The Slow Slide to Barbarity (TomPaine.com)

[marmar]

The Slow Slide to Barbarity
Laura Carlsen
June 01, 2007


Laura Carlsen is the director of the IRC Americas Program at www.americaspolicy.org in Mexico City, where she has been a writer and political analyst for more than two decades.


July 4, 2020. U.S. Border Security officials announced that a record 193 IFs (Immigrant Invading Forces) were eliminated in the American Militarized Security Zone yesterday as a result of illegal attempts to invade the homeland.

In response to the latest deaths—the highest fatality count since last week's record-setting 177—a press release from Border Security (BS), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, states: "The high number of aliens whose attempts to invade U.S. territory were thwarted reflects the continued success of the combined technological and military measures to secure the border. While the division laments the loss of life, Americans can sleep soundly knowing that the sacrifice of our troops has once again protected them from hostile threats to the American way of life."

For its part, the Mexican government immediately issued a statement apologizing for the surge in lethal attempts to incur in U.S territory, and promising to increase raids on "potential migrating groups," both in border zones and in the 30 states throughout the nation that report "high to extremely high" out-migration rates.

In its daily bulletin, the Binational Body Recovery Unit (BBRU) reported that of the deaths along the Territorial Delineator, 77 aliens died of electrocution along the Laredo-Brownsville high-amp fence, 37 were shot to death by border troops for suspicious actions, 46 died from land mine explosions, and 33 from exposure to toxic substances after attempts to forge the Rio Grande.

In the northern part of the American Militarized Security Zone—a hundred-mile wide swath along the length of the former U.S.-Mexico border, expropriated by the U.S. government for security reasons in 2013—another 15 immigrants were hit by moving vehicles while fleeing ground troops or aerial fire, and 17 expired from exposure or dehydration in the Sonora desert.

The youngest victim of yesterday's toll was six-month old Clara Sanchez, shot in the arms of her mother, Fidelia Rodriguez as she fled for cover in the Sonora desert near Douglas, Arizona. The U.S. Border Patrol reported that the young woman was seen "concealing a suspicious object" assumed to be contraband and failed to respond to orders in English to halt immediately (the Border Patrol is prohibited from giving orders in Spanish as a result of the 2015 "English Only" regulation which applies to all government services).

...(snip)...

Today, 2007, the steep increase in immigration throughout the world reflects major changes in the international economy. Global migrants are not only a result of these changes; migrants are also powerful agents of change. The personal decision to leave—multiplied by thousands—transforms the communities that are left behind, the receiving communities, and the migrants themselves.

Change causes fear. Yet knee-jerk reactions against change can cause far more damage. If, as a society and as citizens, we do not take responsibility for directing the economic and social transformations that are taking place, and work together to respond with rational and humane policies, we will soon find ourselves moving toward the barbarity portrayed above.

We have not yet reached the year 2020, when hindsight will yield only a cruel "I told you so." We still have a chance to ask ourselves what kind of society we are, and what kind of society we want. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/06/01/the_slow_slide_to_barbarity.php

[Briar]

1. All too believable

and in fact the attitudes are already in place. In Europe as well as in the US. Moreover, even if we don't start slaughtering immigrants as they attempt to escape poverty and disaster in their own countries, we will still be responsible for countless deaths. Our way of life, so precious to Bush and co, is a killer in terms of the way resources are ruthlessly exploited in countries where annual income is a bare fraction of what our smug and self righteous middle classes (we've erased our own poor and working class from our political rhetoric) take for granted.