You likely never heard of Peter Fechter.
The name most likely means nothing to you. But in the summer of 1962, he became a symbol for people attempting to escape to freedom.
Fechter was a resident of East Berlin in the German "Democratic" Republic, commonly known as East Germany. On August 17, 1962, he and a friend, Helmut Kulbeik, tried to carry out a plan to jump out of a window into a narrow strip between the main section of the Berlin Wall and a two-meter-high wall that had been recently added. Kulbeik escaped, but Fechter was shot by East German border guards as he tried to cross the second wall and fell back into the strip. It was known, for obvious reasons, as a "death strip."
Refused medical attention by East German guards, Fechter was allowed to bleed to death a hour after being hit in his right hip.
This, I am certain, is what we can expect on the northern and southern borders, and possibly on the seas between Florida and the Bahamas, if Trump gets back into power in January 2025. I have alluded to this before - the concept of "illegal emigration" - in a previous post on this blog in my efforts to go beyond what Trump has said he will do as President for a second time and contemplate on what he hasn't said he will do . . . but what we can conceivably expect. I am certain that Trump will criminalize efforts to leave the country.
In the United States, indicted people considered a flight risk and citizens who owe more than $2,500 in child support are banned from leaving the country. There is an obvious and urgent need to regulate the mobility of such people. More recently, efforts have been made in some states to criminalize leaving the state to seek an abortion or facilitating such efforts. But a totalitarian dictatorship, with absolute control over people's lives, would restrict the rights of mobility of its entire population. The Communist bloc, anchored by the Soviet Union, was a perfect example of this. The Soviets and their allies argued that restricting travel of their citizens to other nations was necessary to prevent its best and brightest from leaving their countries and causing human capital flight. Indeed, it was a violation of human rights - and an effort to save face.
Think about it. The Politburo of the Soviet Union considered the country to be a worker's paradise, where common ownership of the means of production provided equality and comfortable living standards for everyone. Why would anyone want to leave the Soviet Union if the country was such a utopia for the proletariat? How about a more recent example - why are so many Cubans fleeing to Florida sailing on rafts and rubber dinghies across ninety miles of sea to get to Florida?
It's no accident that the only Soviet citizens generally allowed out of the country were ballet dancers, Olympic athletes and the like. Many of those lucky enough to get out and perform or compete in the West defected - think of Mikhail Baryshnikov - to avoid returning to tyranny.
As I have argued in earlier posts here, Donald Trump vows to "make America great again." After he has been President for six months and Project 2025 has been implemented, he will claim to have restored America to greatness. If people were to flee to Canada or Mexico, or possibly try to escape by plane to Europe, that would expose the lie that American greatness has been restored. It all boils down to propaganda. Trump would want to promote America as a land of contented, happy people, a great nation that is the envy of the world, but Americans fleeing his dictatorial, tyrannical regime would contradict his propaganda. Obvious solution: Don't let anyone leave.
And if you let performing artists and athletes go abroad for their vocations, keep them under guard to prevent them from escaping.
Today, of course, Americans are free to travel wherever they wish, if they have the money, and those who do travel to exotic locales like Paris or the Swiss Alps, or maybe Belize or Costa Rica. In some countries they may see poverty and dysfunction, but in others they may see orderly, democratic societies with all of the sorts of amenities that make a country worth living in. They may return to America with ideas of how fine our country already is or how it may be improved. But with someone as reprehensible as Trump in the White House - and possibly for longer than January 2029 - some Americans may want to flee to a European country or, at the very least, drive up the freeway to Canada.
In the next Trump administration, expect to find a scene like this at the Canadian border.
A little something to ponder in this new year . . . and on this third anniversary of the Trump insurrection.
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