The first knock at the door came eight days ago, on a Friday morning.
Three federal immigration agents showed up at a Columbia University apartment searching for Ranjani Srinivasan, who had recently learned her student visa had been revoked. Ms. Srinivasan, an international student from India, did not open the door.
She was not home when the agents showed up again the next night, just hours before a former Columbia student living in campus housing, Mahmoud Khalil, was detained, roiling the university. Ms. Srinivasan packed a few belongings, left her cat behind with a friend and jumped on a flight to Canada at LaGuardia Airport.
When the agents returned a third time, this past Thursday night, and entered her apartment with a judicial warrant, she was gone.
Ah, McCarthyism rears its disgusting head. “Oh, you were in the vicinity of people demanding Palestinians not be killed? You must be a terrorist!”
This is far beyond McCarthy. This is beyond fascism. IF historians are able to write about these times, a new word, more full of horrific connotations than even that of Nazism will need be created.
No. This is literally what happened in Nazi Germany, and to the millions of people sent to the gulags in the USSR. It happened to Japanese Americans during WW2.
The problem isn’t the words we use are insufficient. The problem is people are so uneducated and brainwashed they no longer understand what those words mean. The fascist propaganda machine has been normalizing these words for decades.
