Joseph Stalin. (photo: AP)
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
18 June 18
eparating
children from their parents, as Trump, Sessions and their myrmidons are
doing, is monstrous and has been characteristic of the biggest
dictators of the modern era. Here are a few cases in case you don’t
believe me:
1. Stalin’s police
used to designate some Soviet citizens as “enemies of the people” and
then would take their children from those families. Some so designated
who had their families confiscated were Jews.
2. Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in the 1970s, 1980s:
Every family that lived in the cities was forced by Khmer Rouge soldiers to work in the fields in the countryside. This was the time in which husbands and wives, mothers, fathers and their children, and brothers and sisters were all separated from each other.
3. Under Spanish dictator Francisco Franco,
Catholic hospitals were encouraged to steal babies from leftist
families at the hospital, telling the parents they were stillborn, and
then to give the infants to right wing families to raise.
4. Saddam Hussein,
the Iraqi dictator, expelled tens of thousands of Iraqis of Iranian
heritage as marked by their family names. In some instances, Saddam
kept the children but expelled the parents:
“Many Shi’a refugees from southern Iraq testified about the forcible separation of their families during the early years of the Iran-Iraq war, when the Baath regime summarily deported tens of thousands of Shi’a to Iran on the grounds that they were of “Iranian origin.”
5. The Burmese military junta has separated Muslim children from their families, as part of the ongoing attempt by the Buddhists to expel the Muslims.
6. And, yes, Hitler separated children from their
families on a large scale. In some instances, he had children with
blonde hair and blue eyes born into “Slavic” families kidnapped and
given to a German family to raise Aryan.
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