In the following examples, there is a small comfort for those students who are being dumped into the detention centres of the United States or deported to their respective countries or flown back in shackles to India in its warplanes.
This self-proclaimed oldest modern democracy had the distinction of expelling arguably one of the greatest film personalities of the West, Charlie Chaplin, from the country. Not only that, it declared
It’s one of the most dedicated scientists, J Robert Oppenheimer, as a national security risk and boxing legend Mohammad Ali Clay was convicted for five years for not joining the Vietnam War, though he was later acquitted by the court.
In the early 1950s, the United States was suffering from a chronic ailment called Communist-phobia, also known as McCarthyism, named after eccentric Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led a vicious
campaign against many reputed Hollywood stars, academics, scientists, writers, activists, etc.
Witch-hunt
Chaplin, Oppenheimer, Mohammad Ali and many other national heroes associated with different walks of life had to undergo similar harassment between 1950 and 1954. Those were the years of Democratic President Harry Truman and Republican counterpart Dwight Eisenhower.
The big question is how the entire state machinery, including its investigative agency and intelligence, undertakes such a brutal exercise based on a maverick Senator?
The expulsion of Chaplin took place in September 1952 when he was falsely accused of being a Communist sympathizer and conspirator, having a link with the Soviet Union. Exactly similar were the allegations leveled against Oppenheimer, who died as a disgraced man in 1967. Like Stephen Hawking, he could not get the Nobel Prize.
This had happened when the British-born Chaplin had spent 38 years of his life (since 1914) in Hollywood and made several blockbusters. He had to run away from the country in such a way that he could not even take his belongings. It was left up to his wife, Oona, an American citizen, to collect all his fortunes two months later and settle in Switzerland.
Chaplin was an honoured figure across the planet and not an ‘illegal’ migrant, criminal or terrorist.
So was Oppenheimer, a prized asset of the country who is also considered the father of the US nuclear bomb in 1945.
Marking it, Oppenheimer was a New York-born Jew who had to face a witch-hunt not in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, but under the democratically-elected Truman and Eisenhower administrations.
Pig-headed US rulers
Thus, it can be said that this Super Power had produced several pig-headed men and women at the top of the country in the past too. If these selfish people can commit such heinous crimes against those who had made enormous contributions to that very country, then for the migrants, who are being hunted down on one pretext or the other now, there is not much to regret. They should only learn from history before leaving their home country to settle in what many call the country of opportunities.
No, it would be wrong to say that Donald Trump (and his band) is an aberration. The truth is that this is normal in that country, which has produced many Presidents notorious for their misdeeds.
Needless to forget, the treatment meted out to the anti-Vietnam War activists in the 1960s and 1970s, including actress Jane Fonda, is well-known. World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Mohammad Ali Clay was stripped of his title in 1967 and convicted for five years when he refused to serve in the US army.
So, the outgoing Joe Biden and Donald Trump administrations are only maintaining the inglorious tradition of intolerance and suppression when many Americans, not only to speak of the migrant students, protested against the genocide in Gaza.
The liberal democrats, well entrenched in the media, are washing their hands of it by just blaming Trump, when the fact is that they should make an introspection of centuries of crimes and atrocities committed
against the Blacks and Red Indians or the native population in the name of democracy, liberal values and free speech.
Weird irony
The country which had the history of mistreating Chaplin, a Christian, Oppenheimer, a Jew, and Mohammad Ali, a Black convert to Islam, did not hesitate to induct hundreds of German Nazi scientists after the decimation of Adolf Hitler. They were not tried or persecuted after World War II, but were posted in sensitive projects all over the United States.
The absurd irony is that the Jewish scientists who fled from Nazi Germany in mid-1930s to the United States and those Christian scientists of Hitler who toiled hard in the defence laboratories and
industries to produce dreaded weapons to eliminate the former in the gas chambers, after World War II came to work together in the arms manufacturing units and research centres of the same America.
Merchants of death
This exposes the level to which the merchants of death can go for their self-interest. They admit students from abroad, even give scholarships and jobs, only because they benefit from the brain drain. Once they realize that the migrants are of little or no use, they would be thrown out of the country.
Here it needs to be remembered that about 1.12 lakh Japanese-origin Americans living in the US for decades, or even born there, were hunted down and dumped into the obscure detention centres of the United States just after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 6-7, 1941. Though these Japanese-Americans tried to prove their loyalty, they faced the worst form of treatment on the suspicion that they were Japanese spies.
It does not take much time for the United States to transform from a liberal democracy to a brutal dictatorship.
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