There’s not a fascist idea floating in the Republican air space that Gov. Ron DeSantis doesn’t embrace.
His latest endorsement: bills advancing in the Florida Legislature to enable rounding up the state’s homeless and forcing them to live in monitored camps.
A “work in progress,” DeSantis on Monday called House Bill 1365 and Senate Bill 1530, which prohibit city and county governments from allowing homeless people to sleep or camp on public property and rights of way. Digging the knife of callousness deeper, the measures allow property owners disturbed by a homeless person’s presence to sue the local governments allowing it.
DeSantis’ casts the legislation as “ensuring public order, ensuring quality of life for residents, ensuring that people’s property values are maintained.”
But he essentially seems to want to make homelessness illegal.
Touted as “cutting edge,” the idea is to keep homeless people far from the view of selfish people offended and threatened by reminders of the plight of the less fortunate.
Where would we dump the homeless in South Florida? In the bug-ridden Everglades?
READ MORE: DeSantis supports push to move homeless people off streets and into monitored camps
Another cruel ‘Florida Model’
Lawmakers and the governor are so proud of themselves that they’ve already branded this misguided way to deal with homelessness “The Florida Model.”
But mandating that a class of people exist behind by barbed wire and supervised by authorities in the name of “security” is called internment. It’s incarceration as punishment for being destitute.
And, it’s despicable — reminiscent of some of the world’s worst atrocities.
No, that’s not too far of a reach, given recent Florida history.
Legislating against gays, Blacks, women, transgender people and immigrants — unthinkable only a few years ago — is now commonplace in Florida and other extremist red states.
This hyper-focus on reining in people Republicans don’t like — to suit the party’s far-right agenda — is a way to social-engineer a homogeneous society.
Are we in 1933 Germany?
Putting people in camps, a history
How the Holocaust came into being should be seared into our collective consciousness. Genocide didn’t happen overnight. It began with the fascist Nazis fostering anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany, then setting up camps and incarceration sites between 1933 and 1945 to hold not only Jews but also gays, political enemies on the left and Roma people.
In other words, Aldolf Hitler and his like-minded enablers rounded up all who didn’t fit their fantasy of the “Aryan” race. Six million were murdered.
DeSantis’ endorsement of isolating and keeping the homeless under surveillance also reminds me of warehousing Japanese-Americans in camps under Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The justification: the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor in the Pacific.
Considered one of the best American presidents in history, Roosevelt apparently didn’t see the parallel between his internment of innocent Japanese in the United States with the Nazi camps he was fighting against.
In South Florida, we don’t have to go far in history to find another example of people being identified, rounded up and imprisoned.
Homophobic Fidel Castro and his comrade Che Guevara arrested gay men in the 1960s and sent them to infamous UMAP (Military Units to Aid Production) concentration camps. These machistas believed that “a deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant communist should be,” as Castro put it.
Castro also shipped to Cuba’s camps ordinary dissenters waiting for exit visas, forcing them to work without pay in agriculture. Years later, he dealt with the worldwide AIDS epidemic by forcing HIV-positive people into sanitariums.
South Floridians who fled such persecution should stand up to DeSantis.
The slippery slope to institutionalized human degradation begins with acts of infamy that go unopposed and grows by fostering a culture that demonizes classes of people.
In Florida, the formula is clearly in place.
This story was originally published February 06, 2024 1:04 PM.
