The Refugee Scandal FAQ
What is the refugee scandal?
Thousands of children are being stuffed into cages because a great many Americans who have never experienced real want and enjoy a quality of life unknown in history are half-witted, vicious cowards, terrified enough of children that they voted for a man who would separate kids from their parents and put them in concentration camps.
No, wait, I meant the racist, fictional scandal about there being too many refugees trying to get in and how babies are going to collapse western civili-
Kids and toddlers are being tortured at exceptional expense and it benefits literally no one except those ICE agents who get a sexual thrill from oafish cruelty.
But aren’t migrants committing a crime? Isn’t America just locking up criminals?
There is no hurt caused to anyone, no food is stolen from anyone’s mouth by an imaginary line being crossed. No child commits a crime by crossing any border; they are perfectly innocent. They are children. It is bizarre sadism that desires for government agents to force them into filthy, disease-ridden prisons to be tortured.
For those fleeing war, disease, murder, poverty or famine, no crime is being committed in moving across any border, at all. By law, convention and treaty all people may travel into whatever jurisdiction they must in search of sanctuary; when governments speak of refugees illegally crossing borders they are lying, hence they do not charge refugees with any crime, but merely detain, dehumanise and brutalise them. The law reflects your conscience when it comes to refugees: when death approaches your family, you may gather them up and rescue them from it. Of course you can.
For those migrants not seeking asylum, who do unlawfully cross a border, the law being broken protects no one and achieves nothing. Far worse in scope and injury are governments acting aggressively, and indeed unlawfully, in their treatment of migrants.
What we perversely call ‘populist’ governments are comfortable violating their own legitimacy, laws and common human decency while spending vast sums of other people’s money doing it. In a frenetic and ill-spent handful of years the UK, for instance, spent hundreds of millions of pounds detaining migrants pointlessly and tens of millions more in compensation for illegal detention practices, such as habitually pretending that very young children were adults and sticking them in prison. The US government takes a perverse pride in the range of courts, legal associations, charities and international bodies that have found it is criminally torturing people.
Yet the sick weirdos responsible for such crimes against refugees are not having their families torn apart. The children of politicians are not being laid to bed on concrete floors inside large communal chicken wire kennels. Yet you wish us to believe a thing we do not do to torturers, rapists, murderers or ICE agents is a just punishment for crossing an imaginary line?
You may not speak of law to defend the government’s actions. The law is not being enforced but broken. And you are weird and vile if your first thought on hearing the crying of lonely and abused children is that justice could ever demand it. You are not defending a point of principle by hoping that the law is being upheld, even if it was true. You’re just spinelessly hoping a principle exists somewhere that could make your wanton, senseless cruelty acceptable to morally normal people. It does not.
Human beings have a fundamental need to offer support when we see another person, even another animal, in peril; so visceral is this need that it becomes distressing to resist it. It feels good to do a tiny thing to help another person. Our moral sense wounds us permanently when a person in front of us suffers because we were too scared to act. We rightly feel terrible. We remember that feeling, forever.
Our philosophies, laws and religions are our imperfect attempts to codify that fundamental human nature and this is where we can go so horribly wrong. To enjoin us to selfishness and apathy requires ideologies polluted by fear, anger and ignorance combined with the reassuring lie that a law can distance us from the person who stands before us in need. As human beings we conduct our greatest evils when we pretend politics is not personal, when we tell ourselves that when the state inflicts suffering it is the responsibility of some abstract society rather than the individuals who made it happen. We do not get to throw up our hands and say we are allowed to vote and cannot be held liable if those we vote for do the terrible things they say they will. Democracy does not make you less culpable for the evils inflicted by the state. Democracy makes you more culpable. When we vote for blood and tears they stain our hands.
There is something deeply wrong with you if your first instinct upon discovering that babies are being stuck in concentration camps is to defend those who do it. You greedily enjoy society’s luxuries without having any of the decency or inclination towards compassion that makes them possible. Those who need help are not a burden to the rest of us. You are.
But isn’t it the fault of the parents? They know what America is going to do. They’re dreadful for putting their children through this!
Are you asking to be robbed if you own property? Asking to be murdered if you are alive? You are not to be taken seriously to suggest such things. The American state is not some rabid dog that has no moral agency or control of its behaviour. To clumsily attempt to blame the families of abused children for the jeopardy they are placed in is a blanket admission that the policy is horrific and imperils children. You buffoon.
But calling them concentration camps? That’s a bit strong isn’t it?
Concentration camps are the scene of numerous crimes against humanity. They should be vanishingly rare. They should be unthinkable because of the suffering they inherently inflict, because of the noxious combinations of hatred, indifference and complicity required from so many people for them to be built and operated. Prison guards must desperately brace their mental health against the people they torment, politicians and broadcasters and newspapers must call for them to be built, citizens must crow about this incredible victory that earns them nothing but the pain of another person.
They are not rare. Families were rounded up and stuck in concentration camps by the British during the Second Boer War so that a comprehensive scorched earth and mass detainment and collective punishment policy could be enacted. Vietnam and the Khmer Rouge conducted arbitrary mass arrests, detaining whole families, villages, towns, as a terrifying means of maintaining state control by inflicting collective punishment. Britain and America both, during World War 2, rounded up and detained Italians, Germans and especially those of Japanese descent in enormous prisons, simply for their ethnicity; the property and the lives detainees had built in their home nation were stolen from them. Muslim Croats were rounded up by Eastern Orthodox Bosnian Serbs and collectively punished in enormous prison camps, tortured and murdered at random. The list continues for some time.
You should be thinking about all of these crimes against humanity and all of these peoples when concentration camps are referred to. It is not a coincidence that atrocity after atrocity is visited upon the victims of concentration camps. Inflicting collective punishment on an innocent population is their purpose. The desperate wailing of terrified, suffering, traumatised and neglected children is the point of concentration camps. It is why they are built.
But the reason you object to ‘concentration camps’ as a term is because Trump and Session’s detention policy is not like the extermination camps the Nazis operated towards the end of World War 2, is it. The concentration camps have not yet led to mass extermination, you bleat, because you pretend to yourself and others that the Holocaust would be the line you would not cross, that would finally make you disgusted, that you would finally object to, campaign against, protest. In truth if you do not care now you will never care. During the Holocaust you would have aggressively defended every horror enacted by every state actor and denounced everyone who disagreed; we know this, because you do now. Perhaps you have long told yourself that you support gun rights just in case there’s another Hitler, that you would take to the streets and prevent any injustice personally, with a gun. In reality, confronted with another Hitler, you would defend him on Twitter by calling strangers Libtards.
Happy world refugee day.
