The crisis at the southern border

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

Returning violence for violence only serves to multiply violence, adding darkness to a night already devoid of stars.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

Today, the United States is shrouded in darkness, fighting crises on several fronts: a global pandemic which has already claimed 175,000 lives; a national plague of incompetent, immoral and ignorant leadership; an economic recession with unemployment at levels of the Great Depression; and an immigration crisis at its Southern border, the consequence of centuries of aggressive European colonization.

This humanitarian crisis at the Southern border no longer makes news. The American people have become inured to this injustice, this cruelty, just like the German people became inured to the Nazi treatment of the Jews.

The US will continue to wallow in this darkness with four more years of Trump. As Michelle Obama said at the Democratic National Convention last Monday, “If you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election.”

Were there only one light to illuminate the darkness that envelopes the nation today, that will be the election, on November 3, of competent, civil leadership we have not enjoyed since January 21, 2017.

The United States is hardly the only country to have made its fortunes on the backs of “uncivilized” peoples. Wealth creation in many of the richest countries of the world today has been achieved through invasion, genocide, slavery and continuing violence.

Harping on history is a futile exercise. What matters is today. The developed nations in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States act as magnets for those seeking escape from political and ethnic strife which continues to plague many of these former colonies. The US is still the lodestar beckoning seekers of opportunity and prosperity for themselves, and education and a bright future for their children. The melting pot, the nation of immigrants, where 98% of its citizens are immigrants.

The conviction of European superiority has never been in doubt, especially in the minds of Europeans. As Cecil Rhodes wrote in his last will and testatement, referring to the Anglo-Saxon race: “I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race”.

Echoes of Hitler’s fascism in the Germany of the 1930s, when he promulgated the concept of the Master Race, the purity of Nordic or Aryan races among Germans and other Northern European peoples.

The Germans made a straightforward move towards the achievement of a pure race in the 1930s. They decided that the inferior, or impure races, like the Jews, Romanians (Gypsies) and the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, should be eliminated to hasten the evolution of a perfect race. Jews took pride of place as a particularly venomous race, parasites who enervated the purity of humanity. So the Nazis devolved the Final Solution, and just murdered them. If not all, then at least six million of them.

The colonizers of the Americas were perhaps the cruelest of an abysmal lot. In the years after systematic European colonization of the Americas began in 1492, they provided the blueprint for white supremacy, the precursor to Hitler’s Final Solution. They murdered the indigenous peoples to the point of near extinction. They forcibly kidnapped Africans and brought them to work in the cotton plantations in the Southern states of the US and the pineapple fields in the Caribbean. These unfortunates were treated as a species closer to animals than humans, against whom the most despicable forms of abuse and torture, rape, even murder for sport were considered moral, lawful, even expected of them. Indeed, it was the contention of some white Christian Americans that such abuse is mandated by the Bible. Unfortunately, after 250 years since Emancipation, this contention is still shared by some Americans, notably the KKK, White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis and the Trump “Base” of the US.

The English put a unique spin on subjugation and slavery. They proved themselves to be at least as equal to other Europeans in their physical cruelty to the inhabitants of the nations they colonized, but they tempered it with a distinctive brand of psychological cruelty which was far more effective. A brand which, while plundering the resources of the colonies, they made the natives feel that they should be grateful for being the recipients of a great and superior culture. The genius of the English colonizers in the Indian subcontinent and Africa is that they made their victims feel ashamed of their nationality. They questioned their culture, mocked their attire, and ridiculed their languages and religions. They made us ashamed of our darker, richer skin colours, proved even today by the fact that the best-selling cosmetic east of Suez is skin-whitening cream.

The native ruling classes in Ceylon before independence were more British than the British themselves. They wore three-piece suits with a tie in the scorching heat; they went to church every Sunday; they knew their Shakespeare and Chaucer and spoke with an Oxford accent; resplendent in cream flannels, they played cricket in the midday sun, like Noel Coward’s mad dogs and Englishmen; and their drink of choice was whisky with a splash.

I remember when I was in secondary school, it was almost a boast to say, “I say, my Sinhalese (or Tamil) is very poor”. Failing an examination in the vernacular (I am reluctant to say “mother tongue” because, in the ruling elite, our mothers spoke English) was almost a badge of honor. Knowledge of the English language is the kaduwa (sword) that keeps the lower orders ostensibly content with their lot even today.

Even after they granted self-rule and independence to the natives, the Europeans retained economic and emotional control in many of the colonies, some until the 1970s. It took a few decades for the natives to rid themselves of the manacles of colonial subjugation. But for a few notable exceptions like Singapore, this refreshing change gave the natives unfettered freedom and licence to ruin their own countries without any foreign help. At least their wealth and resources were stolen by their own.

Sadly, the inferiority complex and self-flagellation of their hateful black and brown pigmentation persist to the present day among some colonials. There are brown-skinned natives in sovereign nations who yearn for the “good old days”, when they were ruled by the superior white man.

Perhaps this is the reason, this sense of inferiority, that significant numbers of coloured peoples, who hail from Trump’s notion of “shithole countries”, support the white supremacist policies of the Trump administration. As do even some Sri Lankans living in the USA, where overt governmental racism discriminates against their own best interests.

As I said, harping on the past is an exercise in futility. Complaining about the evils of colonialism, after several decades of ruining our countries all by ourselves without any foreign help, is like a middle-aged man blaming his parents for the crimes he has committed.

The immigration laws of the US and other countries of the First World were liberal enough after World War II to invite immigrants to the “mother country”, in the face of a labour shortage in Europe and the Americas after World War II.

The influx of refugees is the greatest problem facing the First World today. There is a reluctance, even a fear, to welcome these refugees, fleeing from poverty, violence and strife often initiated, paradoxically, by the very countries to which they are appealing for refuge.

Applications for asylum to the US have exploded and reached a breaking point, threatening its prosperity. An invasion of brown refugees also feeds the threat to its white majority and white privilege, a fear that is being strategically exploited by the Trump administration.

According to current US immigration laws, anyone seeking asylum in the United States has to be accepted until his case for asylum is heard by an immigration judge. These hearings are delayed, causing a backlog and a waiting period for asylum cases, during which the asylum seeker was allowed to remain and legally work in the country until his case is called. The problem is, many asylum seekers never appear for the immigration hearing, often scheduled months after arrival. They disappear into a twilight zone, creating a vast community of undocumented immigrants, who numbered an estimated 11 million in 2017.

This problem was addressed by the Trump administration with typically inhuman measures. Trump has been stoking the white American fear of illegal immigration from Mexico and other Hispanic countries. He made it the core of his successful 2016 election campaign.

Asylum seekers are now not released pending hearing of their cases for asylum, as mandated by law; they are either deported indiscriminately, or detained at the border in the most inhumane conditions, in Nazi-style concentration camps. Children are separated from their parents, and either caged in terrible conditions in camps at the border, or worse, become prey to a thriving business of sexual trafficking and slavery. Many of these kids simply disappear, and the administration, in whose custody they were, has no idea of their whereabouts.

The American Dream is farthest away from the aspirations of these tortured souls. Their only goal is survival, which they will not achieve if they are deported to their own countries and/or are denied asylum by the inhuman immigration policies of the Trump administration. Unless, of course, you are an aspiring white immigrant from Europe; then the rules change dramatically. As Trump once famously wailed, and I paraphrase, “why can’t we get immigrants from countries like Norway, (the whitest nation in the world) instead of people from shithole countries in Africa and Asia?”

Trump longs for the USA to be nation of whites like the Scandinavian countries, with economic, racial and social prosperity. He does not understand that these countries have no history of colonial and racial cruelty caused by invasion and colonization. Immigrants to these nations are few, and largely welcomed regardless of pigmentation. As an example, Sweden has under 400,000 immigrants from Asian and African nations in a total population of 10.23 million (4%) in 2019, compared to the 90 million (28%) immigrants from Asia and Africa in the USA, also in 2019.

If Trump is allowed to continue his racist policies, the US will not end up like a democratic, socialist nation of Scandinavia. He will transform the greatest democracy in the world to an authoritarian dictatorship like Russia.

For Trump, the secret of a prosperous nation is in the blending, as long as the main ingredient in the recipe is vanilla.

(The writer is the second son of Tissa Chndrasoma, a well-known Civil Servant of his day, and Mrs. Gertie Chandrsoma. He emigrated to the US at age 49 as his elder boy had won a scholarship to Yale and he decided to get the rest of the family to the US after the 1991 explosion at the Joint Operations Command. Then working for the late Gamini Dissanayake, who had lost favour with the Premadasa government and had himself taken a sabbatical at Cambridge, Dissanayake’s trusted aides, like their boss, thought it best to duck out of sight for a while. A Mahaweli colleague helped him to get started in Los Angeles where he and his wife first did low level jobs. He thereafter lived in Phoenix when his company relocated there and worked on the Clinton campaign in LA and Obama’s in Phoenix. His children seized the opportunities America offered and did very well. He has not regretted his decision to retire to Sri Lanka when peace returned in 2009. He says “I have always loved writing, but my raw hatred of Trump, who is ruining what was a beautiful, compassionate nation which gave me  second chance in life, has give me an incentive to vent and expose him as best I can.”)