Some migrants - what we would have called in better times "refugees" - get through only to have to try to survive by selling tissues or counterfeit goods on the streets or, much worse, finding themselves interned in migration centres that are closed off to visitors and are simply modern-day prisons of the worse sort, where migrants are separated from family members and routinely abused. There are more than 13,000 immigrants interned just in Spain, a country that has some 2 millions citizens living abroad at the moment.
After the Twin Towers fell in 2001 - those two towers that were supposedly impacted by two planes flown by trainee Muslim pilots, although there were in fact three towers that fell -, we collectively decided that it was all right for terrorists to be whisked away to black sites to be tortured for decades without charge, nor habeas corpus of course. In fact they were not terrorists (after all they had not be found guilty of terrorism) but just people, normally only the brown skinned sort though. It is not that we did not know about this. Everybody saw the shocking images from the Abu Ghraib prison, after all.
As the famous poem puts it:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
(Martin Niemöller)
We have not protested loudly enough about these black sites and internment centres. The narrative was that suspected terrorists must be removed, for the good of the rest of us, even if it turns out that they are not terrorists. As Bush Jr's Vice President Dick Cheney put it in 2006: water-boarding (ie torture) of suspected terrorists is a "no brainer". The following US President, Obama, would peruse a list every week of suspected terrorists, most of them inhabitants of the very poorest of villages in rural Pakistan, deciding which were to be assassinated - along with scores of collateral victims - using drones.
In 2013 Edward Snowden, an IT analyst, became a western outlaw for showing that the US government and others were unlawfully spying on all of us. We are now all of us presumed guilty, rather than innocent. He had a dramatic escape (from possibly the death penalty in the USA) and currently has asylum in Russia. He has been unable to return home since.
Wikileaks brought to light all sorts of criminal acts carried out by all sorts of governments, including in 2010 the notorious Collateral Damage video, in which US military shot down at least a dozen civilians including 2 Reuters journalists in Baghdad, and including small children, and laughed about the indiscriminate slaying as they did so. Chelsea Manning, a soldier in the US military and an intelligence analyst - the whistleblower -, has spent most of her time since then in US jails, receiving massive fines, and under treatment that can only be classified as torture. Julian Assange (Wikileaks) has spent the best part of a decade cooped up, never charged of a crime, and is currently in bad health in the notoriously awful UK Belmarsh prison, awaiting extradition to the US.
These are the West's political prisoners. There are many others. A few people have protested, but the vast majority has not and sees no cause for alarm in how these heroic citizens have been treated by corrupted power.
Meanwhile, obsessing about possible slights to Jewish sensibilities, confusing the notions of Jewish and Zionist, we have failed to extrapolate from the huge crime the Nazis committed, and have not recognised that it was never about the Jews, per se, but about power and the other. Once the other is equated with some dangerous characteristic, be it usury, lack of hygiene, rabid religious sentiment, black beards..., we have unthinkingly allowed them to be demonised.
By the same measures, being confined in one's home during the coronavirus scare is entirely logical. After all, it is the choice between a deadly virus that is killing millions or your whim to step outside. The problem is that it is not killing millions, that your stepping outside makes no difference, and that the right to leave your home and wander around is not a whim.
You might wonder why you should be confined if you are seriously ill - surely the CV-19 should warrant being in a hospital at least. And if CV-19 has such mild symptoms why are we confined in our homes. If, on the other hand, we are not ill, why - again - are we confined? Instead of confining all of us, why are not the very vulnerable encouraged to stay in, with on-site health support and grocery deliveries?
The press is now reporting that quarantine may be lifted for those who have a test result to show that they have antibodies or have been vaccinated, as Bill Gates has suggested. Hello, Brave New World!
To be able to walk around our common world used to be one of the most basic of human rights. Not being allowed to was, until very recently, recognised as a characteristic of the most totalitarian regimes.
The Faustian bargain we entered into when we did not take to the streets and protest the horrific reality of migrant centres and those concentration camps found on our borders has given the Dick Cheneys of this world a free pass to do the same thing to us.
