Deportation, its meaning and menace: Last message to the people of America by Alexander Berkman and Emma GoldmanGoldman, Emma
History
Deportation, its meaning and menace: Last message to the people of America by Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman
Goldman, Emma
Anarchism; Deportation
When the terrible significance of the administrative process practiced
in Russia became known in Europe, civilization stood aghast. It caused a
storm of protest in the British Parliament, and called forth violent
interpellations in the Italian Diet and the French Chamber. Even the
German Reichstag, in the days of the omnipotent Kaiser, ventured a
heated debate of the barbaric administrative process which doomed
thousands of innocents to underground dungeons and the frozen _taigas_
of Siberia.
Are the Czar’s methods, the Third Section, the secret political spy
organizations, anonymous denunciations, star chamber proceedings,
deprivation of trial, wholesale deportations and banishment, to become
an established American institution? Let the people speak.
The full significance of the principle of deportation is becoming daily
more apparent. The field of its menace is progressively broadening. Not
only the alien social rebel is to be crushed by the new White Terror.
Its hand is already reaching out far for the naturalized American whose
social views are frowned upon by the Government. And yet deeper it
strikes. One hundred per cent Americanism is to root out the last
vestige, the very memory, of traditional American freedom. Not alone
foreigners, but the naturalized citizen and the native-born are to be
mentally fumigated, made politically “reliable” and governmentally
_kosher_, by eliminating the social critics and industrial protestants,
by denaturalization and banishment, by exile to the Island of Guam or to
Alaska, the future Siberia of the United States.
Following the “alien radical,” the naturalized American is the first
victim of the Czarification of America. Patriotic profiteers and
political hooligans are united in the cry for the “Americanization” of
the foreigner in the United States. He is to be “naturalized,”
intellectually sterilized and immunized to Bolshevism, so that he may
properly appreciate the glorious spirit of American democracy.
Simultaneously, however, the Federal Government is introducing the new
policy of summarily depriving the naturalized American of his
citizenship, in order to bring him when so desired, within the scope of
the administrative process which subjects the victim to deportation
without trial.
A most important precedent had already been set. The case of Emma
Goldman affords significant proof to what lengths the Government will go
to rid itself of a disquieting social rebel, though he be a citizen for
a quarter of a century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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