Watching recent events in Minneapolis from the comfortable distance of several thousand miles and a large ocean, my mind turned to an influential paper by Everett Hughes, based on an extended visit to West Germany in 1948. ‘Good People and Dirty Work’ began as a public lecture…
Hughes asks two questions: How did ‘good Germans’ come to let the Nazis get away with their crimes against humanity? How did the Nazis recruit and maintain a workforce to carry out these crimes? Comparing ICE to the agencies of the Nazi state risks being a lazy trope. Hughes’s approach, however, gives a degree of precision that is lacking in the way labels of fascism are being freely applied. As he notes, the analysis is applicable to many other instances of state-sponsored or sanctioned systems of cruelty and death, whether from lynch mobs in the American South or forced collectivization and the Gulag in Soviet Russia..
The contribution of the social sciences does not, though, lie in simple slogans and denunciations. It is in understanding the disruptions of social and economic orders over the last fifty years or so and in devising means to engage those who seem to have nowhere to go and nothing to do. Rebuilding that sense of community and stability is not as easy as voting for a different party next time an election comes around.
A Social Science Space blog