If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews. . .

Then disposing of these 12 million illegals will be a snap. Or so some on the anti-immigrant Right believe.

John caught and Digby elaborated on the commentary in WorldNet Daily linked above, which contained this chilling illogic on the time needed to rid ourselves of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the US:

“Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society”

As Digby notes: “‘Rid themsleves’ is an interesting way of putting it, don’t you think? I’m not surprised at this.” “Appalling” rather than the understated “interesting” might be a more apt description, but certainly unsurprising, since the commentary’s author is self-described as a “Christian Libertarian” which seems to be the latest in a series of “Christian” appellations siezed by white supremacists.

And I say appalling, because history shows that the leap from “deportation” to “extermination” is not all that great a distance.

Indeed, prior to Hitler’s decision to exterminate European Jewry, the policy of the Third Reich was deportation of aliens, and then emigration. As Hannah Arendt noted in Eichmann in Jerusalem, in 1939, before the Wannsee Conference which announced the pending destruction of Europe’s Jews:

the general directives for the immediate future had been given: concentration of Jews in ghettos, establishment of Councils of Jewish Elders, and the deportation of all Jews to the General Government area. Eichmann had attended this meeting setting up the “Jewish Center of Emigration.”

Prior to this, Eichmann made a reputation for himself in Vienna, as an expert in the “forced emigration” of Jews, when in 8 months he oversaw the flight of 45,000 Jews from Austria, more than double the exodus from Germany during same time frame. Up until the Wannsee Conference, Arendt notes that “‘forced emigration’ was the official formula for the solution of the Jewish question.” It was only after the abandonment of emigration as a means for ridding Europe of its Jews, that Eichmann’s reputation as an expert in emigration — in moving bodies — led to his being entrusted with the more lethal “resettlement” of Jews — their forced evacuation into death camps — after the onset of the Final Solution.

The irony here is that “forced emigration” was soon recognized by the architects of the Reich as being too slow and indecisive a method for solving the Jewish Question — that is, the removal of the Jewish population from Europe. When Nazi Germany expanded its eastern borders to include areas populated by millions of Jews, it concluded it needed a swifter method to “rid itself” of that unwanted race. While “Vox Day” uses the timeframe it took to implement the mass murder of Europe’s Jews as a measure of the time it will take to deport America’s unwanted aliens, one of very the reasons for choosing extinction over emigration was the rapidity with which extermination could be implemented, as opposed to “forced emigration.” Eichmann was responsible for the emigration of 45,000 Jews during 8 months in Vienna; a single Einsatzgruppe on the Eastern Front managed to murder, by shooting, over a 250,000 Jews in a single year. And yet killing at that rate only led the Nazis eager to “solve” the problem of unwanted human beings to the conclusion that a faster and more efficient method of slaughtering human beings be devised, which resulted in the nightmarish system of death camps and gas chambers.

This is why using the the template of the extermination of Europes’ Jews as a milepost for what amounts to the implementation of forced emigration of undocumented aliens is both chilling and repugnant. The fact of the matter is that a totalitartian regime found it could kill persons it found undesireable far more quickly and efficiently than it could expatriate them. And in an actual democracy governed by the rule of law, one can assume that the wheels of deportation will move more slowly still.

Which leads to this question: What if the actual pace of deportation is too slow to satisfy or quell the xenophobia being stoked by the hatemongerers on the right? What happens then?