“I was just following orders” Didn’t Spare the Fascists from the Gallows

Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi colonel who led millions of Jews to their murders at concentration camps, during his trial in 1961 tried to blame his superiors for his actions during the Third Reich. ‘I was just following orders,’ was a defense he and so many other Nazis from the Nuremberg Trials forward tried to assert. The courts rejected that defense. Mr. Eichmann was hanged at Ramla Prison on June 1, 1962.

According to a 2020 U.S. Army publication by two lawyers – “Training the Defense of Superior Orders” by Major M. Keoni Medici & Major Joshua P. Scheel – America in 1945 signed onto the London Charter, which set the rules for the Nuremberg Trials. In it was Article 8, which said, in part, “The fact that the Defendant acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility, but may be considered in mitigation of punishment if the Tribunal determines that justice so requires.”

The defense was hardly even mitigating when the sentences were handed out. Nearly all who were convicted were hanged.

Article after article backed up by viral video and testimony before cameras show that over the past few weeks, federal law enforcement in cities throughout the country have flagrantly committed crimes and violated civil and constitutional rights in their following of Trump administration anti-immigrant (anti-Brown) orders. From entering private property and yanking people without warrants to targeting people based on skin color to shooting a journalist with a rubber bullet and marching the military into an American city to subdue political protests, our very own government has violated nearly half of the Bill of Rights with complete impunity.

And the only way it has been able to do this has been with the complicity of federal law enforcement officers.

I wonder, when the dust settles and the people they love most or the communities they belong to ask for their account of their actions, will they say, “I was just following orders”?

In case anyone wants to get wise with a throw to ‘What about immunity’ these federal agents enjoy, I advise you look up what qualified immunity means.

This morning news broke that the New York City comptroller and a Democratic candidate for mayor, Brad Lander, was violently taken from a court house and arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers for simply helping New York residents going through the immigration process. An ICE statement claims Mr. Lander laid hands on one of the agents. The videos and witness testimony tell a different story.

But aren’t we used to that, even here in Guam? Aren’t we used to the police and the government lying in order to cover up the abuse of police power? What is happening in cities throughout the country should be strikingly familiar to us, even on the small scale that we’re used to. We should remember our outrage every time the media or – ironically – the Feds exposed the abuse of police power to further criminal enterprises like drug trafficking and sex trafficking.

We should remember our outrage when police power was abused to allow an off-duty police officer to skirt any accountability for her alleged part in the crash and attempted cover up of the destruction of Jerry Kitchen in Tamuning.

We should remember our outrage when an elderly woman with cancer was assaulted by a police officer inside the Dededo Police Precinct.

We should remember our outrage when a police officer sucker punched a handcuffed defendant.

We should remember our outrage when we found out the now-defunct Mandana Drug Task Force was not only violating the civil and constitutional rights of defendants and non-defendants alike, they were exposed in federal court as being complicit in the drug trafficking operations of at least one organization.

What is happening in American cities 1) is outrageously worse than what has happened sporadically here, and 2) could absolutely happen here with the intensity, impunity and the depravity federal agents and the government are exhibiting elsewhere.

And while I admit to being a Democrat and a progressive at that, my opinion on this matter has much less to do with some academic or political debate as it does with actual experience. I have been on the other side of a politician’s use of police power to settle scores. I have been at the seemingly losing end of the campaign by powerful people to spread false information and make me out to be a pariah and enemy of the state in order for these elites to advance their agendas.

Only, thanks to all of you who love freedom and hate corruption, I didn’t lose.

Kandit was created as a direct response to the flagrant abuse of police power by former Lieutenant Governor Ray Tenorio to target his political enemies and to politicize his failed war on drugs for his election benefit. What’s happening in America – the government’s abuse of police power to settle scores and make political statements at the expense of the Constitution, democracy and most importantly the inalienable rights of citizens and noncitizens alike – makes the outrage of the Tenorio abuses a microcosm and infantile abuse of power by comparison.

There is no way we could ever support what is happening under this Trump administration. There is no way we could keep our mouths shut through this mounting fascism.

Adolph Eichmann was a powerful man when Hitler was in charge. Millions of Germans cheered at the time that he and the other collaborators propagandized the so-called immigrant and “degenerate” problem caused by Jews, Catholics, Gypsies, and gays, then indicted them, then rounded them up, then nearly extinguished them from Europe. The once liberated and freedom-growing people of Europe handed their freedom over to Eichmann and his ilk on the false virtue of security from made-up enemies, and economic patrimony.

All that power ended, unfortunately only after millions had to die. He was executed 18 years before I was even born. And yet, all these decades later, I keep company with the annals of history in remembering the evil of a man who once thought he was right, and the millions of his enablers who believed their moral superiority was above reproach, no matter how many people were being taken, enslaved, assaulted, and murdered before their eyes.

On which side of history will you hang your head?