There Are Currently Secret Prisons In America
As if Immigrations and Customs Enforcement’s secretive detention system and Joe Arpaio’s personal Gestapo throwing Hispanics into a desert concentration camp weren’t bad enough, The Nation recently reported that ICE confines people in “186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices”. ICE official James Pendergraph is quoted boasting that the agency can make people “disappear”.
National borders are the turf boundaries that powerful criminal gangs draw to designate who has control of which people. They are usually created by conquest, and force – even when it doesn’t involve the kind of oppression Americans would rightly criticize East Germany for – is the only way to uphold them. Border enforcement is purely authoritarian at every level. There is no possible way one can be libertarian while supporting the border politics of the most powerful empire on the planet.
Related:
How Borders Work
On Borders
Ant-Border Stencil
International Apartheid Pamphlet
Immigration Subversion Squares
December 21st, 2009 at 9:54 pm
Secret prison issue aside for a moment…
Can private individuals own property, choose who is allowed on their property, and defended their property lines with force?
Can a group of people (a social club for example) own property, exclude non members from that property, and make rules about how their property lines will be defended with force, according to the methods that the groups charter specifies for making such rules?
If so, then how are US laws that specify who we choose to exclude and how how we choose to defend our national borders any different?
December 22nd, 2009 at 12:02 am
>how are US laws that specify who we choose to exclude and how how we choose to defend our national borders any different?
Because the area governed by the United States is not owned by anybody. The federal government has no legitimate claim to ownership, nor does some nebulous “we” have a legitimate claim to decide who I may interact with on land they do not own. I do not make decisions concerning whom the federal government deems geographically correct. That is done by a criminal enterprise that operates based on the needs of the ruling class.
Thought experiments aside, advocating border control means giving aid to the thugs who enforce federal policy in the real world.
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:29 am
Seconding what Darian said. Also, regarding this . . .
> and make rules about how their property lines will be defended with force
There is such a thing as proportionality in response, and standards of justice and transparency in the whole procedure of determining what someone is done and why a particular response is being chosen. That’s not exactly the same as one party just unilaterally kidnapping people off the street and locking them in warehouses for an indefinite period of time with no ability to even talk to anyone.