Numidia

 In his historical novel The Gladiators, Arthur Koestler writes at one point about the fate of the Roman exiles who fled the tyranny of Sulla's dictatorship. 

They first sought refuge in Numidia, he says, whose king appeared to welcome them. 

"It turned out, however, that the King of Numidia, who had seemed friendly and put them off with all sorts of promises, had only done so in order to make them feel safe, and extradite them to the dictator; for dictator Sulla's power reached far and his thirst for vengeance was unquenchable." 

And so in the end the Numidian ruler "consented to this faithless breach of hospitality." (Simon trans.)

Koestler here is talking about the first century B.C. But he is also quite obviously talking about his own century—the twentieth—and, indeed, his own fate. He was one of those anti-Nazi refugees who first fled Germany to France—a democracy that appeared for a time to offer refuge. 

But eventually, Koestler had to flee France in turn, after they signed an armistice agreement with Hitler. One of the provisions of that agreement was the notorious paragraph 19, which promised to extradite any refugee to Hitler's hands he wished. 

In other words—as Koestler wrote in another work—it promised "the handing over of anti-Nazi refugees to the Gestapo." 

And now, it seems, history is repeating itself yet again. 

The Intercept published a truly astonishing piece of reportage this week—based on documents uncovered through a FOIA request. 

The reporters found that U.S. deportation agents received a top-down directive, in the midst of the twelve-day U.S./Israel war with Iran in 2025 (the dress rehearsal for our current never-ending war) to make a plan to deport every Iranian with a final removal order they had in custody. 

In many cases, this meant sending Iranian asylum-seekers to the hands of the very regime they had fled.

Many of them came to the United States specifically to escape persecution under the Iranian government. And the Trump administration itself was meanwhile making disingenuous claims to care about the wrongs that people in their position had suffered under the Iranian theocratic regime. 

The Intercept quotes the White House's own words back to them: "Iran commits grievous human rights abuses and arbitrarily detains foreigners, including United States citizens, on spurious charges without due process of law, subjecting them to abuse." (Sounds like a description of our own current government!)

At the very time they were citing these human rights abuses as a pretext for bombing Iran—the Trump administration was also apparently trying to shove people onto deportation flights to be returned to precisely these same conditions. 

"Why this general and puzzling outburst of hatred against those who had been the first to suffer from the common enemy[?]" as Koestler asks in Scum of the Earth. 

In at least one case—according to the Intercept's findings—an Iranian national appears to have been included on the flight by accident. Even though they realized this mistake and the plane had a stop-over en route, however—the person was still sent on to Iran. 

One of the deportees tried to commit suicide to avoid being sent back to a country that would almost certainly disappear or torture him. He, too, was put on the plane anyway. 

It is all too clear, then, that the U.S. government pulled a bait-and-switch on the Iranian refugees worthy of the antique king of Numidia. 

Our government at first talked big of human rights and friendship. We shed crocodile tears for the suffering of the Iranian people. Our president even promised them verbatim—when their government was gunning them down in the streets—that "help is on the way."

In short—we plied them "with smiles / And with soft deceitful wiles," to quote William Blake—and for the same basic purpose. It was to lull them into a false sense of security, while all the time, we were readying a betrayal. 

Our government stuck them on planes and expelled them to imprisonment or torture or death at the hands of the regime they fled. 

We "seemed friendly and put them off with all sorts of promises, [but] had only done so in order to make them feel safe, and extradite them to the dictator," as Koestler put it. 

It was indeed a "faithless breach of hospitality." And not the first this administration has committed. 

It's done the same to Afghan, Cuban, Nicaraguan, Venezuelan, Haitian, Russian, Chinese asylum-seekers, and on, and on—every one of them a person who opposed and tried to escape governments our own ruling regime claimed to oppose. 

And there is no end to the madness in sight.