wingolog

Good evening, fey readers. Tonight, a note on human rights and human wrongs.

I am in my mid-fourties, and so I have seen some garbage governments in my time; one of the worst was Trump’s election in 2016. My heart ached in so many ways, but most of all for immigrants in the US. It has always been expedient for a politician to blame problems on those outside the polity, and in recent years it has been open season on immigration: there is always a pundit ready to make immigrants out to be the source of a society’s ills, always a publisher ready to distribute their views, always a news channel ready to invite the pundit to discuss these Honest Questions, and never will they actually talk to an immigrant. It gives me a visceral sense of revulsion, as much now as in 2016.

What to do? All of what was happening in my country was at a distance. And there is this funny thing that you don’t realize inside the US, in which the weight of the US’s cultural influence is such that the concerns of the US are pushed out into the consciousness of the rest of the world and made out to have a kind of singular, sublime importance, outweighing any concern that people in South Africa or Kosovo or Thailand might be having; and even to the point of outweighing what is happening in your own country of residence. I remember the horror of Europeans upon hearing of Trump’s detention camps—and it is right to be horrified!—but the same people do not know what is happening at and within their own borders, the network of prisons and flophouses and misery created by Europe’s own xenophobic project. The cultural weight of the US is such that it can blind the rest of the world into ignorance of the local, and thus to inaction, there at the place where the rest of us actually have power to act.

I could not help immigrants in the US, practically speaking. So I started to help immigrants in France. I joined the local chapter of the Ligue des droits de l’Homme, an organization with a human rights focus but whose main activity was a weekly legal and administrative advice clinic. I had gone through the immigration pipeline and could help others.

It has been interesting work. One thing that you learn quickly is that not everything that the government does is legal. Sometimes this observation takes the form of an administrative decision that didn’t respect the details of a law. Sometimes it’s something related to the hierarchy of norms, for example that a law’s intent was not reflected in the way it was translated to the operational norms used by, say, asylum processing agents. Sometimes it’s that there was no actual higher norm, but that the norms are made by the people who show up, and if it’s only the cops that show up, things get tilted copwards.

A human-rights approach is essentially liberal, and I don’t know if it is enough in these the end days of a liberal rule of law. It is a tool. But for what I see, it is enough for me right now: there is enough to do, I can make enough meaningful progress for people that the gaping hole in my soul opened by the Trumpocalypse has started to close. I found my balm in this kind of work, but there are as many paths as people, and surely yours will be different.

So, friends, here we are in 2025: new liver, same eagles. These are trying times. Care for yourself and for your loved ones. For some of you, that will be as much as you can do; we all have different situations. But for the rest of us, and especially those who are not really victims of marginalization, we can do things, and it will help people, and what’s more, it will make you feel better. Find some comrades, and reach your capacity gradually; you’re no use if you burn out. I don’t know what is on the other side of this, but in the meantime let’s not make it easy for the bastards.