanitary and dangerously crowded conditions at or near minimum wage in which hundreds have been infected and some have succumbed to the virus?
Our nation’s lacking-in-empathy chief executive, Donald J. Trump, in addition to Republican Iowa Governor, Kim Reynolds, have issued back-to-work orders for these plants and other businesses. Reynolds announced at a recent press conference:
The Trump/Reynolds decrees negatively affect our country’s most marginalized and vulnerable residents: the working poor and recent immigrant groups comprising primarily people of color: the barely-paid labor force who must try to get by from meager paycheck to meager paycheck; a labor force who must continually work to live in a pandemic placing their very lives and those of their loved ones one in jeopardy.If you’re an employer and you offer to bring your employee back to work and they decide not to, that’s a voluntary quit,” said Reynolds. “Therefore, they would not be eligible for the unemployment money.
Not-so-ironically as conservative politicians coerce poor people and people of color to risk their lives in the workplace where they have limited other options, the virtually monoracial white and largely male protesters are out in force demanding that “work sets you free.”
We are witnessing some of these right-winders carrying antisemitic Nazi swastikas and racist Confederate and Trump MAGA flags and symbols while toting pistols and high-velocity automatic weapons of war in states with “open carry laws,” like those in Michigan, to intimidate and challenge governors and legislators to open state businesses.
Trump, through a series of “Liberate” tweets, encourages protestors to ramp up their efforts in pressuring politicians to reopen their states, against a backdrop of ever-increasing viral infections and COVID-19-related deaths.
In an April 17, 2020 Tweet, Trump further revved up his cult followers’ conspiratorial fears of a statewide ban on firearms:
Toxic Patriarchal HypermasculinityLIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!
Toxic forms of hypermasculinity require the promotion and use of firearms to keep at bay the intensive psychosocial compulsive fear and dread of penetration from bullets, from homosexuals, from the female gaze since patriarchy promises males the right to the aggressive outward intrusive gaze, the right of penetration of “others.”
Laws are built upon and reflect the society in which they are meant to affect. Patriarchal individualistic societies oppress and inhibit women’s reproductive freedoms, encourage the inequities in salaries between men and women, establish and maintain the massive development of wealth for a very few while encouraging the enormous financial disparities between the very rich and everyone else, and many other issues.
On a more basic and personal level, the rhetoric of the loss of “freedom” and invasion taps into peoples’ psychological fears, or more accurately, terrors of infection: our country, our workplaces, and more basically, our private places in which “aliens” forcefully penetrate our bodies, into our orifices, and down to the smallest cellular level. Firearms, some believe, will keep these invaders—human as well as viral—out of harms’ way.
“Necropolitics”
Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist, Achille Mbembe coined the term “necropolitics” (death politics):
With the thousands of individual and mass shootings of four or more victims in the United States each year, men, mostly white, committed the overwhelming majority.[T]the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.
The Pew Research Center found that white men own over 60% of the guns in the U.S. Overall, 74% of gun owners are male and 82% are white.
It is no mere coincidence that generally women (63%) favor stricter gun control regulations more than men (45%). According to a Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters, 71% of women supported a nationwide ban on assault weapons compared with 46% of men.
Donald Trump engages in a form of necropolitics to better ensure his reelection chances.
He has placed at much higher physical risk already marginalized groups–poor people, recent immigrants who comprise primarily people of color, people incarcerated in our prisons, elderly people in care facilities, and people with underlying health conditions.
He has failed in his leadership role in pushing to ensure a safe and organized national food chain, the manufacture of personal protective equipment and medical appliances such as ventilators, guaranteed unemployment insurance throughout the pandemic, a regulated and enforced staged reopening when warranted based on science and not on politics.
He and his Republican empathy-challenged subjects should legislate a guaranteed national income, but that they would consider “too socialistic.”
Actually, Trump’s entire presidency could be cataloged under the overarching concept of “necropolitics.”
