Welcome to the New Trumped Amerika. Now let’s see if we can find a reason not to allow you to stay…

I would hate to come back to the US these days, as I did from Germany in the 1970s. My tourist passport was a bit dodgy, and my red ‘official duty” passport definitely belonged in the ‘Fiction’ section. They only came out if someone wouldn’t accept NATO orders and my military ID which wasn’t supposed to happen, but did. Many of my visas didn’t match, i.e. I would have an entry visa and no exit stamp, or vice versa. There were perfectly valid, and non-spook reasons for what was in that tourist passport, usually related to taking leave after arrival by military transport and having to use commercial transportation to return to my base. Almost all of my ‘documents’ raised questions’.

These days even if you are a natural born US citizen and share the name of your famous father, you are subjected to interrogation: Muhammad Ali Jr., detained at Florida airport, asked, ‘Are you Muslim?’.

You can be a well-known academic invited to participate in a conference and they will attempt to reject you: French historian Henry Rousso nearly deported from US.

Apparently even 70-year-old children’s authors are suspect: Australian author, Mem Fox, was detained at the Los Angeles airport. It would appear that her latest book advocating getting along with people is too subversive for US officials.

In his definitive work on Vichy France Rousso uses the phrase: passé qui ne passe pas (“past that doesn’t pass”). That is also an apt description of the American Civil War, or the Third Reich in Germany. While most people would like to forget these eras, it is the losers who keep resurrecting them. The one bright spot is that sooner or later the revisionists commit another Pickett’s Charge or Operation Barbarossa, because they refuse to learn the lessons of history…