The separation of children from parents by the Trump Administration—especially when that is followed by deportation of the parents without the children—is probably not the result of incompetence, and is more likely a deliberate policy, a tool of war.
The world has a history of child abductions. While many have drawn parallels to the Holocaust, it is more instructive to look farther afield. Especially instructive is the Franco era in Spain. Alasdair Fotheringham, UK Independent:
In Franco's early years, "child-stealing" by the Spanish state was politically motivated, with its key instigator, Antonio Vallejo-Nagera, the army's crackpot chief psychiatrist who championed Nazi theories that Communism was a mental illness caused by the wrong kind of environment.
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Even after the collapse of Nazi Germany, the enforced adoption policies continued, and even intensified to include Republicans living abroad. As late as 1949, official documents of the ruling Falange party give detailed instructions on how children born to their former enemies then exiled outside Spain were to be kidnapped and brought back across the border for re-education.
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But by the 1960s what had begun as a politically motivated state policy slowly morphed into a more straightforward adoption trade – in some cases with the state's connivance. Parents were simply told their infants had died shortly after birth, and the babies were then sold on to families.
One crackpot psychiatrist may have inspired war crimes lasting a generation, but he did so with a lot of help—including substantial help from priests and nuns. It is striking that the Catholic Church had such a central role in Spain, Ireland, and elsewhere, but it is hardly the only culprit. For example, in Africa, child soldiers are an example of the use of abduction as a tool of war. Historically, raiding societies regarded children as valuable booty. Boko Haram uses abduction, especially of girls, as a tool of terror.
The motivations behind child abduction in Francoist Spain were probably many and varied. A child could be a way of rewarding childless supporters of the regime. There can be profit to be had in child trafficking. But the Franco regime clearly had an underlying psychological motive: to erase the Spanish Republic, to pervert its progeny into supporters of the dictatorship, and perhaps especially to inflict torment. As George Orwell’s 1984 illustrates, any good dictatorship requires torment.
The pattern of politically-motivated child abductions in Franco’s Spain has been repeated in a number of US-allied Latin American countries, including:
And then, similar to the pattern in Africa, there are the child soldiers of the left-wing FARC in Colombia, where the motive for kidnapping is less political and more simple enslavement.
Abduction of children has many motivations. Crackpot genetic theories seem to be the rationale of many right-wing child kidnappers. The actions of the Trump Administration, however, resonate more closely with the experience of Franco’s Spain and right-wing Latin American governments than with the Holocaust. It is reasonable to suspect that the separation of parents from children is not accidental, but a tool of policy, a tool of war to terrorize— or “deter,” in Jeff Sessions’ word. But terror is the right word, since the most severe psychological consequences of this so-called “deterrence” fall on children who had no role in the decision to migrate here.
Thanks to Jennifer Harbury, who helped bring out the Propublica tape of children crying from within a baby jail, and especially to her nameless client who recorded this and smuggled it out.
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Update: And don’t miss Meteor Blades’s diary on the mass abduction of Native American children by the US Government.