LOS ANGELES, CA – In an Op-Ed published last week in the Los Angeles Times, a history professor warned Trump’s campaign language could lead to dark places, and severe consequences on marginalized people.
Benjamin Carter Hett, a history professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, wrote about oppressive political systems in his most recent book, The Nazi Menace: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Stalin, and the Road to War.
Hett highlights in the LA Times an interview in which Trump claims the U.S. “open border” is to blame for the admission of 13,000 “murderers,” adding, “it’s in their genes. And we’ve got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
The notion that criminal behavior stems from an offender’s genetic composition is an old and debunked notion, Hett writes.
Hett explains Cesare Lombroso’s theory of the “born criminal” reflects racism of the 1870s that justified mass violence, writing, “Lombroso thought that criminals were ‘primitive’ humans born into the modern world — identifiable by their thick hair, dark skin and small craniums.”
Additionally, Nazis in Hitler’s Germany adopted the idea of “criminal biology” and engaged in preventive crime fighting, Hett argues.
As stated in the Times Op-Ed, Hett writes this encouraged a dangerous dynamic where “criminal policy was about the ‘eradication of life unworthy of life,’ which meant genetic criminals.”
Hett points out in the LA Times, “Two things are important here: first, that the Nazis racialized criminals, holding that lawbreakers were defined by their genes… And second, that Nazis took the next step: This racial group had to be “dealt with in a different way” — in other words, killed.”
The Nazis developed gas chambers to execute criminals and marginalized groups, including people with disabilities, Jews, and others, with carbon monoxide, laying the groundwork for the Holocaust, Hett adds.
Hett charges in the LA Times, “When Trump makes statements about genetic criminals — especially when he equates criminals with immigrants and ethnic minorities, and talks about giving the police ‘one really violent day’ to deal with them — we should worry. We know the grim truth about where racializing, criminalizing and pre-genocidal language can lead.”
