Was It For This?

 The news that filled the headlines from Dublin yesterday was depressing for more than the obvious reasons. Of course, one never wants to open the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal and see front-page images of right-wing extremists torching cars and rioting in the streets in an orgy of xenophobic violence. One doesn't want to see that happening in any country. But there's something about it occurring in Ireland—a country I have long idealized—that cut me especially close to home. 

Why did I have this distinctly strong reaction? After all, the Dublin riots were hardly the only or the worst manifestation of racist sentiment targeting migrants in the democratic West (I mean, just look around us here, in this country). But there's something especially disappointing about it in this case. 

One aspect of it perhaps is simply the irony of Ireland's historic role as an oppressed and colonized underdog. To see the liberal nationalism that fought for centuries for Ireland's freedom later congeal into a hard-right nativism—Ireland for us but not for others—and what's more to find it directed against people who have fled other colonized underdog nations (Ukraine, for example), seems like a profound betrayal. Was it for this? one is tempted to ask, in the sense in which Yeats asked the question. 

There is also the incident's conformity to some of the ugliest age-old patterns of human bigotry. The sequence of events leading up to the violence had the contours of an eighteenth century anti-Catholic riot or an early twentieth-century Eastern European pogrom. A rumor got around attributing a horrific crime to a member of a stigmatized minority group; a mob descended on that community in an orgy of mindless collective retribution. 

It's roughly the same script that rioters have enacted in anti-Muslim communal violence in India or Burma in recent decades. It's therefore the sort of thing that one tends to associate only with the developing world, and that we like to imagine becomes impossible once countries reach a certain level of economic sophistication. Surely, as Ireland emerged as an advanced post-industrial democracy in the last quarter of the twentieth century, with a literate educated citizenry, the same old patterns of communal violence could never play out there. 

But no; it's apparently not so. It is human nature we have to contend with, not just a lack of education or economic development. And indeed, it was precisely mass literacy—specifically people's presence on social media and the means this provides to rapidly disseminate violent incitement by text—that provided the spark for these riots. We should have known long before this, of course, that the democratic West is not immune to xenophobic bigotry (again, look around us!). But this underlined it even more forcefully. 

And it underlined it once more, meanwhile, not only in a democratic European country, but in a country that I had often looked to in my imagination as a potential refuge. This is what made the depressing spectacle of the anti-migrant riots feel so personal. 

Generally, after all, I read news of xenophobic persecution as if it would never affect me personally. I of course deplore it. I am saddened and outraged. But there was also the comforting delusion that such sentiments could never be directed against me personally. I am a citizen of one of the desired destination countries, after all; not one of the sending countries that people are trying so desperately to escape. I am always an insider—calling for the inclusion of others, to be sure, but an insider myself nonetheless—not one of the outsiders asking to be let in. 

In a world where Trump wins the next election, however, it is possible to imagine my position being reversed. It might not only be for others that I am advocating, then, when I call for more generous immigration policies; it might be for myself. 

This of course no doubt seems hyperbolic. But Trump is currently ahead in the polls, in a hypothetical match-up with Biden, and his rhetoric only seems to become more deranged with the passage of time. Recent reports quote Trump describing immigrants in the United States as "poison in the blood" of the nation. He has called for mass round-ups and deportations on a scale that he himself willingly likened to Eisenhower's vast forced removals in the 1950s (which by the way were notorious for also sweeping up large numbers of U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry). And he has described his liberal critics (which would certainly include yours truly) as "vermin." 

Comparing people to "poison" and vermin" of course sounds very much like a call to violence. What else does one do with "vermin," after all, but exterminate them? What else does one do with "poison in the blood" but purge it through bloodletting? If Trump does not manage to establish a murderous fascist dictatorship in his second term in office, then, it won't be for a lack of will or for any moral qualms on his part. 

In the face of this mounting specter of xenophobic bigotry and political violence in the United States, I have often looked to Europe—and especially Ireland—as a spiritual and literal escape. Spiritual in the sense that I like to imagine European parliamentary democracies don't create Trumps; that they would never elect a Trump. And literal in the sense that I have imagined that I could emigrate myself to one of these enlightened parliamentary democracies, if ever things became truly hair-raising in the United States. 

Seeing xenophobic violence erupt in Ireland was therefore a dual defeat for these fantasies. On the one hand, they put to rest any notion I might have had that other countries are immune to Trumpism. They are not. The MAGA ideology, the lure of neo-fascism, pervades the West. No country is immune. I am therefore going to have to fight Trumpism and xenophobia here, since it will be present wherever I go. There is no spiritual escape.

And there is apparently no literal escape either. In my darker moments, watching the upcoming election, I have spent some time googling "how to immigrate to Ireland." The answer is that it is actually really difficult. Just as the United States has made it hard for people to come here, it will be hard for us to go elsewhere, if the historical tables were ever turned, and we U.S. citizens became refugees ourselves—unwanted, hunted, despised across the Earth's surface. Who would take us in, then, when we refused to take in so many others when we had the chance? 

Certainly Ireland will not. Among the right-wing social media posts that fueled the rioting yesterday, large numbers of them included the hashtag #IrelandIsFull. It was directed against Muslim refugees; against Ukrainian refugees; against other Eastern European migrants; against Latin American migrants... and all such bigotry and exclusiveness is shameful. But I also felt, in my current state of dread about the political future of the United States, that it was directed against me. 

I thought of a line from W.H. Auden's "Refugee Blues": They were talking of you and me, my dear... talking of you and me. The poet is speaking from the standpoint of refugees forced out of fascist Europe, and it imagines their reactions to the xenophobia they encounter in the countries where they seek safety. In one stanza of the poem, they overhear a speaker at a public meeting issuing a tub-thumping anti-immigrant speech, warning that the refugees will "steal our daily bread." This prompts the refugees to the reflection above: "he was talking of you and me, my dear,/ [...] talking of you and me."

When Trump gets up and pounds the podium, calling immigrants "poison," he is outdoing the xenophobic mob leader of Auden's imagination when it comes to violent rhetoric. One can only imagine the feelings of the many refugees and migrants in the United States who have to listen to this disgusting hate and know, all the time they hear him fulminating, that "he was talking of you and me, my dear/ [...] talking of you and me." 

And I felt—inapposite though the comparison may be, I felt it nonetheless—some tiny fraction of what they must experience too, when I saw that one of the countries I had fancied as a potential safe haven some day, in case I ever had to flee, was also turning its back upon refugees in need. When I saw the right-wing extremists burning cars in Dublin to cries of "Keep out! The country is full! You're not wanted here!" I could only think: They were talking of you and me, my dear. They were talking of you and me!