Excessive Immigration

by Winston C Banks

  Persecution of the Jews has a very long history and was already ripe for deadly exploitation in Hitler’s Germany. We have eye witness, documentary and photographic evidence of what took place at various Holocaust sites, and subsequent pursuits of war criminals and trials have established guilt and dispensed due punishments. Nazi theft, not only of Jewish assets but from occupied countries, included gold, money, artworks, jewellery, and other valuables amounting to unknown millions, much of it hidden or transferred to Swiss and Portugese banks (although see Finkelstein, 2003). While some was recovered and returned to the original owners, some was not. Germany accepted liability for mass murder and suffering, as well as slave and forced labour in its some of its industries, and paid significant amounts in compensation. This was only decades after financial reparations following the first world war. Money was paid to Israel and also to some individual Holocaust survivors. And of course Germany surrendered territory. In all, the German people paid a high price for its Nazi war crimes, and continues to experience shame and arguably to allow in hundreds of thousands of immigrants by way of unofficial atonement — ethnomasochistic reparations. But there is no direct relationship between money and suffering. Germany can attempt to make financial restitution and offer apologies (as Angela Merkel did in her 2008 Knesset speech). Jewish organisations can and do push for memorials and education for the sake of prevention of future genocides. But nothing can bring back the dead, or address the transgenerational suffering involved, which includes instances of post-traumatic stress, depression and suicide. A certain amount of satisfaction can be effected in the domains of penitence, justice, and compensation, but eternal guilt and recrimination is neither possible nor healthy (Finkelstein, 2003). Germans born today cannot be expected to carry everlasting guilt for the Holocaust; sadness and awareness, perhaps, but not guilt or responsibility.

  The events of the Holocaust are relatively close to us in time, having ended physically in 1945, only 73 years ago. Some individuals still have memories, or second-hand memories. Historical genocidal anti-Semitism is well established and addressed. Not so accessible are the events and effects of slavery during the colonial era. Unravelling the motives, culpabilities and complexities of historical events is daunting. Some of those religious refugees migrating to the New World in the late 16th and early 17th centuries formed the basis of expansion which trammelled on the rights of indigenous Americans, slaughtering many in the process. Reparations for this group have been discussed but some are ambivalent about financial claims and seek instead the return of their stolen, sacred lands (Wildcat, 2014). Perhaps this should also prompt us to wonder about reparations for the persecution experienced by the original religious settlers. We then run into the notion of a queue for historical reparations, with questions about priorities, logistics, and consequences. I will come back to these points soon.

  The British Empire spans the period from the late 16th and early 17th century to 1997 (if one takes the relinquishment of Hong Kong as its formal end point), but most secessions occurred between 1947 to the 1980s. The Empire began in the Americas, spread to Australasia in 1770, expanded in Asia and the Middle East from 1799, peaking in India in 1858. The West African slave trade by the British had begun in the mid-1600s and ended in abolition in 1807. An estimated 3.5 million slaves were shipped across the Atlantic to work on sugar plantations, and between 12% to 25% may have died in transit. The slave trade resulted in the population of the Caribbean islands becoming predominantly black African heritage. It also boosted the British economy, particularly in the cities of Bristol and Liverpool. Caribbean independence began in 1961 and continued into the 1980s. The case for reparations is built on the kidnapping of Africans, their enforced labour, harsh treatment including beatings and killing, rape, dehumanisation, profiteering from their work, and setting back the development of Africa and the Caribbean countries. (I am focusing here on the British element, not the American, the USA facing quite a different set of historical, demographic and race-relations problems.)

  The vast majority of living Britons did not witness these events or benefit from them, except perhaps in peripheral ways. Merchant banks profited from the trade in sugar, coffee, tobacco, cotton and other goods, and income flowed through the industrial revolution into, for example, Barclays Bank, Lloyds, Oxford University, Lancashire cotton manufacturing, and grand aristocratic estates. On ending slavery, the British government agreed to compensate slave owners, not slaves or their families. The wealth accumulated through slavery and by receiving institutions is said to still benefit many British people today. Eric Williams wrote a classic text on the link between capitalism and slavery, which still fuels today’s demands for reparations (Solow & Engerman, 2010). Between 1999 and 2007 Liverpool City Council, Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone made official apologies for the British slave trade, Livingstone explicitly suggesting that the City of London owed much of its wealth to it. So, a case does exist in principle for the abused rights of Africans in the 17th to 19th centuries and the myriad consequences to be addressed. But it is extremely problematic.

  In 1999 an unsuccessful demand was made for $777 trillion (plus annual interest) to Africa to compensate for 400 years of slavery in the USA. This was about 62 times the GDP of the USA, showed no detailed accounting, and hence was completely unrealistic. In 2004 a class action was brought against Lloyds of London for involvement in the slave trade, and complicity in genocide, but it failed. Another case in 2004 sought reparations of £72.5 billion and the means to be resettled in Africa, which also failed. Other estimates lie in the range of $5.9 trillion to $14.2 trillion (Andrews, 2017). We can infer from these, however, that the sums are arbitrary, huge, and the demands unlikely ever to be met. How such monies would be distributed is also an issue, as well as the unresolved question of different views among African-heritage claimants as to repatriation to Africa. The spectre of Garveyism and the Liberian promised land, paralleling Israel, recurs. For a utopian reparations fundamentalist like Andrews, compensation is a moral imperative, even if ‘there would be stark economic consequences’ (for the West). Herein lies the rub, that any such agreement would likely bankrupt Britain and much of the West, leading to an impoverished life for everyone. There are also no good grounds for expecting African or African heritage recipients individually or collectively to use such (fantasy) monies constructively: everyone would be a loser. There is probably some justice in demanding that African debts be cancelled but no guarantee at all that it would lead to a rapidly improving Africa. Indeed, even after historic debt cancellations, debts rise gain (JDC, 2015).

  Historical guilt and the demand for reparations bring up many further problems. It conjures up the can of worms of an infinite regress of claims, all clamouring to be prioritised. We have not looked at the case for compensation for non-black slaves, for modern slavery, for serfs under feudalism, for millions brutalised by poor working conditions under capitalism, for women performing unpaid domestic tasks for centuries, or for ordinary citizens deemed to be ‘wage slaves’ and/or dying from occupation-related illnesses. (Dottridge [2017] is, incidentally, against using the term ‘modern slavery’, arguing that it trivialises transatlantic black slavery, and he prefers ‘extreme exploitation’.) We have not factored in the comparative life chances of Africans versus those African heritage people living in infinitely superior conditions in Western countries, nor the views of some Africans that British rule was ‘relatively benign’ and better than postcolonial conditions. Nor have we looked at disparities between poor, middle class, and rich blacks.

  From any fantasy reparations, deductions would have to be made for welfare payments, affirmative actions, and so on. A case can also be made that for all their faults, the Western Enlightenment, industrial revolution, and capitalism have benefited most people and will continue to do so. The reparations argument is not the same case as claims about alleged racism, and it seems possible that radical blacks would seek compensation for perceived discrimination, instituti
onal prejudice and police violence, in an endless chain of future grievance claims. The case for reparations faces a dizzying array of variables. Unlike the Holocaust claims, which have some concrete fiscal and temporal parameters, the end of the transatlantic slave trade is now 200 years away. Not all blacks agree with the anti-capitalist analysis of the radical reparations lobby. Not all blacks are anti-capitalists or suffering materially in the USA, the UK or other Western nations. The black billionaire Oprah Winfrey is on record as stating that slavery is often used as an excuse (for indolence or dependency), and only 59% of black Americans believe that descendants of slaves deserve reparations (Carnell, 2016). Some whites would agree, as I would, that morally and in principle the slave trade was terrible, something is amiss, and it should be recognised as a human rights issue. But in practice it is too long ago, the cure might well be worse than the disease, and the complexities of calculation, distribution and consequences are too great ever to be realistically implemented (Howard-Hassmann, 2011). Nevertheless, it would not be surprising to see at some future point demands for reparations for Africans forced to flee their homelands by climate change created by Western capitalism.

  Alliances have switched as necessary throughout history, and US political and military manoeuvring around the world is often a source of grievance. US-Saudi relations is just one of these, in which the self-styled champion of democracy maintains trade and diplomatic advantages with an authoritarian regime known for its disregard of modern human rights. Anti-American and more generally anti-Western sentiment is fuelled by such perceived hypocrisies. Interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have stirred resentment among Muslims, and the West’s oil interests are deeply mistrusted. The so-called war on terror instigated by the USA after 9/11 and continuing from Al Qaeda through to ISIS is seen as justified and necessary by many in the West but as arrogant meddling, destroying countless innocent Muslim lives, by those affected. But resentment against the West also traverses the Crusades, the era of colonialism, the end of the Ottoman caliphate, loss of Palestine, and the Gulf Wars. Christendom, followed by godless Western capitalism, seems to have triggered the Islamist backlash (Chtatou, 2017). Some frame this as a sense of humiliation and emasculation across the Muslim world. Add together many years of resentment, relative powerlessness, the most radical interpretation of the Quran, and the alienation experienced by many young Muslims living in the West, and the outcome is today’s perilous mix of European Muslims’ separatism, terrorism, so-called Islamophobia, and impasse. Recent terrorist atrocities committed by ISIS are always celebrated by them but rarely if ever given a clear rationale.

  Muslims do not appear to be demanding reparations for anything, unless it is the return of land or cessation of Western interference. What they do seem to be calling for above all is respect for their religious and human rights. Some in the West are willing to grant this, superficially at least. Western-resident Muslims can dress traditionally (some laws in France and Germany not withstanding), speak Arabic, build their own madrasas and mosques, or even quietly practise polygamy. Islamist terrorist acts have made a dent in the culture of Western freedom of speech. Muslims are free to believe in their religious canon and in this sense they are ‘respected’ and not persecuted. But modern Western civilisation is built on secular reason, science and technology, capitalism, and individual liberty, with religion increasingly taking a back seat. Arguably there can be no reconciliation of these values with traditional Islam, and it is just a matter of time before a major clash arises. The terms Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry are not serviceable in the long-term when these two belief structures are diametrically opposed. False respect cannot endure. Ultimately, the mightier of the two must win, with moderate Islam fading into Western liberalism or the latter surrendering to medieval religious values that Islamic supremacy portrays as eternal correctness.

  Western military interventions in the Muslim world are at least partly motivated by humanitarian concerns, they have certainly caused much destruction and death by way of collateral damage, but they are too recent to evaluate in terms of possible war crimes and reparations. It is almost certainly the case anyway that radical Islam needs no external or circumstantial stimulus to provoke its wrath; unlike Judaism or Buddhism, it is an aggressively proselytising religion. Although in the UK some Muslims claim discrimination holds them back (Stevenson, et al., 2017), some cry Islamophobia, and some live in the conflict zone between British and sharia law and the traditional customs of their countries of origin, few seriously call attention to perceived injustices in the way African-Caribbeans do. What Muslims have in common with many other anti-Westerners is the belief that the West (or Babylon, or occidentalism, as some see us) is a banal, godless, soulless, and sinful civilisation. ‘The West is like being an idiot savant, mentally defective but with a gift for making arithmetic calculations’ (Buruma & Margalit, 2004). This chimes with some Afrocentric views (not to mention Cultural Marxist doctrines) that claim to value feelings, spirituality and religious rights above material and scientific progress. Paradoxically, the extremist position of ISIS is that human civilisation can justifiably be razed to the ground and individuals dispensed with in order to restore divine rule. ISIS uses might to trump the West’s slide into so-called komfortismus, or addiction to meaningless safe existence. We in the West can cry out about human rights, civil and religious rights, and some Islamists will also exploit these rights in the service of undermining their Western hosts and advancing the ummah. Ultimately Islam is progressing not by argument or appeal to human notions of fairness and reparation but to Quranic dogma, and action and procreation.

  No naïve doctrine of human rights can persuade Islamists that they should treat you kindly. Western reason and science has made enormous strides and can continue to do so, but cultural appeasement will have no impact on radical Islam at all. Unfortunately, tragically, no amount of reason, diplomacy, or belief in the co-existence of incompatible worldviews can break the impasse. Indeed, there is no impasse as such, since the forces of the African reparations movement, Islamic jihad, EU expansionism, Cultural Marxism and economic globalisation (and of course others) continue to erode Western civilisation. Anti-Western hybrid ‘warfare’ happily employs might (power or force) alongside propaganda and exploitation of the useful idiocies of human rights legislation. I am absolutely not advocating abandonment of human rights but suggesting (a) we should be highly aware of the cynical lobbying, funding and manipulation of human rights laws that favour certain groups; and (b) we should note the readiness of opponents to use power deviously or brutally while claiming to respect others’ rights. Cultural Marxism has seriously weakened Western institutions. In the name of democratic rights and liberalism, male values, heteronormativity, whiteness, rationality and science have all been undermined by SJWs’ relentless propaganda. Mayer (2016) explains this in terms of deliberate cultural subversion by a programme of demoralisation. Rationality exposes the glaring mismatch between harsh Islamic opposition to women’s freedom, the rights of gays and atheists, for example, but that doesn’t stop the PC juggernaut from pumping out its rights-entranced Islamophobia trope. I am also not proposing that any explicit conspiracy exists to overthrow the West: rather, a concatenation of trends and events points to the phenomenon of anti-Westernism.

  One of the main weapons used is emasculation by propaganda, inducing an attitude of appeasement, self-doubt and cultural suicide (Braun, 1990; Koch & Smith, 2006). Defence of one’s homeland and traditional values, and cultivation of strong leadership — these are trashed by the ‘might’ of the relentless CM insult machine as fascism or neo-Nazism, bigotry, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, fortress Europe, little England, isolationism, patriarchy and the like. The understandable hypervigilance of the ‘never again’ movement explains some of this onslaught (Bray, 2017). Sympathy for refugees and migrants from poorer parts of the world is due, but too many fail to acknowledge that excessive immigration predictably degrades receiving
countries’ standards of living and leads to risky levels of social turmoil. We cannot accommodate the world’s poor, we cannot bail them all out, and any further appeasement will end in self-destruction.

  On the UK’s specific stand on human rights, the 1998 Human Rights Act, largely echoing the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, sets out many necessary but also commonsense principles. These make explicit the fundamentals of a civilised and democratic society. Of particular interest for my argument is the HRA’s Article 9 on freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and Article 10 on freedom of expression. The freedom to manifest your religion is, however, deeply problematic, and is likely to be exploited more by some religious proponents than others. Freedom of thought is also problematic, insofar as many people do not know how to think critically and independently, and some religions dissuade adherents from free thought, even to the point of declaring sinful those thoughts that undermine faith. Freedom of expression is a vital aspect of a democratic society, but the Act qualifies this to such an extent as to undermine it. This is an extremely slippery area since ‘protection of the rights of others’ by being ‘subject to conditions’ subtracts from the scope of free expression. So-called hate speech crimes, for example, are worryingly loose in their potential for being invoked by different individual perceptions of what hate is. ‘A hate incident is any incident which the victim, or anyone else, thinks is based on someone’s prejudice towards them’ according to the UK government’s CPS website. This is a definitionally problematic subject, already being extensively policed by organisations and their websites, including that of the Council of Europe.