Brian4Liberty
10-08-2014, 12:47 PM
Ebola Breaks a Border-Free World
By Scott McConnell • October 8, 2014
Scientist and writer Greg Cochran unearths an interesting morsel about the post World War I influenza pandemic, which killed 50-100 million people worldwide. After the war, the Pacific island of West Samoa passed from Germany to New Zealand’s control. Administrators were aware of the global flu outbreak, but powerful plantation interests opposed any quarantine of the island as bad for business. When the flu bug arrived via crewmen from the SS Talune, which visited regularly, roughly 90 percent of the population fell ill. In the end, more than a quarter of the island’s population died.
American Samoa was nearby, 60 miles away. The climate and infrastructure were more or less identical, and the islands were culturally and socially integrated through trade and intermarriage. A U.S. Navy officer was the administrator. He too was forewarned of the flu danger, but—not receiving any instruction from Washington—took matters into his own hands and responded in the completely opposite manner. He imposed a quarantine on the island, a kind of self-blockade. He even managed to persuade American Samoa’s chiefs to send out canoes to block visits of their kinsmen from their New Zealand-run neighbor. On American Samoa, there wasn’t a single case of flu.
...
One might think that Ebola, like almost everything else in Washington, would become a partisan issue. Hardly. The first federal officeholder to call for moratorium on flights from West Africa was a liberal democrat, Florida congressman Allan Grayson, who did so in July. After Ebola patient Thomas Duncan arrived in Dallas from Liberia, passing through Dulles airport en route, Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal made the case for banning West African flights. But these two stand almost alone. (In the past day or two, some more Republicans, perhaps sensing a new front to oppose Obama, have urged more rigorous airport screening.) But generally speaking, the establishment open-borders coalition has held firm, trumping partisan divisions, as leaders of both parties form a united front, repeating the Obama administration talking points that closing America’s airports to travelers from West Africa would do no good, or even “make matters worse.”
...
Some issues are complicated, but this one seems simple. So long as the epidemic is raging, why should even a single traveler come here from the Ebola-infected countries?
The deeper answer is that much of the American establishment has bought into “post-America”—the concept that the border shouldn’t mean much of anything. There is a right-wing and hawkish component to this: those feel we have the right and duty to meddle in every region of the world. ISIS is treated as primarily an American problem, as are ethnic fissures in Ukraine. The liberal side of the same paradigm is driven by guilt that the United States is richer or more successful than much of the world and hopes–by eliminating the significance of the border—to gradually erase such differences. The Washington Post recently ran an op-ed denouncing “borderism.”
...
Few in Congress would go this far, but the belief that everyone in the world has some kind of civil right to get on a plane and fly to Dallas or Newark is pervasive. One might think a deadly virus whose capacity to spread and mutate is not yet widely understood by scientists would be sufficient grounds to constrain quite dramatically this supposed “right,” at least for a few months. But not in post-American Washington.
...
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ebola-breaks-a-border-free-world/
By Scott McConnell • October 8, 2014
Scientist and writer Greg Cochran unearths an interesting morsel about the post World War I influenza pandemic, which killed 50-100 million people worldwide. After the war, the Pacific island of West Samoa passed from Germany to New Zealand’s control. Administrators were aware of the global flu outbreak, but powerful plantation interests opposed any quarantine of the island as bad for business. When the flu bug arrived via crewmen from the SS Talune, which visited regularly, roughly 90 percent of the population fell ill. In the end, more than a quarter of the island’s population died.
American Samoa was nearby, 60 miles away. The climate and infrastructure were more or less identical, and the islands were culturally and socially integrated through trade and intermarriage. A U.S. Navy officer was the administrator. He too was forewarned of the flu danger, but—not receiving any instruction from Washington—took matters into his own hands and responded in the completely opposite manner. He imposed a quarantine on the island, a kind of self-blockade. He even managed to persuade American Samoa’s chiefs to send out canoes to block visits of their kinsmen from their New Zealand-run neighbor. On American Samoa, there wasn’t a single case of flu.
...
One might think that Ebola, like almost everything else in Washington, would become a partisan issue. Hardly. The first federal officeholder to call for moratorium on flights from West Africa was a liberal democrat, Florida congressman Allan Grayson, who did so in July. After Ebola patient Thomas Duncan arrived in Dallas from Liberia, passing through Dulles airport en route, Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal made the case for banning West African flights. But these two stand almost alone. (In the past day or two, some more Republicans, perhaps sensing a new front to oppose Obama, have urged more rigorous airport screening.) But generally speaking, the establishment open-borders coalition has held firm, trumping partisan divisions, as leaders of both parties form a united front, repeating the Obama administration talking points that closing America’s airports to travelers from West Africa would do no good, or even “make matters worse.”
...
Some issues are complicated, but this one seems simple. So long as the epidemic is raging, why should even a single traveler come here from the Ebola-infected countries?
The deeper answer is that much of the American establishment has bought into “post-America”—the concept that the border shouldn’t mean much of anything. There is a right-wing and hawkish component to this: those feel we have the right and duty to meddle in every region of the world. ISIS is treated as primarily an American problem, as are ethnic fissures in Ukraine. The liberal side of the same paradigm is driven by guilt that the United States is richer or more successful than much of the world and hopes–by eliminating the significance of the border—to gradually erase such differences. The Washington Post recently ran an op-ed denouncing “borderism.”
...
Few in Congress would go this far, but the belief that everyone in the world has some kind of civil right to get on a plane and fly to Dallas or Newark is pervasive. One might think a deadly virus whose capacity to spread and mutate is not yet widely understood by scientists would be sufficient grounds to constrain quite dramatically this supposed “right,” at least for a few months. But not in post-American Washington.
...
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/ebola-breaks-a-border-free-world/