Indifference

 In a recent court filing, the government recounted an episode during their current mass deportation campaign, when a group of prisoners slated for removal to El Salvador's CECOT prison staged a short-lived revolt. The effort wasn't violent—the prisoners merely barricaded themselves inside a dormitory and tried to flood the unit by clogging the toilets and shower drains. No officers were actually endangered by this incident. Nonetheless, the government used it to try to paint the prisoners as dangerous. They climbed onto their high horse of affronted authority to say that they needed to protect their agents. 

But let us keep in mind—the government was confining these men specifically in order to deport them—in violation of federal court orders and U.S. and international law—to a forever-prison in El Salvador. What exactly were these men supposed to do? Which of us would not try to defend ourselves in the same situation? The government expects them to go quietly like lambs to the slaughter. But if you or I knew that we were about to be loaded onto a plane with no way to retrieve us—to spend possibly the rest of our lives in one of the world's most notorious prisons—would we not risk clogging a few drains? 

If the government insists on inflicting lawless violence on people, they can expect people to defend themselves. The state loses its legitimate monopoly on the use of force when it exercises it outside the rule of law. If the state proposes to confine someone indefinitely, without charge or trial or legal recourse, in a legal black hole where they may be tortured or beaten for perhaps the rest of their lives—the state has become a criminal, lawless actor. And a person has at least the right to try to fend them off by barricading doors or flooding a toilet—the same way you'd have a right to push away a mugger in the street. 

The real question—then—is not: why did these men revolt? But: why did we not all come to their aid? Why aren't all American citizens helping them defend their constitutional rights—which are really our constitutional rights; since if the government can do this to Venezuelans living under the protection of our law, it can do it to any of us? 

In his haunting book of concentration camp stories, set during the Second World War, Tadeusz Borowski recounts an episode from the gas chambers when one of the women slated for murder managed to wrestle a gun away from her captors. Instead of coming to her aid and joining in the revolt, however—the orderlies of the camp—fellow prisoners all, like Borowski—instead defended the camp guards and pushed her back into the death house to be killed. Why? Why did the orderlies not see their commonality of interest with the other prisoners in resisting their captors and would-be executioners? Why did they not join forces? 

Time and again in his book, Borowski wrestles with this same question: why did he and the other guards not fight back? He describes another scene, when he was watching as a bus-load of new prisoners were driven through the camp. He and they both knew they were destined for the gas chambers. They stretched out their arms from the windows, pleading for someone to come to their aid. Hundreds of women in the buses, crying "help us!"—and Borowski notes that he and his other prisoners just stood there; doing nothing. Why? He asks. He concludes: because they still had hope that they, at least, could survive. 

This, Borowski says—this hope—was what killed any possibility of heroism in the camps; it was this hope that somehow it would only be others that were killed in the gas chambers, not oneself; that oneself would be spared—that for oneself, at least, it would be possible to live one more day. That is why people submitted: the hope that, if they could just endure it long enough, eventually life would go back to normal. If they could just murder this hope within them, Borowski writes—then the guards would not have been able to keep him and his fellow orderlies in line for even a day:

It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity. It is hope that breaks down family ties [...] It is hope that compels man to hold on to one more day of life, because that day may be the day of liberation. Ah, and not even the hope for a different, better world, but simply for life, a life of peace and rest. Never before in the history of mankind has hope [...] done so much harm [....] We were never taught how to give up hope, and this is why today we perish in gas chambers. (Vedder trans.)

This too is why, when those Venezuelan men were barricading themselves in that detention center in Texas, no Americans came to their aid. They were fighting for you and me—for all of our rights. They were fighting for our Constitution to be respected. Every one of us should have lent a hand. But we didn't. Not even after these men gathered in the prison yard to spell out the letters "SOS" to a helicopter—just like the women Borowski sees in the bus, stretching out their arms to their fellow prisoners, pleading with them for aid. But, just like Borowski's orderlies, we stood there and did nothing. 

Why? The same reason. We are still hoping that this cup will pass from us. We are hoping that Trump will just back down from all his authoritarian excesses and leave us alone—that first, he will come for the Venezuelan asylum-seekers; but then, after that, somehow, he will stop. He will leave the rest of our rights untouched. Trump will abduct a baker's assistant from Dallas, and sentence him without charge or trial or conviction to a lifetime of torture in a black site in El Salvador—on the basis of a rainbow tattoo that he received to express support for his autistic brother—but maybe, afterward, Trump will go no further. 

And, by forcing us to make this choice—to do nothing or to defy lawless authorities—Trump has made us all accomplices in his crimes. Because, of course, we choose to obey. We choose the path of least resistance. Because we still hope that, if we just endure, it will all go back to normal. 

This is the worst part of the Trump era, far and away. It's not the evils that he and his minions—gleeful murderers like Rubio, Bondi, Vance, Noem, who sentence men to torture and indefinite confinement with a smirk and a "trolly" social media quip on their lips—inflict. No. That's not the worst part.

The worst part is how the normal people like the rest of us go along with it. It's how CEOs of seemingly mainstream companies—some of the biggest names in American capitalism, many of whom presented outwardly as "liberals" just a few months ago, such as Larry Fink or Sam Altman—lined up last week in Riyadh to kiss the ass of Trump and the Saudi royals (murderers themselves) in the hopes of making a handsome profit. 

In his book-length poem about the Spanish Civil War, The Battle Continues, Hugh MacDiarmid once wrote that this—not the evil of the dictatorial minority, but the acquiescence of the indifferent majority—is what made the crimes of fascism especially hard to take. He writes in one passage about a friend he knew who had survived the concentration camps in Germany. The man—a political prisoner—had actually managed to escape the camp. But, despite reaching freedom, he nonetheless killed himself a few days later. Why? Because, MacDiarmid writes: 

He had not realised that the outside world
Was so indifferent—that ministers, men of honour, human beings
Shake hands with bloody murderers.

That's those CEOs and tech billionaires and foreign dignitaries lining up in Saudi Arabia. Sure, the Saudi monarch has ordered his enemies murdered and hacked into little pieces. Sure, Trump has deported 200 men to indefinite confinement in a torture-dungeon in El Salvador. Sure, they remain there to this day. But these "men of honour" don't appear to care. 

So long as MacDiarmid's friend was in the prison camp, he could still tell himself: outside, in the real world, people must be horrified by all this. They must care. It was only when he had reached freedom, and could see their indifference, their apathy, with his own eyes, that the despair finally caught up with him and overthrew him. 

It's that same indifference that MacDiarmid once described—in another poem—as gardening in front of the death house. It's that "indifference of men and women / respectable and respected and professedly Christian"—that busies itself with the flowers while, a few feet away, men "as innocent as I am" are pressed "in a cold unjust walk between steel bars"—that's the indifference that murders the will to live.  

That's the indifference of "the outside world." People like you and me—the normal people; the respectable people; the CEOs of the mainstream companies: "ministers, men of honour, human beings," who shake Trump's hand and don't even bother to mention the 200 men suffering torture or beatings this hour on his inhuman orders. 

What right have we to anyone's respect? What right would we have to judge the prisoners in the Texas detention camp for having the temerity just to clog a toilet to try to protect their own lives? None. If we were actually "men of honour"—we would be there helping them bar the door.