CHAPTER 19 (EXCERPT)

CHAPTER 19 (EXCERPT)
            Immigration had become a winning issue for right-wingers and nationalists in Europe, so why not in America?  That was the worldwide trend in the First World, and Trump identified it, rode it, and used its momentum to dupe the American people.  Of course, nobody seemed to ask the question about where (particularly Islamic) immigration was coming from into Europe.  Not “where” as in a geographic standpoint, but “where” as in: “What is the origin of immigration from the Third World to the First World?”  People, immigrants, don’t just arrive in floods from the same geographic location randomly.  Like NAFTA’s effect upon Mexican immigration to the United States, there were real, quantifiable reasons for the amount of immigrants to Europe from the Middle East following 9/11, and they had nothing to do with Radical Islam putting a Jihad upon Western Civilization.  Here’s one: the war.

            If you start bombing people in a certain region, people are going to want to leave that region (all internal political turmoil that occurs after bombings and occupations aside).  Yes, in war-torn countries, warring factions battle for control of the region’s tax system.  Using drones to bomb civilian weddings, funerals, schools and hospitals because of intelligence - which may or may not be accurate - claiming knowledge of the existence of a terrorist in the general area is going to stir up a debate in any country, including one with nuclear weapons, like Pakistan, amongst the country’s ruling elite.  The infighting and general loss of infrastructure and wealth from such imperialistic aggression creates a region significantly more impoverished than it once was, which creates a lower ratio of resources to people, and therefore induces a wave of immigrants leaving the oppressed and divided nation, or region.

            I experienced the United Kingdom immigration “services,” back during the Obama years, following the invasions, bombings and occupation of Middle Eastern countries by the Western World.  After a fight with my long-distance girlfriend whom I had traveled to visit, I took a flight from Venice back to England, where I hoped to catch a flight back to the states or to try to work things out with her.  She obviously realized I hadn’t boarded the plane from Venice to Rome with her, and she would have a choice to finish the vacation without me, or to come back to England.  But the flight from Venice back to England experienced a great deal of turbulence after a long delay on the runway, due to a sudden need for “repairs” to the plane.  The turbulence got so bad, the crew thought we might crash, and consequently loaded us up with wine, compliments of the airline.  If someone offers me free booze, I’m drinking it.  I stumbled into customs, drunk.  They searched my bag (thanks Bush and Cameron), and found my left-wing and anti-war literature, A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn being an example.  More importantly, they found some poetry I had written on the topic of how I felt the UK treated Muslims and the overtly racist attitudes I saw directed by English citizens toward Islamic immigrants.  I didn’t appreciate or approve of the often negative references to Pakistani immigrants as “Packies.”  They detained me and transported me throughout the network of government-only roads which are attached to major airports.  I was placed in a barred vehicle with illegal English immigrants from Pakistan and Afghanistan, with the exception of one man who was from Ghana, practically the only Christian I met in the system.  The vast majority of the detainees were from Pakistan and Afghanistan (two countries belonging to one region the natives refer to as Pashtunistan, a major bombing site for American and Western military power) and were Muslim.  I interviewed several of the men who could speak English, and was informed of horrible, demeaning living conditions (cameras in the bathrooms being an example) which existed in some of the concentration-camp styled detention centers I was lucky enough to not be placed in, but only viewed from the outside, their high fences, security gates, sectioned off housing and barbed wire eerily bringing anecdotes of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia to mind.  When it comes to capturing people, rounding them up based on their ethnicity or place of birth alone, imprisoning them, and controlling their ability to freely move, I’m not sure World War II ever truly ended.  In terms of the concentration camp approach to dealing with foreigners, immigrants, and those who are kidnapped and incarcerated by the state without even committing a crime and treated like property of the state, or perhaps its trash, World War II in my mind started back when the British invented the first concentration camp.  The war’s concentration camp legacy still exists today in the design and use of immigration detention/deportation centers.

            I was deported back to America after several days, long enough for me to get the idea these sadistic motherfuckers wanted me to understand:  “If you love the Packies so much, we’re going to treat you like one.”  And this hateful, racist attitude was manifesting into rhetoric and policy in Europe, and it was coming to the United States.  Now it’s arrived, and liberals seem to be thrown for a loop over it.  I had been on the fence about immigration before I was detained, dragged through the immigration system, and deported.  Immigration policy as it currently exists is antithetical to what the concept of human rights is supposed to be all about.  The only moral position is a policy of open-borders.

            What the right-wingers and nationalists have never had to defend is the existence of the immigration system itself, and that probably has a lot to do with leftists continuing to use and keep that system while in power, in office.  The system is inhumane.  The nationalists likewise never had to explain what the origin of Muslim immigration was.  Mexican immigration was never explained to the American worker.  I listened to a lot of Rage Against the Machine growing up, aside from developing a background in Geo-politics, or International Relations.  According to Zach de la Rocha (who quit Rage after speaking at the United Nations and realizing his political, or rather humanitarian goals were not achievable through music), immigration from the Third World to the First World is a result mainly of Western exploitation of the Third World, one of those mechanisms for exploitation being imperialism.  You stick your nose where you don’t belong, you try to control and profit from the natural resources of the Third World, you bomb the shit out of nations whose leaders don’t comply with selling out their people, or at least their own political power, you’re going to get scores of thousands of immigrants coming to the shores of the First World.  If you give a people a choice of: move, or get bombed or die starving or live in poverty, a portion of the people will move.  Ron Paul explained to a crowd of Republicans in a Republican primary debate years ago that the CIA has referred to the so-called “phenomenon” of something they call “Blowback.”  This is the concept I’m highlighting here – Blowback.  But the average liberal didn’t listen to the obscure congressman from Texas.  Liberals around the world and Democrats in the United States generally do not have an understanding of this dynamic of Blowback, and are unaware of (or are willing to endorse while their side is in office) the exploitation and/or obliteration of the Third World.  Where I differ from, or rather expand upon Paul’s official position on the matter is I extend the logic from “Imperialism leads to terrorist attacks” to “Imperialism leads to not only acts of terror, but to immigration.”

            The concept of borders is unethical and bombing and sanctioning of foreign people is wrong.  If the left continues to support politicians like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton who are complicit in and endorse the existence of aggressive wars against foreigners and the existence of the immigration system itself, they cannot win elections consistently and create any meaningful, positive change in the world.  They will continue to lose elections and struggle to improve the nation because of the contradictions in their own belief system and actions.

            What liberals are missing is that they are playing into the nationalists’ hands.  They are supporting the idea of a wall being built between Mexico and the United States by endorsing the concept that the United States and Mexico should have a border and an immigration system at all, without seeing the contradiction in their belief systems.  The apparent “strength” of Trump and the anti-immigration crowd’s arguments are all based on the following argument: Nations exist objectively speaking, they are real-world entities and not abstractions (I would argue vague abstractions like God, used as a mechanism to create a religion, one now referred to by many anarchists as “Statism”).  If these nations have an obligation to protect their “own” people (as has been commonly assumed since the Magna Carta), and uphold their “own” people’s, or citizens’ rights, then it must be recognized that some nations are “better” than others, with the propaganda of America being a great, if not the greatest nation on earth in the back of the brainwashed minds of the average American Public School student.  If America is a “great” nation, of course foreigners would want to immigrate, to migrate to American soil, either for opportunities lacking in their own countries (which to the average, dumbed-down liberal has nothing to do with Western Imperialism), or perhaps due to some innate jealousy that drives them to travel across the world in some sort of Holy War, or Jihad.  According to the logic, these foreigners therefore threaten the “rights” (advantage) of the citizens of “great” countries like America, which creates a need for something like an immigration detention and deportation system.  It’s been Democrats refusing to embrace or accept the truth which prevents them from winning arguments with nationalists, right-wingers, Republicans, neo-Nazis and neo-fascists, that has led to this “need” for liberals to punch right-wingers in the streets, and the truth is this: the concept of a border itself is incompatible with humanitarianism.