Migration. Refugees. Influx thereof into western democracies precipitated by war and economic hardship etc. Are you sick of hearing about it? Too bad, bitches!
I don't live in Calais or southern Italy and I don't have to watch thousands of desperate strangers battling local police or washing up with nothing and nowhere else to go, except in the media. But I think about it as though it is happening next door. I'll admit to being more moved by the idea of of hundreds of thousands of women and girls having to choose between ISIS/Assad and destitute exile than I am by images of a single drowned child. But if people need to see that to give a shit, whatever makes it happen.
New Zealand accepts 750 (no, I didn't drop a zero off that) refugees a year, which is a pathetic humanitarian fail and a sleazy shirking of our international responsibilities. We don't really have a problem participating in the illegal and unethical conflicts that have precipitated the current humanitarian crisis- we just don't want to hear from the victims. But at least we're not Australia.
What should we think, as people accustomed to protection from the immediate effects of the policies our representatives pursue, with or without popular consensus? We need to be reflective, empathetic and practical. Half of my ancestors were refugees, escaping horrific conditions in some of the most brutalised parts of Ireland. The rest were mostly 'economic migrants' from what was still essentially feudalism and starvation on the European mainland. These scenarios have been driving people from one place toward another for as long as we have existed. As a writer of historical shit I tend to think of current events in the context of a pretty extended timeline, leading me to conclude that every single person who's ever lived was both migrant- in the sense that their ancestors probably came from somewhere else- and indigene, including every last arsehole cluttering up my native archipelago, both Maori and misc.
I don't live in Calais or southern Italy and I don't have to watch thousands of desperate strangers battling local police or washing up with nothing and nowhere else to go, except in the media. But I think about it as though it is happening next door. I'll admit to being more moved by the idea of of hundreds of thousands of women and girls having to choose between ISIS/Assad and destitute exile than I am by images of a single drowned child. But if people need to see that to give a shit, whatever makes it happen.
New Zealand accepts 750 (no, I didn't drop a zero off that) refugees a year, which is a pathetic humanitarian fail and a sleazy shirking of our international responsibilities. We don't really have a problem participating in the illegal and unethical conflicts that have precipitated the current humanitarian crisis- we just don't want to hear from the victims. But at least we're not Australia.
What should we think, as people accustomed to protection from the immediate effects of the policies our representatives pursue, with or without popular consensus? We need to be reflective, empathetic and practical. Half of my ancestors were refugees, escaping horrific conditions in some of the most brutalised parts of Ireland. The rest were mostly 'economic migrants' from what was still essentially feudalism and starvation on the European mainland. These scenarios have been driving people from one place toward another for as long as we have existed. As a writer of historical shit I tend to think of current events in the context of a pretty extended timeline, leading me to conclude that every single person who's ever lived was both migrant- in the sense that their ancestors probably came from somewhere else- and indigene, including every last arsehole cluttering up my native archipelago, both Maori and misc.
On that timeline, no one is magically-righteously resident anywhere, so all the exclusivist bullshit falls away and we're all just a herd of shuffling undifferentiated vertebrates, lucky to be drawing breath.
It's human to want to defend the privileges you enjoy, and that's not just down to selfish exclusivity. But many of our privileges have been purchased at the expense of others, and we need to grow the fuck up and extend them if we really trust in their merit. Exclusion and deprivation are the oxygen of extremism and violence.
Everyone's all fuck foreigners or I heart refugees without bothering to wonder or elucidate why, and it's not enough to just assume either position; in fact, given the scale of the issue, this reactive polarisation has horribly dangerous implications.
I regard myself as a redistribution-minded misanthropic autodidactic ultra-liberal feminist secularist slash anarchist depending on moon phase. Allow me latitude to argue with my inner jaded arseclown in public, because honest acknowledgement of our own bullshit is the first step out of this perpetual clusterfuck.
It's human to want to defend the privileges you enjoy, and that's not just down to selfish exclusivity. But many of our privileges have been purchased at the expense of others, and we need to grow the fuck up and extend them if we really trust in their merit. Exclusion and deprivation are the oxygen of extremism and violence.
Everyone's all fuck foreigners or I heart refugees without bothering to wonder or elucidate why, and it's not enough to just assume either position; in fact, given the scale of the issue, this reactive polarisation has horribly dangerous implications.
I regard myself as a redistribution-minded misanthropic autodidactic ultra-liberal feminist secularist slash anarchist depending on moon phase. Allow me latitude to argue with my inner jaded arseclown in public, because honest acknowledgement of our own bullshit is the first step out of this perpetual clusterfuck.
^ Migrants on a razor wire fence in the Melilla, one of the two tiny Spanish enclaves on Morocco's Mediterranean coast. image: Jose Palazon, who works for migrant rights group Pro.De.In Melilla.
TEAM CYNICAL T R O L L V TEAM ASPIRING A D U L T
- I don't like my own species. We don't regularly donate to humanitarian orgs like Oxfam outside of natural disasters because humans are a simian pox upon the planet.
- Yeah, but no one asks to be born, especially not into a fucking civil war or systemic collapse. You're a fucking person too, bitch.
- Detest organised religion and the male privilege ensconced in even mainstream understandings of Islam, not really keen on having to accommodate more conservative societal bullshit.
- Firstly, private beliefs = none of my business. The best way to challenge the retarded medieval aspects of religion is to expose them to the wonders of personal freedom and gender equality as delineated, if not always enacted, by secular societies. Concerned with their survival? Learn to share. Also: your knowledge of the general grass roots awesomeness of the cultures in question + the positive social values within Islam, which you ahem profess to share.
-Yeah, well why aren't all the faithful headed to the likeminded theocracies next door if it's all so fucking awesome? Isn't it time the Saudis got off their incredibly rich arses and did something positive?
- Syria is surrounded by the sort of active conflicts, poverty, failed states and geographic barriers that make the Mediterranean look like the best option. Re religious affiliation: the KSA (Saudis) have kept their shit tight with draconian policies of messiness-exclusion and ruthless exploitation despite the social responsibilities explicitly mandated in the Koran; it's 'worked' for them so far. Everyone in the region knows this. And they're fundy Wahhabi/Salafi (i.e. OG) Sunnis and the vast majority of Syrians are not; ask your catholic nanna if she'd like to bunk with the pentecostals down the road.
- Cynical collusion or at least tacit acceptance by a sizeable chunk of the general populace is usually a minimum requirement for any successful dictatorship. A fair number of the people now fleeing Syria would have been fine-to-neutral with Assad's bullshit as long as he wasn't gassing their particular neighbourhood.
- But you hate a lot of the shit that's going down in your own country and are essentially powerless to affect change in a pretend-democracy; how does dissent go down in a regime that's holding your family in an unspecified location? It usually doesn't, and you probably wouldn't risk it either.
- At least half of NZ is already struggling to house and feed themselves due to grossly unfair distribution of wealth and inadequate social services, and it's not alone in that.
- New Zealand is social justice-poor, not resource-strapped. A few more thousand cases of hardship isn't going to change shit about anything. Also, NZ-poor trumps war-poor. So shut up.
- Know only too well that our current government will abandon and demonise any cohort that struggles to adapt to the cannibalistic requirements of living in a shitty western country already on its way to social failure.
- Fuck the bad people in charge. They're not the boss of us, anyway.
- Accepting greater refugee quotas will mean trafficking explodes on an unprecedented scale.
Pretty sure that cat's already peeled out of the bag. I don't accept that wealthy countries are entitled to parsimonious admission policies toward the refugees their violent international fuckery have impoverished and displaced.
- Have already participated in a local support/English language scheme for refugees; have discovered the allocation of resources is largely ineffective and possibly corrupt.
- Well shit, you might have to actually get back to doing something to change that instead of wanking on the internet.
- Yeah, but no one asks to be born, especially not into a fucking civil war or systemic collapse. You're a fucking person too, bitch.
- Detest organised religion and the male privilege ensconced in even mainstream understandings of Islam, not really keen on having to accommodate more conservative societal bullshit.
- Firstly, private beliefs = none of my business. The best way to challenge the retarded medieval aspects of religion is to expose them to the wonders of personal freedom and gender equality as delineated, if not always enacted, by secular societies. Concerned with their survival? Learn to share. Also: your knowledge of the general grass roots awesomeness of the cultures in question + the positive social values within Islam, which you ahem profess to share.
-Yeah, well why aren't all the faithful headed to the likeminded theocracies next door if it's all so fucking awesome? Isn't it time the Saudis got off their incredibly rich arses and did something positive?
- Syria is surrounded by the sort of active conflicts, poverty, failed states and geographic barriers that make the Mediterranean look like the best option. Re religious affiliation: the KSA (Saudis) have kept their shit tight with draconian policies of messiness-exclusion and ruthless exploitation despite the social responsibilities explicitly mandated in the Koran; it's 'worked' for them so far. Everyone in the region knows this. And they're fundy Wahhabi/Salafi (i.e. OG) Sunnis and the vast majority of Syrians are not; ask your catholic nanna if she'd like to bunk with the pentecostals down the road.
- Cynical collusion or at least tacit acceptance by a sizeable chunk of the general populace is usually a minimum requirement for any successful dictatorship. A fair number of the people now fleeing Syria would have been fine-to-neutral with Assad's bullshit as long as he wasn't gassing their particular neighbourhood.
- But you hate a lot of the shit that's going down in your own country and are essentially powerless to affect change in a pretend-democracy; how does dissent go down in a regime that's holding your family in an unspecified location? It usually doesn't, and you probably wouldn't risk it either.
- At least half of NZ is already struggling to house and feed themselves due to grossly unfair distribution of wealth and inadequate social services, and it's not alone in that.
- New Zealand is social justice-poor, not resource-strapped. A few more thousand cases of hardship isn't going to change shit about anything. Also, NZ-poor trumps war-poor. So shut up.
- Know only too well that our current government will abandon and demonise any cohort that struggles to adapt to the cannibalistic requirements of living in a shitty western country already on its way to social failure.
- Fuck the bad people in charge. They're not the boss of us, anyway.
- Accepting greater refugee quotas will mean trafficking explodes on an unprecedented scale.
Pretty sure that cat's already peeled out of the bag. I don't accept that wealthy countries are entitled to parsimonious admission policies toward the refugees their violent international fuckery have impoverished and displaced.
- Have already participated in a local support/English language scheme for refugees; have discovered the allocation of resources is largely ineffective and possibly corrupt.
- Well shit, you might have to actually get back to doing something to change that instead of wanking on the internet.
-Have personally emigrated twice and know how difficult and isolating it can be, even within countries sharing a language and basic cultural expectations.
- People tend not to leave everything and everyone they know on a fucking whim. And you expect to be able to move between western countries yourself for comparatively trivial and entirely selfish reasons, right? Yeah, I thought so.
- Thousands of desperate, dislocated people will further compromise an already semi-Dickensian labour market and encourage employers to dismantle our few remaining legislative protections.
- Lol, too late! Also, NZ is becoming a gross hideout/indentured service culture for stinky rich people absconding from the shit they've done in their countries of origin. If we're going to import humans, let's welcome the ones trying to dodge bullets, not taxes/audits/warrants.
- Unformed ideas about people staying in their own countries and dealing with their own shit leading to a more comprehensive and lasting resolution. Ponders the catastrophic intergenerational effect of the mass departure of educated moderates+secularists from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.
- Because ignoring and essentially confining people within countries trashed by Western meddling and aggression has worked so well up til now. If tanks rolled into your town, you'd probably be on the next fucking plane to bunk with your relatives in Australia. A lot of Syrians will go home when it's safe to do so anyway; we owe them the help they need so that they can return and rebuild their societies.
- This is a bullshit, entirely predictable situation laden with no-win near-immortal systemic toxicity, cynically engineered by a corrupt patriarchal hegemony so fuck everyone, I'm not going to give a toss.
- The hardest for me to personally plug my ears against. Old enough to have seen all this before, know it's going to happen again. But, do as you would be done to. If we can't do better than the greedy psychopathic dickholes who landed us in this shit, who are we, really?
I make no apologies for boring the pants off you with this extended raving. Abnormal transmission will resume.
- People tend not to leave everything and everyone they know on a fucking whim. And you expect to be able to move between western countries yourself for comparatively trivial and entirely selfish reasons, right? Yeah, I thought so.
- Thousands of desperate, dislocated people will further compromise an already semi-Dickensian labour market and encourage employers to dismantle our few remaining legislative protections.
- Lol, too late! Also, NZ is becoming a gross hideout/indentured service culture for stinky rich people absconding from the shit they've done in their countries of origin. If we're going to import humans, let's welcome the ones trying to dodge bullets, not taxes/audits/warrants.
- Unformed ideas about people staying in their own countries and dealing with their own shit leading to a more comprehensive and lasting resolution. Ponders the catastrophic intergenerational effect of the mass departure of educated moderates+secularists from Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran.
- Because ignoring and essentially confining people within countries trashed by Western meddling and aggression has worked so well up til now. If tanks rolled into your town, you'd probably be on the next fucking plane to bunk with your relatives in Australia. A lot of Syrians will go home when it's safe to do so anyway; we owe them the help they need so that they can return and rebuild their societies.
- This is a bullshit, entirely predictable situation laden with no-win near-immortal systemic toxicity, cynically engineered by a corrupt patriarchal hegemony so fuck everyone, I'm not going to give a toss.
- The hardest for me to personally plug my ears against. Old enough to have seen all this before, know it's going to happen again. But, do as you would be done to. If we can't do better than the greedy psychopathic dickholes who landed us in this shit, who are we, really?
I make no apologies for boring the pants off you with this extended raving. Abnormal transmission will resume.
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