Where’s your point of deciding enough is enough?
If you’ve been following the international news, with its mainstream America slant (because, of course, the US is the world), you’ll know that once President Donald Trump finished turning long-standing allies into grumpy neighbours at the G7 meeting in Canada, the news broke that his administration was playing hard-ball with illegal aliens lest they “pour into and infest” the US.
Since early this year, the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” approach has resulted in the practice of separating illegal immigrant parents from their children, and housing the children in converted mega-store facilities and purpose-built tent camps.
Previously (under the Obama administration) only unaccompanied minors were treated in this way.
It’s estimated that 2,300 children have been separated from their parents in this manner and that the administration has no effective means of tracking where the children are.
Only 500 have been returned to their parents.
Social media has gone into a feeding frenzy, sometimes getting it right, sometimes getting it wrong.
There have been photos of “cages” from the Obama era masquerading as genuine pictures; the Bible has been (mis)quoted; there have been tape recordings of children crying smuggled out; there is video footage of Democratic senators and congressmen being refused entry into the facilities; and much attention on the first lady wearing a Zara jacket emblazoned with “I really don’t care do u (sic)” en route to visiting a “tender-age” facility.
Everyone in the US with a Twitter account has burnt out their thumbs condemning or defending the actions.
It led to Trump’s unprecedented turnaround: 14 hours after saying he couldn’t do it, he signed an executive order to bar family separation.
Would any parent willingly accept their child being taken from them?Is there a mental health professional alive who’d say that this experience isn’t deeply traumatic for children and will have life-long consequences?
So how did US officials (parents themselves) not only implement it, but also defend it?
How does anyone justify such treatment?
Is it because they’re immigrants – the “other”?
Fortunately this only happens in the US.On March 11 1994, members of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) drove through Mmabatho and randomly killed 42 people from the safety of their exiting convoy.
For years AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche had been preaching that civil war was the only way the Afrikaner “volk” could retain their freedom.
So when Lucas Mangope, then president of Bophuthatswana (the supposedly independent homeland), came under threat of civil unrest and called for help from his Freedom Alliance partners, the AWB came running, only to discover that its brand of “help” wasn’t wanted.
Denied the opportunity of being the saviours of the day, members extracted their petulance on innocent people – 42 people died because the AWB saw “war” as a means to an end.
They died because adult men had their egos bruised. But the day did not end there.
It ended with the world’s media displaying images of an AWB car being shot up and the two wounded survivors being “executed” by a Bophuthatswanan policeman.
It proved to be a turning point in SA’s transition.
Up until the point of the Bophuthatswana massacre, conservative white Afrikaners intent on self-determination and an independent homeland – a volkstaat – had cobbled together a loose coalition of right-wing and conservative elements under the banner of the Volksfront (People’s Front).
They claimed to have up to 50,000 soldiers or weapons-trained individuals they could call on.
It had been established by a group of ex-military generals, led by retired defence force chief General Constand Viljoen.
In January 1994, Viljoen’s public appeal to negotiate had been shouted down by cries of “we want war” at a conservative gathering in Pretoria.The AWB had already, at that stage, begun an anonymous bombing campaign and would later storm the World Trade Centre in an attempt to disrupt the Codesa process.
Egged on by the powerful oration of Terre’Blanche, adult people – many who would have self-identified as Christians – came to believe that killing the “other” was their only way.
The difference was that Viljoen knew war.
For him it wasn’t a romantic notion, but a reality.
After the Bophuthatswana massacre, he realised that the rag-tag army they had put together would not manage the precision military campaign he envisaged without plunging the country into war and that the consequence of such a war would lead to the suffering of everyone.
“I knew for certain then that the political strategy was the only one left,” Viljoen told the Sunday Independent.
Mediators facing intransigent parties in a conflict have a term for this threshold (the point at which the perceived benefit of continued conflict is outweighed by its cost) – it is simply known as “body-count”.
Trump is riding the wave of a powerful narrative – the story of America under threat by the “other”, and that the US can only be saved by walls and “law and order”.
But it’s an imaginary tale, not based on fact, and when confronted by the reality of pictures and voice recordings of actual children suffering, the US appears to have reached a momentary “body-count” and forced him to back down.
South Africa too, it seems, is once again a place of uniforms and powerful orators, of stories of civil war and violence against the “other” being the righteous way.
We still have the luxury of a choice: we can uphold principle or we can face a body count.
It may be wise to heed the experience of those who have seen it before when choosing a path forward.