Ridding their societies of "undesirables" has been the goal of authoritarians as far back as biblical times and is usually carried out with crude methods.
Fearing newborn Hebrew boys would grow up to join his enemies, Pharaoh sent legions across Egypt to slaughter hundreds of them years before the birth of Christ.
Adolph Hitler, obsessed with creating a purified Aryan race, turned millions of Jews into non-persons by robbing them of their property and their freedom and civil liberties, then finally of their lives in gas chambers.
Modern-day tyrants were no less brutal. Communist mainland China murdered upwards of 20 million of its own. Ethnic cleansing—a sanitized name for genocide—has left rivers of blood flowing through parts of Africa and Eastern Europe.
Today's political hotheads have their own ideas, perhaps more polished and less lethal.
Carrying on the family tradition of right-wing extremism, Republican U.S. Rep. Duncan D. Hunter (son of retired 14-term California Congressman Duncan L. Hunter whose fizzled 2008 presidential effort produced humiliating 0.02 percent poll support in its closing days) cottons to the idea of rounding up and deporting U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, despite the offspring's automatically being citizens upon birth in the United States.
Hunter ignores his oath as a Marine Corps officer and now as a Marine Corps reservist—upholding and protecting the U.S. Constitution, whose 14th Amendment reads, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States wherein they reside."
Hunter also flirts with the idea of a pure American race. "It takes more than walking across the border to become American citizens," Hunter proclaims. "It's in our souls."
Finally, U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman proposes giving the secretary of state power to strip citizenship of anyone "providing material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization," even if only suspected. Why only "foreign" terrorists? The Southern Poverty Law Center, the premier monitor of homegrown U.S. radicals, reports that between the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and 2005, more than 60 domestic terrorist plots were uncovered. If mere suspicion that a U.S. citizen is supporting foreign terrorists can lead to loss of citizenship, why not strip domestic terrorists of their birthright? Was Timothy McVeigh less a terrorist than the Times Square bomber?
The unilateral power to deprive Americans of their citizenship on the basis of suspicion should give Lieberman's Senate colleagues pause. We know what happened to hundreds of "suspected" terrorists swept up in the Bush-Cheney dragnet and packed off to Guantanamo and never charged after years of detention.
