‘Europe
Must Take Responsibility for Refugee Crisis, Which It Created!’ blared
President Zuma from the front page a few days ago. For once shower-head
Zuma is right.
Terrorists,
freedom fighters, refugees, failed states … all are created by the elites, they
are not born. I know, I was a Rhodesian. As happened in near identical terms in
South Africa we few whites - protectors of the defunct Capitalist Greed system
- isolated, disparaged and terrorised the majority. We did this not to simply retain
our highly privileged position but to enhance it. And for a time it worked.
Now
Zimbabwe lies in ruins while the new South Africa boasts an elite comprised of
the old white oppressors working with the new ANC. They are boosted by a willing
and supportive mixed-race middle class because they are getting more than their
fair share.
Below
them sits a poverty stricken lower class. It’s these that do all the manual
labour including the waiting about for a job, and it’s from here that there has
arisen millions of home-grown, local refugees.
They
are the folk we find convenient to call ‘squatters’, or more nasty, ‘beggars looking
for a chance to steal’ and ‘social welfare professionals’. We declare that as
though they are that, and there of their own free will.
Thankfully
the majority of black people of Southern Africa don’t have evil in their
hearts. Mostly they have dismissed the past as past and are trying to live in
the present. They are living with desperation, though, let it be said.
In
the latest cycle of bringing democracy to (in the order of most recent) the
Horn of Africa, the Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Iraq, ongoing in the wider Congo
region and without letup in South America, the western capitalists have killed
or have caused millions to be killed under contract.
‘Bringing
democracy’ is the marketing phrase but the reality is that wherever the US, UK,
France and scavengers like Canada and Australia have gone they have destroyed
the very fabric of society’s functions. They have dismantled every aspect of
socialism or opposition to the capitalist process,[i] stolen
all and pissed off home with the loot leaving no workable processes or
honest governments behind, only chaos.
The
results of the West’s total aggression (which is no more than amazing money
making opportunities) is civil war(s) and the displacement of 100’s of millions
of people. Those displaced people were always simply civilians operating as
best they could in their respective economic and religious systems, they were
not ‘terrorists’.
The
reverse ‘terrorism’ from these horror campaigns conducted for money and oil
power will arrive in (my guess) 2050 onwards. The new aggressors will be
children of the victims of today. Murder, rape, pillage, unexpressable horrors
… these hurts run deep.
But being human, crying over pictures
of dead babies and agreeing to accept 1000s upon 1000s of refugees isn’t going to work. The
differences between the receiving countries and the them is just too great.
In the long run there will be more and more unresolvable aggression - Saudi
Arabia is already making sure of that with its offer to build 200 mosques in
Germany. The fighting of the future will be happening inside the borders of the
'generous'.
There
are only two ways to resolve the refugee crisis:
One: Solidly refuse them entry. Look
into their eyes and deny their existence, knowing that ultimately the refusal
is a death sentence. Leave them to their fate.
Two: Correct the wrong, accept
responsibility and accept the refugees as temporary residents. Convert the
bombers, troop ships and personnel carriers and send engineers, doctors,
teachers, managers, uranium waste collectors and so on to re-build, using the
fortunes stolen to cover the cost. But send people and companies committed to
rebuilding lives, not the junk heads Bush sent to Iraq to make a profit on the $25 million a day reconstruction work, with the paperwork “largely missing.”[ii]
A
resolution by all of Europe to send the problem to its maker by dispatching,
say, a million refugees to the US may make a difference in the future, but
right now the coming reality staring Europe in the face is in place, and it
looks just like South Africa’s informal settlements.
Just
as Europe has been taken by surprise so Vorster and his fascist Nationalist
Party didn’t expect the flood of squatters who began arriving on the fringes of
white cities and town strongholds in the late 70s. For 60 years the downtrodden
and deliberately impoverished had stayed meekly at home out in the countryside.
There they had starved, watched their children grow up missing vitals and died
quietly, unrecorded, without upsetting the white Capitalist government. Then
the trigger.
In
Algeria it was when the French finally pulled their dominating 300,000 armed
and murderous bullies out that the masses started crossing over into Europe. In
Rhodesia/South Africa, where domination was never complete, the move began when
the white administrators withdrew support and basic facilities and instead sent
in white goons who kicked and traumatised and moved on, only to come back
another day.
It
was De Klerk, big business and the whites’ inability to share that created
South Africa’s own Libyas, Ethiopias and Syrias. The black folk of those
decimated ‘Homelands’ zones, evictees from ‘white’ farms and residential areas,
were left with nothing except their courage, their desire for life and to get
up and do it. And do it they did, as the Syrians are doing, moving in search of
hope.
It’s
ironic that it was their move (and not the ANC or its armed wing) that was the
straw that broke the white elite’s economic back. Today those refugees include
about 20% of the white population.
Any
student who wishes to have a crack at forecasting the future of South Africa
only has to look at the conditions under which South Africa’s squatting
refugees exist. Today they live in much the same squalor as I first saw 40
years ago when arriving in Cape Town, one of the world’s top ten destinations,
for a holiday. But the problem is much, much bigger.
The
successive governments from the Nats into the three ANC administrations (including
the DA in the Western Cape) don’t care. They don’t because the ANC has simply
slipped on the Nat-suit and the money continues to flow upwards into places and
accounts where it does no good, and often where there are no records.
They
have learnt that the poorer the base population, the more desperate they are
for jobs and the greater the wage/salary competition, the bigger the profits at
corporate level. Sitting pretty at corporate level are big business’ puppets,
the ANC stalwarts who start with Zuma and president elect Ramaphosa, and run
right down the rotten hierarchy through provincial and into municipal level – just
like the old days.
The
step-up on farmer murders (not only white), isolated small business owners and
lately foreigners is an obvious reaction to the fact that poverty is climbing –
even the once immune middle class is feeling it.
The
BEE exercise, police corruption, the undermining of the NPA and the continued flow
out of money existing alongside a further failing of government in the fields
of education, health and you-name-it, has proved that profit at any cost is in
control.
The
only goal in sight is self-enrichment, both of the new black elite and the old white
one.
What
is happening throughout society is shocking, intolerable. But what exactly did
the world expect, what exactly do South Africans expect?
For
every one decent, hard-working individual killed violently, 1000s die an
unnatural death long before their allotted time. They die because of desperate
living conditions and desperate people, because of the refugees we willingly
accepted as a short term move and now accept as part of the furniture. Because
we are unwilling to think about what to do.
Caring
is not a once a year, making a wide appeal for blankets and kids toys, or being
brave enough to pick up an indigent hitch-hiker and take him to town affair.
That’s as good as praying. ‘There you are, I’ve prayed for you! (Now away, and
be grateful for the sandwich).
Caring
for them, for myself, for the country and for my long term future in it is about
going back to the Homelands. It’s about taking every under-used farm and the
near empty old time Settler towns, disused golf courses, idle factories and bending
the rules to near breaking point, pumping in some big money to make places
where people can live, grow and begin once again to contribute to society
simply by trading. Me-to-you-trading, nothing complicated.
There
is no such thing as a sustainable project. There will be a start up and
maintenance cost. The government (and the wealthy need to join) has to pump in
money. And if money can’t be ‘found’ remember that we own the Rand, not the foreign banks, and if it gets really
desperate Ramaphosa and De Klerk have a bundle.
As
George Galloway of the UK said last week, ‘those who rule us brought us this.
They are lower than vermin.’ In South Africa those who rule are a combination
of all the wealthy – say every one earning over R26,000 p/m – and the voters.
Today
Syrian refugees are flooding Europe. Today Europe has come face to face with
the world it created. But let’s not be foolish. It’s a phenomenon as old as the
royals, that all the privileged had a part in, and have the ability to change.
Unless
South Africans start caring, my advice is join the queue in Europe.
Picture: Carol Guzy, Kosovo, 2010.
[i] In
the Horn of Africa the people are fighting to rid themselves of west imposed
leaders. In strategic Syria, Assad was the first man to achieve anything near
unity among the diverse players - hence the funded, trained and put into the
field by the USA, Saudi Arabia and Britain ‘rebels’ – many who broke away to
become ISIS. Libya had a flourishing socialist-type economy - too much money,
oil and designs on an Africa united under a single currency, hence the British
pseudo troops and 100 straight days of ‘UN’ bombing. Saddam broke his contract
with his US masters. He was building a sound welfare economy and distributing
more to the people, and he was talking about selling oil in currencies other
than the US$. Capitalism doesn’t allow either – it can’t.
[ii] 'An occupation conducted through
under-scrutinized emergency appropriations enabled dozens, if not hundreds, of
private companies to act like pigs at the trough – wasting taxpayer dollars on
frivolous expenses while the insurgency raged around them. These private
companies were able to behave so rapaciously because they were so desperately
needed by the US government to run the Iraq war without revealing its true cost
to the American public' ... see ‘How the US public was defrauded by the hidden
cost of the Iraq war' by Michael Boyle