“Many people – many nations – can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’,” wrote Levi. “For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.
The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone “as a sinister alarm-signal” Levi concluded, a signal which is now once again becoming horribly visible in different parts of the world.
“It is a concentration camp,” Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert said this week. “If they [Palestinians] will be deported into the new ‘humanitarian city’, then you can say that this is part of an ethnic cleansing.”
US advancing down a dark path
The state of Florida is spending $450m to build the “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp in the swamps of the Everglades west of Miami, where 4,000 inmates accused of being illegal immigrants will ultimately be detained.
The speed and ferocity with which the state can give pariah status to any single group of people, or to anybody expressing sympathy for them, is always frightening. Having reported on oppressive regimes from Haiti to Afghanistan for decades this comes as no surprise to me.
A policeman told her that “mentioning freedom of Gaza, Israel, genocide, all of that all come under proscribed groups, which are terror groups that have been dictated by the Government”. Astonished at what was happening to her, Murton said that if the opinions expressed on her placards were an arrestable offence, then they would “have to arrest half the country”.
Asked if she supported Palestine Action, proscribed two weeks ago, she said that she did not. But the police still demanded that she give them her name and address, or they would arrest her.
The state of civil liberties in Britain
It is extraordinary – and depressing – to realise that, had Ehud Olmert held up a placard in Canterbury this week carrying his remark about Israel setting up a concentration camp in Gaza and carrying out ethnic cleansing, he too might have faced arrest as a supporter of terrorism.
Though Starmer has since apologised for his infamous speech about Britain becoming “an island of strangers” in a clumsy bid for the anti-immigrant vote, his words fit all too well into Primo Levi’s vision, borne out by his own sufferings, about how easily a government can demonise strangers and turn them into mortal enemies.
Israel’s newly forged dominance in the Middle East and mass migration to Europe from the region may seem like separate issues. But they are intimately connected.
Yet the new era in which Israel, backed by the US, dominates the Middle East is likely to see even more violence and instability than in the past. In the last few days, Israel has carried out airstrikes in the centre of Damascus while other strikes took place in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen earlier in the month.
Further thoughts
How will the Israeli airstrike on central Damascus this week impact on the sort of people who take small boats across the Channel from France to the UK?
These conflicts are the far end of a conduit down which people make dangerous journeys, suffering terrible hardships on the way, to reach the White Cliffs of Dover. Governments in the UK are either blind or embarrassed by their own role in driving this mass migration. It is lazily said that asylum seekers in the small boats come from “failed states”. But it is important to ask: who did the failing?
Western complicity in wrecking the societies from which migrants come is strange since everybody knows the political explosion in Europe ignited by the flight of Syrians from the Syrian civil war 10 years ago. It was this which gave the far right its opportunity and probably led to the pro-Brexit vote in the UK referendum. In 2011, the Western backed overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi reduced Libya to a murderous anarchy in which criminal warlords earned vast profits smuggling people across the Mediterranean.
square SYRIA Terrified TV reporter runs for cover as Israel bombs Syrian military HQ
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Sir Keir Starmer speaks of “smashing the gangs” organising people smuggling, infantilising a problem driven by high demand from desperate people, ensuring vast profits for those who transport them. If one gang of smugglers is caught, they will be promptly replaced by another – as in the drugs trade.
Since Reform UK’s triumph in the local elections on 1 May, the party now has control of several county councils, enabling us to see them in action.
The excellent online newsletter Kent Current has the story in a fascinating article by Ed Jennings with the title “First They Came for the Books”. He quotes the Reform UK’s Leader on KCC, Linden Kemkaran, as claiming the book purge as “another victory for common sense in Kent,” adding that “telling children they’re in the ‘wrong body’ is wrong and simply unacceptable”.
The case of the Herne Bay trans book is evidently a tiny Kentish echo of the giant book purge by Maga Republicans of libraries across the US. With only one book under its belt so far, KCC has a long way to go.
Cockburn’s picks
I thought this piece in The Wall Street Journal about vigilante groups increasingly taking control of Russia’s streets, as police leave for higher salaries fighting in the war in Ukraine, told one a lot about the present state of Russia. In some towns and cities, half the frontline police officers have gone.
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