leftlibertarian.org

Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation, is trying to raise funds to expand the Foundation's activities. The quality of writing on the P2P Foundation blog is incomparable, and I have relied heavily on material in the P2P Wiki on peer production, open source manufacturing, and desktop manufacturing, in writing Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen of my org theory manuscript.

I highly recommend Bauwens' extended essay "P2P and Human Evolution," and his shorter introductory essay "The Political Economy of Peer Production."

Bauwens' solicitation follows below. If you're interested in helping, you can click on the "Donate Now" button on the right-hand sidebar at the P2P Foundation Blog.

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Dear friends,

Help us build a better more humane and sustainable society through the research and promotion of peer to peer alternatives. Help us build and strengthen the infrastructure of cooperation of the P2P Foundation!!

As you know, we believe that the current economic model is not sustainable, because it treats nature as infinite, while it attempts to render free cooperation more difficult through the creation of artificial scarcity in the field of culture of knowledge. While there is now a thriving sustainability movement, the achievement of an open environment for the global and local sharing of knowledge is just as important, as this is where the solutions for sustainability need to be generated.

The P2P Foundation focuses on creating a knowledge base and internetworking platform for peer production, governance, and property, and for open/free, participatory, and commons-oriented social practices, in every field of human activity: politics and the economy, the scientific and the spiritual.

We want go "get better at working together" by studying what works and what doesn't work in the emerging new social forms enabled by peer to peer technologies. We want to help people to have more fulfilling lives by supporting approaches and policies for meaningful constructive work so that social innovation can thrive.


Our Achievements so far

About two and a half years ago, we started building an ecology of online resources to serve that purpose:

- A Wiki (http://p2pfoundation.net) to build the knowledge base as well as well as a directory of initiatives. Franz Nahrada has called it the largest collection of free modes available on the planet. We have nearly 6,000 pages of documentation which have been viewed almost 3.5 million times. As an example, where else could we find an overview as well as details of the many emerging open design communities that aim to assist in the making of physical products? See http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design for these pages, one amongst many sections.

- A blog (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net) which keeps track of current initiatives and offers current thinking on p2p developments. Our blog has now about 700 readers daily and is growing at a constant rate.

- An interconnected network of social bookmarking sites, where our sympathizers exchange their finds on a continous basis

- A community center (http://p2pfoundation.ning.com) where people can discuss issues and get to know each other

- A series of mailing list, such as the Peer to Peer Research list

The people who work with us are often active in their own fields, and this leads to a cross-fertilization and co-learning of different initiatives.

In the last 18 months, as the founder of the P2P Foundation, I have also undertaken intensive lecture tours in academia, business and policy communities and institutions.

These achievements, the result of voluntary contributions by myself and a core group of active supporters, also come at a cost, and we could do much more with your active support, which would enable more consistent efforts.

We have created a non-profit structure in the Netherlands to achieve a next level of organization.



Contribute funding to our infrastructure of cooperation!!

We are at a stage where funding would be instrumental in growing our activities and reach.

We need funding of our physical infrastructure, which is now paid by individual volunteers.

We need funding to provide a less insecure financial environment for some of our full-time volunteers.

We need funding to formalize the knowledge base, to give it an extra level of presentation and synthesis so that it can appeal to new communities. Such synthetic reports are difficult to achieve on the basis of volunteering alone.

The funding would allow us to stimulate mini-projects that are proposed by some of our sympathizers, who would not have the opportunity to carry them out without some form of compensation.


Here is how we propose the money would be allocated:


- 3,333 EUR (one third) to fund a small annual stipend to assist one full-time worker with developing and growing the P2P Foundation

- 3,333 EUR to fund the physical infrastructure of cooperation: this includes servers/publications in print and in new media formats

- 3,333 EUR to fund proposed community projects that enhance the knowledge base of the P2P Foundation (new research as well as synthetic reports)

It was a great loss several years ago when the server went down and all the online issues of Jonathan Simcock's Total Liberty magazine were lost. But now the entire archive is available online. Issues 4-20 are available in pdf format. Issues 1-3 are no longer available in the original format, but are archived in html at Spunk Press (they're linked from the TL website). Check it out.

MCLA has an intriguing post up over at Strange Blue Planet in response to my “Consent and Coercion: The Power of Stockholm Syndrome“. MCLA makes the following provocative pronouncement: “Human society as we know it is Stockholm syndrome at a gigantic scale.”

To back up this claim MCLA mentions several institutions and social facts where the mechanisms of Stockholm syndrome might be at work. While I don’t fully agree with all the points made, the post is still an engaging read. Check it out!

The Libertarian Futurist Society has released the names of this year’s winners of the Prometheus Awards — two full weeks before their presentation at Denvention 3, the 66th World Science Fiction Convention in Denver (August 6-10).

The Best Novel award will go to two novels this year, marking the first time in the award’s 29-year history that there was a tie in the voting. Both novels are alternative histories and sequels: Harry Turtledove’s The Gladiator and Jo Walton’s Ha’penny.

A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess, is winner of the 2008 Hall of Fame award.

The Prometheus Award, says the LFS, "is given each year to sci-fi/fantasy that explores the possibilities of a free future, champions human rights, dramatizes the perennial conflict between individuals and coercive governments, or critiques the tragic consequences of abuse of power."

Once again the subject of psychiatric abuse is in the news and on this blog. Shagya is the only anarchist blogger who makes the struggle against psychiatric fascism a centrepiece of his postings. I wonder what the Globe and Mail's feature writers would make of the following? Even CNN has more on the ball here. The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty also maintains a sidebar list of other organizations fighting this battle. Her autopsy demonstrates she died from a deep vein thrombosis possibly from sitting in a chair for up to twenty hours. She had come into the emergency ward earlier that day in an "agitated state" and had been sedated.




Friday, July 25, 2008

WE THE PEOPLE Call for an End of Medical and Psychiatric Abuse, Torture, and Neglect in the Wake of Ms. Green's Death While Detained at Kings County Hospital Center's Psychiatric Emergency Room. (below is a picture from the surveillance camera. This was placed on CNN.)




Advocates, human rights activists, and community members are holding a vigil and demonstration to mourn the death of Ms. Esmin Elizabeth Green. WE the PEOPLE are calling attention to the reported horrific inactions and complete neglect that Ms. Green was subjected to while detained at the Kings County Hospital Center's Psychiatric Emergency Room, 451 Clarkson Avenue Brooklyn, New York 11203.

According to the Associated Press, after being involuntarily committed to the institution, Ms. Green sat waiting for a bed to become available for nearly 24 hours before she collapsed on to the floor. She lay there helpless for nearly an hour until she received medical attention, which came too late. Further, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union, facility staff possibly falsified documents, stating that Ms. Green was "up and went to the bathroom" and was "sitting quietly in the waiting room - more than 10 minutes after she last moved". The surveillance tape shown on CNN Video portrays Ms. Green dying on the floor as people pass her by. In fact, on the Internet, one can find a mass of comment on this tragedy by individuals all over the world - a question repeatedly asked, "Where is the humanity?"

All people must be treated with dignity, humanity, and respect. We must not tolerate violations of human rights that individuals who are assigned psychiatric labels often endure.

We ask you, wouldn't you be depressed and possibly even 'agitated' if you were going to lose your home and employment? Reportedly, this is what led to Ms. Green's commitment[iv]. Any one of us could be labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis and subjected to inhumane 'treatment' if we are thought to be 'agitated', particularly if we are poor.

How many more people labeled with "mental illness" will be subjected to torture and neglect before something is done to protect human rights within psychiatric systems? David Oaks, Executive Director of MindFreedom International states, "I encourage us all to reflect on the need for a deep nonviolent revolution in the field of mental health, far beyond the "reforms" that have gotten us to where we are today, with televised death via neglect of a mother of six".

In 1875, a New York Times article cites abuses of inmates at the Kings County Asylum, spurred by Mr. Nelson Magee, a former inmate. Then-Commissioner Norris reacts to the investigation, "This sort of thing is very common among lunatics; they are always imagining themselves in great danger of being killed by their keepers". How many more centuries have to go by before action is taken to end these abuses and neglect?

WE the PEOPLE stand for change. We have been abused by the psychiatric system. Our brothers and sisters continue to be abused and murdered, as evidenced by Ms. Green's untimely demise. Massive human rights violations happen every day in psychiatric institutions but this horrific inaction was captured on videotape. We will call attention to the every day tortures committed in the name of psychiatric "help" including diagnosing life's challenges as 'illness', forced pharmaceuticals, restraint, seclusion, and electric shock treatment (ECT) with a Vigil to honor Ms. Green's memory beginning at 1 PM.

There are many questions as to what led to Ms. Green's death. Was it in any way related to the toxic and debilitating drugs that people labeled with "mental illness" are intimidated, coerced, and forced into taking? A thorough investigation is necessary to determine the extent of the torture, ill treatment and other human rights violations involved in this case and in the practices of the institution as a whole. We must stand united to demand social justice, equal rights, and environments free from torture and detention.

On July 25, 2008, we invite all people to join us and stand united in support of the demand that everyone receive the full benefit of their human rights and the preservation of their liberty, dignity and respect. Similar vigils are being held in New York and Cork,Ireland.

We are also allowing time for people to remember friends or relatives who have died from psychiatric abuse or neglect in psychiatric facilities.

Who: All People.

What: Candle Light Vigil to mourn the loss of Ms. Esmin Elizabeth Green and condemn violations of human rights.

Why: WE THE PEOPLE call for an end of medical and psychiatric abuse, torture, and neglect in the wake of Ms. Green's Death on June 19, 2008, while detained at Kings County Hospital Center's Psychiatric Emergency Room.

O pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers!
Thou art the ruins of the noblest
who ever lived in the tide of times.
Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood!
(Julius Caesar, Act 3:1)

A Moment of Reflection ...

If only we in Canada had an ounce of Marc Antony's outrage when it comes to murder in our midst.

All the "honorable men" who slew Caesar had the weight of law on their side, as do the officials of church and state in our country who legally killed generations of innocent children in the "Indian residential schools", and who now absolve themselves of their crime.

Can we dare to ask for pardon from the slaughtered children, for our meek gentleness with their butchers?

Can we ask them to forgive us, when we watch a recent CBC TV broadcast in which Irene Favel described seeing a newborn baby shoved live into a roaring furnace by a priest in Saskatchewan, and we do nothing?

Why should we be forgiven? Who are we to issue an "apology" for our crimes when we refuse to be held accountable for them? When names are not allowed to be named? When priests and nuns are allowed to get away with murder? And when "misconduct" in residential schools cannot even be referred to at the government's upcoming "Truth and Reconciliation" hearings?

Crimes without criminals. Words without substance. That is the Canadian way.

Looking Back, and Forward:
Written on Squamish Nation Territory, under Foreign Occupation - July 21, 2008

Over the past year, the impossible has happened: the government and churches of Canada have been forced for the first time to publicly acknowledge that massive numbers of children died in their Indian residential schools, and that many of these deaths were criminal in nature.

But the predictable has accompanied the impossible: the very same guilty parties have responded to this exposure by effectively absolving themselves of this crime with a verbal "apology" and a self-appointed "inquiry" that is structured to ensure that the crime will be officially whitewashed.

Nothing less can be expected in a place like Canada, where the institutions that ran the residential schools are still in power and call the shots, with the help of their aboriginal collaborators.

But rather than being a cause of despair, this predictable scramble by the guilty to hide their filth is yet another crumbling piece of masonry in the collapsing facade called colonial Canada, which has never resolved what it likes to call its "Indian Problem" - and never will.

Only in an insecure and guilt-haunted nation could the fact of missing aboriginal children generate the enormous turmoil and change that we've witnessed in Canada since April of 2007, when the Harper government was forced to address the missing residential school children in Parliament.

The media scramble that resulted, and has never abated, hovers around the issue of dead residential school kids like a voyeuristic John, watching but not daring to touch all those mass graves. And yet two years ago, the topic was strictly forbidden and censored in the monopolized corporate media in Canada. Today, the Establishment seems to be struggling to gradually acclimatize the populace to the fact of genocide in their midst.

This is all a repeat, but on a bigger scale, of what was tried a decade or more ago, when the first lawsuits by residential school survivors threatened to nail the Catholic, Anglican and United churches to the wall. By slowly leaking to the public some aspects of the residential school nightmare in small, digestible pieces, the media and the courts contained the potentially- explosive issue to yet another ho-hum abuse litigation, complete with "apologies" and "compensation" .

Back then, by reducing genocide to a matter of personal injury claims, Canada spared itself what it's now forced to face: its own history of deliberately exterminating aboriginal nations. But, then as now, the strategy of the guilty churches and state seems to be identical: namely, to minimize and contain the issue by pretending to address it whole not addressing it.

Just as the so-called "Aboriginal Healing Fund" contained the fallout of residential school lawsuits with hush money to survivors, so now does the misnamed "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" (TRC) appear to inquire into missing children by studiously preventing any actual disclosure of their fate.

A simple reading of the TRC mandate reveals an alarming deception. While portraying itself as the definitive investigation into Indian residential schools, the TRC in fact is not an investigative body or a legal inquiry; it has no power to subpoena or compel involvement, does not allow the naming of the names of perpetrators, and will not allow any statement involving wrongdoing by a person or organization; nor does it extend immunity or protection to anyone offering evidence.

In short, the TRC is an explicit whitewash of any criminal behaviour in the residential schools. Imagine a "final report" on these schools that has not a single mention of misconduct in it!

Again, this is precisely what one expects when church lawyers and officials like the United Church's former Moderator Bill Phipps - a TRC convenor - establish an inquiry into themselves. And yet, this whole effort by the guilty is doomed to failure.

For one thing, the crime is too huge to contain. Since April 10, we have documented and released to the press thirty-three mass grave sites across Canada near former residential schools, where countless children are reputedly buried. In response, I have been inundated with stories from eyewitnesses who buried children, witnessed the incineration of others, and who saw killings and other crimes in the schools. And many of these stories have appeared in the media.

But what is especially encouraging and unusual about this disclosure is that it is being accompanied by a new wave of lawsuits against the churches responsible for these deaths, brought by relatives of children who were killed. For the first time, the churches and government of Canada are being named in criminal lawsuits for acts of murder.

It gets even better. In some cases, like on Squamish territory in what whites call Vancouver, these lawsuits will be launched not through Canadian courts of law, which have time and again disqualified claims involving murder, but in aboriginal courts of Justice, convened by traditional elders like Squamish Chief Kiapilano.

In other words, raising the spectre of murdered children is unleashing a revolutionary challenge to Canada and its courts, as survivors and other native people invoke their own sovereignty to win justice.

This fact raises the second problem of Canada's attempt to co-opt and contain its culpability for genocide: namely, that there is no consensus "at the top" of how to deal with the threat of indigenous sovereignty. The power of the Canadian establishment is too fractured and regionalized to devise a common response to the growing breakdown of native peoples' imprisonment in their own land.

Today, the Canadian state does not have a single, credible group of collaborating native elites to impose a uniform "Indian policy" across the nations, which means that any effort to simply shut down or contain the furor over missing residential school children will meet with failure. The growing native populaces, restless, off reserve and plagued by poverty and discontent, are too diverse to be so easily managed anymore.

This fact highlights the third roadblock to any easy resolution of the residential school crimes: the particularly vulnerable position of Canada in the world economy as an exporting and tourist nation, and the battering its "humanitarian" image and credit rating have taken as a result of the residential school scandal.

One of the main reasons behind the creation of the fraudulent "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" was the need to create a convincing public relations front to the world during the period leading up to the 2010 Olympics in British Columbia, a region that is the hotbed of independent native protest and non-treatied communities.

The Canadian elites - native and white - are terrified of the prospect of native road and railway blockades during the B.C. Olympics, disrupting as these will the "new relationship" between these elites in their efforts to secure new foreign export markets for Canadian resources, most of which are located on unceded native land. An upstart aboriginal bourgeoisie is acting as the chief arm of the Canadian state in securing these markets, especially with Asian countries, and restraining protests by their own people in the process.

Nevertheless, all of these factors add up to a single truth: Canada and its churches - and their aboriginal accomplices - will be unable to extricate themselves from their liability for their crimes, and therefore will remain extremely vulnerable to any public criticism or protest campaigns aimed at exposing the full extent of the residential school genocide.

The Implications for Us, and the Challenge

Until recently, the movement to bring Canada and its churches to justice for genocide has been localized and relatively unpopular, even among supposed "progressives and radicals". And yet its impact on events has been profound, and has forced Canada's back to the wall, simply by continuing to make public the hard evidence of death and torture in residential schools.

This work is finally paying off, as our efforts are stimulating a much broader reaction among even mainstream Canadians, and we are linking up with more disgruntled residential school survivors and aboriginal youth. There are now twenty six local groups across Canada working with our network, organizing protests, documenting evidence, and educating the world about the Canadian holocaust.

As the frustration of survivors continues to grow with their loss of any avenue for resolving their claims, as the bogus "TRC" exposes itself as Canada's version of the Warren Commission, and as the puppet native chiefs continue to become alienated from their own people, a huge crisis of leadership is emerging in the aboriginal world.

This crisis has created a unique opportunity for those committed to indigenous sovereignty and full justice for residential school survivors. What is lacking is the audacity, the networks, and the overall strategy to begin uprooting the causes of genocide and the colonial political-economic system that is ruining our lands and people.

Last April 15, ten indigenous elders launched their answer to the government's TRC: an independent "International Human Rights Tribunal into Genocide in Canada". That Tribunal will begin its work this autumn, by convening local inquiries into deaths and other crimes in residential schools, in open opposition to the TRC.

As part of its work, this Tribunal will begin enforcing the Eviction Notices issued by Squamish hereditary Chief Kiapilano against the Catholic, Anglican and United churches on his territory, in "Vancouver". We will claim these buildings and lands as our Mohawk cousins are doing in their land reclamation battle in "Ontario". And within these liberated zones, we will be establishing popular courts of justice to try and convict those persons and organizations responsible for the residential school crimes.

Until September 15, I will be travelling in Europe and elsewhere to gain new international allies for this campaign and cause. Let us begin planning for this "hot autumn" by planning local Tribunals and direct actions of sovereignty and reclamation in all of our communities, against the churches, corporations and government responsible for the murder of our peoples.

May our hearts and courage rise to this challenge. Spread the fire.

I am your brother,

Kevin Annett Eagle Strong Voice
for the Tribunal and sovereignty campaign

260 Kennedy St.
Nanaimo, BC V9R 2H8
ph: 250-753-3345 or 1-888-265-1007

hiddenfromhistory@ yahoo.ca
www.hiddenfromhistory.orgRead and Hear the truth of Genocide in Canada, past and present, at this website: www.hiddenfromhistory.org

It's a sign either 1) that I'm settling in and getting a little relaxed after the move, or 2) that I'm finally losing it. It's no secret that baseball comes in somewhere not too far behind liberty on the scale of my obsessions: watching and listening to games accounts for much of the minimal downtime that my attention gets from things like French grammar, the fine points of Proudhon, the economics of infoshops, etc. I inherited the love of baseball and, specifically, of the Boston Red Sox, from my grandmother, who was an avid fan. I catch a couple of games a day, mostly on the radio or web radio, mostly of collegiate summer league or professional minor league teams.


It's also probably not much of a secret that my mind frequently works in half-mad leaps between subjects, at least some of which can eventually be turned into good sense of one sort or another. It was the product of two or three of those mental leaps that produced my own personalized version of the ALL logo, more or less as a joke. Curiously, the post containing the first version of the joke got about twice as many hits as posts usually get. (Put it up there with the notice of my small Lucifer archive, the Stephen Pearl Andrews article about Kant, and the post with the Distributive Passions "FedEx" collage as unlikely hits, for whatever reasons.)

In any event, having blown an hour or two on designing an entirely personal logo, why wouldn't I spend a night stitching it on a baseball cap. My embroidery skills are admittedly rusty, and tidy work on a ball-cap is not the easiest thing in the world, but, hey, I did it, and I have my DIY conversation piece that also keeps the sun off.

It's fun to do this kind of stuff, just to prove to yourself that you can.

No nations but the Red Sox Nation! It ain't plumb-line, but I'll stick with it.

From GT 2008-05-14: Voyage of the S.S. St. Louis:

If you and your family are from Iraq, and, because of the crushing poverty and the tremendous danger to your life and limb which you face — due to the United States government’s own war and bombing and occupation in Iraq; or due to threats from the government-backed and freelance ethnic-cleansing death squads, which have flourished under that occupation; or due to the crossfire in the endless battles between the United States government’s occupying forces and Iraqi insurgents — if, because of all that, you are one of the 2.5 million Iraqis who have fled the country in order to try to find a new home (either temporarily or permanently) where you can live your life free of fear and starvation and unspeakable daily violence, and now you find yourself stuck — like 2.4 million of your fellow Iraqis — in some hellhole refugee camp or urban ghetto in neighboring countries like Syria or Jordan, where conditions are awful, where you are surrounded by suffering, where you cannot legally work for pay and have little or nothing to do other than take hand-outs and fill out paperwork for UNHCR, while you watch your life savings drain away in the effort to keep yourself alive for a few more months while you wait, and wait, and wait, and if you don’t happen to be one of the 500 people per year who are eligible for Special Immigration Visas in return for collaborating with the U.S. government’s occupying forces in Iraq, and you don’t happen to be one of the quota of only a few thousand Iraqi refugees that the U.S. government has agreed to accept each year — well, then, I’m sorry, but according the United States government that just isn’t a good enough reason to get out of your way and leave you alone to travel to the United States and live your life peacefully within the borders that the United States government claims the right to fortify. Your suffering, and the danger to your life or the lives of your loved ones, by any one of the countless armies and armed factions rampaging through Iraq, don’t matter enough to them for them to reconsider their immigration quota policy. So this government will keep you penned up in your hellhole ghetto, where you can die for all they care, or, if you somehow get to America, this government will march you out at bayonet-point, and ship you out of the country, back to the ghetto conditions or to the tormentors in Iraq who you risked everything to escape.

And the S.S. St. Louis sailed on from the United States to Sweden, and this is the safe harbor that they found:

But amid a refugee flood that has taxed even this Scandinavian nation’s traditional liberal compassion, Sweden has dramatically narrowed the standards for granting asylum to people from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia.

[…]

The change in policy stems from a new immigration law and an appeals court ruling this year that found, incredibly to many Swedes and refugee advocates, that legally there is no internal armed conflict in Iraq — allowing deportation of asylum seekers to their home country.

They say there is no armed conflict in any part of Iraq. There is no armed conflict in Somalia; there is no armed conflict anywhere in the Middle East. There is armed conflict in five or six of the most southern parts of Afghanistan, said Kalle Larsson, a Left Party member of Parliament who has sought to preserve asylum opportunities in Sweden.

I’m afraid that what is really happening is the system is sending political signals to the courts and to the migration board, he said. And these signals are saying, There are too many people coming to Sweden.

—Kim Murphy, Boston Globe (2008-07-21): Refugees find door to Sweden closing

Too many people for what? For a bunch of comparatively comfortable Swedes to maintain a particular level of wages, to find an apartment in a particular neighborhood or at a particular monthly rent, to go on living in the style to which they have become accustomed? Well, I guess that’s understandable. I mean, it’s not like those Iraqi, Afghan, or Somali refugees lose much by being forced out of the country at bayonet-point. It’s not like anything important hangs in the balance.

For hundreds of refugees across Sweden, the deportation orders seem to amount to death sentences.

How can we go back? After what happened to us, Iraq to me was no longer a country, Naseir, who does not want his last name published, said as he slumped over at a coffee shop one recent afternoon to hide the tears streaming down his face.

—Kim Murphy, Boston Globe (2008-07-21): Refugees find door to Sweden closing

The fact that this is done by comfortable men and women sitting in well-appointed offices, nicely dressed and with nameplates on their desks, does not matter. The fact that it is done with obfuscatory handwaving and bromides about the National Interest does not matter. What matters is that it is criminal—obscenely criminal—that even one man, or one family should be put through this in the name of some bullshit policy. It is criminal—obscenely criminal—that even one man, or one family, should be forced out of their new homes at bayonet-point, marched back to an almost certain death.

But of course, this isn’t personal; this is policy, which means that it won’t just be one man or one family being murdered by the fountain pen of Swedish immigration bureaucrats.

But the doorway is narrowing sharply. Not only have the new legal standards meant a drop in approvals, with only about 43 percent of applicants winning their cases so far this year, but those who lose are also booted out.

Since February, 290 Iraqis have been ordered expelled from Sweden and have returned voluntarily [sic!] to Iraq, according to the Swedish Migration Board. Ten others have been forcibly returned.

—Kim Murphy, Boston Globe (2008-07-21): Refugees find door to Sweden closing

From GT 2008-05-14: Voyage of the S.S. St. Louis:

This is life, such as it is, under government immigration controls. It is life as it always will be, as long as politicians and bureaucrats have the power to pick and choose whose reasons for wanting to cross an arbitrary line on a map are good enough, and whose are not.

But it is criminal that there is even one single refugee in this world who cannot immediately find asylum and a chance to make a new life and a new home for herself in a new country.

It is inexcusable that, in the name of the ethno-political system of international apartheid, the governments of the world continue to collaborate in violence against women, in forced starvation, and in ethnic cleansing, by forcing peaceful women and men into refugee ghettoes or, worse, by forcing peaceful women and men back into the maws of the very governments or violent factions who intend to devour them.

It is obscene that a bunch of politicians and unaccountable bureaucrats from the United Nations or the U.S. government would be invested with the power to sit in judgment, from their comfortable offices, on the most marginalized, the most exploited, and the most oppressed people in the world, so that they put all their conventional prejudices and political blinders to work in picking and choosing whose suffering should count as real, in the eyes of the governments of the world, or whose suffering, if acknowledged as real by the government, is important enough to let them into a tiny quota that the government will allow to cross an arbitrary line on a map.

The S.S. St. Louis still sails the seas today, a ghost ship with ghost passengers, without rest and without safe harbor. It will haunt the world forever, as long as this system of international apartheid is enforced.

And all for what? To avoid the voluntary co-mingling of people from different countries? To ensure that the people of the world hear only one language, live and work with people of only one nationality, remain segregated, either by penning them up in their government-appointed place or else by making sure you can monitor all their movements according to a government-created system of passbooks and minders? The idea would be laughable if not for all the ghosts—the ghosts of millions upon millions of real, living, irreplaceable and unique individual people, who were turned back, ruined, persecuted, mutilated, tortured, starved, and murdered for the sake of that idea.

There is another way. A way in which the living can finally live, and the dead can finally rest, in peace. But that other can only become a reality when people are free to move from one place to another, and their reasons, their suffering, and their lives cannot be measured and found wanting by entitled strangers with the power to turn them back and force them back to the tormenters that they risked everything to escape. It can, that is to say, only become a reality with the immediate, unconditional, and complete abolition of all government border controls, and with universal amnesty for all currently undocumented immigrants.

There’s no room for compromise or moderation in the politics of immigration when real people’s bodies and real people’s lives are hanging in the balance. As they are all over the world today.