Separation Anxiety (2)

The psychological damage, the demoralisation, visited upon great sections of the Greek population by the destruction of the old kinship-based tribal system, dealt with in the first part of this article last week, was a consequence of a deliberate decision of the Greek leadership of the time.  It involved forcing people out of social arrangements they had for generations grown up in and which were second nature to them.

But there were and are different ways of achieving the same ends.  One way would be through the massive dilution of the native population through mass immigration.  Indeed it was this that primarily led—though it is seldom admitted—to the Brexit referendum being carried in Britain in 2016.  Ordinary people of a certain age had over a period of time began to feel themselves increasingly strangers in what used to be their local surroundings.

Like people sheltering from a flood, they looked out across a drowned landscape where the everyday symbols of community were gradually being swallowed by change.  Rather than those they shared a familiar culture with, they found themselves living increasingly side by side with people with whom they had little in common, other than in the abstract sense of being human beings.

Which is not to say, of course, of course that nations or cultures need be exclusive.  Nations have rubbed along side by side for thousands of years, exchanging molecules. Rather like the guard in Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman who muses philosophically on the notion that he may be turning into his bike and his bike turning into him as a result of ongoing friction between him and the saddle.

But what seems to be going on nowadays is on a totally different scale.  Without any explicit by your leave, and not as a result of armed invasion or conquest, the world would now seem to be free range for anybody who wants to travel, especially to the extent that they can concoct a sympathetic backstory.  And not alone to travel, but to be fed, clothed and housed as a matter of right.

The obvious effect of such a policy is not to balance development or living standards internationally, but rather to fuel a cavalry charge from the impoverished world (not to mention the flood of opportunists passing as poor) to the relatively advanced world, which, like connecting the positive and negative terminals of a battery, can only have the effect of reducing every place to a similar common level of poverty.

The UN Human Rights Commission has published, in its Handbook for Parliamentarians No. 24, a schedule of reasons it sees as driving migration, which just as easily might be seen as a tick-off list for would-be migrants to follow.

‘Migration today is motivated by a range of economic, political and social factors.  Migrants may leave their country of origin because of conflict, widespread violations of human rights and other reasons threatening life and safety.  Many are compelled by the absence of decent work to seek employment elsewhere.  They may also migrate to join family members already established abroad . . . As globalization expands the global circulation of capital, goods, services and technology, migration responds to growing demand for skills and labour in destination countries.  These factors along with aging populations and declining workforces in high-income countries increase international migration, including mobility of labour and skills.’

The one thing that you do not find in any of this—or if it exists it is certainly not easy to find— is a schedule of the rights of indigenous populations in the face of serious migration.  The philosophy would seem primarily to be one of just roll over and play dead.  No preliminary negotiation or consultation.  No worry about consequences.  Nothing.

What we have here is the result of ivory-tower thinking by ivory-tower elites, used to deliberating in purely globalist terms, who are never themselves likely to come face-to-face with the knock-on damage arising from their actions, such as having to scuffle around in a saturated rental market to try and find somewhere to live.

Not to mention the ongoing psychological damage rising from the ruthless internal reconfiguration of societies going on to make them fit to accommodate our ‘welcome diversity’.

Not the other way around, of course.

More later . . .