https://www.takimag.com/article/barriers-against-barbarism/print
One of the most fashionable manifestations of Trump derangement syndrome—the assumption that Walls Never Work—is crushingly debunked in historian David Frye’s eye-opening history of 4,000 years of barrier-building, from the Fertile Crescent to the Malibu Colony, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick.
In a brilliant epilogue entitled “Love Your Neighbor, But Don’t Pull Down Your Hedges,” Frye points out that, ironically, shortly after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall made anti-wall triumphalism the unchallenged conventional wisdom, the world quietly entered its Second Age of Walls. (The first ran from prehistory up to the proliferation of cannons in the 1400s.)
Years before Donald Trump pointed out the utility of border barriers, governments around the world and private landowners (especially in “sanctuary cities”) had already embarked on a new spate of wall-building to keep out terrorists, immigrants, and criminals.
Worldwide, some seventy barriers of various sorts currently stand guard over borders.
(Frye dismisses as a “largely meaningless semantic distinction” the recent shibboleth that “walls” are intrinsically evil while “fences” are not to be noticed.)
India, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, for example, have recently enclosed much of their perimeters. Frye observes that although Barack Obama dismissed border walls as “wacky” in 2016, his administration subsidized Jordan and Tunisia to construct their own strategic lines to protect themselves from the chaos of the uprisings Obama had supported in Syria and Libya.
Frye pithily sums up:
[Where] there are no border walls, there will be city walls, and where there are no city walls, there will be neighborhood walls….
Thus, Walls concludes with a quick history of the gated communities favored by Hollywood celebrities, such as the Malibu Colony, Hidden Hills, and Beverly Park.
Of course, where there are no neighborhood walls, there will tend to be walls around yards, often with broken bottles on top…
Walls ends with a brief meditation on why anti-boundary prejudice remains so appealing in the current year, despite its manifest failures to make real life less poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Why are critics of walls constantly denouncing them as cowardly?
Are we forever building “monuments to fear”? It strikes me as an ironic testimony to the lingering influence of our primitive warrior past that cowardice remains the harshest and most stigmatizing opprobrium that can be cast on another human being. Those are fighting words, or would be if we weren’t so afraid to fight.
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