TODAY'S Plagues Belong in All Our Seders
Dear companions,
Today’s Pharaohs are imposing PLAGUES on all Americans. The difference from the ancient past is that the ancient plagues exempted God’s favorite folks — But the modern plagues suffocate everybody who lives here. Plus, moments everywhere of Hitlerian/Stalinist attacks on the human person.
Perhaps it is a blessing in very masked disguise. It requires a very broad transformation, just as the end of the Seder requires: “In every generation, every human being must act to move from slavery to freedom.”
The article that seemed to me a list of Plagues appeared in the New York Times in the last week. I will include an excerpt from the article and a link to the full article for you to follow up.
Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.
Those of us who’ve seen secret police in action can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity.
By M. Gessen
Apr 02, 2025 09:04 AM
“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.
“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.
Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”
It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbedon a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked.
The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.
It’s the forced mass transports of immigrants. These are not even deportations, in the way we typically think of them. Rather than being sent to their country of origin, Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador, where they are being imprisoned, indefinitely, without due process.
It’s the sight of men being marched in formation, their heads shaved, hundreds of people yanked from their individual lives to be reduced to an undifferentiated mass. It’s the sight, days later, of the secretary of homeland security posing against the background of men in cages and threatening more people with the same punishment.
It’s the growing irrelevance of the law and the helplessness of judges and lawyers. A federal judge ordered flights carrying the Venezuelan men to be turned around and demanded information about the abductees.
Another federal judge forbade the government to deport, without notice, Rasha Alawieh, the Brown University medical school professor who was detained on return from a trip to Lebanon.
Another judge prohibited moving Rumeysa Ozturk from Massachusetts without notice. The executive branch apparently ignored these rulings.
It’s the chilling stories that come by word of mouth. ICE is checking documents on the subway. ICE is outside New York public libraries that hold English-as-a-second-language classes. ICE agents handcuffed a U.S. citizen who tried to intervene in a detention in Harlem. ICE vehicles are parked outside Columbia. ICE is coming to your workplace, your street, your building. ICE agents are wearing brown uniforms that resemble those of UPS — don’t open the door for deliveries. Don’t leave the house. The streets in the New York neighborhoods with the highest immigrant populations have emptied out.
. . .
The citizens of such a state live with a feeling of being constantly watched. They live with a sense of random danger. Anyone — a passer-by, the man behind you in line at the deli, the woman who lives down the hall, your building’s super, your own student, your child’s teacher — can be a plainclothes agent or a self-appointed enforcer.
People live in growing isolation and with the feeling of low-level dread, and these are the defining conditions of living in a secret-police state. People lose the ability to plan for the future, because they feel that they have no control over their lives, and they try to make themselves invisible. They move through the world without looking, for fear of seeing too much.
But while we are still capable of looking, we have to say what we see: The United States has become a secret-police state. Trust me, I’ve seen it before.
M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.
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Have a sweet and transformative Pesach seder. Remember to encourage creative questions. With blessings toward justice and peace,
Arthur