When I read CNN’s piece about  a pro-Israel group sharing with the Trump administration a Palestine activist “deportation” list, I immediately thought of Edwin Black’s foreword in IBM and the Holocaust, in which he questioned where the Nazis got their lists in the first place. That got me thinking about Occupied France during World War II, and how some French collaborated with the Nazis by denouncing resistance fighters and Jews, who were rounded up, tortured, and sent to death camps.

I then realized that I had not checked the injured and death statistics in Gaza for a few days. I am still not certain as to whether the death toll is 50,399 or 61,700 — adding the presumed dead under the rubble — or if the wounded are 114,583.

I then came across articles about the killing of 15 aid workers and their burial in a mass grave, and another about the dispute between Israel and the UN over whether there was enough of food in Gaza.

Then I got to thinking about Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk and wondered whether an Israeli graduate student at Columbia or Tufts who had publicly expressed their views or done the same things these two were accused of doing would also be whisked away and disappeared. I wondered if there was something specific about them that made them targets for deportation.

I remembered the Israeli speaker at Harvard who made a joke about giving exploding pagers to protestors and the people in the audience who laughed. I wondered whether an international graduate student who said the same thing about pro-Israel protestors at some Harvard event would be whisked away and disappeared.

I thought about those in the room who would have been ill at ease at the joke, and equally concerned about how “combatting antisemitism” is pretext for instrumentalized antisemitism, which I’ve written about in an earlier commentary.

I thought about the disappeared individuals who have been denied due process rights and are multiplying in such large numbers there is now a “disappeared” tracker. And I thought about those persons disappeared by my government into a torture prison in El Salvador.

This all got me thinking back to interviews of fired federal workers who lost their jobs because of their work, or for having participated directly or indirectly in Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts.  And when I thought about that, I remembered the interview of a few of those fired workers. I remembered the Maine government employee who had worked on DEI in an earlier part of her career but was not working on that in her current position. She described the phone caller from the Office of Personnel Management saying that did not matter and she was fired. And this got me thinking about what might be called the “non-white man’s burden” that the federal employees suspected was the true reason for their abrupt terminations that they chose to resist by suing.

As I thought about that report, I remembered the law firms that had promised to collaborate with the current administration by providing oodles of pro bono hours, worth tens of millions of dollars and promising not to do that “bad” DEI stuff like it was some juju or voodoo.  That made me imagine them as legal shock troops ready and willing to enable the repression.

And that got me thinking about the law firms that refused to collaborate, and how the American Bar Association stood up for the rule of law. I also reflected on Elias Law Group Chair Mark Elias’s statement that the firm would not negotiate with the Trump administration about which clients they could represent or which cases they would take.

After all that stream of consciousness musing, I wondered whether what I just wrote would land me on some list that some private or public citizen is compiling with the help of AI. Then I wondered whether someone who was reading this on a device would also be added to a list.  And then I wondered whether a relative or a friend of the reader would also be subject to spyware technology — like Palantir — and also be put on the list.  And then I wondered if someone who lived or worked near the reader would be added to a list because they might have had contact with them at some point; like maybe a barista at the local Starbucks.

And then I remembered Hans Fallada’s novel Every Man Dies Alone and the discussion of the complex, ever-widening circles of fear people experienced in 1942 Berlin where a German husband and wife rebelled against Hitler by dropping anti-Nazi 3 x 5 cards in public places when no one was looking.

And like a warm — or is it cold? — embrace, I felt that fear strike deep into my heart it did creep.  And, like Ripley in one of the Alien movies, as she fell into the white-hot lead and the alien erupted from her chest, I caressed and embraced that fear.  For if there was no fear, there would be no chance to be fearless.