© 2010, UrbisMedia
Preamble: A person from Britain I met a few years ago while on my travels, and for whom I have admiration and affection, sent me a solicitation she received from the Conservative Party amidst the current political campaigns in the UK. I am posting the reply I sent to her because I think her identity is sufficiently protected. I will call her “Sister J.”
Dear “Sister J”,
We come from two countries, as G.B. Shaw sagely observed, “separated by a common language.” But I think, as I peruse some of the political propaganda sent to you from the Tories, not so much separated by the similarities of our political circumstances of the moment. I certainly am amused by a platform of promises that might easily have come from this side of the Atlantic (although not from the crazed extreme right wing of the American “conservative” ideology). I restate so of it from what was sent to you:
We will change politics
Our political system needs to change. Politicians must be made more accountable, and we must take power away from Westminster and put it in the hands of people – individuals, families and neighbourhoods.
After making several pledges one might hear from any politician running under the current economic circumstances the document states:
If you elect a Conservative government on 6 May, we will:
1. Cut wasteful government spending so we can stop Labour’s jobs tax, which would kill the recovery.
2. Act now on the national debt, so we can keep mortgage rates lower for longer.
3. Reduce emissions and build a greener economy, with thousands of new jobs in green industries and advanced manufacturing.
4. Get Britain working by giving unemployed people support to get work, creating 400,000 new apprenticeships and training places over two years, and cutting benefits for those who refuse work.
5. Control immigration, reducing it to the levels of the 1990s – meaning tens of thousands a year, instead of the hundreds of thousands a year under Labour.
Change a few terms and a little spelling and these promises might well have come from this side of the ocean. Much as I would like to, I cannot address all of this, so I want to single out thenumber 5 immediately above, because, if you have had an opportunity to take note of the doings in our Great Reich of Arizona, you have noted that both our nations have political debates much concerned with immigration. Let me concentrate on that.
Sure, you have that dinky little island where you are nowhere more than a hundred miles from the sea, and we have this vast place with “amber waves of grain” and “purple mountains majesty” in the middle. So we have a lot more geographic room than you do. But in a way, GB is implicated in the American immigration “problem” as well. They are, in fact, derived from the same historical circumstances.
We are GB’s former colony you will recall. Yup, we were still Brits when we started pushing the native Americans out of their ancestral lands in the 17th C. We were “British undocumented immigrants,” although the term might not have appeared in political statements by the Iroquois, Huron, Mohawk or other “nations” that resided here. Anyway, we were Americans free of Britain by the time we undertook a rather vigorous and effective process of genocide to clear those “pesky redskins” out so we could get on with building the White American empire. (I’ll come back to this.)
Empire. Now that’s a word not unfamiliar to any Briton. Well, it’s fading a bit, isn’t it? The sun seems to be setting on the Empire these days. I even got to watch Prince Charles sail out of Victoria Harbour in 1997, when GB handed back to the Chinese the territory it acquired by forcing them to buy heroin in the Opium Wars. We Americans had good imperialist teachers in learning how not to be nice to those “redskins,” “wogs,” “fuzzywuzzies,” “chinks,” and the rest. And how to rip them off.
So what is happening here? Well, underneath and unspoken in the political propaganda both our countries must hear and read from our politicians is that the “immigration problem” might well be called “the chickens are coming home to roost!” The people that Europeans and Americans conquered and exploited are coming back and would like of piece of the economic action that was built on the backs of their ancestors. Europe had economically depleted itself with it’s stupid monarchistic wars among the English, French, Spanish, Dutch and others, and so set out, mainly to steal from faraway peoples who were ill-prepared to defend themselves. You will hear that we gave them language (so they can run computers today), law, science and technology (a lot of it military), but we made them pay dearly for it, and we still considered them beneath us. Oh, and did I mention slavery? (I know St. Paul approved of the practice, but it just does not seem a proper thing for Christian nations to engage in.)
Sure, there were good people with good intentions who were a small part of the imperialist process. There were even good Christians (I say “good” without tongue in cheek this time, and I mean other faiths as well), who wanted to help the sick and the poor, but were often used as pawns in the process of exploitation that was the essence of the imperialist agenda. You, yourself were one of the good ones working in Africa. But the record shows that most of them were rapacious, racist bastards.
Now before I go much further we must not exempt many other countries from engaging in this practice. Italy has its Ethiopians and Somalis who want to return; Germany the Turks it wangled into their 20th C bellicose adventures, the French in North and West Africa, the Dutch in the spice latitudes, the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas; I could go on into East Europe and Asia. There are not many nation states free of the taint. And GB had the biggest empire of them all—the one on which the sun never set. How else could that dinky island come to call itself “Great” without sucking out the resources and exploiting the peoples on five continents? And—I am compelled to say this—when the British decide it’s time to leave they are precipitous about it and often leave one hell of a mess behind (India, midnight, 14 August 1947).
So what’s my point, it is fair to ask. Well let’s take the good ole US of A, perhaps the most politically dumb and hubristic nation on the planet. We seem to be having a devil of a time with the people we began shoving out of the American southwest a century and a half or so ago. It was their country once. They were, and are still, the “Indians,” the same people we tried to wipe out, they just speak Spanish. (The Brits and their antics at Amritsar didn’t have a monopoly on this sort of thing. We’ll put Wounded Knee up against that one.) The current Native Americans vexing us come from Mexico and Central America where the Spanish, another brutal, racist bunch, were after their gold, strong backs, and souls (and molesting their children).
So, can we let them all back in? Can we let the southern hemisphere relocate to the northern? Of course, not; that would not even work out well for the immigrants—millions of people of color jammed into your dinky island, or Arizona, just wouldn’t work. First of all, they would take all of our best jobs, like stoop labor and cleaning toilets. But the really scary thing is that these immigrants are prolific as all get out, especially those Catholics and Muslims. Letting them in is like letting in kudzu vines and African bees. So when they get numerous enough to be a political threat it’s time to circle the wagons. At bottom that’s what it is, especially in democracies with universal suffrage.
So it seems we really need to have a look at the circumstances of these people before they get on the boats and rafts and sneak over the fences. What impels them to want to live with snobby French, class-obsessed Brits and stupid Americans? After all, what we have done is not right. Mostly we have fomented the wars between and among them and supplied the means to fight them. We have supported the dictators who would give us economic advantages (but keep them from their own people and steal what little foreign aid is offered), and assisted ones who would brutally squelch and incipient movement toward liberty that had a taint of political liberalism on it. In short we have made many of these former colonies poorer, less safe and healthy and given people good reasons to want to emigrate from them. But they had better not show up at our door unless they have advanced degrees or play great soccer or baseball.
In short, we have done much pretty the opposite of what is required to staunch the exodus from any of these former colonies or political satrapies. We need to improve their circumstances where they are, not worsen them. We need to re-direct the enormous sums of money and resources wasted on wars and the implements of war. They need to be turned into not just plowshares, but hospitals and clinics, clean water sources, improved shelter, clean electric power, and schools. Frankly, I don’t have much of a problem if bad things (demise or long incarceration) happen to the thugs, dictators, thieves and others who oppress, rob, enslave, and rape and murder innocent people. Needles to say, that means mostly eliminating people who are the whores of American corporate interests and/or downright ideological idiots.
OK, I know there is a lot left out of this and a lot to argue about. But I will stop with this. Immigration pressure on our countries is a problem we made with our greed, racism, and bellicosity. Self-spoiled rats that we are we refuse to own up to our responsibilities. These people are reminders we do not want living to share with.
So, “Sister J,” I might be heading into the immigrants queue myself. So it would be about 120 between my grandfather coming over here and me getting the urge to leave. Do you think if those Tories win on May 5 they would shut the gates on Italian-Americans?
Cheers(?)
jim
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© 2010, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 5.4.2010)