American’s Version of Nazi Germany’s “Useless Eaters”
By KEITH MCHENRY
Mark Melton, who heads up a pro bono team of 175 volunteer lawyers in Dallas, reported on NPR on April, 7, ”We’ve had a failure of leadership that’s going to result in tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Texans becoming homeless in relatively short order.” On paper, landlords could still face hefty fines and jail time for violating the CDC rules on evictions. But Melton says in reality, there has been virtually no enforcement for landlords who violate the CDC order. He expects a significant number of landlords will now push ahead with evictions.
“I think we just stepped off a cliff that we really didn’t want to step off,” Melton says.
In South Carolina, as in most states, rental assistance is difficult if not impossible to get. Rebecca Liebson writes in The State, “Since the moratorium went into effect, according to court records, at least 50,000 evictions have been filed across five of the state’s most populous counties — Richland, Lexington, Horry, Greenville and Charleston.”
Though there’s no way to tell how many of those tenants will ultimately be forced to vacate their homes, date from the Census Bureau shows that many South Carolinians have serious concerns about losing housing. Nearly 53% of renters said they were very likely or somewhat likely to be forced to leave home due to eviction in the next two months.”
Six people came to me in March and were seeking a safe place to sleep in their car. Sadly, like most people, they do not qualify for the City’s Safe Parking Program and are likely to have their vehicles confiscated under the crush of tickets they are now being issued.
The Eviction Lab at Princeton is warning that as many as 40 million Americans are facing eviction. At the same time, a luxury condominium building boom is underway. Poor people are being “Red Lined” from their communities and are forced to seek shelter under bridges, doorways or along highways.
Tragically everyone could be housed. Bay Area business journalist Aaron Glantz’s book, “Homewreckers,” is about the 2007 housing foreclosure crisis. He provides evidence that property speculators had a strategy that included parking their money in housing that they intended to leave empty. The current wave of building here in Santa Cruz is also likely to sit vacant. The Pacific and Laurel property was already sold to another out-of-town investor before any construction had begun.
I was first confronted by the now common use of language to justify the elimination of the homeless in the fall of 1986 in Massachusetts. I had a graphic design business in Kenmore Square, Boston and lived in an apartment across the street from my office. The Boston Red Sox were among my Kenmore Square clients. I also volunteered my services to the Kenmore Association, a local civic group organized by local property speculators who called the people who lived outside our neighborhood tramps, vagrants, punks, druggies, transients, vermin, and street people.
The October 1986 issue of the association’s newsletter included this:
“Kensmore News
“The Security & Maintenance Committee encourages all KA Members to assume an active role in cleaning up Kenmore Square. In order to prevent the attraction of street people (especially the “rough element”, new to Kenmore Square), following guidelines were suggested at the breakfast meeting…
“Please don’t give free food to these streetpeople.
“Please lock all dumpsters. Unlocked dumpsters will be cited by the City inspectors and all infractions will be subject to fines. Open dumpsters attract street people looking for collectibles and food.
“Please refrain from throwing returnable cans and bottles in public trash receptacles. The streetpeople find Kenmore Square a profitable location for collecting on these cans and bottles.
“Start calling the police if certain annoyances persist and keep a record of your calls (ie. date, time of day and response time).”
My wife and I were shocked and responded to the association by writing a letter: “As members of the Kenmore Association we object to the dehumanizing statements against those living on our streets made by the Security & Maintenance Committee in the October newsletter. These people are our neighbors, friends and family and deserve our compassion and support.
“Dehumanizing people in this manner smacks of Hitler’s Germany. The association is showing a total disregard for people being people. We urge the Association to support efforts to help our neighbors instead of adopting policing to drive them out of the community.
“There is no evidence that their presence is having any impact on business. We should celebrate the unique qualities of Kenmore Square that make it attractive instead of seeking to become a second Newbury Street,” signed Andrea and Keith McHenry, 24-hour residents of Kenmore Square.”
The decades long drum beat of dehumanization may be coming to its logical conclusion. We had Take Back Santa Cruz pushing the false narrative that swarms of unhoused are taking our city from the good people. A community that would would organize a “SeaBright Strong” campaign with posters that showed a "No Tent" image is the more recent example of creating separations between humans by promoting the concept of "others," those who don't have any human rights because they live outside.
The “Camping Services and Standards Ordinance” starts to put this dangerous idea of the "other" into law. The county and city's Two by Two committee has a proposal to adopt the now popular Obligation to Accept Shelter policy and to send those who refuse, off to the county Navigation Center, “a camp like Camp Roberts.” This may be a response to the millions of Americans being forced from their homes. It appears there is no national concern about the mass evictions since Congress went on vacation and the limited eviction moratorium will run out in October.
Videos of AR-15 armed police officers driving the unhoused from their tents in Portland and Los Angeles give me the impression that we are quickly coming to the point that if we remain silent, unimaginable horrors will follow. The time is coming where we are either going to turn our gaze away from the inhumane policies of the property speculators and their employees in government, or we are going to unite against these plans to drive the unhoused into camps.
Three decades of the dehumanization of those who cannot afford rent has set the foundation for forced removal of America’s “Useless Eaters,” a term my friend Erich Kuerschner, who witnesses this dehumanization as a schoolboy in Hitler’s Germany introduced me to, derived from the racial policy of the National Socialist meaning “life unworthy of life” and used to justify to imprisoning and killing people it deemed unworthy.
