Barbed wires

During a Thanksgiving Day teleconference with members of the US armed forces, US President Donald Trump took the opportunity to exult over the intensified militarisation of the nation’s southern border in response to the US-bound Central American migrant and refugee caravan:

“We have the concertina fencing and we have things that people don’t even believe. We took [the] old, broken wall and we wrapped it with barbed wire-plus …We’re fighting for our country. If we don’t have borders, we don’t have a country”.

Nevermind that the United States’ disregard for other people’s borders is a major cause of Central American migration in the first place, as US political and economic meddling in the region continues to increase poverty and violence.

Now, the ‘barbed wire-plus’ scheme has resulted in a situation in which thousands of asylum seekers are stuck on the Mexican side of the border waiting to have their cases processed, with black numbers written on their arms as part of an informal tracking system.

Even the ultra-Zionist Times of Israel – another country well known for its manic and deadly border fortification projects – felt compelled to note that the “marking of asylum seekers” recalled the “Nazi practice of tattooing prisoner numbers”.

Nor has ‘barbed wire-plus’ worked out well for some of Trump’s fellow citizens as 32 people were recently arrested at a pro-migrant demonstration on the border, organised by a Quaker group. Time Magazine explains that the protest “was meant to launch a national week of action called Love Knows No Borders: A moral call for migrant justice, which falls between Human Rights Day on [December 10], and International Migrants’ Day on December 18”.

And as we mark this year’s International Migrants’ Day, right-wing efforts rage on to selectively criminalise not only migration but also human solidarity and empathy. After all, the prevailing capitalist system – in which the financial tyranny of the minority is predicated on the severance of interpersonal bonds – can’t really handle love.

Across the Atlantic, European countries are flaunting their own borders, as xenophobia and the demonisation of the ‘other’ are ever-handy means of detracting public attention from domestic malaise.

Take Italy, for example – a primary landing point for migrants from Africa and elsewhere and a wellspring of racist political rhetoric. During his successful campaign for president of the region of Lombardy earlier this year, Attilio Fontana warned Italian radio listeners about the perils of immigration: “We must decide whether our ethnicity, our white race, our society should continue to exist or should be erased”.

Meanwhile, far-right leader Matteo Salvini, who in 2018 acquired the posts of Italian interior minister and deputy prime minister, set about propagating the idea that Italy was ‘under attack’ by Muslims. This apocalyptic scenario, he claimed, had been foretold by Oriana Fallaci, late Italian journalist-nutcase who had also excoriated US universities for allowing persons by the name of Mustafa and Muhammad to study biology and chemistry despite the threat of germ warfare.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘‘Barbed wire-plus’:

Borders know no love’.

Courtesy: Aljazeera.com