Rand Paul Says: "No More 14th Amendment, No More U.N., More Electric Fences and Satellite Border Monitors"

Rand Paul, still reeling from interviews in which he advocated the politically extreme position that businesses should be free to discriminate based on race, has given an interview in which he advocated completely eliminating the 14th Amendment's guarantee of citizenship to those born in the U.S.  Interestingly, this interview was with the quirky Russian television network Russia Today, which broadcasts a lot of odd, far-right political opinion in a pseudo-news format. (By Russian, I mean that it's sponsored by the Russian government. It broadcasts in English via cable.) That's how far afield Rand Paul now has to go to avoid being asked about the Civil Rights Act.

Is this the strategy of his new campaign manager, Jesse Benton? Remember, Benton was the communications director for Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign, so it would make sense that media image building would be his focus.  Benton probably looked at the options, saw RT and said, far-right, outside the echo-chamber, not highly visible, let's go for it.  And maybe, just maybe, RT agreed in advance not to ask about the Civil Rights Act or BP comments.

In spite of being limited by his new campaign manager to this carefully chosen safe forum, Paul still manages to put his foot in another whopping pile of crap. His problem isn't just bad political instincts, it's that his views like those of his father are truly crazy.  These aren't just unforced errors.  These are the man's core beliefs.

Listen at 9:20 of the video below. He even spells out a motive for opposing the 14th Amendment. He worries out loud that "it helps the Democrats".

In addition to advocating gutting the Constitution in this interview, Paul also gets the facts of the attempted Times Square car-bombing wrong, advocates that the U.S. install an underground electric fence along the entire border with Mexico, and says he wants the U.S. to leave the IMF, World Bank and U.N. He's concerned about the U.N. leading armies in battle, although he makes a point of clarifying this by saying that he "likes diplomacy".

He "likes" it.

Hat tip: Little Green Footballs: Rand Paul Wants to Dump the 14th Amendment

Anti-Obama smear author on racist radio

Swiftboat smear monger Jerome Corsi is flogging his scurrilous anti-Obama screed in such friendly forums as the Sean Hannity radio show and the Sean Hannity TV show, where he accused Obama of supporting infanticide. More about that in a future post, but chew on this for now: Corsi's had a friendly interview on the overtly racist, anti-Semitic show Political Cesspool, previously a forum for neo-Nazis, neo-confederates and the Klan. He fits right in. In fact, he's scheduled another interview for Sunday, Aug. 17.

Read the following and then tell me what Mary Matalin is doing promoting and publishing this guy and even touting his "scholarship". I saw a Republican flack on the Larry King show going so far as to claim that Corsi wasn't associated with the Republicans. He's not? They're just publishing and promoting him as they did with the 2004 swfitboating book.

The Republicans must clearly and emphatically disavow the racist anti-Semitic Corsi and stop using neo-Nazi radio shows to promote their views. More on this to come.

, from Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center:

Perhaps Corsi’s most telling appearance, however, has been on The Political Cesspool, an overtly racist, anti-Semitic radio show hosted by self-avowed white nationalist James Edwards. Corsi was interviewed on the Cesspool on July 20 and is scheduled to appear again this Sunday, August 17, joining a recent guest roster that has included Christian Identity pastor Pete Peters, Holocaust denier Mark Weber and former Klan boss David Duke.

Along with promoting Corsi’s appearances, Edwards is boasting on his website that the three-hour weekly show will join the Republic Broadcasting Network in September. This conspiracy-minded network, heard via satellite and the web, features talk about a sinister “New World Order” and wild theories about the causes of 9/11. Shows that air on the network include The Piper Report, named after host Michael Collins Piper, who has contributed to the holocaust denial magazine The Barnes Review, and Mark Dankof’s America, which has interviewed Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, a leading Holocaust denial group.

UK elections: fascists win seat on London Assembly

By now you've heard the good news that Ken Livingstone has lost his bid for reelection to the London mayorality after a desperate negative campaign which included a mailing bearing the headline "Don't vote for a joke. Vote for London." (Read here and here).

You may not have heard the good news that George Galloway, whose political career is suffering a well deserved downward trajectory, lost in his bid for the Greater London Assembly (read here).

Both Livingstone and Galloway are leftists who love to cozy up to Islamists advocating extreme homophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism and theocratic dictatorship. To understand this leftist / Islamist alliance, a study of cognitive dissonance would be more useful than political science.

Now the bad news. Richard Barnbrook (read here) of the British National Party (BNP), by getting over 5% of the vote, has actually won a seat on the Greater London Assembly. If that doesn't seem like much support, let's put it in perspective: in 1992, the BNP got 7,005 votes nationally; in 2005 it got 192,746 votes nationally. Now the votes of over 130,000 in London alone have given them a seat on the London Assembly. That's a troubling sign of disaffected voters turning to extremism.

The BNP has a long history of advocating an extreme racist agenda while maintaining that they're actually part of the political mainstream. But don't be fooled. According to the Independent: "(t)he BNP has tried to rebrand itself, hoping we will forget its founder declared “Mein Kampf is my Bible”, and its current leader attacks even David Irving for admitting some Jews died in the “Holohoax.” (read here)



Barnbrook is an idiosyncratic figure, to say the least. While publicly disavowing Nazism, he favors light brown suits and ties and a Hitler hairstyle. According to the English gossip press, a former lover has accused Barnbrook of keeping a copy of "Mein Kampf" under his bed. (read here) She also said that she had "only ever seen him properly sober a couple of times". Based on his ranting, slurred speech and watery eyes in the video clips I've seen of him, that seems entirely plausible. (View video here.)

What's most troubling to me about his victory is that it shows that an extremist party can take advantage of anti-immigrant sentiment to gain office by pretending to be non-racist. We in the United States should take note of this as we prepare for what may be an election dominated by the immigration issue, at least from the Republican side. The Republicans, if they do go down this path, may well be opening door to legitimizing the sort of extremist views advocated by the BNP. We have already had a taste of this from the likes of Ron Paul and Tom Tancredo, both of whom have connections to the extreme far right and have histories of racist utterances. (Most recently, Tancredo advocated putting the fence on the U.S./Mexico border north of Brownsville, Texas. Read here.)

On the brighter side, the odds are that the BNP will crash and burn before it becomes a major national force like Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National is in France. Historically speaking, both the U.K. and U.S. had flirtations with the far right in the last great economic crisis in the 1930s, and both soundly rejected extremism in favor of liberalism. I have every confidence that this would happen again. However, the far right, anti-immigrant and isolationist movements of the 1930s had real, tangible effects on the politics of that time. They impeded the liberal democracies from doing what was necessary and right in response to the rise of fascism. They also continued to influence policy through connections with the more mainstream right wing. Fortunately, for the most part, the U.S. extreme right dissolved into debates between extreme isolationists and anti-Communists. Their tendency to advocate racism, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theory put them on the margins of American politics, where they have largely remained.

In Britain, the anti-immigrant right is attempting to rebrand itself. No longer do they goose-step and sieg heil. Now they present themselves as a sort of last resort for those who fear Muslims and feel the government have forgotten them. The success of the BNP this week is partly the result of the real failure Britain to deal with the presence of a hostile subculture of Islamist extremism. In a sense, the failure to deal with one extremism is begetting another. Yet the British far right is still isolated from the mainstream. Their influence is still negligible.

In the U.S. anti-immigrant movement, there has been some success with "rebranding" (this is really a polite term for deception, isn't it?), especially by Ron Paul and his minions, who come across as humble "live and let live" types, until they start advocating rounding up illegal immigrants for deportation en masse. The extremism is always just below the surface. The Tancredo anti-immigrants advocate a "robust" foreign presence -- a polite way of saying that he feels free to threaten to nuke Mecca. The Ronpaulian anti-immigrants, on the other hand, advocate a return to the foreign policy of George Washington, i.e. as minimal a foreign presence as possible. Presumably, that would also mean writing only with quill pens and replacing our navy with three-masted frigates. The U.S. anti-immigrant extremists are currently divided by adherence to extreme positions which are completely incompatible. This is true with respect to foreign policy (complete withdrawal from the world scene versus complete dominance of it) and federalism (extreme states rights / libertarianism versus presidential authority by fiat). As I hope is obvious, the positions of both camps are as impractical as they are absurd. I can say with complete confidence to both sides: it ain't gonna happen. We can only hope that the more mainstream Republicans don't try to tap into these currents of anti-immigrant thought by finding ways to cherry pick bad ideas acceptable to both, although I fear that this is just what they intend to do. We'll just have to wait for the convention to see if this is what they do.

Here's the news on the BNP:

from BBC NEWS: BNP gains from Labour disaffection

The British National Party has won its first seat in the London Assembly - but what does that result mean?

For the past 10 years there have been predictions that the British National Party (BNP) could achieve a major electoral breakthrough - but at the end of each election the picture has been mixed and open to interpretation.

The BNP and its supporters are cheering the success of Richard Barnbrook's election to the Greater London Assembly, but it was a tight race - and tighter than a lot of people had feared.

Mr Barnbook was elected because he passed the critical 5% mark required for a seat from the city-wide list.

This is a form of proportional representation that balances constituency results with each party's overall tally in the capital. But the senior BNP man only just made it, scraping in with 5.3%.

The party's tally of councillors has reached a psychological barrier of 100 - but a deeper look at the nationwide results reveals that there can be a world of difference between a point of importance for a small party and a genuine gathering of electoral steam.

In fact, those councillors represent less than 1% of all those elected in the UK and gains on the night, beyond the headline-grabbing result in London, were short of some expectations.

Nevertheless, 130,000 people supported the idea of a BNP assembly member in London - and the party has a toehold in a handful of councils around the country.

The BNP's strategy has increasingly seen it focus not just on fears of immigration, but also on a subtle blend of tensions relating to feelings of disregarded "entitlement" in communities that would have long been considered core Labour supporters.

MPs in communities that have seen the most change from immigration in recent years have warned about this for some time.

John Cruddas, an east London Labour MP, has warned more than once that the frontline is housing.

When the BNP claims on the doorstep that local folk are losing out to newcomers, the main parties have found it difficult to explain the intricate realities of a system that is targeted at the very poorest in society.

Tension over churning Eastern European migration, particularly a fear of competition for the lowest-skilled jobs, has not helped.

To make matters worse, no politician can honestly provide voters with hard facts about migration - for historical reasons, the data and statistics just do not answer many of the questions people want answering.

The BNP has targeted these fears - but has also sought to moderate its message. The party used to talk purely in terms of sending people "home".

Richard Barnbrook's language in London was different, couching an anti-immigration pitch in terms of "fitting in" with British society - the target being Muslims.

"You may have your religion behind your closed doors, but you don't bring it onto the streets," he said.

"You can be gay behind closed doors, you can be heterosexual behind closed doors, but you don't bring it onto the streets, demanding more rights for it."

Critics would say this is laughable in a city like London - arguably the most important city in the world because it is home to such as extraordinary range of different people.

But if the BNP has found a way of tapping into anger - particularly among those who would not necessarily always vote, then a different view of London is revealed.

The question is what happens next?

In more than one area the BNP has found its support drain away very quickly as councillors have been accused of incompetence or worse.

The party's vote in Sandwell in the West Midlands halved on Thursday - almost certainly because of a row over one BNP member who was ejected for not doing his job.

The key to understanding the BNP's attraction is perhaps more easily found in places like Nuneaton, which Labour lost after three decades of control.

The BNP did not sweep to power - but it won two councillors. Up and down the country the party appears to make very small gains when traditional Labour voters stay at home.

But when those voters come out, its vote is very quickly squeezed.

Lou Dobbs: Short on facts, long on opinions

It seems that Lou Dobbs, not satisfied with only one hour per day on CNN and a nationwide book tour, is planning several more hours per day on CBS-TV and a syndicated radio show. Dobbs already hosts a CNN "news" program devoted largely to his anti-immigrant propagandizing. His factual distortions have been critiqued by the New York Times (read here). Media Matters uncovered his attributed use of material authored by the hate group Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), formerly known as the White Citizens Council (read here) (learn about the CCC here and here). Dobbs, undeterred, now roams the land on a book tour falsely claiming that no major errors have been found in his reporting and that his views have no connection to bigotry. Interviewers almost exclusively lob him softballs, but every so often the unexpected happens, and his feet get held to the fire. READ THIS:

from Southern Poverty Law Center Hatewatch:
‘Democracy Now’ Takes On Lou Dobbs:

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of “Democracy Now,” a serious radio and television news and analysis program, conducted an hour-long interview with nativist CNN host Lou Dobbs yesterday, and it was a doozie. Dobbs was pounded with questions about the bogus “facts” that he regularly trots out to demonize undocumented immigrants, such as his claim that a “third of our prison population” are “illegal aliens.” (As “Democracy Now” pointed out, the Justice Department says about 6% of state and federal prison populations are non-citizens. The government does not know what percentage of those non-citizens are undocumented.)

Dobbs’ chief reaction was to attack the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), whose Intelligence Report has carried a series of reports on Dobbs inaccuracies (see here, here, here and here), his promotion of racist conspiracy theories (see here), and the appearance of hate group members and leaders on his program (see here). (“Democracy Now” relied heavily on that SPLC research to confront Dobbs, who was plugging a new book.) Bizarrely, Dobbs responded to mention of his use of a white supremacist group’s graphic by noting that he had sent producers and reporters to SPLC’s Alabama offices in late 2004 “to make certain this sort of thing doesn’t happen.” But minutes later, he described the very same SPLC as “indulging in pure BS” in order to raise money. On his own show, he has called the SPLC a “fascist” group after SPLC criticized him. The whole thing was reminiscent of the way Dobbs last spring defended his false claim of immigrant-borne leprosy in a on-air debate with SPLC officials (see here).

This morning, “Democracy Now” invited Mark Potok, editor of the Center’s Intelligence Report, to respond to Dobbs’ comments and to discuss the magazine’s new cover story, which details an apparent surge in violent, anti-Latino hate crime.

Also today, The New York Times reported that Dobbs was planning to add a three-hour daily radio program to his CNN show, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” and his post as a commentator on CBS’ “The Early Show.” Dobbs characterized his radio show in this eyebrow-raising comment to the Times: “My interest is in bringing a voice of reason, rather than the partisan and ideological poles that define talk radio right now.”

Forward to Lou Dobbs: The real immigration health threat

Yeah...Lou Dobbs has been touting as real the non-existent threat of Mexican immigrants infecting U.S. citizens with leprosy. Turned out his statistical evidence was totally off the wall -- manufactured by some anti-immigrant crackpot. (READ ABOUT IT HERE.)

Contrary to the Dobbsian view of the world, here's the real threat, according to todays NY Times:

Mexican Migrants Carry H.I.V. Home - New York Times

I guess Dobbs will now call for those who've been in the U.S. to be banned from other countries.

What's Scary About the Anti-Immigration Debate

from History News Network (hnn.com) By Jean Pfaelzer (professor of English and American Studies at the University of Delaware, author of Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans)

When we think of ethnic cleansing we think Darfur, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia. Maybe its time we started thinking Fortuna, California; Hazleton, Pennsylvania; Cherokee, Georgia; and Whitewater, Wisconsin.

Once, 1.5 million Native American Indians lived here; by 1900 250,000 survived the roundups, slaughter, and wars of extermination.

Between the Gold Rush and the turn of the 20th century, in town after town, Chinese miners and merchants, lumberjacks and field workers, prostitutes and merchants’ wives, were gathered up at gunpoint in over two hundred towns. The first Chinese Americans were forced onto steam ships, marched out of town, or driven out, sometimes along the railroad tracks they had built.

In Tacoma, Washington, at nine o’clock in the morning of November 3, 1885, the mayor ordered all the steam whistles at the foundries to blow, to notify vigilantes to begin the rout of the town’s Chinatowns. By mid afternoon Tacoma’s Chinese were forced from town on a nine mile trek in the mud and rain, never to return. In Eureka, California the rout of 1885 took less than a night, as the Chinese packed whatever belongings they could. The Chinese, many of whom had lived in Eureka for twenty years, were held under gunpoint at a warehouse on the docks, loaded onto two steam ships and sent to San Francisco.

In the mountain town of Truckee, it took ten weeks to starve out the Chinese, when the editor of the local newspaper shamed merchants, timber barons, and women who ran boardinghouses, ordering the town to neither buy from, rent to, hire, or honor wood cutting contracts with early Chinese Americans. When most of the Chinese had left, the “anti-Coolie” League and the vigilante committees (like the “601”—six feet under, zero trial, one bullet) circled the white part of town with fire wagons, invited the ladies to watch, and burned Chinatown to the ground. Two Chinese men died, refusing to leave their homes.

During the Great Depression, two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported under Herbert Hoover’s Mexican Reparation campaign. Sixty percent of the deportees were children, born in America. The rest were mostly US citizens who had lived on this land for generations.

Now, from Fortuna, California, to Trenton, New Jersey, immigration officials are sweeping through towns without warrants, seizing Latinos from homes and factories, leaving children abandoned at schools and day care centers.

And now too, a simple housing code, traveling the Internet, is purging thousands of Latinos, suddenly homeless and on the run. Over eighty towns have enacted the canned language of “The Illegal Immigration Relief Act” and banned any landlord from renting to an undocumented worker.

Evicted from their housing, American citizens, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants are in flight from frightened landlords who have become the storm police.

In Hazelton, PA, landlords face arrest or fines of $250 per day. In Riverside NJ the fines grow to $1,000 per day. In Cherokee, GA, even after an eviction, landlords must prove that their former tenants have left the county before they can again collect rents.

In just one year this housing code has spread from historic Sandwich on Cape Cod, (whose web site invites you to “experience life the way it used to be”), south to Riverside NJ, Landis, NC and Beaufort, SC, to Avon Park, FL, Cherokee, GA, and Valley Park, MO. The code travels to Farmer’s Branch, Texas, up through Carpentersville, IL, Bloomington, MN, and Arcadia WI, where 140 Latinos once lived in a little town of 2,300 people. Then it jumps westward to Escondido, California.

As civil rights groups try to enjoin the codes, others spring up. Only the federal government can deport people, but small towns can drive them out of town.

This week, as soft wild dogwoods bloomed along the East Coast, I read a Christmas story, a tale of Christmas just past. It was called the Ordinance 2006-18.

T’was the week before Christmas 2006 when Hazleton banned Santa Claus. Santa was about to climb down the chimney without a green card. Although his biology has always been a bit unclear, Santa was an “alien” of the illegal sort who employed thousands of alien elves—“unfair foreign competition” to American toymakers.

Making a list and checking it twice? For the feds: “identity data provided by the property owner.” Data provided by a landlord? Based on what kind of verification?

And why?

Hazleton’s mayor told Sixty Minutes about a 70% rise in violent crime since Latinos came to town in 2001 (the correct number is 20 of 8,500 crimes). Farmers Branch, Texas said that the code would prevent terrorist attacks by purging its Latinos. One third of towns that passed the code are in unemployed areas of Pennsylvania--railroad towns that once sold anthracite coal, steel tubes, and carpets. Now they export Latinos.

These gentlemen prefer blondes. The mayor wants Hazleton to remain 94.7% white. Last week in front of a burning cross the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party, recently defunct, announced to ABC Evening News that since they began assaulting, torching, and “bleaching” Latinos, membership has risen 40%.

“Pack your bags…It’s over, go home” shouted local Minutemen after Escondido’s city council voted 3-2 for the Hazleton code. With nearly half the town born outside the US, anyone who looked or sounded “foreign” stood to be evicted. In Altoona, which is 99.9 % white, a city councilman declared “We just want to stay ahead of the curve.”

Neither the local U.S. Attorneys (those that still have their jobs), the Department of Homeland Security, or Attorney General Gonzales is stopping the unconstitutional enforcement of this unconstitutional code.

But immigrant rights groups are trying to stop the spread of this internet virus. They took Hazelton to federal court, arguing that the code violates immigrants’ rights to due process, fair housing codes and legal leases. The judge temporarily stopped the town which still awaits a final ruling. Sixty eight percent of the voters in Farmer’s Branch voted to support its code in May, but in June the Mexican American Legal Defense fun managed to get that vote overturned. Another break may be protections in the Hate Crimes Bill, passed by the House, moving through the Senate but facing a presidential veto.

Still, as Hazelton’s mayor bragged, the code endures, even though his struggling town faces $2 million in fines and legal costs

Yet across small town America, landlords face empty apartments and vacant trailer parks. Businesses are shutting down. One-third of Riverside’s immigrant population has moved away. Twenty-five percent of our undocumented population has children who are US citizens, but unable to fend for themselves, these kids are losing their constitutional right to live here. This code, perhaps deliberately, violates what children promise: permanence, stability, and future generations.

Latinos often say, “mi casa es su casa.” By contrast, this code says “leave.”

Zyklon B on the US Border

Alex Cockburn has a very interesting column in the July 9, 2007 Nation recounting a bit of history that I found totally unfamiliar and incredibly interesting. The piece is only available online by subscription. Here's an excerpt. (The first sentence is an eye-catcher.)

Zyklon B arrived in El Paso in the 1920s courtesy of the US government. In 1929, for example, a Public Health Service officer, J.R. Hurley, ordered $25 worth of the material--hydrocyanic acid in pellet form--as a fumigating agent for use at the El Paso delousing station, where Mexicans crossed the border from Juárez. Zyklon, developed by Degesch (short for the German vermin-combating corporation), was made in varying strengths, with Zyklon C, D and E representing gradations in potency and price. As Raul Hilberg describes it in The Destruction of the European Jews, "strength E was required for the eradication of specially resistant vermin, such as cockroaches, or for gassings in wooden barracks. The 'normal' preparation, D, was used to exterminate lice, mice, or rats in large, well-built structures containing furniture. Human organisms in gas chambers were killed with Zyklon B." In 1929 Degesch divided the Zyklon market with an American corporation, Cyanamid, so Hurley likely got his shipment from the latter.

As David Dorado Romo describes it in his marvelous Ringside Seat to a Revolution: An Underground History of El Paso and Juárez: 1893-1923 (Cinco Puntos Press, El Paso), Zyklon B became available in the United States when, in the early 1920s, fears of alien infection were being inflamed by the alarums of the eugenicists, most of them political "progressives." In 1917 Congress passed, and President Wilson--an ardent eugenicist and pro-sterilizer--signed, the Immigration Act. The Public Health Service simultaneously published its Manual for the Physical Inspection of Aliens.

The manual had its list of excludables from the US of A, a ripe representation of the obsessions of the eugenicists: "imbeciles, idiots, feeble-minded persons, persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority [homosexuals], vagrants, physical defectives...anarchists, persons afflicted with loathsome or dangerous contagious diseases...all aliens over 16 who cannot read." In that same year Public Health Service agents "bathed and deloused" 127,123 Mexicans at the bridge between Juárez and El Paso.

The mayor of El Paso at the time, Tom Lea Sr., represented, in Romo's words, "the new type of Anglo politician in the 'Progressive Era.'" For Lea, "progressive" meant a Giuliani-style cleanup of the city. He had a visceral fear of contamination and, so his son later disclosed, wore silk underwear because his friend, one Doc Kluttz, had told him typhus lice don't stick to silk. His loins thus protected, Lea battered the US government with demands for a quarantine camp on the border where the Feds could protect El Paso from typhus by holding all immigrants for fourteen days. Health officer B.J. Lloyd thought this outlandish, telling the surgeon general that typhus fever "is not now and probably never will be, a serious menace to our civilian population."

Lea sent his health cops into the city's Mexican quarter, forcing inhabitants suspected of harboring lice to take kerosene and vinegar baths and have their heads shaved and clothes incinerated. After barging into 5,000 rooms, inspectors found only two cases of typhus, one of rheumatism, one of TB and one of chicken pox.

.....

The delousing operations provoked fury and resistance among Mexicans still boiling with indignation after a lethal gasoline blaze in the city jail some months earlier. As part of Mayor Lea's citywide disinfection campaign, prisoners' clothes were dumped in a bath filled with a mixture of gasoline, creosote and formaldehyde. Then the prisoners were forced, naked, into a second bath filled with "a bucket of gasoline, a bucket of coal oil and a bucket of vinegar." On the afternoon of March 5, 1916, someone struck a match. The jail went up like a torch. The Herald reported that about fifty "naked prisoners from whose bodies the fumes of gasoline were arising" caught fire. Twenty-seven died. In late January 1917, 200 Mexican women rebelled at the border, prompting a riot and putting to flight police and troops on both sides.

Now, Zyklon B is fatal when absorbed through the skin in concentrations of more than fifty parts per million. How many Mexicans, many crossing daily, suffered agonies or died after putting on those poisoned garments? Through oral histories, Romo has documented cancers, birth defects and deaths that he estimates could go into the tens of thousands and yet, as he told a reporter, "This is a huge black hole in history."

The use of Zyklon B on the US-Mexico border was a matter of interest to the firm of Degesch. In 1938 Dr. Gerhard Peters wrote an article in a German pest science journal, Anzeiger für Schädlingskunde, which called for its use in German Desinfektionskammern and featured photos of El Paso's delousing chambers. Peters went on to become the managing director of Degesch, which supplied Zyklon B to the Nazi death camps. He was tried and convicted at Nuremberg. (In 1955, he was retried and found not guilty.)

In the United States, the eugenicists rolled on to their great triumph, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, much admired by Hitler, which would doom millions in Europe to their final rendezvous with Zyklon B twenty years later. By the late 1940s, the eugenicists were mostly discredited, but the Restriction Act, that monument to racism, bad science and do-gooders, stayed on the books unchanged for forty years.

.....