Our Corner of Evil
As a young man completing my Masters in Political Science I felt compelled to read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago which had just been published in english. One passage that remains with me even today;
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart…And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unprotected small corner of evil.”
Even now, almost forty-five years later, sadly, those words ring true for me because they are fundamental to human nature. Within the heart of all human beings, including Americans, we are now finding that “small corner of evil” Mr. Solzhenitsyn found in the hearts of his “Security operatives” in the Soviet Union’s forced-labor camps.
Today Senator Jeff Merkley revealed a previously secret document that shows the Trump Administration deliberately plotting to create a crisis at the southern border. The memo, dated December 2017, details deliberate plans to implement a family separation policy as a deterrent to would-be asylum seekers and lays out strategies to increase detention of migrant children.
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?” What if each of those ICE guards on the Mexican border thought about their children being seperated from them and locked in cold cages like Ringling Brothers’ animals? What if all those Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Undersecretaries thought about their Nazi-lke tactics and plans?
What if indeed!
