Paragraph Nineteen

 A truly jaw-dropping report from the Associated Press yesterday describes a lawsuit now pending, which alleges Trump administration officials actively colluded with the Iranian government to repatriate Iranian asylum-seekers who feared torture, death, and persecution at the hands of that same government.  

These are people who, for one reason or another, refused to accept the rule of the Islamic Republic. They had the courage to come to the United States to try to escape the repression and authoritarianism of their home government (a government that, let us recall, still routinely does things like hang dissidents or sentence women to be beaten for appearing in public with bare shoulders). 

And now, the Trump administration is apparently trying to send them back to the very dangers they fled. 

Obviously, the fact that the administration seeks to commit refoulement against refugees, in violation of international law, is nothing new. Still, the government is carrying this evil to truly shocking new extremes when they apply this policy even to Iranian dissidents—whose plight Trump has dared to invoke to justify his illegal war of aggression against their home country. 

When he first started bombing Iran in February, after all, Trump talked fleetingly about how this was all for the sake of Iranian freedom, and how he wanted to punish the Iranian regime for gunning down protesters. 

But if this lawsuit's claims are true—his own government actually continued to share information with Iranian authorities about Iranian dissidents and refugees who fled this same violence, even after U.S. bombing commenced. 

And even if the lawsuit's claims prove not to be true—the administration has already deported a similarly-situated Iranian asylum-seeker to the Central African Republic, from which she faces the risk of "chain refoulement" back to her home country in turn. 

Back during the Iraq War, critics of Bush's intervention sometimes had to struggle to honor two truths at once: on the one hand, Saddam's regime was evil; the Iraqi dictator had in fact tortured and gassed his own people. On the other hand, though, the unprovoked U.S. invasion was still an illegal violation of the UN Charter. 

In the case of Trump's Iran war, it appears that the moral considerations have become much simpler, since Trump—per usual—has managed to combine the worst of both worlds. He is fighting an illegal war of aggression against the Islamic Republic. But he also apparently does not object at all to its human rights violations. In fact, according to this lawsuit, he is actively facilitating them. 

Arthur Koestler, in an essay in The Yogi and the Commissar, remarks on the perversity of the French government that put refugees from fascism in internment camps, even as it was ostensibly fighting fascism at the start of World War II. The authorities, he writes sarcastically, seem to have concluded "that the first thing to do in a war against Hitler was to lock up all the notorious anti-Hitlerites." 

So too, our government—in its infinite wisdom and mercy—seems to have decided that the first thing to do in a war against the Iranian regime is to lock up everyone who opposed it and who voted with their feet in favor of our more democratic and secular system of government. 

And, as Koestler goes on to note, "locking up" the refugees was ultimately not even the worst of it. After France fell to the collaborationist Vichy government, the latter inked a deal with Hitler to forcibly repatriate German refugees. 

"Paragraph nineteen" of the Vichy Armistice treaty, he writes, "provided for the extradition of any German-born subject the German authorities asked for—in other words, the handing over of anti-Nazi refugees to the Gestapo." 

The Trump administration—mere months into its war with the Iranian regime—appears to have already stooped as far as this same moral low. Not only have they locked up Iranian refugees—apparently they are also sharing their information with the very regime that seeks to hang them, imprison them, beat them, or torture them. 

***

And of course—also based on yesterday's news—apparently we don't even need foreign governments to do our killing for us. Sometimes—indeed, increasingly—our own federal agents go ahead and kill noncitizens on our soil, without any refoulement necessary. 

In Texas earlier this week, ICE agents apparently gunned down Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Afterwards, they trotted out their usual talking points to try to excuse the killing. Sure, he appeared to be unarmed and defenseless when government agents shot him to death. But he was in a vehicle. So, the agents alleged, he tried to ram them and run them over with the vehicle. 

Never mind that the ICE agents were reportedly pursuing him in an unmarked car that he could not possibly have known represented the government. 

Now, the FBI is reportedly opening an investigation—into whether the victim of the shooting committed an "assault" against federal officers!

But sure, go ahead, ICE. Make him the villain. Say that this unarmed father was the dangerous aggressor, and that you—the heavily-armed agents of the state who admit you shot him to death—were the innocent victims. 

Slander the murdered, libel the dead, 

burden your guilt on the innocent dead, [...]

call them 'barbarians,' you who have murdered, to quote Harry Alan Potamkin.

To quote the inscription that Koestler found over the grave of a Spanish refugee in the internment camps of France—someone who fled fascism only to find himself then locked up and left to die by an ostensibly anti-fascist government: Pues viva la democracia.