I could never have imagined that I would find myself “behind the lines.” The phrase was always a feature of the kind of military adventures that I consumed as a boy; the First World War ace forced down behind the German Trenches, Jan Kubis in Alan Burgess’s novel Seven Men at Daybreak, heroically assassinating Reynard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague.

“Behind the Lines” evokes a kind of Boy’s Own heroism, combined with the real terror of potential capture by villains in jackboots and field-gray uniforms, or worse. It speaks of torture, and brutal interrogations, where the hero holds out even after his captor growls “vee vill make you talk. “

It also brings to mind the nightmares that I had as a child, which I still have, and which I know many of my Jewish friends have had, of hiding from Nazi stormtroopers only a few steps behind. Being “behind the lines” means being a fugitive, hunted prey. An unwanted outsider.

… A stranger in a strange land.

It seems absurd, in a self—aggrandizing way, to claim that I am “behind the lines” in the United States. It feels ridiculous to claim so dramatic – not to say melodramatic – a label for a comfortable, middle class college professor in suburban New Jersey in the 21st century. No Nazis are coming for me to ship me to the crematoria; no Black Helicopters are landing on the tennis courts behind my house; no coworker has threatened to expose me. And yet…

I am a Canadian expat in the United States at a time when the relations between our two countries have broken-down to a level not seen since early last century. President Donald Trump has publicly declared that he would like to annex our country, he has belittled our Prime Minister and demeaned our significant historical uniqueness with rhetoric reminiscent of Vladimir Putin on the eve of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. Then he followed up with onerous tariffs, on the bogus pretext of national security, that threaten to destroy the Canadian economy.

That they will likely ruin the US economy – and show signs of doing so already – is cold comfort.

I have lived in the United States for almost two decades and, although I cannot say that I have ever felt “at home” here, I now feel an unfamiliar and constant frisson of hostility, not necessarily to say danger, all around me. A colleague at the university where I teach history commented on the maple leaf lapel pin that I have taken to wearing. “Better be careful with that,” he joked, “you’re making yourself a target.”

I might have laughed the comment off in the spirit with which it was offered. Only, I have a sinking feeling that as a left-wing, Jewish, Canadian college professor in MAGA America, I am, indeed a target, though not a terribly high-priority one. I can feel the malice, not in my sheltered and privileged everyday life, perhaps, but in the media and the cultural aether all around me. It is in the air, and I know it.

My interlocutor, a native-born US citizen, is nonetheless a member of a vulnerable group targeted by MAGA. I wondered for a moment if he was oblivious to that fact, or if maybe he was subtly building a connection in our shared peril. I believe it was the latter, but it might also be that he was wryly commenting on the arrival of vulnerability into the bubble privilege that I have always enjoyed as a white, male, straight, middle-class intellectual. “Welcome to the club, Captain Canuck. ” To be honest, I probably deserve it.

Still, my vulnerability is real, if I read the news and the tea leaves correctly. In just the last few weeks, my complacency in being a legal resident “alien ” (in the curious language of the US Immigration and Nationality Act) has been shot all to Hell – and no green card will protect me.

Just last week (as I write this), Jasmine Mooney, a Canadian citizen, was arrested at the US point of entry at San Ysidro, CA as she was attempting to renew an expired business visa. Given that one must apply for visas at border crossings and ports of entry, it is difficult to guess what Ms. Mooney’s offence might be, but the conditions of her detainment by ICE, in one of the prisons they operate for undesirable “aliens” is, by all accounts ” inhumane. “

Fabian Schmidt, a German national, but a legal permanent resident of the United States, was arrested and brutally interrogated at Logan International Airport upon trying to return to his home and Family in New Hampshire. He was so badly abused by ICE officers that they had to stop at a hospital to treat his wounds before remanding him to a detention facility in Rhode Island. Officials have not yet informed Schmidt’s family of the charges against him.

Most chilling is the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident married to an American citizen who went to graduate school at Columbia University, and who was simply “disappeared” by ICE. The official pretext is national security because Khalil is a staunch and vocal critic of the State of Israel and its war in Gaza, but there is no legal justification for depriving a permanent resident of their civil rights. More ominously, still, Khalil is being held incommunicado, iris an undisclosed location, unable to be contacted by his lawyers and his family.

There are other cases, all of which have in common only that they involve foreign nationals, even citizens from countries friendly to the US like Canada and Germany, either entering or within US borders. The rest of it – the absence of any explanation or justification adds up to. . . what?

Arbitrary power.

And that is what frightens me. I don’t know if I will be arrested and detained when I re-enter the United States from Canada after a long delayed and much anticipated return home this summer to celebrate my late father’s 100th birthday. I am not a prominent activist like Khalil, and I am certainly no bomb-throwing radical.  But neither is Schmidt or Mooney. I don’t know whether the fact that I teach US history with a critical perspective will come back to haunt me, or whether wearing a maple leaf on my lapel somehow marks me out.

That uncertainty, of course, in the whole point. Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism that unpredictability and randomness were essential practices of totalitarian regimes. If the leader is all-powerful, yet arbitrary and unpredictable, his subjects never know if they will be next, if someone might denounce them, if they might disappear without warning. So, they conform, both inwardly and outwardly to the demands of power in what we today call pre-emptive obedience. And if the regime here, behind the lines in America, can be characterized as anything, it is totalitarian.

In theory, this unpredictability should buy my compliance, if not my complicity. In theory, I should sanitize my lectures so as not to mention the genocides of the American past and present, to soft-pedal slavery as merely a quaint labor system whose legacy does not extend to persistent, structural racism in the present, to promote American “greatness” and to not respect my students’ pronoun choices. We have already seen the MAGA regime exert its power to control the curriculum at the US’s leading universities, an effort that I believe, sadly, will be successful. Why not cow some “alien” like me into compliance with the threat of arbitrary expulsion or worse?

That is what life is like “behind the lines” in America. It is not as dire as attempting to cross German trenches into No Man’s Land and then, one hopes, to safety. But there is a persistent reminder that I am an alien, and the threat that the regime can destroy my life, should it choose, hangs over me. 

It is not heroic, and the terror is not exactly existential, but it is real. Still, I wear my maple leaf proudly, teach history in the way that makes sense to me, stay relatively safe in the company of my family and friends, while all the time feeling the fear – nay, the expectation – that they ‘re coming for me, or that they will be waiting for me when I deign to cross back into the United States.

It isn’t even particularly exciting. It is just the dull, grey buzz of the persistent anxiety, of “alienness;” of being a stranger in a strange land that I used to understand, even if I didn’t ever really like it. It is the distant tolling of a bell that I have never heard before. It might toll for me.