Member-only story
Backroom Geopolitics
posted to a WILPF listserv Jul 27, 2025, 1:54 PM
[ WILPF: Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom]
[photos and links added, text unedited but for one typo]
I think the bigger issue is the documented versus the undocumented. People lucky enough to have been swept up into one of the nation states have a modicum of rights, although precious few in some countries, and perhaps fading rights in the former USA (now USSA) unless people fight to keep them. One of our Quakers is in detention right now, uncharged, in a windowless cell, after an FBI raid of his group home. That’s the new normal around here.
Never in history have nationalists had it within their means to finally once and for all nail down human traffic such that no one has the right to relocate without the proper credentials. That has been a dream in many a totalitarian eye, but prior to computers (think Nazis and IBM) and facial recognition, drones, omni-surveillance, we had that liminal space between nations, occupied by gypsies and other historically nationless peoples, loyal to no family or come-and-go potentate or supranational corporation.
Times have changed. Now you had better get citizenship somewhere (Palestine doesn’t count apparently) or give up all human rights per the UN Declaration of same. It’s not easy though, when “the system” is rigged against you. A lot of families just write something in their Bible when a baby is born. How does that give you rights in El…
