When both sides accuse their enemies of being the heirs to Hitler, compromise becomes almost unthinkable
Archive for category: #Imperialism #Multipolar
Cold war strategist discusses Russia, the Ukraine war and China at the FTWeekend Festival in Washington
Now that the Biden administration has pledged to help the International Criminal Court, or ICC, in The Hague—“and other efforts”—to prosecute Putin and others for war crimes committed during the invasion of Ukraine, it makes even less sense for the United States not to join the court after decades spent ducking the responsibility. Let’s face facts: After Ukraine, the ICC will be the only game in town. And like it or not, the U.S. has already been forced to build the court up, the perennial objections from the Pentagon that the ICC should not be permitted to have jurisdiction over U.S. military personnel notwithstanding.
It is a fantasy to believe that the ad hoc tribunals created by the U.N. Security Council—where Russia has a veto—are going to derail the ICC from its steadily growing preeminence in the judging of war crimes of the future. And while the claim that the ICC has no “jurisdiction” over nonsignatory countries may technically be a limit in the ICC’s charter, that limitation was rendered impractical well before the Russian invasion. Russia is not a member either; while Ukraine may have technically accepted jurisdiction, the reality is that the ICC has, in its legal DNA, the ability and the responsibility to act globally—especially against monsters who do not accept its jurisdiction. There is no future for the U.S. in trying to stand apart from the ICC. And we will be far better able to protect our legitimate national security interests by being inside, and not outside, the court.
Let’s start with what we get out of participating in the ICC. Just as we did at Nuremberg in 1945, we will have a hand in defining what is or is not a war crime, what is or is not genocide, and what is or is not a crime against humanity. We will participate in the judging, and inside the ICC, we will be primus inter pares—first among equals—at least in the bloc of ICC members who are our NATO allies and who are beholden to us for their own security. Why would we stay out, give up that leadership role, and let other countries take the lead in defining the legal standards that will apply to us? Aside from setting the standards, it is additionally important for the U.S. to have some say about who should be prosecuted under these standards. We can continue to cheer from the sidelines if we wish. But there is no internal institutional reason why Ukraine, our NATO allies, or less friendly countries should take any heed from us as to whether it makes sense to prosecute Putin.
And it is not just that the U.S. loses this power by staying out. It has erected a law that is designed to alienate or poison our relationship to anyone who is a lawyer, civil servant, or part of whatever permanent bureaucracy, formal or informal, constitutes the European Union. That’s because of the spectacularly ill-advised American Servicemember Protection Act, or ASPA, one of the more stupid and self-defeating laws ever enacted by Congress. Under the ASPA, should the ICC detain or take custody of any American service member or “U.S. person”—which is defined to cover just about anyone helping us—the president has authority to use any means necessary, other than bribery, to obtain that “U.S. person’s” release. In other words, the president can conduct a special military operation, the term Putin used for the initial invasion of Ukraine.
The notion is utterly ridiculous. Consider that Article 5 of the 1949 NATO Treaty—invoked only once, after the 9/11 attacks—would have to be invoked again if the U.S. carried out a military assault upon The Hague, located within the territory of a NATO country. Not only would our NATO allies be required to attack the U.S., the U.S. would be required … to attack itself. Nonsense it may be, but it is hardly lost on those connected with the ICC that each and everyone is potentially under a shoot to kill order, enacted without a sunset clause, by the same U.S. that is providing assistance to build up the ICC into a preeminent global institution.
While we lose leverage by staying out, we lose nothing by going in. After the Ukraine invasion, our claim that the ICC has no jurisdiction over the U.S. will be even more illusory: If it is to be brushed aside in the case of Russia, the logic that the U.S. is similarly exempt will no longer be tenable. It is also true that there is a big distinction: In effect, American service members and American citizens, if not the looser category of “U.S. persons,” would not be subject to prosecution in the ICC if the U.S. legal system can render justice on its own. This is the principle of “complementarity,” a key part of the original Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, the founding treaty adopted now by 123 member states and which went into effect in 2002. It is the ICC that is supposed to be “complementary,” used only in case no nation or applicable nonstate is willing to exercise jurisdiction.
Aside from that jurisdictional limit in the Rome Statute itself, Congress can put in that same limit into a federal law as an additional limit on ICC jurisdiction. With any treaty the U.S. signs, Congress can always pass a law to limit—or modify or clarify the limit of—the U.S. commitment. Such a law will generally have precedence under the Constitution over any treaty obligation. In effect, we can join the ICC and still determine its jurisdiction, or lawfully exclude it over American personnel. Congress can do so by mandating the jurisdiction of the federal or military courts over the same crimes covered by the ICC. In the last resort, the president also can even abrogate a treaty—lawfully under the Constitution—should he choose to do so, and such an abrogation by the president is effectively unreviewable, not only by our own courts but by the ICC as well.
Once in the ICC, and with such a law in place, the U.S. could refuse to extradite or turn over any American service personnel. Under the Rome Statute—but also under a law—we have a legal entitlement to their release. Or we do so long as we have a functioning judicial system capable of adjudicating possible war crimes. God help the U.S. if it does not have such a system. For the sake of our domestic liberty, we might want such a check. And to have such legal entitlement taken from the statute, even if it is one that we unilaterally enforce under our own domestic law, is at least as much protection as we have now.
For the heretofore reluctant Pentagon, membership in the ICC may offer a boon: It should increase the capacity of military leadership to command and control the lower ranks. It will increase the importance of the military courts in which Senator Lindsey Graham used to practice. The worst thing for both the military and the delicate military missions it is likely to conduct in the future is to bear any resemblance to the anarchic insubordination of the Russian army in Ukraine. We need to incorporate military justice into military missions in an age when global standards are here to stay. Remaining outside the ICC weakens our ability, as well as NATO’s, to overcome suspicion of the U.S. on those occasions when winning the cooperation of civilians is crucial. Staying out of the ICC will always be a stain on our military—a mark of Cain on them in any country where American soldiers may find themselves serving.
But regardless of whether joining the ICC will have an effect on military discipline or on amplifying the standards of the U.S. military to a level beyond Russia’s or China’s reputation, we have a vital interest in being part of a court whose territory is the NATO heartland. We are the West—and it is in our long-run interest to be the West. The ICC exists as the bearer of values that historically came out of Europe’s civil wars. What is the interest of leaving our NATO allies and other countries to develop the legal standards that will inevitably be applied to us?
There is a moral issue that has become sharper since the invasion of Ukraine. So far, the U.S. has had a very good war. Without risking a single life, or losing a single soldier, the U.S. has achieved a remarkable strategic objective: the degrading of the capability of the Russian military. We have had to sit back and write checks—checks that are not even that dear, compared to what’s at stake in this war. For all the human sacrifice the Ukrainian people have made for us, for all that they have served our own interest, the U.S. owes an enormous debt: a debt that money can never repay. Should the outcome of this war permit it, we owe them a new world order. A Nuremberg for our century, wrought through joining the only institution through which it can happen. It would be a lasting stain upon our country not to join the ICC.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has defended his invasion of Ukraine, saying it was a necessary blow against NATO. His remarks came during Russia’s annual Victory Day celebrations on May 9 marking the defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II. U.S. lawmakers, meanwhile, are increasingly describing the fighting in Ukraine as a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia. We speak with the Quincy Institute’s Anatol Lieven, who says the war can only end through negotiations, and aggressive U.S. rhetoric risks prolonging the fighting. “That is a recipe for this war going on essentially forever, with colossal suffering for Ukraine,” says Lieven.
By Tim Anderson – Apr 28, 2022
In recent years NATO—essentially the USA and Western Europe—has bared its fascist roots through multiple interventions across four continents. The NATO states backed fascist coups in Venezuela, Honduras and Bolivia, imposed blockades on dozens of nations, fomented Al-Qaeda/ISIS/Boko Haram sectarian terrorism to destabilize Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Nigeria, and are now arming open Neo-Nazis in Ukraine.
All this seems at odds with the NATO states’ heavily promoted self-image: as models of liberalism and democratic values, even lecturing other countries on that theme. They claim to have fought both fascism and communism. Yet, it was European and North American imperialism and colonialism that laid the foundation for 20th-century fascism.
Since the Second World War—a massive conflict that took more than 70 million lives—both Washington and the western Europeans made great efforts to hide the contributions and sacrifices of both the Soviet Union (principally Russia) and China, nations that lost more lives in WW2 than any other.
Indeed, in 2019 the European Parliament went so far as to blame both the USSR under Joseph Stalin, alongside Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, as being jointly responsible for WW2. That resolution claimed that “the Second World War… was started as an immediate result of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty on Non-Aggression of 23 August 1939.”
If not entirely cynical, this was an extraordinary self-deception, and the culmination of a long campaign where socialist leaders Stalin and Mao Zedong were presented, over decades, as moral equivalents of the western European fascist Adolf Hitler.
That deceit made use of false claims that Stalin and Mao had instigated famines that killed many millions. In fact, the famines in both Ukraine and China were the last in a long cycle of famines of the pre-socialist era. US historian Grover Furr has debunked the myth that the Ukrainian ‘Holodomor’ famine was a deliberate act by Stalin.
Similarly, the claim that WW2 was the “immediate result” of the Soviet-German “non-aggression pact” is an utter falsehood. There were a number of similar European agreements with Nazi Germany before this, and several were more substantial.
The Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935, for example, helped Germany rebuild its fleet, while Britain, France, and Italy conceded Berlin’s claim to part of Czechoslovakia, in the 1938 Munich Pact. Then, there were the active fascist collaborations between Germany, Spain, and Italy, including the Italian-German Pact of Steel.
Much of Europe’s fascist collaboration coalesced under an Anti-Comintern Pact created by Nazi Germany and Japan in 1936 to oppose communist states. This pact later drew in support from Italy, Hungary, Spain, and—during the war—from Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Romania, and Slovakia. Fascism was aflame across Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. Key European agreements with Nazi Germany are set out below, in Table 1.
Table 1: Key European agreements with Nazi Germany
1933, 20 July
Concordat with the Vatican
Mutual recognition and non-interference
https://www.concordatwatch.eu/reichskonkordat-1933-full-text–k1211
1933, 25 August
Haavara agreement with German Jewish Zionists
Agreement to transfer capital and people to Palestine
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/haavara
1934, 26 January
German-Polish Non-Aggression Pact
To ensure that Poland did not sign a military alliance with France.
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/blbk01.asp
1935, 18 June
Anglo-German Naval Agreement
Britain agreed to Germany expanding its navy to 35% the size of the British.
https://carolynyeager.net/anglo-german-naval-agreement-june-18-1935
1936, July
Nazi Germany aids fascists in Spain
Hitler sent air and armored units to assist General Franco.
https://spartacuseducational.com/SPgermany.htm
1936
Rome-Berlin Axis agreement
Italian – German fascist and anti-communist alliance.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/int/axis.htm
1936, Oct-Nov
Anti-Comintern Pact
Anti-communist treaty, initiated by Nazi Germany and Japan in 1936 and which later drew in 9 European states: Italy, Hungary, Spain, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Romania and Slovakia.
1938, 30 September
Munich Pact
Britain, France, and Italy concede Germany’s Sudetenland (Czech) claims.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Munich-Agreement
1939, 22 May
Pact of Steel
Consolidates the 1936 Italian German agreement.
https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=228
1939, 7 June
German–Latvian Non-Aggression Pact
Sought peace with Nazi Germany.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43211534
1939, 24 July
German–Estonian Non-Aggression Pact
Sought peace with Nazi Germany.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43211534
1939, 23 August
USSR (Molotov-Ribbentrop) Non-Aggression Pact
Sought peace with Nazi Germany, protocol defined spheres of influence.
https://universalium.en-academic.com/239707/German-Soviet_Nonaggression_Pact
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What is fascism?
The term is used far too frequently, but it has real meaning. We cannot be trapped by particular 20th-century histories of fascism—conceptual elements must be identified.
Fascism is a heavily militarized, anti-democratic, and racist-colonial regime that engages with a private, capitalist oligarchy. While primary fascism is an imperial project, there is also subordinate fascism in former colonies like Brazil and Chile, which integrates itself with the imperial power of the day. Fascist regimes are especially hostile to socialist and independent states and peoples. They differ from extreme right regimes only by openly crushing any semblance of social and political democracy. Imperial cultures and interventions, which always and everywhere negate the possibility of local democracy or accountability, are inherently fascist and remain at the root of contemporary fascism.
NATO’s fascism was built by the imperial and colonial history of many (but not all) of the European states, where the crushing of local communities and nations was justified by fabricated theories of race and racial superiority. The denial of this colonial-fascist history has led to suggestions that, as a Russian documentary put it, the rise of Hitler was “something atypical of European democracies; the Fuhrer’s doctrine of superior and inferior races rather appeared out of thin air in Europe due to an unlucky turn of events.”
In fact, the fascism of Nazi Germany had deep roots in European colonial history and culture. As Gerwin Strobl’s book The Germanic Isle points out, Adolf Hitler himself was a great admirer of the “ruthlessness” of the British Empire and dreamed of such achievements. For its part, the USA built myths of “liberty” while running the largest slave economy in human history. As the great Latin American resistance leader Simón Bolívar said two centuries ago, “The United States appears to be destined by Providence to plague America with misery in the name of liberty.”
Beyond the European ‘appeasement’ of Nazi Germany there was active European and North American collaboration with fascists before, during, and after WW2.
First of all the Anglo-German Naval Agreement of 1935 helped re-arm Nazi Germany, breaking with the 1919 Versailles Treaty limits on German ships and submarines but pretending to keep the German navy a fraction of the British. Then several North American companies, notably General Motors, Ford, and IBM, invested directly in the Nazi regime’s economy, infrastructure, and military. There were many influential North American and British admirers of the Nazis. On the verge of WW2, British bankers funneled third-party (Czech) gold into the Nazi-controlled banks.
Ford assisted the Nazi war machine before and into WW2 through its motor vehicle factories in Germany and occupied Vichy France. It made use of German slave labor from Nazi concentration camps, though the company later complained that it had no control over these labor regimes. While the Ford company struggled to escape these allegations, Polish officials and former inmates named Ford as “one of 500 firms which had links with [slave labor from the Nazi death camp] Auschwitz.” IBM, a “New Deal” company close to the Roosevelt administration, also invested in Nazi Germany through the 1930s and into the early years of the war, helping build Nazi information systems.
The Swiss sold millions in arms to the Nazis, both before and during WW2. Despite pretensions of neutrality, between 1940 and 1944, “84 percent of Swiss munitions’ exports went to Axis countries.” Yet, according to researcher Bradford Snell, “General Motors was far more important to the Nazi war machine than Switzerland… GM was an integral part of the German war effort.”
North American and European investment in and collaboration with the Nazis continued well into WW2. One aspect of this was a desire to participate in what was, between 1940 and 1942, “a spectacular investment boom, primarily directed towards widening the industrial base for war.” No doubt that encouraged Ford and GM to keep collaborating with Hitler.
After 1939-40, when Nazi Germany had invaded much of western Europe, Berlin counted on the support of many European fascist and collaborationist states, as well as civilian volunteers. Alongside its alliance with fascist Italy, Nazi Germany could count on the support of fascist Spain, despite General Franco’s alleged policy of neutrality.
Then there were the pro-fascist statelets set up by the Nazis, Vichy France, and the Quisling regime in Norway. The Germans created multiple SS divisions, with tens of thousands of willing pro-fascist volunteers, in the Netherlands, Croatia, and Albania. Vichy France under WWI hero Marshall Petain enacted a racist anti-Jew law (Statut des Juifs) which made Jews second-class citizens in France and so more readily subject to Nazi predations. The fascist regime of Vidkun Quisling similarly encouraged participation in local SS divisions, helped deport Jewish people, and executed Norwegian patriots.
Danish King Christian X may have been friendly with the Jewish community, but he did not stand up to the Nazis. It is often falsely claimed that King Christian “donned the Star of David in solidarity with the Danish Jews.” This is quite false. In reality, the Danish regime opposed resistance activities and shared intelligence with the Nazis. One of the factors in this collaboration was that Denmark was “technically an ally of Germany.” Under pressure, they had signed the Anti-Comintern Pact. Despite great efforts to sanitize this history, in 2005 Danish PM Rasmussen apologized on behalf of Denmark for the extradition of minorities and resistance figures to Nazi Germany, many of whom were sent to their death.
Substantial Nazi collaboration took place in all the Baltic states: Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia all had Waffen SS divisions. They, along with ultra-nationalist Nazi collaborators in Ukraine, played a key role in local massacres of communists, Jews, and Gypsies.
Between 1941 and 1944, hundreds of thousands were slaughtered in Ukraine, many by local ultra-nationalist Nazi collaborators, like Stepan Bandera. Russian historian Lev Simkin says, “In practice, the Holocaust of the Jews began in Ukraine,” with the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. The mass killings were linked to Hitler’s paranoid view of dangerous Bolshevik Jews. Mass killings of Jews in Kiev, Lvov, Kherson, and other parts of Ukraine have been well mapped out. These are some of the sites of current Russian fighting with Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis. During WW2, most of Ukraine’s pre-war Jewish population of about 1.5 million “was wiped out.”
Academic studies have shown a “massive participation of Baltic nationals in the murder of Jews in the Holocaust.” Many tens of thousands of Jews were killed in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, much of this by local hands. There has been a strong reaction to exposure of this ugly history of fascist collaboration. Lithuania, for example, is said to want to hide its “ugly history of Nazi collaboration” by accusing Jewish partisans of war crimes.
Across Europe, there was large-scale participation in the fascist slaughter. In Hungary, Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was said to be “reliant on the collaboration of the Hungarian authorities” to deport more than 400,000 Hungarian Jews to the death camps.
All this underlines the fact that WW2, from the European and North American sides, was not fundamentally a fight against fascism, even though those states fought a fascist Axis. The war was more of a competition between imperial blocks, with the Hitler-led coalition determined to colonize “living space” (lebensraum) in the east. The struggle of patriots in eastern Europe and Russia, as well as much of the western resistance, was certainly anti-fascist. Those leading the western states, however, were not idealists.
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After WW2 the USA immediately sought to take advantage of Nazi science and technology in their subsequent Cold War against the emerging socialist bloc. The allied powers smashed anti-fascist forces in Greece and militarily occupied western Germany. The Soviet Union, for its part, ensured that it dominated those close neighbors, which had been most deeply embedded with its fascist enemies: in particular the Baltic states, Ukraine, and eastern Germany.
The US began a project of secretly recruiting Nazi scientists to its war machine. North American use of German rocket specialist Werner Von Braun is often cited with reference to the peaceful Apollo space project. However, Von Braun was an SS officer who had hand-picked slave labor from concentration camps. The US military wanted him for his rocket and missile expertise. In the secret but now notorious Operation Paperclip thousands of Nazi scientists were recruited and given safe haven in the USA, for their value in building up the US military. The Pentagon was particularly interested in the Nazi development of a “whole arsenal of nerve agents” and in Hitler’s work towards “a bubonic plague weapon.”
For all their later complaints about other states possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), the US military wanted every type of WMD at its disposal. And they were prepared to use them on civilian populations, as their biological and chemical attacks in Korea and in Vietnam showed, and as the gratuitous and horrific nuclear “demonstration” attacks on the civilian Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated. Masters of doublespeak, and with a doctrine of “plausible deniability,” US officials hide their own atrocities as much as possible.
Emerging as the dominant power after WW2 Washington, which had used fascist tactics—invasions, coups, dirty wars—to intervene in most other countries of the Americas, began to employ these same methods on other continents. So the terrible war in Korea led to a permanent US military occupation in the south of the peninsula, the democratic government of Iran was overthrown and replaced by a dictatorship in 1953 and the next terrible US anti-communist war against the people of Vietnam failed, only after millions had been slaughtered.
In the 21st century, Washington backed multiple coup attempts against Venezuela, the biggest oil producer in the Americas and historically important for fuelling the US war machine. In 2002 the USA and Spain-backed coup plotters who kidnapped elected President Hugo Chávez, falsely claimed that he had resigned, tore up the constitution, dismissed the elected National Assembly, and announced the head of the Chamber of Commerce Pedro Carmona, as president. Carmona only lasted two days, but multiple coup attempts followed. This was pure fascism. Venezuela decided that a strong state, with a large civilian militia, was necessary to defend itself from relentless US-backed fascism.
At the same time, fearing the loss of its dominant role in the world, Washington launched multiple wars in the Middle East, in futile attempts to contain the growing influence of Iran, post-Soviet Russia, and China. The wars against Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen are not the subject of this article. However we should observe the US-NATO use of massive proxy armies, al Qaeda and ISIS styled, infused with sectarian Saudi ideology, across the West Asian region and into Africa, in the shape of Boko Haram.
In Russia’s 2022 retaliatory war on Ukraine—provoked by a post-2014 war on the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine and by a NATO military build-up, intended to destabilize and weaken Russia—we see a combination of the US fascist method and the older European colonial mentality. The US maintains its double-speak over “liberty,” while the Europeans speak of lesser human classes. In Ukraine, ultra-nationalists such as Azov and Right Sektor describe themselves as Nazis who want to kill Russians, Jews, and Poles. NATO and its embedded media try to hide this ugly reality.
German and European Union official Florence Gaub, for example, uses racist rhetoric to dehumanize Russian people, “Even if Russians look European, they are not European, in a cultural sense. They think differently about violence or death. They have no concept of a liberal, post-modern life, a concept of life that each individual can choose. Instead, life simply can end early with death.” Critics called this a very German reversion to the Nazi concept of Untermenschen or inferior races.
21st-century fascism has arisen in new circumstances but carries the key elements of the 20th-century project: an imperial, heavily militarized, deeply anti-democratic, and racist-colonial regime embedded in a private, capitalist oligarchy. It spawns subordinate fascism, every bit as venomous as its parent: a global imperial project which remains the key enemy of all democratic peoples.
Tim Anderson is an Australian historian, author of The Dirty War on Syria, and director of the Sydney-based Centre for Counter Hegemonic Studies.
Featured image: Photo composition showing armed soldiers, with flags of NATO and the Ukrainian neo-nazi Azon Batallion. Photo: Al Mayadeen
We speak to Yale University historian Timothy Snyder about his latest article for The New Yorker, “The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War.” Snyder writes about the colonial history that laid the foundations for the Russian war in Ukraine, such as Russia’s imperial vision and how leaders including Hitler and Stalin have aimed to conquer Ukrainian soil on different premises. “The whole history of colonialism … involves denying that another people is real. It involves denying that another state is real,” says Snyder. “That is, of course, the premise of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”
First, it was the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) vehicles speeding along on the road in front of our campsite. Then it was the Border Patrol’s all-terrain vehicles moving swiftly on a ridge above us. I was about 10 miles north of the border with Mexico, near Peña Blanca Lake in southern Arizona, camping with my six-year-old son and some other families. Like fire trucks racing to a blaze, the Border Patrol mobilization around me was growing so large I could only imagine an emergency situation developing.
I started climbing to get a better look and soon found myself alone on a golden hill dotted with alligator junipers and mesquite. Brilliant vermilion flycatchers fluttered between the branches. The road, though, was Border Patrol all the way. Atop the hill opposite mine stood a surveillance tower. Since it loomed over our campsite, I’d been looking at it all weekend. It felt strangely like part of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s panopticon — in other words, I wasn’t sure whether I was being watched or not. But I suspected I was.
After all, that tower’s cameras could see for seven miles at night and its ground-sweeping radar operated in a 13-mile radius, a capability, one Border Patrol officer told me in 2019, worth “100 agents.” In the term of the trade, the technology was a “force multiplier.” I had first seen that tower freshly built in 2015 after CBP awarded a hefty contract to the Israeli company Elbit Systems. In other words, on top of that hill, I wasn’t just watching some unknown event developing; I was also in the middle of the border-industrial complex.
During Donald Trump’s years in office, the media focused largely on the former president’s fixation with the giant border wall he was trying to have built, a xenophobic symbol so filled with racism that it was far easier to find people offended by it than towers like this one. From where I stood, the closest stretch of border wall was 10 miles to the south in Nogales, a structure made of 20-foot-high steel bollards and covered with coiled razor wire. (That stretch of wall, in fact, had been built long before Trump took office.)
What I was now witnessing, however, could be called Biden’s wall. I’m speaking about a modern, high-tech border barrier of a different sort, an increasingly autonomous surveillance apparatus fueled by “public-private partnerships.” The technology for this “virtual wall” had been in the works for years, but the Biden administration has focused on it as if it were a humane alternative to Trump’s project.
In reality, for the Border Patrol, the “border-wall system,” as it’s called, is equal parts barrier, technology, and personnel. While the Biden administration has ditched the racist justifications that went with it, its officials continue to zealously promote the building of a border-wall system that’s increasingly profitable and ever more like something out of a science-fiction movie.
As March ended, one week before my camping trip, I saw it up close and personal at the annual Border Security Expo in San Antonio, Texas.
“Robots That Feel the World”
The golden chrome robotic dog trotted right up to me on the blue carpet at the convention center hall. At my feet, it looked up as if it were a real dog expecting me to lean over and pet it. According to the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate, this “dog” will someday patrol our southern border. Its vendor was undoubtedly trying to be cute when he made the dog move its butt back and forth as if wagging its tail (in reality, two thin, black antennae). Behind the vendor was a large sign with the company’s name in giant letters: Ghost Robotics. Below that was “Robots That Feel the World,” a company slogan right out of the dystopian imagination.
According to its organizers, this was the most well-attended Border Security Expo in its 15-year history. About 200 companies crowded the hall, trying to lure officials from CBP, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, border sheriffs’ departments, and international border forces into buying their technologies, sensors, robots, detectors, and guns. As I stood staring at that surreal dog, behind me the company Teledyne Flir was showing off its video surveillance system: a giant retractable mast sitting in the bed of a black pickup truck. On the side of the truck were the words “Any Threat. Anywhere.”
Another company, Saxon Aerospace (its slogan: “Actionable Intelligence, Anytime, Anywhere”), had a slick, white, medium-sized drone on display. One vendor assured me that the drone market had simply exploded in recent years. “Do you know why?” I asked. His reply: “It’s like when a dog eats blood and gets carnivorous.”
Elsewhere, the red Verizon Frontline mobile command-and-control truck looked like it could keep perfect company with any Border Patrol all-terrain vehicle unit; while Dell, the Texas-based computer firm, displayed its own frontline mobile vehicle, promising that “whether you’re providing critical citizen services, innovating for the next generation, or securing the nation, we bring the right technology… and far-reaching vision to help guide your journey.”
And don’t forget 3M, which has moved well beyond its most famous product, Scotch tape, to provide “rugged and reliable equipment across DoD [Department of Defense], DoJ [Department of Justice], DHS [Department of Homeland Security], and U.S. state and local agencies.” Top defense contractors like Airbus (with a shiny black helicopter on display in the center of the expo hall) were also present, along with top border contractors like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Elbit Systems.
Just the day before the expo opened, the Biden administration put out its fiscal year 2023 budget, which proposed $97.3 billion for the DHS, that agency’s largest in its two-decade history. The Customs and Border Protection part of that, $17.5 billion, would similarly be the most money that agency has ever received, nearly $1.5 billion more than last year. Although Immigration and Customs Enforcement received just a marginal increase, it will still get $8.5 billion. Combine just those two and that $26 billion would be the highest sum ever dedicated to border and immigration enforcement, significantly more than the $20 billion that the Trump administration started out with in 2017. As DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas put it, such a budget will help secure our “values.” (And in an ironic sense, at least, how true that is!)
“Notably,” Mayorkas added, “the budget makes smart investments in technology to keep our borders secure and includes funding that will allow us to process asylum claims more efficiently as we build a safe, orderly, and humane immigration system.”
What Mayorkas didn’t mention was that his border plans involve ever more contracts doled out to private industry. That’s been the case since 9/11 when money began to pour into border and immigration enforcement, especially after the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2002. With ever-growing budgets, the process of privatizing the oversight of our southern border increased significantly during the administration of President George W. Bush. (The first Border Security Expo was, tellingly enough, in 2005.) The process, however, soared in the Obama era. During the first four years of his presidency, 60,405 contracts (including a massive $766 million to weapons-maker Lockheed Martin) were issued to the tune of $15 billion. From 2013 to 2016, another 81,500 contracts were issued for a total of $13.2 billion.
In other words, despite his wall, it’s a misconception to think that Donald Trump stood alone in his urge to crack down on migration at the border. It’s true, however, that his administration did up the ante by issuing 87,293 border-protection contracts totaling $20.9 billion. For Biden, the tally so far is 10,612 contracts for $8 billion. If he keeps up that pace, he could rack up nearly $24 billion in contracts by the end of his first term, which would leave Trump’s numbers and those of every other recent president in the dust.
If so, the contracts of the Trump and Biden administrations would total nearly $45 billion, slightly surpassing the $44.3 billion spent on border and immigration enforcement from 1980 to 2002. In the media, border and immigration issues are normally framed in terms of a partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans. While there is certainly some truth to that, there are a surprising number of ways in which both parties have reached a kind of grim border consensus.
As Maryland Democratic Congressman Dutch Ruppersberger, a member of the House appropriations committee, said ever so beamingly on a screen at that Expo conference, “I have literally put my money where my mouth is, championing funding for fencing, additional Border Patrol agents, and state-of-the-art surveillance equipment.” And as Clint McDonald, a member of the Border Sheriff’s Association, said at its opening panel, the border is “not a red issue, it’s not a blue issue. It’s a red, white, and blue issue.”
When I asked the Ghost Robotics vendor if his robo-dog had a name, he replied that his daughter “likes to call it Tank.” He then added, “We let our customers name them as they get them.” While we were chatting, a prospective customer asked, “What about weapons mountable?” (That is, could buyers weaponize that dog?) The vendor immediately assured him that they were already working with other companies to make that happen.
Later, when I asked Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz about the surveillance dogs, he downplayed their significance, stressing the media hype around them, and saying that no robo-dogs were yet deployed anywhere on the border. Nonetheless, it was hard not to wander that hall and think, This, much more than a wall, could be our border future. In fact, if the “big, beautiful” wall was the emblem of Donald Trump’s border policy, then for the Biden moment, think robo-dogs.
Border Security Is Not a “Pipe Dream”
The night before I stood on that hill in Arizona, I had heard people passing through the campsite where my son and I were sleeping in a tent. Their footsteps were soft and I felt no fear, no danger. That people were coming through should hardly have been a surprise. Enforcement at our southern border has been designed to push such border-crossing migrants into just the sort of desert lands we were camping in, often under the cover of night.
The remains of at least 8,000 people have been found in those landscapes since the mid-1990s and many more undoubtedly died since thousands of families continue to search for lost loved ones who disappeared in the borderlands. Those soft footsteps I heard could have been from asylum seekers fleeing violence in their lands or facing the disaster of accelerating climate change — wilted crops and flooded fields — or economic dispossession in countries where foreign corporations and local oligarchies rule the day. Or all of that combined.
For years, I’ve been talking to migrants who crossed isolated and hazardous parts of the Arizona desert to bypass the walls and guns of the Border Patrol.
I thought of them when, on the last day of that Border Security Expo, I watched Palmer Luckey, the CEO of Anduril, a new border surveillance company, step up to the podium to introduce a panel on “The Digital Transformation of the Border.” The 20-something Luckey, already worth $700 million, had floppy brown hair and wore a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and flip-flops. He told the audience of border industry and Homeland Security officials that he was wearing shades because of recent laser surgery, not an urge to look cool.
He did look cool, though, as if he were at the beach. And he does represent the next generation of border tech. Since 2020, his company has received nearly $100 million in contracts from Customs and Border Protection.
His introduction to the panel, which sounded to me more like a pitch for financing, offered a glimpse of how the border-industrial complex now works. It was like listening to a rehearsal for the lobbying appearances he and his company would undoubtedly make in Congress for the 2023 budget. In 2021, Anduril spent $930,000 lobbying on issues that mattered to its executives. It also gifted political candidates with nearly $2 million in campaign contributions.
Luckey’s message was: fund me and you’ll create a “durable industrial base,” while ensuring that border security will not be a “pipe dream.” Indeed, in his vision, the new border-surveillance infrastructure he represents will instead be an autonomous “pipeline,” delivering endlessly actionable information and intelligence directly to the cell phones of Border Patrol agents.
I was thinking about his pitch again as I stood atop that hill watching the border apparatus quickly mobilize. I was, in fact, looking at yet another Border Patrol vehicle driving by when I suddenly heard a mechanical buzzing overhead that made me think a drone might be nearby. At our southern border, the CBP not only operates the sizeable Predator Bs (once used in U.S. military and CIA operations abroad), but small and medium-sized drones.
I could see nothing in the sky, but something was certainly happening. It was as if I were at the Expo again, but now it was real life. I was, in fact, in the middle of the very surveillance-infrastructure pipeline Luckey had described, where towers talk to each other, signal to drones, to the all-terrain vehicle unit, and to roving Border Patrol cars.
Then the buzzing sound abruptly stopped as a CBP helicopter lifted into the air, its loud propellers roaring.
The Real Crisis
After that dramatic helicopter exit, I wondered if there was indeed a border emergency and finally decided to get in my car and see what I could find out, leaving my son with our friends. As I rounded a corner, I came across Border Patrol agents and vehicles at the side of the road with a large group of people who, I assumed, were migrants. About four individuals had already been put in the back of a green-striped Border Patrol pickup truck, handcuffed and arrested. They had the tired look I knew so well of people who had walked an entire night in an unknown, hazardous landscape, had failed, and were now about to be deported. The agents of the ATV detail were lounging around in their green jumpsuits as their quads idled, as if this were all in a day’s (or night’s) work, which indeed it was.
I remembered then hearing those footsteps as my son slept soundly and thought: The border is not in crisis. That’s impossible. The border’s inanimate. It’s the people walking through the desert — the ones who crept past us and those in the back of that truck or soon to be put in other trucks like it, arrested so far from home — who are actually in crisis. And it’s a crisis almost beyond the ability of anyone who hasn’t been displaced to imagine. Otherwise, why would they be here in the first place?
The ongoing border-crisis story is another example of what Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once would have called an “upside down” world, so twisted in its telling that the victim becomes the victimizer and the oppressor, the oppressed. If only there were a way we could turn that story — and how so many in this country think about it — right-side up.
As I was mulling all of that over, I suddenly noticed the omnipresent “eye” of the Elbit Systems tower “staring” at me again. Its superpower cameras were catching the whole scene. Perhaps its radar had detected this group to begin with. After all, the company’s website says, “From the darkest of nights to the thickest of brush, our border solutions help predict, detect, identify, and classify items of interest.” Not people, mind you, but the handcuffed “items of interest” in the back of that truck.
As I watched the scene unfold, I remembered a moment at that Expo when a man from the Rio Grande Valley asked a panel of Department of Homeland Security officials a rare and pointed question. Gesturing toward the hall where all the companies were hawking their wares, he wondered why, if there was so much money to be made in border security, “would you even want a solution?”
The long uncomfortable silence that followed told me all I needed to know about the real border crisis in this country.
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