Running out of excuses

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Despite what Marx said about tragedy and farce, history never really repeats itself. There are historical parallels, of course, but different groups of people in different contexts never fully replicate the responses of other groups in past times. Marx also asserted that human nature is not something fixed and unchanging (an assumption at the root of much conservative thought) but something which is continually changing and developing, arising more from social and economic relationships than from an innate characteristic. But when those relationships barely change over a long period human nature can appear to be more permanent.

Where the capacity for cruelty fits is open to debate. Those of us who hope for a better world cling to the idea that it isn’t an essential part of us, just waiting to be invoked, but that hope is sometimes challenged. We know from the history of Europe during the first half of the twentieth century just how easy it is for ordinary citizens, given a uniform, weapons and legal authority, to apply their cruelty against the vulnerable and weak – and not even just to ‘follow orders’, but to go beyond and add their own twists when dealing with people who they no longer see as human. The Milgram experiment showed us how easy it is to get randomly selected people to inflict pain on others when told to do so by someone in authority.

Some of the stories coming out of the US seem to indicate that little has changed. Random arrests and detentions – even of firefighters in the middle of dealing with a blaze – are becoming the Trumpian norm; and ‘disappearing’ people and moving them across the country whilst depriving them of adequate food, water and hygiene seem to be widely accepted, with far too many US citizens seemingly welcoming what is happening.

Here in the UK, we had Farage this week proposing to round up and detain at least 600,000 people in camps before deporting them to anywhere which will take them, regardless of their potential fate when they arrive. That is close to 1% of the UK’s population – one in every hundred people, and even if (after a bit of back-tracking) women and children will be ‘dealt with’ later in the programme, he’s been quite clear that they’re not exempt. There can be few of us who don’t know 100 people; even if the proportion of migrants in Wales is lower than it is in the big cities of England, many of us will know at least one person on Farage’s list, even if we don't realise it. They say it will be a ‘targeted’ program, but as we’ve seen in the US, when the target for the number removed becomes the main driver, discriminating between those here illegally and others becomes a luxury, not a necessity, and he’s already made it quite clear that there will be no right of appeal, and no right to any due process before removal.

With the immediate reaction from the Tory leader having been to try and be even harder than Farage by not excluding women and children from her immediate action plans, and Sir Starmer’s lot apparently being more concerned about whether the ‘solution’ is workable than whether it is moral, there is little room for any optimism that the ‘main’ parties will show any leadership. When deliberate cruelty stalked the European mainland nearly a century ago, news of what was happening wasn’t always readily available – people had the excuse of ‘not really knowing’. We’re no longer in that age – news spreads instantly and widely, and even if some of the stories might turn out to be exaggerations, the general drift of what is happening, and the truth of many of the specifics, is clear. What’s our excuse this time?