"IS is a mortal threat to the people of the Middle East. It has grown in the shattered social spaces left by the violence and poverty of the neoliberal era. It is a monster created by Western imperialism. It is a form of mass psychotic rage unleashed by a world gone mad.
And therefore, the very last thing the region needs is yet another round in the cycles of bombing, killing, and displacement that have made IS possible."
A World Gone Mad
Europe, including Britain, is now dealing with huge numbers of refugees (not migrants). It was inevitable that this would happen someday. You can't expect to have masses of people living in poverty and near starvation, in fear for theirs and their family's lives, in fear of torture, in fear even to go to the market to buy or sell, and have no reaction when they can see via media that there are places in the world where this is not happening, where life is better, where life has value.
Do we have a responsibility to take these people in? Can our social services, housing, job market, etc. manage such a huge influx of desperate people? Has the Muslim religion been so demonized that we are afraid of these people, of their beliefs? Do we think they will destroy us from within? What a mess we have been complicit in creating with our bombs, drones, soldiers, and with our meddling in the affairs of these countries.
We have exhibited a complete lack of respect for cultures, governmental systems, and belief systems that differ from ours. We have learned absolutely nothing from history. We have blundered our way throughout the world carrying our heads high in the belief that our way is the right way. And here we are now, shaking our heads, building walls, creating camps, crushing mobs with riot police and soldiers, ghettoizing, in general freaking out over a mass refugee crisis we helped to cause.
Am I saying we should accept atrocities committed by people and governments, accept genocide, accept slavery, accept obvious crimes against humanity? No, of course not. But don't assume we have never committed any of these crimes ourselves, that we are innocent. Is it not a crime to kill numerous civilians with a drone in order to "take out" one enemy? Is it not a crime to sanction a population to the point of severely lowering their standard of living because their government refuses to come to terms with ours? Is torture not a crime against humanity? How about imposing our drug war on a country whose main source of income lies in its poppy fields? Should we be profiting by selling armaments to one side or another, or both sides, in an internal conflict of another country? And the list goes on...
So here we are, the innocent West, sitting with a smile on our faces while we watch Europe struggle to deal with this huge influx of population. This is not their problem, it's everyone's problem. If Europe must take in refugees, so should we. Unless we work our asses off to improve conditions within the borders of these countries this crisis will not go away. It's serious now and it will escalate. Desperate people do desperate things. They have nothing to lose.
Do I have the answers? No, and even if I did it's unlikely that anyone in power would listen to me. It seems to me that nearly all governments in the world are self serving, that the idea of serving the people has quietly slipped to the wayside while the citizenry was too busy or too uncaring to notice. It's frightening. The world has indeed gone mad.
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I apologize for the negativity of my blog today. Sometimes I almost wish we were back in the days when we knew very little about the rest of the world, about the activities of our own governments - those dark ages before the "Net", before TV, before... It's hard now, to stick your head in the sand.
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