Bloodline Punishment

 The third article of the U.S. Constitution includes a striking phrase forbidding Congress to "work Corruption of Blood." This was intended to forbid the practice under the old tyrannical kings of punishing children and heirs for the acts of their parents. It therefore appeals to a basic moral intuition: the innocent should not suffer for the deeds of another person.

And yet, right now, there is reportedly an Iranian family—a mother, a father, and a teenage son—being held captive in a detention camp on U.S. soil—all because one of them happens to be the child of someone indirectly involved in the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. 

Everyone in this family had a green card and was living with legal permission in the United States. But the government moved to revoke their LPR status, and has now apparently confined the mother and child for more than 120 days in administrative detention in Texas. Their only "crime" is that the father of the family is in turn the child of someone loosely involved in the hostage crisis. 

"This is bloodline punishment," the mother of the family wrote in an open letter. It may not be technically forbidden under the "Corruption of Blood" clause of the constitution—which deals only with charges of treason—but it implicates the same fundamental philosophical principle. One would think we all knew that no one should ever be punished merely for whom they happened to be born to. 

As Thomas Hardy once aptly put it (in Tess of the d'Urbervilles): "though to visit the sins of the fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities, it is scorned by average human nature"—and rightly so! (that was Hardy's point). 

There should be no such thing as "bloodline punishment," in other words. 

Yet—here as in so many other places—the administration seems to be treating the immigration system as a laboratory to try out forms of authoritarianism—and revivals of despotic practices from the pre-Constitutional order—that they cannot yet directly roll out against U.S. citizens. 

Of course, we do actually have real national security issues to worry about in this country—unrelated to innocent green card holders who have been living and raising families with legal permission in the United States. Trump's decision to ignite a war of aggression against Iran and assassinate generations of their leadership has obviously raised the risk that we will face some form of retaliation. 

And it may already have happened. 

The guests on the Rational Security podcast last week were making the point that the recent cyber attacks on water treatment facilities in small towns across America may have stemmed from precisely such a retaliatory strike. 

A sane U.S. administration would be focusing on these acts as potential threats to U.S. citizens. Ordinarily, this would fall to someone in Stephen Miller's job—as the homeland security advisor. But instead of worrying about actual security risks, it is quite obvious that Miller has—as the guests describe it with pointed understatement—"other priorities." 

Miller and Marco Rubio recently co-hosted a ministerial event on terrorism with foreign leaders from around the world. But instead of talking about problems like potential cyber attacks on U.S. soil from hostile governments, with whom we just started a needless war of aggression—the entire conference was devoted to what Miller and Rubio frame as a threat from internal leftist dissidents. 

The Trump administration's only response to the water infrastructure attacks specifically, meanwhile, was to blame Democratic state governments with whom they have a long-running feud. 

And of course, the U.S. government is locking up Iranian immigrants and asylum-seekers who came to this country in the first place precisely because they oppose the theocratic regime in their home country we now appear to be fighting. 

To find a parallel to this madness, we'd have to go all the way back to Vichy France. There too, as Arthur Koestler points out in his memoir Scum of the Earth, there was a pointed refusal to focus on the obvious external enemy, and a perverse obsession with hunting the "enemy within" (to use Trump's phrase).  

As soon as Germany threatened to invade France in the 1930s, Koestler writes, the democratic French government responded—not by welcoming anti-Nazi refugees from Germany—but locking them up. "Why this general and puzzling outburst of hatred against those who had been the first to suffer from the common enemy[?]" as Koestler rightly asked. 

Apparently, we are doing the same to Iranian refugees today. 

Instead of welcoming those who were first to suffer from and resist the Iranian theocracy—those who voted with their feet against that regime and in favor of American democracy instead—we are apparently separating them from their families—and locking them up in detention centers that resemble all too much the French internment camps in which Koestler and his fellow refugees were confined. 

But the madness and perversity did not end there. After Germany actually invaded and occupied large parts of France, the Vichy authorities—instead of devoting themselves to fighting off direct threats to the homeland from the foreign attacker on their soil—took to persecuting French citizens and internal dissidents. 

Koestler recounts their campaign against civil servants; against people who warned against the German invasion before it happened; against foreigners whom they threatened with having their citizenship revoked (sound familiar?).

In short, in the very hour when France was under invasion from a foreign power, the Vichy government not only failed to oppose than power but devoted all its attention to attacking their own people instead—just as Stephen Miller is doing today. 

That is apparently the same madness we have to live under today. The U.S. was quite possibly literally just attacked by a foreign power on our own soil, due to a war that our own idiotic leadership needlessly started. 

And instead of focusing on how to protect U.S. residents from this threat—our national security apparatus is apparently devoting all its attention to blaming the administration's domestic political critics and harassing U.S. left-wing dissidents and kidnapping and caging noncitizens who did nothing wrong (indeed, who oppose the Iranian government more than anyone!). 

God help us—we're living in Vichy America!