Blog Posts From The Glorious Future: The Breaking Of The Man With The Iron Heart
The most radical reforms of the Great Redo were reserved for America's immigration policy
There was a particularly nasty one, with a nasty disposition and a nasty scowl and the nasty tattoos to match, who refused to break. Until one day, he did.
His name was Geoffrey, though he refused to answer to his given name. He wanted to be called Reinhard, in honor of Reinhard Heydrich, perhaps the most violent and evil member of the Nazi Party known as the Butcher of Prague. Reinhard, Geoffrey said, had done nothing wrong. He got a bad rap in the years after the war because “the victors write history.” Geoffrey said he admired Heydrich’s resilience, and his refusal to allow his enemies to escape justice. “He did what needed to be done,” Geoffrey said of Heyrdrich, whose nickname was Man With The Iron Heart, and who oversaw myriad executions of civilians during the Nazi occupation of Prague. “He is a hero of humanity. He wanted to save the world.”
Geoffrey was a member of America’s secret police in the Bad Times. Some back then called it ICE, but it took many forms: Armed vigilantes marauding through communities of color and the downtowns of major American cities, rounding up anyone and everyone who looked to them like undocumented immigrants. Geoffrey had participated in the first and second insurrection. In between those two uprisings, he bounced between positions for border patrol and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, a rogue entity that had declared itself a quasi-government not subject to the law of the United States. No one in power challenged that arrangement because ICE agents and those cosplaying as ICE agents would disappear them, or kill them and display their bodies as a warning to the regime’s opposition.
I recall one such display from my college years: A state lawmaker in New Mexico placed on a busy street holding his head and the head of his dog, a black lab. That state senator had cast the deciding vote to launch a formal investigation of secret police agents who had arrested Albuquerque city council members and the mayor and were essentially running the city themselves. A sly smile slid across Geoffrey’s face when I recalled that story. I asked him if he thought that massacre was funny. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”
Geoffrey was among the ten percent of secret police who chose imprisonment over working at the Immigration Assistance Centers all along the southern border. The Great Redo national security reforms included hundreds of pages of proposals for deradicalizing those in local police departments, border patrol, ICE, National Guard, and other agencies and institutions that had long ago rejected federal government oversight. These people – men, mostly – were a government within a government and would do what they wanted to whomever they wanted with no repercussions. That ended with the ushering in of the Redo reforms. ICE was abolished within days. So was Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security, a relic of the War on Terror that had been turned against the American populace.
Every single person even loosely associated with these agencies was arrested and housed in the concentration camps they had built for migrants in the Bad Times. Most were shipped to the camp built in the Florida swamps, where hundreds of migrants died with no explanation from authorities (the former governor of Florida was arrested at the Miami airport the day after the president’s election; he, like so many others, had planned on fleeing to Russia). There was room in those camps because they had been emptied out within 48 hours of the Redo taking effect, and every migrant kept in the inhumane camp conditions was housed and cared for by the federal government. They would later be awarded reparations for the horrors they had endured at the hands of the American government. The idea was that these migrant families would never again want for money or food or healthcare. We would take good care of them after they had been treated as less than human for so many years. Geoffrey once spat on the ground when I mentioned the reparations in passing.
Denny Carter
Geoffrey was one of my clients in those early days. I worked with sixteen former members of the country’s secret police, all of whom had been convicted of crimes against humanity in trials conducted by a special Great Redo truth and reconciliation commission. Fifteen of my clients cried during the trials and begged for mercy and said they had only followed orders, that it was not their fault. They had no choice, they said through tears. There were no good jobs in the Bad Times, they said, and the secret police kept a roof over their heads. Please, they begged, give us another chance.
Geoffrey did not cry. In fact, he smirked and told a prosecutor that he would do it all again if he had the chance. He told me stories in those early days after his conviction. He told me about the time he and a police buddy stormed a hospital one morning and arrested a six-year-old boy being treated for lukemia. The boy refused to come with them and a nurse said she would not let them take the kid, who had entered the country without proper documentation as a toddler. Geoffrey said his colleague flashed a gun at the boy and laughed as the kid peed his pants. He turned and shot the nurse in the knee when she punched him in the back. They dragged the boy to a nearby camp, where he died six weeks later. Then there was the story of the time Geoffrey and his partner forced a grandmother from El Salvador to choose which of her two grandchildren would be taken to the camps. They couldn’t tell who was who, and no one in the house would help them identify the pre-teen girl who had violated U.S. law when she entered the country at a secret entry point controlled by Mexican gangs. “So we said, OK then grandma, choose,” Geoffrey recalled. “She’s crying and screaming and vomiting and asking god to strike us down and all that shit. We refused to leave until she chose. It took an hour.”
“Eventually,” Geoffrey said, “she understood we were more powerful than god. It just took her a while.” Maybe he really was the reincarnation of Reinhard Heydrich, the Man With The Iron Heart.
I was among the hundreds of federal workers trained and deployed to de-radicalize those who had served in the secret police during the Bad Times. De-radicalization was – and still is – a key plank in the Redo agenda, which sought to drain the country of the right-wing extremism that had degraded our democracy and made the courts and Congress powerless to stop our slide into authoritarianism using traditional methods. In re-radicalizing members of the secret police, the hope was that most of them could be rehabilitated through service to the very people they persecuted in a former life. The Great Redo, after all, is about justice above all else, about rejecting the violent peace that had defined the US for generations and delivering justice to those who had been trampled amid the fascist excesses of the Bad Times. No people deserved justice more swiftly than the immigrants who had been treated worse than animals in keeping with national policy.
One of the more controversial planks of the Great Redo agenda was the president’s insistence that states that had been home to the country’s migrant concentration camps had to have at least some migrants in their state legislatures. One of the great failings of post-Civil War Reconstruction, the president told her staffers and administration officials, was the federal government’s premature withdrawal of requirements for formerly enslaved people to serve in legislative bodies. This, she believed, needed to be a long-term feature, not a temporary arrangement. So all fourteen states that held concentration camps in the Bad Times – mostly in the South and Midwest – were mandated to have fifteen percent of their legislature composed of migrants who had been jailed in the camps. These people were appointed by Redo boards tasked with democratizing the South. They would receive around-the-block security and could serve in the legislature for as long as they wanted.
Critics called it a humiliation. The president in private said she was glad they were humiliated, that they needed to feel shame for what they had done. “We sorely miss shame,” she said. “It serves a function in a working society.”
When this was leaked to the press, the president denied it and blamed the enemies of the Great Redo.
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