The Evil happening at the Border

"The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference" is a quote by famed historian Ian Kershaw. The point Kershaw is making here is, of course, that evil gets its best chance to take hold when good people don'tt make a stand against it. It's not my problem is never an answer because if evil comes looking for one, it's not long before it comes looking for another, then another and so on until the majority are also targeted for discrimination and worse.

The evil, and there is no other word for it, that it being allowed to unfold at detention centers along the southern border of the U.S., is an absolute outrage.

Family separations, kids in cages being deprived of basic amenities, highly suspicious assaults and deaths, due process being abandoned - all have become the new normal under Donald Trump and his complicit band of conservative creeps.

And just when you think a new low has drilled its way through the floor with child separations / detentions, we are quickly reminded that Trump oversees The China Syndrome administration and takes the bar down not just lower, but melts it down into the surface of the Earth.

By that consider recent efforts of the Department of Justice to argue in court that the U.S. authorities have no obligation to provide things like soap and toothpaste to children held in detention centers.

The fact that a spoiled, narcissistic pretend billionaire con-artist, with the temperament of a teething toddler coupled with the morality of your average klansman, has somehow managed to drag the country down to this level will forever be a stain on American history. Quite how the U.S. now has the temerity and bare-faced cheek to claim any moral superiority in the world is mind- boggling. Shining city on the hill? That light will be the kids's; detention center clothes being burnt because they're riddled with lice.

The U.S. has spent the vast majority of the post-War period lecturing large parts of the world what they should and shouldn’t do when it comes to human rights.

But where now is the U.S? Clearly and blatantly offering up some serious competition to those that it has previously claimed to be egregious human rights transgressors.

Despite Trump's rabid assertions that refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants are animals (unless of course they come from Norway or somewhere else “Ivanka” like) it is a key principle of not only international law, but also basic common decency, that all humans have rights.

Consequently, they have the right to be treated as human beings, without condition, and not mere objects for Trump and his supporters to demonize, degrade and humiliate.

Movement from one country to another, be that asylum seeking, immigration, travel or any other way, should always be undertaken in peace and with dignity for all.

Not to excuse the apathy of an unfortunate number of Germans in the run up to the brutal finality of Auschwitz, but they did not have the benefit of things like 24 hour a day news coverage and social media. The fact that the aberration on the southern border of the U.S is now so high profile makes the culpability of Trump and his miserable, “only following orders” lackeys even more difficult to swallow.

One can only assume that given Trump’s dismal proposal for a wall has failed, and will continue to fail, he is now taking out his miserable wrath on the southern border in this fashion. If you cast your mind back to when Trump ran his campaign back in 2015 / 2016, some made very astute predictions that his winning the Presidency would be the gateway to the U.S. fundamentally losing its democratic way and lurching to a more authoritarian, populist style of governance, increasingly free from the restraints of the rule of law.

At the time, those who predicted that were shouted by down by the MAGA mob as being fanciful, dramatic and that Trump was “just saying it how it was.” Now we have kids in cages, denied basic human rights.

Maybe those predictions weren’t so far-fetched after all?

Th only thing that could be worse than the first four years of Trump? Another four. Come 2020, its beyond vital to be rid of Trump and begin the long road to recovery, democracy, the rule of law and yes, no more kids in cages.