I’m currently reading a book Alaric the Goth, An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome, by Douglas Boin, a history professor at Saint Louis University. It’s a history of the sack of Rome from the Goth’s point of view, and is, of necessity, somewhat speculative in the details, though what I’m about to pass on is apparently fairly well documented.
It seems that in response to various pressures on their society, the Goths congregated at the Roman borderland near the Danube, not to conquer, but to avoid those pressures. The Romans responded. In or about 377 the “border patrol began indiscriminately separating Gothic boys from their parents”. “The young Gothic boys were identified, processed, and sorted, the impersonal nature of the border guards tasks little different from the inhumanity of the colonial-era Dacian slave trade.” Then:
State resources were soon allocated to implement the border separation policy in full. An office of the Roman government was set up to oversee the relocation program, and a military appointee received a government salary to manage it. The rugged plateaus and cities beyond the Taurus mountains were identified as suitable holding pens for the children. Gothic children were forced to say good-bye not only to a familiar landscape of childhood memories but to their actual parents, grandparents, and siblings. No documentation was ever kept, as far as historians know, that would have identified the children or helped reunite them with their families. An obvious paper trail, in fact, is quite likely what the Roman government wanted to avoid. Cruelty was the intention. Many Gothic parents never saw their sons again.
We here in America can be proud that our border separation policy is not sexist like the Roman. So far as I’m aware, we separate the girls too. Beyond that, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to distinguish the two, except, of course, that our policy was implemented by a devout Christian (according to our evangelical brethren) rather than a pagan.
The book was written this year, so one must assume that the current situation on our border was very much on Boin’s mind when he wrote the words I’ve quoted above.
One thing I’d like to see, if Trump doesn’t steal the election, is for Joe Biden, or better yet, Kamala Harris, to bring the press to one of our concentration camps on January 21st, and open it up to full public display. We have to be confronted with the full ugliness if we’re going to put a stop to it, not just now, but forever.