Huddled Masses of the 20th Century

While the focus of Lost on Earth is on refugees and human migration, the book uses this angle to discuss broader issues in America's post Cold War foreign policy, paint a vivid picture of the horrors and atrocities still present in our supposedly "modern warfare" and convey the hopelessness and frustration of entire societies through the lives of individuals. Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent Mark Fritz succeeds in writing a thoughtful book that should shock the average, complacent American into realizing that a world of incredible human tragedies surround an insulated, peaceful American society.

Beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union, Fritz describes the violent and turbulent social migrations created by these changes. In Eastern Europe people free from oppressive communist regimes for the first time in generations poured into Berlin. Citizens of Hungary, Romania and other Eastern European countries fled to West Germany, while many West Germans took advantage of their opportunity to travel in East Germany again. Fritz writers that "Everywhere, everyone caught a scent of something--prosperity, pop culture, maybe--and went a little loony," Romanian Gypsies came to Berlin mostly in dire straits but left their theft and abuse of humanitarian aid alienated many from assisting their migration. Romanians continuously begged for clothing and go sell it on the street, stole whatever they could from the common supply rooms so that humanitarian relief workers had to keep supplies locked up and were audacious enough simply to leave their children outside of doctor's offices and depart, expecting the doctors to care for their children. East Germany had no real asylum laws, which coupled with West Germany's generosity led refugees to promote Germany as the promised land to all of their suffering countrymen at home. This demonstrated what Fritz calls a "basic principle of migration. The more pilgrims migrated to the promised land, the less promising it became." By 1992 Germany had half a million registered asylum seekers and it was estimated that twice that number had arrived illegally. These difficulties led to an anti-immigrant backlash in Germany, with groups of neo Nazis openly attacking anyone they perceived to be foreign. Germany had allowed an enormous number of refugees and migrants into its borders but had not been able to develop an effective plan for their assimilation or integration.

Next in Fritz's survey is the U.S. war with Iraq. In describing the pathetic state of the Iraqi army, he quotes a U.S. official in an Iraqi POW camps saying "We were looking for warriors. Here we got these wimps." All the same, Fritz's summary of the war against Iraqis is sickening in its glorification of the brutality exercised on what he admits to be toothless Iraqi military: "The mission was proof of the last superpower's capacity to halt catastrophe when it summoned the sufficient courage...At no time in history had one ideology and one nation been given such a clear path to influencing the flow of historic events, to halting evil on a historic scale."

The break-up of the Soviet Union is viewed by Fritz as a major factor in increased migration and emigration. Fritz argues that the "forced collectivization of the '20s, the ideological purges of the '30s and the ethnic shuffling of perceived Nazi sympathizers during the '40s "caused much displacement and conflict in terms of people of different ethnicities and nationalities thrown together haphazardly. For example, in describing the independence movement in Chechnya, Fritz tells of the conflicts between Chechens, Russians and the Ingush who wanted to unite with North Ossetia, who in turn wanted to unite with South Ossetia which was waging a guerrilla war against Georgia, a nation "consumed by conflicts between Muslims and Christians, nationalists and Communists, secessionist provinces and one irate band of paramilitary horsemen." Blaming the U.S. and the West as being unprepared to deal with the effects of the Cold War, Fritz writes that "The West got the world it had demanded, and now it was scrambling to shield itself from it." The Western demand for open markets in the world obviously did not include open movement of populations.

The problems of migration and refugees, Fritz's "postcard from oblivion," are more pronounced than many people realize and will not disappear anytime soon. From 1989 to the mid '90s more than 50 million people were violently displaced from their homelands and much more than twice that amount left for economic reasons. Citing fears form the failure of Vietnam as haunting the U.S. and preventing it from assuming a larger role as peacekeeper in the world, Fritz suggests a possible solution being the creation of a "special military branch for the sole purpose of enforcing peace agreements." With the recent success of U.N. peacekeepers being dubious at best, it is unlikely that this proposal will be implemented anytime soon. However, the West should heed Fritz's call if it hopes to find a way to solve the refugee problem: "wealthy nations that took part in creating the dynamics of the old era should assume the responsibility for accepting people uprooted by the transition to a new one."