If anyone would like some added context for Donald Trump’s rough treatment of the Australian prime minister during their conversation this week, I’d urge you to read this deeply disturbing and (rightly) morally outraged article by Roger Cohen about the specific refugees the United States has pledged to take in. Their desperate plight encapsulates some of the major global disorders that every citizen needs to engage with. These are people fleeing war torn areas of the world, whose desperation has led them as far as Australia. Australia, in turn, has instituted a policy of relocating these refugees on two distant islands called Manus and Nauru and keeping them under horrendous and hopeless conditions, basically as a deterrent to other people considering making similar flights to the land down under. The word “hellish” is not too extreme a description for their plight; to giver you a flavor of their suffering, take this one paragraph:
"The toll among Burmese, Sudanese, Somali, Lebanese, Pakistani, Iraqi, Afghan, Syrian, Iranian and other migrants is devastating: self-immolation, overdoses, death from septicemia as a result of medical negligence, sexual abuse and rampant despair. A recent United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees report by three medical experts found that 88 percent of the 181 asylum seekers and refugees examined on Manus were suffering from depressive disorders, including, in some cases, psychosis."
The refugees have even been attacked by native islanders, leaving at least one of their number killed, prompting one refugee to wonder if he was actually back in Darfur. This is a clear-cut situation of state-sponsored sadism.
When Donald Trump attacks the deal that ends this madness, he shows that he’s either ignorant of their plight, or that he’s aware of it and is not moved by it: an incompetent or a monster, take your pick. And when he tweets that they are “illegal immigrants” and complains to Turnbull that they contain the next “Boston Bombers,” he shows the adoption of a paranoid, immoral vision of the world in which those who flee wars and those who flee for a better life are the same, and that neither deserve basic human decency. In saying “this is the worst deal ever,” he signals that he cares more about his reputation for anti-foreigner toughness than the United States acting in a moral fashion. But this isn’t just about morality; it’s good international politics. Even from a realpolitik perspective, it makes us look beneficent, relieves a deeply immoral situation that is burning out the Australian nation’s soul, and removes a recruiting godsend for extremists. For Trump not to comprehend these things is frightening indeed.