"Whelps and Dams"

The ghastly earthquake in Turkey and Syria is reminding the world of the plight of—among many others—the millions of displaced people still living in both countries who had fled Syria's civil war. Amidst the overwhelming catastrophe, some U.S. senators have even spared a thought for the tens of thousands of displaced civilians in the region who are still held in locked detention camps, despite never being charged with or convicted of a crime. These are the families of suspected ISIS fighters (and other civilians with the misfortune of being found in former ISIS territory) who are still being confined at the al-Hol camp in Northwest Syria. 

In truth, the al-Hol facility is far from the earthquake's epicenter and most of its devastation. News reports say they have not yet heard of any damage to these facilities in particular. Nonetheless, the renewed threat to the safety and survival of Syrian refugees in general prompted a bipartisan group of senators to re-introduce legislation seeking—rightly—to protect an even more stigmatized subset of the displaced civilian population: those at al-Hol. The senators are calling for the creation of a special office charged with coordinating the repatriation of the individuals confined in this camp, instituting formal prosecutions where those are actually justified by the evidence, and eventually closing the camps.  

The problem is, of course, that even if the United States were to create such a post, many of the forces keeping the camps in operation are beyond their control. The largest single reason why so many civilians are still confined in these camps is that their home countries will not take them back. Many are citizens of European countries who are now wrongfully and unlawfully refusing to repatriate their own nationals, due to the suspicion (never charged or tested before a fact-finder) that they are affiliated with ISIS. 

(Most of the people held at these camps, though not all, are the spouses and children of suspected ISIS fighters. The fighters themselves, as well as adolescent boys from the civilian camps, are detained in separate locked facilities. Many of them have similarly been deprived of any due process to assess the legality of their confinement.)

Then there is the problem that, even as the U.S. claims to have repatriated its own citizens from the camps and is urging its European peers to do the same, it is also still engaged in active hostilities in the region which may be adding to the detained population. The U.S. military reportedly detained 374 people in the course of joint operations with our Kurdish allies in Syria last year. Under what conditions? Were they simply sent to the locked facilities with the other suspected fighters? What about their families and children? Have they too gone to al-Hol? It is not clear, and few seem interested in reporting more deeply on these operations. 

Over on my other blog, I tried to convey some sense of the humanitarian outrage of these civilian detention facilities by characterizing them as concentration camps. This was not meant to draw a comparison to the Holocaust, which would be tendentious and misleading. These camps are not death camps; no one is being sent there for purposes of extermination. Nevertheless, the term "concentration camp" existed long before the Nazi genocides. It more generally denoted a place where a civilian population was involuntarily confined because they were seen as in some way suspect, undesirable, or too dangerous to be allowed to walk free. 

To illustrate the point, I called to mind a passage from Ulysses, in which Joyce's alter-ego Stephen Dedalus refers to "concentration camps" in a conversation with friends. The novel is set on a single day in 1904, and is famously punctilious in matters of chronological accuracy, so I recall being surprised, when I read this passage as a teenager, by the sudden appearance in the text of this emotionally-fraught phrase, which one typically associates with the 1930s and after. What Dedalus is referring to, however, are the civilian detention camps that the British set up to confine women and children during the Second Boer War, indicating the term was in use for these purposes as early as the first years of the last century. 

I went back to find the original passage, and an online annotation to it helpfully pointed my way to the specific poem that Joyce was referencing. Apparently, Dedalus was making a sardonic nod to a poem by Swinburne, which eulogized one of the architects of the concentration camp policy and constituted a sort of apologia for the British policy of confining Boer civilians in appalling conditions: "Nor heed we more [...] what liars dare say" wrote Swinburne in a sonnet "On the Death of Colonel Benson,"—"Of mercy's holiest duties left undone/ Toward whelps and dams of murderous foes, whom none/ Save we had spared or feared to starve and slay."

For those of us used to seeing Swinburne in the role of ultimate Victorian rebel—at least in matters of sexuality and religion—it is surprising to find him here in the pose of such an uncritical defender of throne and country. Yet there the poem stands, in all its incontrovertibility: it seems that when it came to the Boer War, at least, Swinburne was an utter jingoist and chauvinist. After all, the message of his lines appears to be that the British need not have fed or spared the lives of Boer women and children at all, and that it bespeaks unusual decency on their part that they merely confined them in appalling conditions, and didn't simply massacre these civilians outright. The "whelps and dams of murderous foes," he implies, deserved no better. 

After I found out what Joyce originally had in mind, I was struck by the conclusion that the reference to Swinburne was even more apt for our moment than I had at first realized. After all, the reason the European powers are refusing to do their legal duty by repatriating their own citizens can only be the effect of an unspoken Swinburnean bias: they see these women and children as the "whelps and dams of murderous foes," to whom they owe nothing. 

Such is the logic that has enabled the construction of concentration camps since the Boer War right up to the present: the belief that some civilian populations can be treated as presumptively criminal and dangerous, based purely on their family ties, and can therefore be deprived of all legal rights. It is a presumption flatly at odds with human rights norms and any belief in the rule of law. But many people around the world nonetheless incline to make an exception: surely, they say, the families of ISIS fighters don't deserve due process. Surely, this is where the rule of law ends. These people, this one particularly loathed group, belongs on the other side of it.

Which is just what Swinburne thought of the Boers. And so the pattern continues: even those who ascribe to liberal values in the abstract will suddenly betray them in practice, so soon as it is their own foes and their own most feared adversaries (or those associated with them, such as their children) whose rights are being denied. The real test of humanity and one's commitment to liberal values will always come down, therefore, to whether one is willing to apply them even in the most controversial cases; whether one extends human rights protections even to the hated and feared. 

This, as Ortega y Gasset once wrote, is the true hallmark of liberalism: it is "the determination to share existence with the enemy; more than that, with an enemy which is weak." Will the rich countries of the global North show this commitment to liberalism—here, where it is hardest—and where precisely for that reason it most needs to be shown?