Irrational fear, hopefully

An opinion article in yesterday's Aftonbladet by Jan Myrdal argues that holding people who are not informed of what they are accused and against whom the government has no proof prisoners has no place in a civil society with rule of law. He mentions some old examples of when rule of law has not been upheld: political prisoners in France in the 16th and 17th century; Feb. 28, 1933, the new Hitler government decided that to protect the people and the state, no proof or trial was necessary to take people prisoners. Having just read a book about an Estonian child refugee and having seen some of my mother's old photographs, I think of all the people who disappeared during the night - both during Hitler's regime and during Stalin's. Trains full of people, some or most pretty arbitrarily taken. All the stories I heard as a kid about the Soviet Union and what happened to the people behind the iron curtain, people who we had belonged together with either by blood or by culture and tradition. All the letters with codes to sneak past the censure. And the immense pride that Finland has in having stayed independent - and all the sacrifices that people have made for their country to keep it that way.

Every time we go to visit my grandfather, we go to the graveyard. He shows us the family graves - there's two - and the graves of more distant relatives, even though we know where they are. And then we go to the war memorial section to look at our relatives who are buried there. The Winter War (Talvisota) and the Continuation War (Jatkosota) killed some of my relatives and hurt others. My great-grandfather was one who died. Afterwards, my great-grandmother couldn't afford to feed her six children. My grandmother and her siblings had to become huutolapsia, children who were auctioned off to the family who promised to take best care of them. Huutolapset often had to work hard for their food and most of the time didn't get a lot of love. They were at the bottom of society. My great-aunt Anni, the youngest, was lucky and ended up in a good family who treated her well. I don't know what exactly happened to the rest, because still is very shameful and painful for my family to talk about. Even my mother didn't know until for about five years ago, after my grandmother's death. Finland lost Karelia and had to take care of thousands of refugees. The Finns had to seek help from Hitler Germany to keep Stalin away; they had to seek help from a regime almost as feared as the one they knew they would have to fight. But Finland is independent. Estland, almost like Finland's sister country, was occupied first by Hitler and then by Stalin. Both did basically the same thing - got rid of anyone who might in any far-fetched way sometime in the future maybe possibly be part of the resistance movement. Killed or deported to Siberia or concentration camps.

The Finns were the primary means of smuggling information past the Soviet censure, because of the close ties between Finland and Estland. I heard stories as a kid about the efforts and the danger involved. My grandfather was asked to mail something by an Estonian stranger, someone who approached him in a very scared and secretive way in Helsinki. He did. Someone must have been told some very sensitive information thanks to him. The Estonian must have smuggled the letter - very dangerous - with her on an official sanctioned trip. I heard the stories of the watching and the eavesdropping and the poor Finns who crossed the border to join the Revolution. Most of them ended up in Siberia or killed. When the wall fell, everyone's first though wasn't political - it was happiness for the people on the other side. In the happy naivete that followed the tearing down of the wall, we all thought that now they could have what we had, that torn families could re-unite, that we could all be free and prosperous together like we should have been.

Although I know that such a fear is not warranted right now, there is a part of me that immediately thinks back to all this when I hear about things like holding prisoners without proof or trial. As a child, I often felt very grateful for having had such luck to have been born outside the Soviet Union when I heard the stories and felt the fear turned into action and later pride from my family. Both my mother and my father could have been inside the iron curtain if things had been different, my father more likely than my mother. I could have been born a Soviet citizen. My childhood could have been full of the fear and scarcity and corruption that my third cousin's was. Even though it is - I hope - irrational and I try not to think about it, sometimes I can't help but imagine a world where the US is like a rich Soviet Union, where not even being a model citizen and pledging your loyalty and belief in the System can save you, because that's just what a good terrorist would do to hide. And that just gives me a lump of cold ice in my chest. It's just too much. And it just can't happen. There must be a law of physics preventing it from happening.

I don't know what to think, what to really realistically think, when I hear things like that, that prisoners can be held indefinetly without accusation, prrof, or trial. I don't know what to think when I hear the propaganda touting the glory of fighting terrorism at any cost for the safety of the people. We've heard that argument before. Many, many times before. As soon as the safety and well-being of the people at any cost is on the agenda, innocent people start disappearing and dying. Nothing scares me so much politically as a Strong Leader who Only Wants My Best. And that's what I have. I just can't reconcile that with history, not at all. My solution seems to be to not think about it too much, but in some moments I think, "I have a foreign passport. If it starts happening, I'm leaving everything behind and I'm driving to an airport and I'm flying to safety." That's what worked last time, leave before the borders close. But I also can't bear the thought that this could happen in the US. It's just so unimaginable that it could be happening again, it's ridiculous, it's ludicrous. But I can't get rid of this irrational fear, as much as I would like, I can't reason it away. It makes my feelings toward America very complicated right now. I can't feel the solid foundation of being critical and patient and diplomatic like I do in Europe. I trust Europe. I trusted America, too. I don't know what to do now - I want to have faith in the way the country is built, in the people, even more or less in the politicians and the arms of government. But... faith is exactly what propagandists want. If I just have faith in that it will work out, I could be putting the gun in the hand coming to shoot me. As the old saying goes, "When they came for the blacks, I didn't speak up, because I wasn't black. When they came for the Jews, I didn't speak up, because I wasn't a Jew. When they came for the Catholics, I didn't speak up, because I wasn't Catholic. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak up." Faith killed a lot of good people. I feel kind of like I might toward a loved parent that suddenly, unprovoked, hit me. How could it be? And what should I do?