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Recently, reading an article in the Guardian by Ariel Dorfman on the deportation of children from this country, I thought about the three children, actual U.S. citizens, who were recently deported to Honduras with their mothers -- one a four-year-old with Stage 4 cancer but without his or her medications.
Dorfman is a novelist -- as an editor at Pantheon Books long, long ago, I once edited and published his work -- who himself had to leave his homeland as a young child. At the moment, he wonders what the children of deportable immigrants might be fearing (along with their families) now that the Trump administration is going after all too many such families all too eagerly. He recalls a story he wrote almost a half century ago about two siblings in Chile and "how those children would cope psychologically with the threat of agents of the state roaming the streets in search of dissidents to arrest and disappear, what sort of permanent scars of dread would be carved into the souls and bodies of those kids forced to become adults before their time."
He then adds, "It is tragic and disgraceful that the fate of a boy and a girl in yesteryear's dictatorial Chile can resonate so perversely in today's America." And he points out, all too pertinently, that "there could be an Albert Einstein lurking inside the head of one of the boys being whisked right now to some unknown destination, there could be a Madame Curie inside one of the girls going through that ordeal. A Cervantes, a George Eliot, a Bob Dylan, a Taylor Swift, a Nelson Mandela, an Abraham Lincoln, a Harriet Tubman, a Simà à ? ï ? ? ï ? ?n Bolivar, a Garibaldi, a Monet, a Sappho, a Meryl Streep -- who knows what miracles are being snuffed out with each stalked child?"
And in that context, let TomDispatch regular Aviva Chomsky take you into an all-American world in which the power to control the movements and locations of others has already brought us all too close to a distinct hell on earth. Tom
Freedom of Movement and Global Apartheid
The United States and Israel
In an aphorism sometimes attributed to Leo Tolstoy, sometimes to John Gardner, all literature relies on one of two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.
Let me offer my own version. We might summarize the entire history of the human race in two words: people move. Everything else is just elaboration on that basic plot.
Some of history's worst atrocities can be attributed to certain people trying to control other people's movements, whether by capturing them, herding them into prison camps (concentration camps, strategic hamlets, model villages), enslaving and transporting them, or warehousing them in besieged countries or regions while barricading the borders of anyplace to which they might want to flee, often consigning them to death in treacherous deserts or seas for trying to exercise the basic human right of freedom of movement.
European Freedom and Colonial Domination
In February, President Trump astonished the world by proclaiming that the United States should "take over" Gaza and rid it entirely of its Palestinian population. Yet in many ways, as startling as that might have seemed, his proposal fit right in with his drive to remove millions of people from the United States. Both reflected a colonial arrogance that the U.S. and Israel share: the idea that some people (Americans/Europeans/Whites/colonizers) have the right to move themselves as they desire while moving others against their will. Consider it, after a fashion, a contemporary (as well as historic) version of apartheid.
Forcing people to move or prohibiting their mobility are two sides of the same colonial or neocolonial coin. Colonizers invade and drive people out or enslave, transport, enclose, and imprison them while barricading off the privileged spaces they create for themselves. In a vicious cycle, colonizers or imperial powers justify their borders and walls in the name of "security" while protecting themselves from those desperate to escape their domination. And such ideas, old as they may be, are still distinctly with us.
European imperial actors from Christopher Columbus on claimed the right to freedom of movement on this planet. Today, the flyer you get in the mail with your passport proudly insists that, "with your U.S. passport, the world is yours!"
Or consider historian and scientist Jared Diamond's nonchalant claim that "no traditional society tolerated the relatively open access enjoyed by modern American or European citizens, most of whom can travel anywhere" merely by presenting a valid passport and visa to a passport control officer."
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