[P2P-F] Fwd: Don't Have to Look Like a Refugee

Sat Jun 30 10:38:54 CEST 2018

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <douglas at rushkoff.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 20, 2018 at 7:47 PM
Subject: Don't Have to Look Like a Refugee
To: rushkoff at simplelists.com

Lots to tell you about.

• Parker Posey is joining me for a Team Human Live
<https://teamhuman.fm/live-events/> event in NYC on July 19, to celebrate
humanity as well as the launch of her new book, You're on an Airplane
<https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780735218192>. It's free, but seating is
limited. Reservations link will be up later today. Don't worry - there's a
special block of seats for Team Human members, so you won't miss out.

• I'll be in the UK doing FutureFest in July, and a Team Human Live
<https://teamhuman.fm/live-events/> with Pat Cadigan and Rupert Sheldrake.

• I'm planning more events for Portland, Seattle, and Miami. More to come.
Please tell your friends about TeamHuman, and feel free to forward this
email to anyone interested in human intervention in the machine.

Here's my monologue from today's episode of Team Human
<https://teamhuman.fm/episodes/ep-91-adah-parris-the-art-of-conversation/>,
with special guest Adah Parris.

*Don't Have to Look Like a Refugee *

Whenever you’re confused by something Trump is doing, remember: he’s less a
politician than a propagandist. Don’t look to the policy for the logic
driving his actions - look at the pictures.

This week, progressives are confused and outraged by the imagery coming out
of Texas showing immigrant children being separated from their parents and
held in detention centers. Babies crying, chain-link fence, mothers
restrained by ICE agents, teens warehoused in decommissioned Walmarts.
Surely this is enough to bring down the Trump administration, or lead
evangelicals and others to appreciate the hard-heartedness of his treatment
of the huddled masses.

But despite the outrage, despite the round-the-clock coverage, despite the
YouTube videos, and despite the rush of the horrified, truth-based media to
the scene of the Mexican border - or even because of it - Trump’s
propaganda is coming through loud and clear: America is being invaded by
something less than human beings.

On the surface level, at least to those already sympathetic to Trump, the
immigrant children are not victims of the US Department of Homeland
Security but victims of their own parents. Smuggle your kid over an
international border into a country where you’re not welcome, and guess
what? You’re going to risk being separated from your kid. Like driving
drunk, or leaving your kid in the parking lot while you do grocery
shopping, illegal immigration puts one’s children at risk.

The images of weeping children are meant as warnings to those thinking of
setting out tomorrow or next week or next month for a stealthy border
crossing into America: the risks are greater. And Trump manages to generate
all this fear and deterrence without shooting or electrocuting anybody.
Better yet, he can blame the democrats for not having made a deal with him
on the Dream Act. You want this horror show to stop? Accept my terms for a
wall.

But to understand the longterm propaganda strategy, we have to focus less
on the words than the pictures.

It’s not about who is to blame for what. It’s about recasting the
immigrants as refugees, and refugees as animals, prisoners, vermin, and
potential terrorists. Photos of teen boys in detention centers, sectioned
off by chainlink fence, are meant to evoke reform schools or prison cells.
These are the would-be members of the notorious MS-13 gang. Pictures of
children of color, huddled together under rescue blankets, recall those of
Syrian refugees fleeing war for the relative safety of Europe.

As if to make these comparisons explicit, Trump proclaims that “the United
States will not be a migrant camp. It will not be a refugee holding
facility. You see what’s going on in Europe and around the world and it’s
not going to happen here. Not on my watch.”

He’s not just calling them “poisonous snakes” or “animals,” but creating a
situation that - however painful to watch - slowly recontextualizes human
beings from America’s south as animals. With enough time, our brains
reconcile the images with an imaginary reality: if these people are in
cages like animals, then they must be animals. It’s the same strategy used
to undermine the humanity of immigrants for ages, whether it’s the media
treatment of Albanians fleeing to Italy in the 1990’s, made to appear like
an invading army of rodents, or the Biblical Pharaoh framing his Israelite
slaves as fast-replicating insects. It plays to the darkest, fear-based
construction of our primitive psyche: us or them.

Forget the reality - that Mexicans are actually emigrating from the US back
to Mexico: there’s a net decrease. That more immigrants come from China and
India than the south. The only way to understand the Trump administration’s
proposed wall is as a safety play for global warming. Instead of admitting
there’s an environmental crisis underway and reducing carbon emissions,
just accept the inevitable climate crisis, and barricade the nation from
the inevitable flow of refugees from the south. Whatever we’re doing now is
simply priming the American public for the inhumanity to come.

The one thing this photographic strategy doesn’t take into account is the
sound
<https://www.thecut.com/2018/06/immigrant-children-separated-parents-families-border.html>.
Photography emphasizes distance and objectivity. It’s evidence. Human faces
shrunk down to the size of thumbprints, frozen in time. The sounds of the
crying children reach a different part of our psyche. The cries resonate in
our bodies as surely as if the suffering children were in the same room.
Sound is intimate. That’s why I do radio and podcast: the sound connects
us, retrieving a pre-internet, pre-printing press, pre-scribal sense of
community.

The net has encouraged us to use our eyes to understand the world. Pictures
and text. Memes. That may be great to promote ridicule and provoke fear.
But it’s time to get beyond the images we’re fed before we accept the fake
news they’re trying to disseminate. If it takes the sounds of crying
children to wake us up from this nightmare of nativist superiority, so be
it.

*This has been adapted from today's monologue on Douglas Rushkoff's
podcast, Team Human <http://teamhuman.fm>. *

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