This is Kisti Noem, the USA’s Secretary of Homeland Security – aka The Puppy Killer because, well, you can work that bit out for yourself, but she justified it as the puppy wasn’t doing what she wanted.
Fast forward to this week and here she is at a press conference following the murder of Renee Good by one of her ICE goons. You can see there’s a slogan on the podium.
“One of ours, all of yours” is the ugliest arithmetic in history — used by many totalitarian regimes, but the Nazis perfected it.
At Lidice (1942), one Czech village was erased because one successful assassination embarrassed the Reich. 173 men were shot where they stood, 60 women died later in concentration camps, 82 children gassed. The village was razed, the cemeteries dug up, the very name expunged.
At Oradour-sur-Glane (1944), an entire French village was annihilated because one German officer was allegedly captured. 190 men shot. 247 women burned to death in a church, 205 children with them.
Neither massacre was about justice.
Neither was about security.
They were about terror as policy:
One of ours, all of yours.
Collective punishment. Exemplary murder. Message sent. That phrase wasn’t rhetoric — it was policy.
The logic was simple and obscene:
- Collective punishment
- Terror as governance
- Deterrence through massacre
And here’s the part that still matters:
This wasn’t “excess” or “rogue units”. It was bureaucratised cruelty, calmly justified, written up, rubber-stamped.
When states abandon individual responsibility and reach for collective blame, civilization has already failed. You don’t slide into barbarism — you decide to use it.
Lidice and Oradour aren’t historical footnotes. They’re warning labels.
They’re case law for humanity.
Any government, anywhere, that talks in the language of “they’re all the same” or “they brought it on themselves” is walking a very dark road. The last time it happened it took six years and 75 million dead to rid the world of it. Europe recognises what’s happening in the USA because we still bear the scars.
History has receipts.
And they’re written in ash.