( Tomdispatch.com) – When Jennifer López shouted out that last line of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish during Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, like so many Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States I felt a sense of pride, a sense of arrival. It was a joy to hear my native language given a prominent place at a moment when the need to pursue the promise of “liberty and justice for all” couldn’t be more pressing.

A sense of arrival, I say, and yet Spanish arrived on these shores more than a century before English. In that language, the first Europeans explorers described what they called “el Nuevo Mundo,” the New World — new for them, even if not for the indigenous peoples who had inhabited those lands for millennia, only to be despoiled by the invaders from abroad. The conquistadors lost no time in claiming their territories as possessions of the Spanish crown and, simultaneously, began naming them.

Much as we may now deplore those colonial depredations, we still regularly use the words they left behind without considering their origins. Florida, which derives from flor, flower in Spanish, because Ponce de León first alighted in Tampa Bay on an Easter Sunday (Pascua Florida) in 1513. And then there is Santa Fe (Holy Faith) and Los Angeles (the Angels), founded in 1610 and 1782 respectively, and so many other names that we now take for granted: Montana (from montañas), Nevada (from nieve, or snow), Agua Dulce, El Paso, and Colorado, to name just a few. And my favorite place name of all, California, which comes from a legendary island featured in one of the books of chivalry that drove Don Quixote, the character created by Miguel de Cervantes, mad and set him on the road to seek justice for all.

It was not justice, not justicia para todos, however, that the millions who kept Spanish alive over the centuries were to encounter in the United States. On the contrary, what started here as an imperial language ended up vilified and marginalized as vast swaths of the lands inhabited by Spanish speakers came under the sway of Washington. As Greg Grandin has documented in his seminal book, The End of a Myth, the expansion of the United States, mainly into a West and a Southwest once governed by Mexico, led to unremitting discrimination and atrocities.

It was in Spanish that the victims experienced those crimes: the girls and women who were raped, the men who were lynched by vigilantes, the families that were separated, the workers who were deported, the children who were forbidden to speak their native tongue, the millions discriminated against, mocked, and despised, all suffering such abuses in Spanish, while holding onto the language tenaciously, and passing it on to new generations, constantly renewed by migrants from Latin America.

Through it all, the language evolved with the people who used it to love and remember, fight and dream. In the process, they created a rich literature and a vibrant tradition of perseverance and struggle. As a result, from that suppressed dimension of American history and resistance, Spanish is today able to offer up words that can help us survive this time of pandemic.

That’s what I’ve discovered as I navigated the many pestilences ravaging our lives in the last year: the Spanish I’ve carried with me since my birth has lessons of hope and inspiration, even for my fellow citizens who are not among the 53 million who speak it.

Words of Aliento for Our Current Struggle

Aliento tops the list of Spanish words that have recently mattered most to me. It means breath, but also encouragement. Alentar is to give someone the chance to breathe, to hearten them. (Think, in English, of the word encourage, which comes from the same root as corazón, heart, in Spanish.)

It’s worth remembering this connection today, when so many are dying because they lack breath and not even a ventilator can save them. Because they don’t have aliento, their heart stops. Perhaps they can’t breathe because others didn’t have the courage, el coraje, to help them survive, didn’t rage against the conditions that allowed them to die unnecessarily. Recall as well that so many of us in this country felt suffocated in another sense, breathless with the fear that we wouldn’t survive as a republic, not as a democracy, however imperfect it might have been.

Maybe that’s why, last year, so many Americans felt represented by the next to last words of George Floyd, repeated more than 20 times before he died: “I can’t breathe.” If he had cried out those words in Spanish, he would not have gasped, “No tengo aliento,” though that would have been true. He would undoubtedly have said: “No puedo respirar.”

Respirar. English speakers use the verb “to breathe,” but can certainly appreciate the various echoes respirar has in English, since it’s derived from the same word in Latin, “spirare,” that has bequeathed us spirit, inspire, and aspire. When we inhale and exhale in Spanish, I like to think that we’re simultaneously in communion with the sort of spirit that keeps us alive when the going is rough.

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In normal times, the sharing of air is a reminder that we’re all brothers and sisters, part of the same humanity, invariably inhaling and exhaling one another, letting so many others into our lungs and vice versa. But these times are far from normal and the air sent our way by strangers or even loved ones can be toxic, can lead to us expiring. So rather than respirar together in 2021, we need to inspirar each other, to aspirar together for something better. We need to band together in aconspiracy of hope so that every one of us on the planet will be granted the right to breathe, so that good things can transpire.

As so many of the initial measures of the Biden-Harris presidency suggest, to begin to undo the venomous divisiveness of the Trump era, we all need to tomar aliento or breathe in new ways to survive. We need to have more vida juntos or life with one another in order to go beyond the masked solitude of this moment, este momento de soledad.

Here Comes the Sun, But Let It Be for All

As soledad originates from that same word, solitude, it undoubtedly will sound familiar to English speakers. But the Spanish syllables of soledad radiate with the word sol, the sun, that antidote to loneliness and separation, which rises for all or will rise for none, which warms us all or fries us all or heals us all. And soledad also contains the suffix dad (from the verb dar, to give), telling us again that the way out of isolation is to be as generous as sunlight to one another, especially to those who have more edad; who, that is, are older and therefore at greater risk. To be that generoso is not easy. It may take a lot of work to care for those in need when one is also facing grief and hardship oneself — a labor that is frequently difficult and painful, as the Spanish word for work, trabajo, reminds us.

Trabajo is not just physical labor or exertion. It brings to mind something more distressing. The last novel that Cervantes wrote after finishing Don Quixote was called Los Trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda and there trabajos refers to the torments and trials that two lovers go through before they can be unidos, united.

Think of trabajos as akin to travails in English and, indeed, many who toil among us right now during this pandemic are going through special travails and trouble to keep us fed and sheltered and safe. Called “essential workers,” trabajadores esenciales, many of them have journeyed here from foreign lands after terrible travails and travels of their own (two words that derive from the same tortuous linguistic roots). As in the era of Cervantes, so in our perilous times, to leave home, to wander in search of a secure haven in a merciless world is an ordeal beyond words in any language.

It gives me solace, though, that when so many of those migrants crossed the border into the United States where I now live, they brought their Spanish with them, their throats and lives full of aliento, inspiración, trabajo, sol, and solidaridad. Now may be the time to record them — or rather recordarlos — in the deepest meaning of that word, which is to restore them to our hearts, to open those hearts to them at a moment when we are all subject to such travails and plagues.

In concrete policy terms, this would mean creating a true path to citizenship, ciudadanía, for so many millions lacking documentos. It would mean reuniting (re-unir) the families that Donald Trump and his crew separated at our southern border and finding the missing children, los niños desaparecidos. It would mean building less disruptive walls and more roads, caminos, that connect us all.

There Is No Unidad Without Struggle

Not all words in Spanish, of course, need to be translated for us to understand them. Pandemia, corrupción, crueldad, violencia, discriminación, muerte are sadly recognizable, wretchedly similar in languages across the globe as are the more hopeful, justicia, paz, rebelión, compasión. The same is true of President Biden’s favorite word of the moment, unidad, to which we should add a verb whose indispensability he and the Democratic Party should never forget, at least if there is to be real progress: luchar or to struggle.

Equally indispensable is a more primeval word that we can all immediately identify and make ours: mamá. Who has not called out to his or her mother in an hour of need, as George Floyd did at the very end of his existence? But the Spanish version of that word contains, I believe, a special resonance, related as it is to mamar — to suckle, to drink milk from the maternal breast as all mammals do — and so to that first act of human beings after we take that initial breath and cry.

For those of us who are grown up, an additional kind of sustenance is required to face an ominous future: “esperanza,” or hope, a word that fittingly stems from the same origin as respirar.

Many decades ago, Spanish welcomed me into the world and I am grateful that it continues to give me aliento in a land I’ve now made my own. It reminds me and my fellow citizens, my fellow humans, that to breathe and help others draw breath is the foundation of esperanza. The native language that I first heard from my mamá — even though she is long dead — still whispers the certainty that there is no other way for the spirit to prevail in these times of rage and solidarity and struggle, full of light and luz and lucha, so we may indeed someday fulfill the promise of “libertad y justicia para todos,” of liberty and justice for all.

Copyright 2021 Ariel Dorfman

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

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The more Trump has abused his power and position in this world and the more he’s escaped any retribution for his crimes, the more obsessed I’ve become with visualizing ways for him to pay in some version of the afterlife.

As I mulled over the treatment he deserved for the havoc he continues to wreak on the lives of countless others here in the United States and across the globe, I turned almost automatically to the work of Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet whose Divina Commedia minutely recreated in a verse called terza rima what awaited the readers of his time once they died. Dante (1265-1321) laid out his otherworldly landscape in three volumes — Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso — that have rightly been considered among the towering and influential literary achievements of humanity.

There was nothing abstract about the Hell he created. Dante pictured himself personally taking a voyage into the hereafter to meet men and women, both of his time and from the past, who were being rewarded for their virtue or eternally castigated for their offenses. Of that journey through purgatorial fires and heavenly wonders, guided by his dead childhood sweetheart Beatrice, it was the Florentine writer’s descent into the saturated circles of Hell that most fascinated and enthralled readers throughout the centuries. We listen to stories of the wicked as they express their remorse and experience the excruciatingly sophisticated torments he dreamt up as suitable reprisals for the damage they did during their earthly existence.

Witnessing the infernal realities President Trump has unleashed on America, I can’t help wondering where Dante would have placed our miscreant-in-chief in his afterlife of horror. In the end, perhaps not surprisingly, I realized one obvious thing: the 45th president has such a multitude of transgressions to his name that he fits almost every category and canto that Dante invented for the sinners of his age.

As I pondered what the Italian author would have made of Trump and his certainty that he was above the laws of society and nature, I was invaded by Dante’s divinatory and lyrical voice. It came to me as if in a hallucination. Listening carefully, I managed to record the words with which that visionary poet of yesteryear would describe a man who, until recently, believed himself invincible and invulnerable, how he would be judged and condemned once his life was over.

Here, then, is my version of Dante’s prophecy — my way, that is, of finally consigning Donald Trump to Hell for forever and a day.

Dante Greets Trump at the Gates of Hell and Explains What His Punishment Is to Be

My name, sir, is Dante Alighieri. Among the innumerable dead that inhabit these shores, I have been chosen to speak to you because an expert on the afterlife was needed to describe what awaits your soul when it passes, as all souls must, into this land of shadows. I was chosen, whether as an honor or not, to imagine your fate once you wind your way toward us.

Having accepted this task, I was tempted, sir, as I watched your every act in that life before death, to make this easier for myself and simply conjure up the circles of Hell I had already described in my terza rima. I would then have guided you down my cascade of verses, step by step, into the depths of darkness I had designed for others.

Were you not the selfish embodiment of so many sins I dealt with in my Commedia? Lust and adultery, yes! Gluttony, yes; greed and avarice, oh yes; wrath and fury, certainly; violence, fraud, and usury, yes again! Divisiveness and treachery, even heresy — you who did not believe in God and yet used the Bible as a prop — yes, one more time!

Did you not practice all those iniquities, a slave to your loveless appetites? Do you not deserve to be called to account in ways I once envisioned: buffeted by vicious winds, drowning in storms of putrefaction, choking under gurgling waters of belligerence, immersed in the boiling blood that echoes rage, thirsting across a burning plain, steeped in the excrement of flattery and seduction, clawed to pieces by the night demons of corruption, or feeling that throat and tongue of yours that tore so many citizens apart mutilated and hacked to bits? Would it not be fair that, like other perjurers and impostors, you be bloated with disease? Would it not make sense that you be trapped in ice or flames, endlessly chewed by the jaws of eternity, like those who committed treason against country and friends in my time?

And yet, in the end, I rejected all of that. After all, I was selected not to repeat myself but because I was trusted to be creative and find an appropriately new reckoning for you — something, said the authorities in charge of this place, less savage and fierce, more educational, even therapeutic. Thus have times changed since I wrote that poem of mine!

My mission, it seems, was not to insert you in rings of an already conceived Hell of terrifying revenge. So I began to seek inspiration from my fellow sufferers so many centuries later and there, indeed, they were — your multitudes of victims, the ones who need to heal, the ones you never wanted to see or mourn, whose pain you never shared, who now want to greet you, sir, in a new way.

Perhaps you haven’t noticed yet, but I have. They’ve been lining up since the moment they arrived. Now, they’re here by my side, counting the days until your time is up and you must face them. And so I decided that they would be given a chance to do exactly that, one by one, through all eternity.

After all, each of them was devastated because of you: a father who died of the pandemic you did less than nothing to prevent; a little boy shot with a gun you did not ban; a worker overcome by toxic fumes whose release your administration ensured; the protesters killed by a white supremacist inflamed by your rhetoric; a Black man who expired thanks to police violence you refuse to condemn; a migrant who succumbed to the desert heat on the other side of the wall that you stole taxpayer money to (only partially) build. And let us not forget that female Kurdish fighter slaughtered because you betrayed her people.

On and on I could go, naming the wrongfully dead, the untimely dead, the avoidable dead, now all huddled around me, otherwise unrepresented and forgotten but awaiting your arrival for their moment of truth. Each of them will have to be patient, since according to my plan, every single casualty of yours will be afforded whatever time he or she desires to relive a life and recount its last moments. You will be forced, sir, to listen to their stories again and again until you finally learn how to make their sorrow your own, until their tragedies truly lodge in the entrails of your mind, as long as it takes you to truly ask for forgiveness.

Trump Tries to Find a Way Out of Hell

Your first reaction will undoubtedly be to indulge in the fantasy that, just as you swore the pandemic would be magically dispatched, so this new predicament will miraculously melt into nothingness. When you open your eyes, however, and still find yourself here, your urge will be to call on all your old tricks, those of the ultimate con man, to avoid sinking deeper into the moral abyss I’ve prepared for you.

Just as you’ve bribed, bought, and inveigled your way out of scandals and bankruptcies, so you’ll believe you can bluster and wriggle your way out of this moment, too. You’ll try to pretend you’re just hosting one more (ir)reality TV show where this Dante fellow can be turned into another of your apprentices, competing for your largesse and approval.

And when none of that works, you’ll make believe that you have indeed atoned for your terrible deeds and fall again into the lies and macho bravado that were your second skin. You’ll swear that you have repented so you can escape this confinement, these rooms where you have become the prey rather than the predator. You will present yourself as a savior, boast of having singlehandedly concocted a vaccine against accountability, discovered a manly cure for the terrors of Hell. You’ll dream — I know you will — of reappearing victorious and, of course, maskless on that White House balcony.

This time, though, it just won’t work, not here in this transparent abode of death. And yet you will certainly try to hurry the process up because you’ll know — I’ve already decided that much — that those you ruined while you were still alive are only the start of your journey, not the end. You will become all too aware, while you spend hours, days, years, decades with the men, women, and children you consigned to an early mortality and permanent grief, that a multitude of others will be arriving, all those who will perish in the future due to your neglect and malevolence.

They will, I assure you, snake endlessly into your mind, accumulating through many tomorrows, all those who are yet to die but will do so prematurely as the brutality you worshipped and fueled takes its toll, as the earth, heavens, and waters you ravaged exact heat waves of revenge — hurricanes and droughts and famines and floods, ever more victims with each minute that slithers by, including the women who will die in botched back-alley abortions because of your judicial nominations. The decades to come are already preparing to welcome the legions of your dead.

That is the despair I imagine for you now that I am no longer the man bitterly exiled from his beloved Florence. The centuries spent in the afterlife have evidently softened me into compassion for those who have sinned. Beatrice, the love of my life, would have admired my transformation, the one that, as you are ground down and down, will also allow you to be lifted up and up until you really do repent, until you beg for an absolution, which (if you are truly sincere) will be granted.

Even so, even as I speak and divine, I find myself eaten by a worm of doubt. This, I am being told, has been tried before. The mists of time are filled with men who, like you, thought they were gods and who, upon their demise, were led howling into rooms overflowing with the lives they broke, with the irreparable damage they wrought. And these criminals — Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong, Augusto Pinochet, Napoleon Bonaparte, Andrew Jackson, Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin (oh, the list is endless!) — never left the twisted mirror of their own penitential rooms.

They are still stagnating in them. That’s what’s being whispered in my ear, that the redemptive prophecy of Dante Alighieri will never come true for you, Donald Trump. Perhaps like those other accursed malefactors, you will refuse responsibility. Perhaps you will continue to claim that you are the real victim. Perhaps you will prove as incorrigible and defective and stubbornly blind as they continue to be. Perhaps there is an evil in you and the universe that will never completely abate, a cruelty that has no end. Perhaps when pain is infinite, it is impossible to erase.

I fear, then, that it may be unkind to promise any kind of justice when there will be none for those who stand in line hoping to meet their tormentor on the other side of death. Why, I ask myself, resurrect the dead if it be only to dash their hopes again and again?

What Forever Means

And yet, what else can I do but complete the task given to me? Of all poets, I was chosen because of the Divina Commedia that I wrote when I was alive and banished from Florence, because I descended into the Inferno and climbed the mount of Purgatory and caught a glimpse of what the sun and stars of Paradise looked like. I was chosen from the fields of the dead to prepare these words for you as a warning or a plea or a searing indictment, an assignment I accepted and cannot now renounce.

What’s left to me, then, but to conclude these words by responding to the one objection you might legitimately raise to my picture of your fate in the afterlife? I imagine you crying out — “But Dante Alighieri,” you will say, “the future you’ve painted will take forever.”

And I will answer: yes, Donald J. Trump, it will indeed take forever, but forever is all you have, all any of us have, after all.

Ariel Dorfman, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of Death and the Maiden. His most recent books are Cautivos, a novel about Cervantes in jail, and The Rabbits Rebellion, a story for adults and children. He lives with his wife Angélica in Chile and in Durham, North Carolina, where he is a Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

Copyright 2020 Ariel Dorfman

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Nobody, however, should have been surprised. The president has a long history of excoriating people of color as animal-like. In 1989, for instance, reacting to the rape of a white woman in New York’s Central Park, he took out full-page ads in four of the city’s major papers (total cost: $85,000) calling for the reinstatement of the death penalty and decrying “roving bands of wild criminals roaming our streets.” He was, of course, referring to the five black and Latino youngsters accused of that crime for which they were convicted — and, 10 years late, exonerated when a serial rapist and murderer finally confessed.

Trump never apologized for his rush to judgment or his hate-filled opinions, which eventually became the template for his attacks on immigrants during the 2016 election campaign and for his presidency. He has declared many times that some people aren’t actually human beings at all but animals, pointing, in particular, to MS-13 gang members. At a rally in Tennessee at the end of May, he doubled down on this sort of invective, goading a frenzied crowd to enthusiastically shout that word — “Animals!” — back. In that way, he made those present accomplices to his bigotry. Nor are his insults and racial tirades mere rhetorical flourishes. They’ve had quite real consequences. It’s enough to look at the cages where undocumented children separated from their families at or near the U.S.-Mexico border have been held as if they were indeed animals — reporters and others regularly described one of those detention areas as being like a “zoo” or a “kennel” — not to mention their parents who are also trapped behind wire barriers, even if arousing far less attention and protest.

A History of Caged Humans

All the president’s furious contemporary rants and rallies, along with those cages and detainee centers, have certainlybrought Nazism to mind for some, but it might be more illuminating to think of them as echoing an earlier moment in history when comparing dark-skinned humans to animals would hardly have caused a stir. It would have been considered part of normal discourse, in both Europe and the United States.

Indeed, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of Europeans and Americans considered it perfectly natural to treat certain members of our species quite literally as if they were beasts. They were unfazed, so the historical record suggests, by the idea of seeing such “animals,” such oddities, displayed in literal zoo cages at boisterous public events. It may now be hard to believe, but our forebears once flocked in staggering numbers to “human zoos,” where thousands of natives kidnapped from Asia, Africa, and Latin America were exposed to scrutiny, curiosity, and derision, as well as, sometimes, undergoing scientific experimentation.

Today, such mindboggling violations of human rights have almost entirely vanished from public memory. I had only vaguely heard of human zoos myself, before I became obsessed with them when research for my latest novel, Darwin’s Ghosts, led me into the world of human menageries. I discovered that the phenomenon had been launched in the most modest of ways.

One hundred and seventy years ago — 1848, a year of revolutions across the globe — a Hamburg fishmonger, Claus Hagenbeck, decided to charge customers to take a peek at some Arctic seals swimming in a large tub in the backyard of his house. Soon enough, that first timid entrepreneurial step developed into a highly lucrative family business exhibiting wild animals, while feeding growing demands for wondrous beasts to populate circuses and fill the private collections of monarchs and other wealthy individuals.

In the end, animals were not enough. By the early 1870s, in conjunction with the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris and American impresarios like P.T. Barnum, the Hagenbeck family started dabbling in displaying “savages” from the farthest corners of the planet. The first victims of this desire to bring exemplars from the rest of humanity to viewers in the West were Laplanders, displayed in a setting meant to look like one of their villages. (A similar urge gave birth to the dioramas that soon began to flourish at museums of natural history.)

That first exhibition in Hamburg of “the little men and women” of Lapland proved so sensational — tours were organized to Berlin, Leipzig, and other German cities — that the desire to see more “primitive” humans soon became insatiable. Scavengers who had previously specialized in locating and bringing African and Asian wildlife to Europe and the United States were now instructed to be on the lookout for similarly exotic human wildlife. They should not be, it was quickly stipulated, so monstrous as to disgust audiences, but neither should they be so beautiful as to cease to be bizarre.

The Laplanders were followed by a multitude of indigenous inhabitants of the planet forcibly removed from their habitats: Eskimos, Cingalese, Kalmuks, Somalis, Ethiopians, Bedouins, Nubians from the Upper Nile, aboriginal Australians, Zulu warriors, Mapuche Indians, Andaman Islanders from the South Pacific, head-hunters from Borneo. The list went on and on, as those human zoos spread from Germany to France, England, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and the United States, all of which — what a coincidence! — just happened to be the globe’s imperial powers of that era.

Representatives of ethnic groups from all over the planet soon became an expectable feature of then-popular World’s Fair pavilions. Besides providing entertainment for the whole family — they might be thought of as that moment’s equivalents of reality TV shows — those exhibitions were proclaimed “educational” experiences by the enterprises cashing in on them. Such tableaus of “prehistoric” people offered a way for affluent visitors to gawk at and be amazed by the bizarre habits of the bizarre inhabitants of the faraway lands that their countries were incorporating with great violence into “civilization” via colonial dominion. In fact, that violence was such that some of the native populations on display, like diverse groups of Patagons from Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Latin America, were already then on the verge of becoming extinct. One of the draws of seeing living specimens of those strange men, women, and children was to do so before their last remnants, along with their languages and their cultures, disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Even if you were among the millions of Americans and Europeans who couldn’t personally visit such folk displays, ethnic villages, and human zoos, you could still inexpensively and vicariously experience those exotic others. The images of the captives — who, of course, had been photographed without their consent — were commercialized on an industrial scale. The postcards upon which their faces and bodies were flaunted soon became an everyday feature of domestic life, one more way that the human zoo was normalized, whitewashed, and sent into the home with barely a thought about the horrors, the suffering being visited on those captives or how their children, husbands, wives, mothers, fathers, relatives, and friends, left behind, were dealing with the trauma of having their loved ones torn from their midst.

Nor were such acts repudiated by the most illustrious members of those “advanced” societies. Quite the opposite, many of the abductions had been financed by scientific institutions eager to discover how such specimens might fit into Darwin’s theory of evolution. Their research, in turn, was backed by government officials more than ready to show their respect and support for scholars looking into the origins of humanity. Were those Africans and South Americans entirely human or did they constitute missing links in the great chain of beings that became our species? Eminent naturalists and doctors debated just such matters, gave lectures on them, wrote treatises about them, and (in what then passed for scientific experimentation) poked at or into the bodies of those who had made the mistake of being born far from the so-called civilized world.

The Ota Bengas of Today

Today, of course, human zoos and the medical experiments on live human beings that went with them are inconceivable. The consciousness of humanity, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. 70 years ago, has made such practices disgraceful and intolerable. Who today could stomach the fate of Ota Benga, a pygmy from the Congo who was housed with the primates at New York’s Bronx Zoo in 1906 and committed suicide a decade later when he realized that he would never be able to return to his native land? Who among us would bring their children to gape at “missing links” like Thai dwarfs, Amazonian Indians, or Sudanese villagers as if they were freaks of nature, not human beings?

Unfortunately, congratulations are not (yet) in order, given how often the same racist impulses resurface today, and not only in the president’s intemperate diatribes equating humans and animals (none of which have so far provoked indignation in most of his followers). A similar dehumanization of strangers with darker faces and skins appears to animate current anti-immigrant sentiments in many lands, a desire to escape “infestation” from abroad and maintain mythical versions of racial purity and national identity. Are we really that removed from the spectators who watched their fellow humans abused in zoo-like conditions a century or so ago without blinking or being disturbed?

In retrospect, what’s most sobering about the human zoos of an earlier time is how oblivious those who participated in such degrading spectacles were to the crimes being committed before their eyes. Many of them would have judged themselves decent, enlightened citizens, shining advocates of progress, science, and freedom. And yet, in Berlin in 1882, the police had to be called in to quell a riot by visitors to an exhibition of 11 Kaweshkar natives abducted from Tierra del Fuego. Thousands of customers, having imbibed copious gallons of beer, began to stone the hostages, demanding that they mate in public. Or consider the fate of two female Kaweshkar whose sexual organs, after they died in captivity, were carved from their dead bodies and sent to be examined by a prominent German researcher interested in discovering how such creatures might be distinct from European women.

So many decades later, it’s easy enough to condemn such offenses. More difficult and painful is to ask what injustices are happening now that we take to be as normal as human zoos (or the disempowerment of women and child slavery) were just a few generations ago. Is it the thoughtless annihilation of immeasurable species, the plundering of nature, the loss of wisdom stored for millennia by ethnic groups that are fast disappearing? Is it the punitive incarceration of millions, so many lives wasted? Is it our incredibly counterproductive “war on drugs” that unnecessarily ravages cities, nations, and lives? Or our inability to rid ourselves of the plague of nuclear proliferation, the brutality of widespread hunger, America’s endless wars, the detention centers for immigrants and their children in this country, the spectacle of undocumented minors shut up in cages and crying for their parents, or the overflowing refugee camps elsewhere in the world? And what of so many children displaced in their war-torn lands or incarcerated in poverty? Where is the indignation about them? Who marches to have them released from their structural captivity? And who even noticed the 10,000 children murdered or maimed in armed conflicts in 2017 alone, deaths invisible to us if you didn’t happen to catch a brief news item quickly forgotten?

In reality, those human zoos of the not-so-distant past pose a terrifying question for us: What everyday horrors of our world will our descendants look back on with disgust in the future? How, they will wonder, could their ancestors have been so blind as to condone such transgressions against humaneness and humanity?

Ariel Dorfman, an emeritus professor of literature at Duke and a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the play Death and the Maiden, a recent book of essays Homeland Security Ate My Speech: Messages From the End of the World, and a new novel, Darwin’s Ghosts. He lives with his wife in Durham, North Carolina, and in their native Chile.

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Copyright 2018 Ariel Dorfman

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