Boats and Men

 Pete Hegseth was in Normandy last weekend to commemorate the D-Day landings. In a tortured metaphor, he yet again echoed this administration's standard racist talking point that today's nonwhite migrants and refugees are staging an "invasion" of Western Europe. 

"Today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies," Hegseth intoned. "Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion?"

What's particularly odd about this—as I noted in an earlier post—is that the U.S. troops should be the refugees and migrants in this metaphor. We were the ones bringing "boats and men" to the European coast in 1944, n'est-ce pas? 

There were also refugees and migrants landing on European coastlines in the 1930s and '40s, of course—most of them displaced by exactly the fascist regimes the U.S. troops were there to fight in the Second World War. 

I just finished reading Arrival and Departure—by one of my favorite author-heroes, Arthur Koestler—and his book opens with a refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe literally landing on a beach in Portugal, in order to escape their terror. 

"Boats and men arrive." They arrived on boats in Portugal ("Neutralia," in the novel) in the 1930s too. They sought exit visas to escape to the United States or Britain, in order to evade precisely the sort of fascist ideology Hegseth is now echoing. 

Hegseth in that speech dared to invoke the memory of U.S. troops who gave their lives to free Europe from fascism; and yet he echoes the talking points of today's European fascists—and insults the refugees from around the world who flee the same kind of racial, religious, and political persecution that the fascists inflicted on similarly-situated people in the 1930s and '40s. 

Koestler describes all this in the book in agonizing detail. The vans; the "mixed transports"; the torture chambers; the early instruments of a looming genocide. "Nobody who has not been through it can understand it," he writes. "Terror, atrocities, oppression—that's all words. Statistics don't bleed. Do you know what counts? The detail." 

When I read that passage, I thought of the refugees and asylum-seekers our own government today is sending to conditions of torture and persecution. The people we have trapped in jury-built prisons in Equatorial Guinea and Congo and Eswatini, where people are confined until their will breaks and they accept deportation back to the countries they originally fled—all as a strategy to circumvent protections that U.S. law and U.S. courts interposed precisely to shield people from being sent back to such conditions!

Even I—as I write that—can't really imagine it. I can't actually embrace or conceive of the full horror of it. I say that our government, my own government, is right now deliberately sending refugees to a place where they know there is a good chance they will be tortured and persecuted. I know that detention camps in our own country are scarcely much better or less torturous. But these, as Koestler says, are just words. 

It is thanks to indelible books like his that we can start to form some empathic understanding of what those phrases actually mean. He provides "the detail."

We should remember those details—we should be haunted by them daily—when Pete Hegseth gets up there and spouts the same ideology as the people who send innocents to be tortured and persecutes; when he attacks refugees and asylum-seekers as invaders, when in truth they are just trying to do what the refugees did in the 1930s: to survive, to escape a dictatorship that they refused to accept as a matter of principle—and maybe even to aid the cause of democracy—if only the surrounding governments would let them!