The suffering of small foreign children kept in American border camps is a story of wartime. Presumably such things might be done in the midst of a human catastrophe when normal rules might not apply.

But Americans are not living in an emergency. Life in the U.S. has remained remarkably pleasant under President Trump. Those citizens within the large magic circle live in safety, relative comfort, and sleep well at night.

For those outside this circle of security, it has been hell, not a perfect hell, because there is always something worse. But that point has been reached, and in peacetime too.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is right. There are concentration camps for children, on American soil, policed by American officials and with the permission of the American people within the safe circle.

The descriptions of the filth and terror in which these children are living, removed from their parents, are not something Canadians expected stable Americans to be willing to inflict.

At this point, it’s time for another of those Trump-era mundane “Did you ever think you’d see the day …” remarks. Let me oblige. “Did you ever think you’d see the day that Americans sent small children to concentration camps?” I did not.

Americans are responsible. They voted Trump in and allowed him to break rule after rule, every day taking them closer to the moral brink.

This is the brink.

Those within the circle are not marching on Washington, refusing to pay taxes, going on strike or even making much of a fuss. If these camps are understaffed, it’s not because guards quit en masse.

It is disingenuous for President Trump and Vice-President Pence, that self-proclaimed religionist, to blame Democrats for not passing a spending bill that would direct billions of dollars to border services. The truth is that Trump’s governing cohort could not be trusted to spend the money on giving toddlers food, baths, cots and, most of all, soap and toothbrushes, in safe and sanitary conditions, as the law demands.

They would spend it on migrant hunting or border security or the Wall or anything else on their octopus-like list of manic obsessions.

Observers who happened to visit the camps have described children unwashed for as long as a month, covered in mucus, dirt and lice. In Clint, Tex., from where many of the children are apparently now being moved — but to where, I ask — the guards wear face masks to protect themselves from the filth. There are infants and toddlers and older children caring for them because there is no one else to do it.

The fact is that one of the richest nations on the planet already has the money available not to commit widespread child abuse.

Canada has history. This nation also snatched small children from their parents, kept them in distant residential schools, starved, tormented and sexually abused them until quite recently. Canada has officially apologized and is trying to relieve the intergenerational suffering it chose to impose.

We crossed the line. Learn from us, Americans, if you can’t learn from your own history of slavery.

Children are sacrosanct. This is a basic human belief. It is why we read terrible stories of human torment and sigh that ’twas ever thus. But not about children. They are the line humans do not cross, and when they do, the perpetrators are wished dead or shut away forever.

I am comforting myself in a dark way by reading about the ancient Assyrians (from 900 to 612 BC). I’ve been brooding about them thanks to art critic Jonathan Jones, who last year described the “art of war,” a London show of stone carvings that celebrated their customs of war.

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The Assyrians ripped out their enemies’ tongues and skinned them alive. They forced prisoners to “grind their fathers’ bones before being executed in the streets of Nineveh.” Inventive and assiduous killers, they did worse too.

Did you ever think you’d see the day where you’d have to haul up not the Nazis but the Assyrians to assure yourself that human beings had steadily improved throughout history?

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