Per the Washington Post, the fascist regime has seized control of the Social Security Administration’s “Death Master File.” (That’s quite a name, don’t you think?) It’s a list of all the people with Social Security numbers who have died. It’s not a list you want to be on. It either means that you’re dead or that there’s been some administrative error that is going to make your life a living hell. You won’t be able to work a legitimate job or access your money or borrow money and you’ll lose your privacy protections, among other likely headaches.

The first thing the regime did once it gained control was to place 6,100 living people on the list. The second thing they did was physically accost Greg Pearre, a “senior executive…overseeing the agency’s sprawling databases,” and remove him from the premises. Pierre had objected to giving them access, calling their plan “illegal” and “cruel.”

The 6,100 living people who have now been declared dead by the regime are immigrants “ranging in age from teenagers to octogenarians.” The idea is that without working Social Security numbers they’ll be unemployable and will “self-deport.”

Experts in government, consumer rights and immigration law said the administration’s action is illegal. Labeling people dead strips them of the privacy protections granted to living individuals — and knowingly classifying living people as dead counts as falsifying government records, they said. This is in addition to the harm inflicted on those suddenly declared dead, who become unable to legally earn a living wage or draw benefits they may be eligible for. Social Security itself has acknowledged that an incorrect death declaration is a “devastating” blow.

If anyone has a problem with this illegality, they can stuff it.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that, by adding the immigrant names to the deaths database, “the Trump Administration is protecting lawful American citizens and their hard-earned Social Security benefits, and ensuring illegal immigrants will no longer receive such economic entitlements. Anyone who disagrees with the common sense policies of this Administration can find a new job.”

If there are people who shouldn’t receive Social Security benefits, there are ways to cut them off without falsely declaring them dead, but that wouldn’t dehumanize illegal immigrants in the way the regime prefers.

When I was reading this article, what immediately leapt to mind was something I read long ago in Daniel Goldhagen’s 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. I went to one of my bookcases and dusted the book off. It didn’t take me long to find what I was looking for in a chapter about how the Nazis approached the so-called “Jewish Problem” prior to deciding on pursue the Holocaust. I’ve highlighted the parts that rang a bell for me almost three decades after I last read them.

Some might object that this is a false equivalence in the sense that Germany’s Jewish population in the 1930’s was living and working in the country legally, whereas the Trump regime’s targets entered the country without permission and don’t have a legal right to work here. Where there is a one-to-one equivalence, however, is that both the Nazi regime and the Trump regime determined that a target population should be removed from both the economy and the country.

The idea that the Nazis pursued this by creating a kind of “social death” for Jews is what really echoed in my ears when learning that the Trump administration is declaring living immigrants to be dead. It’s not just the “alive vs. not alive” element that I noticed, but the broader effort which includes both rendering a population unemployable in an effort to convince it to self-deport, and a sustained verbal attack that both intimidates the targets and prepares the majority population for “still more eliminationist measures.”

As I said, if the goal were simply, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, to ensure that “illegal immigrants will no longer receive such economic entitlements,” there are other databases that could be tinkered with to achieve that objective. But there’s a greater goal, which is eliminationist in nature. It begins with defining people as rapists who aren’t rapists and as gang members when they aren’t gang members. It’s an “ubiquitous vituperation” that begins with “never-ending installments” in radio, television, newspapers, magazines, and journals, and which may eventually reach film and schoolbooks.

This can escalate into physical violence that is countenanced or even encouraged. The goal is the familiar one of racial purification of the country, which is why it’s a big mistake to think that the legal status of the targets is all that important. For people with this kind of white nationalist mindset, the problem is non-whites residing and working in the country, and inducing them to self-deport is a key goal of theirs that will be pursued with as much vigor as they can muster once they’re done with the low-hanging fruit of non-citizens.

In the period of time being discussed in this book excerpt, the Nazis had not yet decided to murder all the Jews in Europe, but that was a practical decision rather than an ideological one. It’s not easy to kill millions of people, and it would have interfered with their other plans. Once the decision was made to invade Russia, the decision was also made to stop pursuing self-deportation and instead engage in the Holocaust.

I believe and hope that the Trump regime will be satisfied to cleanse the country rather than the continent of non-whites, but I am sure they will be content with nothing less.

This is where we’re headed if we don’t quickly defeat the fascist regime.