The Eyes of Hate
In September of 1933, at the League of Nations meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was open and affable when he first met LIFE Magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt. It was only a few minutes later, when Eisenstaedt returned to take more pictures of Goebbels, that he caught one of the most startling photos of the twentieth century. Goebbels had changed — dramatically.
I couldn’t tell you why the photo is so powerful. But then, that’s what great art does, it describes the indescribable. Goebbels clutched the arms of the wooden chair he was sitting in like the talons of some awful, predatory bird. He glares at the photographer with eyes full of menace and suspicion. Goebbels was transformed into an image of pure hate.
Indeed, so famous was the photograph that tradition eventually gave it a name: “The Eyes of Hate.” If you Google those four words you’ll get the image. Goebbels had only just learned that the photographer was Jewish.
Just as I can’t tell you why that photograph is so powerful, I can’t tell you why I am reminded of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller every time I see it. Or, for that matter, I can’t tell you why I’m reminded of that photo whenever I see Stephen Miller. They look very different from one another, Miller and Goebbels. For one thing, Goebbels had hair.
But there is an ineffable quality that binds men and women who are particularly loathsome, a kind of brotherhood and sisterhood of evil. This is especially true of Miller and Goebbels, because they are similar in nature, they are driven by hate. And like Goebbels, who had a club foot, Miller is a cripple. Only Miller is crippled emotionally. When he was in high school an Hispanic girl spurned his attempt to take her out on a date. Ever since Miller has loathed Hispanics. I know, it’s pitiful, but irrational bigotry frequently usually is.
Miller recently eXcreted the following: “The right of ‘due process’ is to protect citizens from the government, not to protect foreign trespassers from removal. Due process guarantees the rights of a criminal defendant facing prosecution, not an illegal alien facing deportation.”
That quote is a lie from one end to the other. The job of due process is to protect the rights of everyone in the United States — without exception. Miller’s opinion is at variance with the law as enunciated by the Supreme Court of the United States, many times over.
For example, in Shaughnessy v the United States (1953), the majority opinion held that “It is true that aliens who have once passed through our gates, even illegally, may be expelled only after proceedings conforming to traditional standards of fairness encompassed in due process of law.”
In Matthews v Diaz (1976), SCOTUS held “There are literally millions of aliens within the jurisdiction of the United States. The Fifth Amendment, as well as the Fourteenth Amendment, protects every one of these persons from deprivation of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”
Still not convinced? In 1982, in Plyler v Doe, SCOTUS further affirmed that, “unlawfully present aliens are entitled to both due process and equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment.”
As a side note, I would like to say for the record that I loathe the term “illegal alien.” There is no such thing as an inherently illegal human being. That’s nothing more than bigoted crap that has crept into the English language like an imposter. It should be summarily scooped up and expelled. Possibly to El Salvador.
Anyway, due process is inconvenient, to be sure. It’s burdensome. The machinery of government is already encumbered by the proverbial red tape of bureaucracy. Wouldn’t it be easier and faster to just forgo all that and scoop people up in the middle of the night and ship them off to El Salvador? Of course it would. Such systems of government already exist. They’re called dictatorships.
This is why we Americans aren’t loathsome Nazis. Because we don’t do such things. People like Miller are, in their souls, anti-American. They don’t want the law to apply to everyone. They want the law to brutalise people who don’t conform to their narrow bigotries. And that is why people like Miller and Goebbels all have the same eyes. Eyes of Hate.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.