THE FIRE THIS TIME

From Pharaoh to Trump: How Xenophobia Spreads Like Wildfire Through Dry Vegetation — And Why Globalism Might Still Save Us

I. THE SPARK (AMERICA UNDER TRUMP)

It started, as these things always start, with permission.

Not a law. Not a policy. Permission. The quiet, terrible permission to say aloud what you had always thought but never spoke — the suspicion, the resentment, the low-grade fear of the stranger who looks different, prays differently, came from somewhere else.

Donald Trump gave America that permission on June 16, 2015, when he descended a golden escalator in Trump Tower and said: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

The crowd cheered.

Not because they were evil. Because they were afraid. And fear is the only fuel xenophobia has ever needed.

What followed was not a departure from American history but an acceleration of its darkest current. The Muslim Ban (Executive Order 13769) — signed in the first week, upheld and rewritten and fought over — was never about security. It was a signal: certain people, from certain places, with certain prayers, were not welcome. The Wall — not a metaphor, a wall — was never about drugs or crime. It was a symbol: this far and no further. “Shithole countries” — his word, in the Oval Office, about entire nations of brown-skinned people — was the mask slipping. Not a dog whistle. A bullhorn.

Family separation. April 2018. The policy that took children from parents at the border and placed them in cages. Toddlers on concrete floors. Babies lost in a system that did not care to find them. The images — children crying, aluminium blankets, chain-link enclosures — evoked concentration camps because they were concentration camps, albeit temporary. The message was explicit: We will hurt your children to keep you out.

And the fire caught.

Not just in America. Everywhere. Because Trump did not invent xenophobia. No single leader ever does. He just made it respectable again. He gave permission to every nativist, every nationalist, every fearful soul who had been waiting for someone to tell them their hatred was not shameful but patriotic.

Brazil elected Jair Bolsonaro, who told an Indigenous woman she weighed too little to rape. Hungary built Viktor Orbán’s wall against Muslim refugees. India passed Narendra Modi’s citizenship laws explicitly excluding Muslims from belonging. England voted for Brexit — a wall of water instead of concrete, but a wall nonetheless. Australia kept its offshore detention centres, where asylum seekers wait for years in Pacific squalor. Italy elected Giorgia Meloni, who promised to defend “Italian blood.”. Cambodia just sent citizen of certain African countries packing.

The dry vegetation was everywhere. Decades of economic stagnation. Rapid cultural change. The terror of a globalised world where borders seemed to dissolve. The winds were blowing. All that was needed was a spark.

The spark came. The world burned.

II. THE FIRST FIRE (EGYPT AGAINST THE HEBREWS)

Before Trump, before Hitler, before the word “xenophobia” existed (from the Greek xenos — stranger, foreigner — and phobos — fear), there was Egypt.

The Hebrews came seeking at the bequest of Pharoah for their contribution to their survival. Famine had cursed their land of Canaan. They were pastoralists, hungry, desperate. Egypt was the breadbasket of the ancient world because of Joseph a Hebrew who managed the entire endeavour. They crossed the border as invited personnel, they have always crossed borders — with nothing but their children, their God, and their hope.

For a time, they were tolerated. Even useful. The Book of Genesis tells us they were given the land of Goshen, the best pastureland in Egypt. They built storehouses. They multiplied. They became visible.

And that was the problem.

Exodus 1:8–10 — “Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. And he said to his people, ‘Look, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and if war breaks out, they join our enemies.”

Not a single Hebrew had lifted a hand against Egypt. Not a single one had conspired with foreign powers. But fear does not need evidence. It needs a target and they had grown and were visible.

First came the othering. The Hebrews were not Egyptians. They dressed differently, worshipped differently (one invisible God instead of the pantheon of Ra and Isis and Osiris), kept to themselves. That was enough.

Then came the laws. Forced labour. Quotas. Whippings for failure. The Hebrews built the store cities of Pithom and Rameses — names that archaeologists have found on Egyptian records. Slave labour. State-sponsored exploitation.

Then came the violence. The midwives — Shiphrah and Puah, the first recorded civil disobedience — were ordered to kill every male Hebrew baby. Throw them in the Nile. Drown the future. The midwives refused, claiming Hebrew women gave birth too quickly. God blessed them for their lie.

Then came the expulsion. After the plagues, after the Passover, after the Red Sea — a whole people driven into the desert with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a God they hoped still and which remembered them.

The pattern was set. For three thousand years, it would repeat. The othering. The laws. The violence. The expulsion. Sometimes the extermination.

III. THE INFERNO (NAZI GERMANY)

Germany in the 1930s was tinder waiting for a match.

The Treaty of Versailles had gutted the economy, stripped the nation of its colonies and its pride, forced an admission of guilt that festered like an open wound. Hyperinflation had wiped out savings — people burned marks for fuel because it was cheaper than wood. The Great Depression had erased jobs — six million unemployed by 1932. Democracy seemed weak, the Weimar Republic a failed experiment. Strongmen promised order.

The Jews were visible. They were successful — overrepresented in medicine, law, journalism, finance. They were different — synagogues instead of churches, Yiddish instead of German, kosher instead of schnitzel. They made convenient targets.

Adolf Hitler did not invent German anti-Semitism. No single leader ever does. He inherited it from centuries of Christian anti-Judaism — the blood libel, the accusation of deicide, the forced conversions and expulsions that had marked European history since the Crusades. He inherited it from Wagner and others, who had written in 1543: “Set fire to their synagogues… drive them out of the country.” He inherited it and nurtured it and weaponised it.

First came the words. Mein Kampf — “My Struggle” — written in prison, sold millions. Jews were Untermenschen — sub-humans. Vermin. Parasites. A poison in the blood of the German people. The newspapers repeated it — Der Stürmer, with its caricatures of hooked noses and greedy hands. The radio broadcast it. Children sang it in school.

Then came the laws. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 stripped Jews of German citizenship. Forbidden to marry or have sex with Aryans. Forced to wear yellow stars. Their businesses boycotted. Their professions banned. Their property registered for confiscation.

Then came the violence. Kristallnacht — the Night of Broken Glass — November 9–10, 1938. Synagogues burned. Jewish homes and shops smashed. Ninety-one Jews killed. Thirty thousand arrested and sent to concentration camps. The police did nothing. The neighbours watched. The world called it a pogrom. The Nazis called it a warning.

Then came the camps. First Dachau, for political prisoners. Then Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald. Then Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor — death factories built not for labour but for extermination such as the gas chambers.

Six million Jews. Not killed in battle. Not collateral damage. Industrialised murder. Engineers designed the ovens to maximise throughput. Railroad managers scheduled the trains like freight. Accountants calculated the profit from confiscated gold teeth, wedding rings, eyeglasses. Children, grandmothers, teachers, shopkeepers — all reduced to ash.

The Roma. Five hundred thousand. The disabled — seventy thousand killed in the T4 program before public protests briefly stopped it. Homosexuals — an estimated fifteen thousand in camps. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Soviet prisoners of war — three million starved or shot.

After Auschwitz, the world swore: Never again.

The world was lying.

IV. THE SILENT PLACES (GENOCIDE WITHOUT HEADLINES)

Rwanda: 100 Days That Shattered “Never Again”

April 6, 1994. President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down over Kigali. Within hours, roadblocks appeared across the city. Militiamen with machetes and lists — carefully prepared lists, names gathered over years — began going house to house.

Eight hundred thousand Tutsis killed in one hundred days.

Let that sink in. Eight hundred thousand. In one hundred days. An average of eight thousand deaths per day. Three hundred and thirty-three per hour. Five or six per minute. A killing rate five times higher than the Nazis achieved.

Not with gas chambers. With machetes. With clubs studded with nails. With farming tools repurposed for murder. Neighbours killed neighbours. Priests killed parishioners. Teachers killed students. Hutu husbands killed Tutsi wives. Hutu mothers killed Tutsi babies.

The radio — RTLM, the hate station — broadcast names and addresses. “The cockroaches must die,” the announcer said. “Kill the tall trees.” The militiamen called themselves Interahamwe — “those who attack together.”

The world knew. The UN had soldiers on the ground — 2,500 of them, led by Canadian General Roméo Dallaire. Dallaire begged for permission to intervene. He was refused. The Security Council voted to reduce the force to 270.

The United States blocked any mention of the word “genocide” because that word, under the Genocide Convention of 1948, would require action. President Bill Clinton would later call it his greatest regret. The word was not used until the killing was almost over.

Belgium — the former colonial power — pulled its troops out after ten of its soldiers were killed. France — allied with the Hutu regime — helped the genocidaires escape as the RPF rebels advanced.

Eight hundred thousand dead. The world yawned.

Belgium in the Congo: The First Industrial Genocide

Before Hitler, there was Leopold II, King of the Belgians.

Leopold never visited the Congo. He did not need to. He owned it — a private colony the size of Western Europe, acquired through treaties signed with chiefs who did not understand what they were signing, enforced by a private army of mercenaries.

Between 1885 and 1908, ten million Congolese died.

Not from war. Not from famine. From profit. Rubber and ivory. The world’s appetite for rubber — for tires, for hoses, for the gaskets of the Industrial Revolution — was insatiable. The Congo had rubber vines. Leopold wanted them.

The system was simple: quotas. Villages had to deliver a certain amount of rubber per month. If they failed, the Force Publique — Leopold’s army — came. They took hostages. They burned villages. They chopped off hands.

Hands. The signature atrocity of the Congo. Militiamen were required to provide proof that bullets had not been wasted. A severed hand for every bullet. Hands of men. Hands of women. Hands of children. Piled in baskets. Smoked over fires. Presented as trophies.

The African-American journalist George Washington Williams visited the Congo in 1890 and called it “a crime against humanity” — the first time that phrase was used in its modern sense. The British consul Roger Casement documented villages where every inhabitant had lost their right hand. The Irish nationalist Edmund Morel published Red Rubber, a book that horrified Europe.

Missionaries reported the truth. Newspapers printed the stories. Mark Twain wrote King Leopold’s Soliloquy, a savage satire. The Congo Reform Association pressured governments.

But no one stopped it. Not until 1908, when Leopold finally sold the Congo to the Belgian state. The killing continued. Independence came in 1960. The killing continued. The Congo Wars of the 1990s and 2000s killed another five million.

The fire never stopped burning. It just moved.

East Timor: The Genocide the World Chose to Ignore

December 7, 1975 — the same day Japan attacked Pearl Harbour thirty-four years earlier — Indonesia invaded East Timor.

The timing was not coincidental. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were in Jakarta the day before. They gave President Suharto the green light. The Cold War made strange bedfellows. East Timor’s independence movement, Fretilin, was called communist. That was enough.

Two hundred thousand Timorese died over the next twenty-four years. One-third of the population. Equivalent to 110 million Americans.

Not a war. A genocide. Starvation used as a weapon — Indonesian forces destroyed crops and livestock. Napalm on villages — the same chemical used in Vietnam. Death squads — known as “Ninjas” — who disappeared entire families. Foreign journalists banned. The few who entered documented mass graves.

The Carter administration sold attack aircraft to the genocidaires. The Reagan administration increased military aid. The Australian government pretended not to see refugees drowning in the waters between Timor and its northern coast. The Indonesian military trained its officers in the United States, at Fort Benning and the International Military Education and Training program.

East Timor was silent not because the suffering was small, but because the victims were brown, poor, Catholic, and far from Western news desks. Their suffering was invisible. That is how genocide works when the world looks away.

They won independence in 2002. The dead did not come back.

Sri Lanka: The Spiral That Never Ended

1983 to 2009. One hundred thousand dead.

The Sinhalese majority had long discriminated against the Tamil minority. The Sinhala Only Act of 1956 made Sinhala the sole official language, excluding Tamils from government jobs. University quotas blocked Tamil students from higher education. Citizenship laws rendered hundreds of thousands of Indian-origin Tamils stateless.

By July 1983, frustration exploded. The pogroms of “Black July” killed an estimated three thousand Tamils and displaced hundreds of thousands. The government did nothing. The police participated. Neighbours turned on neighbours.

What followed was a brutal insurgency — the Tamil Tigers, one of the most effective terrorist organisations in modern history, invented the suicide vest — and an even more brutal counter-insurgency. The government’s strategy was collective punishment: any village that harboured Tigers was destroyed; any family that produced a fighter was targeted.

In 2009, government forces cornered the remaining Tamil civilians on a narrow strip of beach at Mullivaikkal. They shelled them for weeks. The UN estimated forty thousand civilians died in those final months. The government denied everything. The UN buried its own report under diplomatic pressure.

The world moved on. Tamils still sing their songs in exile.

V. THE COMMON THREAD (MAN’S INHUMANITY TO MAN)

Every genocide follows the same script. Every xenophobic wave, from Egypt to America, uses the same tools. Read them carefully. You will see them in the news tomorrow.

Step One: Name Them Less Than Human

The Hutus called Tutsis inyenzi — cockroaches. The Nazis called Jews Untermenschen — sub humans. The Belgians called Congolese savages. The Indonesians called Timorese animals. Trump called Mexicans “rapists” and “animals.”

The word does not matter. The effect does. Once a group is named as subhuman, anything can be done to them. You cannot commit atrocity against a human being. You can only commit atrocity against a rat, a cockroach, a parasite.

Step Two: Blame Them For Your Problems

Pharaoh blamed the Hebrews for potential treason. Hitler blamed the Jews for the Depression and the loss of World War I. The Hutus blamed Tutsis for poverty and oppression. Trump blamed immigrants for crime — even though immigrants commit less crime than native-born citizens.

Lost your job? The immigrant took it. Economy struggling? The refugee drains resources. Crime rising? The outsider brings violence. Never mind the data. Never mind the facts. Fear does not care about evidence. It needs a target.

Step Three: Separate Them

Walls. Ghettos. Camps. Cages. Put them somewhere else. Out of sight, out of conscience.

The Nazis built ghettos in Warsaw and Lodz, sealed with brick walls and barbed wire. The Indonesians built camps in East Timor, surrounded by fences and guard towers. The Americans built cages for children — chain-link enclosures on concrete floors, under fluorescent lights, without soap or blankets or their parents.

The architecture of separation is always the same. Fences. Barbed wire. Armed guards. Dehumanisation made physical.

Step Four: Violence Becomes Normal

The German who would never harm a neighbour could watch Jews loaded onto trains. The Hutu who loved his Tutsi friend could pick up a machete. The American who believes in family values could cheer children in cages.

This is not a failure of individual morality. It is a triumph of engineered hatred. Step by step, the unspeakable becomes speakable. The unthinkable becomes policy. The unimaginable becomes history.

VI. THE COUNTERFORCE (GLOBALISM AND THE BLURRING OF DIFFERENCES)

Here is the strange, beautiful contradiction. The paradox at the heart of our age.

Even as xenophobia spreads like wildfire through dry vegetation, something else spreads too. Globalism. Cultural fusion. The slow, grinding, undeniable blurring of lines that once seemed solid.

A teenager in Jakarta watches K-dramas from Seoul. A teenager in Seoul listens to Nigerian Afrobeats. A teenager in Lagos orders Indian food from a delivery app. A scientist in Nairobi collaborates in real time with colleagues in Boston and Bangalore. A Syrian refugee in Berlin has a cousin in Detroit and a brother in Sydney.

The most popular music on the planet — K-pop, reggaeton, Afrobeats, Latin trap — is hybrid, borrowing from everywhere, belonging nowhere. The most popular films — Marvel movies, Korean thrillers, French dramas — cross borders effortlessly. The most popular fashion — sneakers and jeans and hoodies — is the same in Tokyo, London, Mexico City, and Cape Town.

We are becoming, whether we like it or not, one species with one fate.

The pandemic proved it. A virus in Wuhan, China, shut down London, New York, Mumbai, São Paulo. No wall could stop it. No ban could contain it. We breathe the same air. Our blood is the same color. A cough in a wet market in Hubei became a funeral in Milan, a crowded ICU in Chicago, a mass grave in Manaus.

The climate crisis will prove it again, more brutally. Floods in Bangladesh will mean refugees in Europe. Droughts in California will mean food prices in Cairo. Wildfires in Australia will mean respiratory illness in Buenos Aires. There is no “away.” There is only here.

The arsonists know this. That is why they fight so hard. The lines are blurring. The differences are fading. The stranger is becoming a neighbour, a co-worker, a friend, a spouse, a family member. For those who thrive on division, this is terrifying. They are losing. And they know it. And technology has a big part in this as it forges ahead with neck breaking speed,

VII. THE DETERMINED ARSONISTS (THOSE WHO IGNITE HATRED)

Some people want the fire.

Politicians who win on fear. Media that profits from outrage. Warlords who need chaos to survive. Elites who prefer a divided working class fighting itself instead of demanding fair wages. Extremists who believe their identity is so fragile that contact with difference will destroy it.

They are not confused. They are not misled. They are strategic. They know exactly what they are doing.

The playbook is ancient:

• Find a crisis — real or manufactured — that frightens people.
• Blame a vulnerable group — visible, different, powerless.
• Dehumanise them with propaganda — rats, cockroaches, vermin.
• Propose a “solution” that hurts them — a wall, a ban, a camp.
• Repeat until the public is desensitised and the violence begins.

We saw it in Egypt. In Nazi Germany. In Rwanda. In Belgium’s Congo. In Trump’s America. In Bolsonaro’s Brazil. In Modi’s India. In Orbán’s Hungary.

We see it now. Every day. On every continent. In every language.

But here is what the arsonists do not understand. Fire burns indiscriminately. It does not ask who lit it. It consumes everything.

The German who cheered Hitler lost his sons on the Eastern Front. The Hutu who killed his neighbor watched his own children die in refugee camps. The American who cheered the wall will pay for it in higher prices, slower growth, and a coarser culture.

Xenophobia is a suicide pact. It always has been.

VIII. THE FIREFIGHTERS (THOSE WHO REFUSE TO BURN)

But for every arsonist, there is someone who refuses to burn.

The Egyptian who hid a Hebrew child — unnamed, unknown, but present in every telling of the Exodus. The German who sheltered a Jewish family — Oskar Schindler, yes, but also thousands of ordinary Berliners who hid neighbours at risk of their own lives. The Hutu who risked everything to save a Tutsi neighbour — Paul Rusesabagina, made famous by Hotel Rwanda, but also the countless unnamed who smuggled friends across the border.

The American who stood at the airport in 2017 with a sign saying “Welcome” — lawyers who worked pro bono to free detained travellers, citizens who gave their phone numbers to strangers, faith communities who sponsored refugee families.

These people are not saints. They are ordinary. They just made a different choice.

The rise of globalism is not automatic. It is not inevitable. It is fought for, every day, by people who refuse to let fear win.

The Welcome Movement in Germany — 2015, when Angela Merkel opened the borders to Syrian refugees. Citizens taught German, found jobs, built relationships. Not because they had to. Because they chose to.

Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa — 1996 to 1998. Facing atrocity not with revenge but with testimony. Not forgetting. Forgiving. Possible.

The International Criminal Court — flawed, yes, resisted by powerful nations, but existing. For the first time in human history, leaders can be held accountable for crimes against humanity.

Social media movements — #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #FridaysForFuture — that cross borders and languages and time zones. Not perfect. Human. Trying.

Every marriage across a cultural line. Every friendship across a religious divide. Every meal shared with a stranger. Every act of translation that makes a poem cross a border.

Small acts. They matter. They add up.

IX. THE INESCAPABLE TRUTH (HUMANITY IS BASICALLY THE SAME)

There is no gene for xenophobia.

No culture is inherently more or less tolerant. Every group has produced heroes and monsters. Every group has built walls and bridges. Every group has committed atrocities and acts of breathtaking kindness.

The Egyptian who enslaved Hebrews is the same species as the Egyptian who hid Anne Frank’s family. The Belgian who chopped off Congolese hands is the same species as the Belgian who rescued Jewish children. The American who cheered children in cages is the same species as the American who fought for civil rights.

This is the great, uncomfortable truth: You and I are capable of the same atrocities. And the same courage.

Xenophobia is not destiny. It is a choice.

Not one choice made once. Thousands of small choices made daily:

• Which news to watch — the one that dehumanises or the one that complicates?
• Which jokes to laugh at — the ones that mock difference or the ones that celebrate it?
• Which candidate to vote for — the one promising walls or the one promising bridges?
• Whether to speak up when a friend tells a racist joke — or stay silent.
• Whether to see a refugee as a threat or as a parent just like you.

We are not born hating. We are taught. And what is taught can be unlearned.

X. THE HEAD (THE PARADOX OF LIFE MANIFESTING)

We are at a head. A convergence. A moment that will determine the trajectory of human society for generations.

On one side: walls, bans, blood-and-soil nationalism, the fiction that we can return to a past that never existed — a past of cultural purity that is a lie because no culture has ever been pure, all are products of migration and fusion and borrowing.

On the other side: bridges, fusion, the slow dawning recognition that our survival depends on each other. That a virus anywhere is a threat everywhere. That carbon emitted anywhere warms the planet everywhere. That a refugee created by war or climate collapse will seek safety somewhere — and that somewhere is everywhere.

The fire is real. The arsonists are determined. They are well-funded, well-organised, and ruthless.

But the firefighters are everywhere. They are ordinary people making ordinary choices. And the tide — the slow, grinding, undeniable tide of human connection — is rising.

Every refugee who survives. Every immigrant who succeeds. Every mixed-race child who grows up loved. Every translation that makes a poem cross a border. Every vaccine developed in one country and administered in another. Every disaster that brings strangers together to help.

These are the waves. They are small. They are countless. They are winning.

CONCLUSION: THE FIRE AND THE WATER

The Egyptians expelled the Hebrews. The Hebrews survived. They are still here, still telling the story, still eating matzo every spring to remember how fast they fled.

The Germans tried to exterminate the Jews. The Jews rebuilt. They returned to the land of their ancestors, built a nation, revived a language that had not been spoken in daily life for two thousand years.

The Belgians brutalised the Congo. The Congolese endure. They make music that moves the world. They have produced some of Africa’s greatest writers, artists, athletes.

The Indonesians slaughtered Timorese. East Timor became a nation. The smallest country in Southeast Asia, born from the ashes of genocide, holds its head high.

The Sri Lankan government killed Tamils. Tamils still sing their songs. In Toronto, London, Paris, Sydney — the diaspora keeps the language alive, tells the children what happened, waits for justice.

The Hutus killed Tutsis. Rwanda still stands. It has rebuilt, reconciled, become one of the most stable and dynamic nations in Africa. It is not perfect. It is human. It is trying.

Xenophobia destroys. But it does not win.

Because the same blood runs through every vein. Red. Iron. Salt. Because tears taste the same in every language — salt, again, the taste of sorrow. Because a mother’s love for her child does not require a passport. Because a father’s grief at a grave is the same in Kigali and Berlin and Srebrenica and Gaza and Beirut and Buffalo.

The lines are blurring. The differences are fading. The stranger is becoming us.

And that — that — is why the arsonists are so desperate. Because they feel the tide rising. They see the future coming. They know that their children will marry across the lines they have drawn. They know that their grandchildren will not share their hatreds.

The fire is catching. But so is the water.

The question is not whether the fire will burn. It always burns. It has always burned. From Egypt to Germany to Rwanda to the Rio Grande.

The question is whether we will choose to fight it.

”The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

That was Martin Luther King Jr., quoting Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister from the abolitionist movement. Parker said it in 1853, when slavery still ruled half of America. King said it in 1968, the night before he was assassinated.

They were both right. The arc is long. It bends slowly. Sometimes it seems to bend backward. But it bends.

Choose the water. Choose the bend. Choose the firefight.