If You Think Like John Kerry That Borders Make a Nation, You’re a Fool: Here’s Why
Refugees and migrants, especially from Africa, deserve far better than platitudes from Western politicians
If there is anything stupider than an American fascist barbarian, it’s an enabling liberal Democrat, who is basically a Republican in a sheep outfit.
Exhibit A: John Kerry, former U.S. secretary of state, another dumb person masquerading as a smart person.
“Trump was right,” Kerry argued in an interview for the BBC, claiming, “The first thing any president should say — or anybody in public life — is without a border protected, you don’t have a nation.”
But this is nonsense, and I know it’s nonsense because I’ve lived for decades next to what has been the longest, largely undefended border in the world. If I wanted to, I could get out of a car in the middle of nowhere in my native province of Manitoba and simply walk across a field, and I could do it in other provinces, too.
Canada did not crumble into angst and dust back during Trump’s first term when a couple of desperate refugees braved freezing temperatures and trekked into a nowhere spot in Manitoba. And the pair came north because they justifiably feared that the U.S. would send them back to Ghana.
There is real ugliness packed into Kerry’s statement that a nation doesn’t exist without borders. It works on the inherent logic that a substantial population of the world is not welcome in America. Not a few, not a handful — a lot. Otherwise, why would you need all the guns and fences and soldiers? And you know… that dumbass wall that never got finished and never worked anyway.
It’s a petty, spiteful philosophy that presumes a hierarchy of human beings who must prove their worth and meet arbitrary standards.
It’s bad enough that we have the ridiculous contradiction in Canada, Britain, France and the rest of the “developed world,” that you can make a human being whenever you please — just go ahead, forget the birth control — and they get to enjoy the so-called “rights,” but heaven help you if you were born elsewhere and want to come in.
No, in the West, you must “earn” your way through the door. I have never understood this. Especially as it’s been proved again and again that the system is rigged in the UK and in the rest of Europe to keep out Africans and Asians. As I explored in a chapter of my book, The Gifts of Africa, they can be barred for even trying to visit for conferences or to perform their functions as diplomats! Yet this asinine rationale of “earning your way” remains popular.
It is a sign of the times that this mean-spiritedness has infected the Canadian mindset, which used to enjoy the conceit that we were somehow “better” than our southern neighbors. Not anymore. Now you have douchebags from New Zealand who have stuck around long enough to appropriate our perspective. Note the final paragraph in his tweet:
I wait for McCaffrey’s defenders (if he has any) to explain to the rest of us what “value” he’s created through his right-wing think tank. Surely, someone who wants to bar people from entering the country simply on suspicion of how they might vote in the future (!) deserves a visit from the RCMP for inciting extremism and fascism. Surely, that deserves deportation. But I won’t hold my breath as the Mounties seem to have their hands full lately with just going after the dangerous nut-jobs in our armed forces.
Just as the propaganda lies to defend capitalism look increasingly ridiculous, so we are living in an era where the nation state looks more and more obsolete. This is where I grumble like an old man that if only people would read…! They would learn that Kerry’s precious nation state is a relatively “new” political construct. There was no unified Italy or Germany or Greece before the 19th century. And yet there were nations. Fancy that. Yes, there were border outposts and traffic flows in and out of places, but even the passport as we know it today was mainly a post-World War One document, often only obtainable by the very rich and privileged.
If anyone in the 18th or 19th century had heard John Kerry’s words of “no nation without a protected border,” they would have laughed in your face. They knew that keeping a national border perpetually closed was impossible, and most of the time, natural features like a river or a mountain range served as the obvious demarcations and means of defense. During the Spanish Civil War, international volunteers wanting to fight Franco’s fascists sometimes lost their lives trying to cross from France into Spain through treacherous passes of the Pyrenees.
To Westerners of the past three centuries, as it should be to us, a nation didn’t exist because a government and its army said it did. It existed first as a cultural abstraction and then later in Europe with the Enlightenment, as a political entity held together by shared and common values.
More importantly, today’s nations aren’t in jeopardy from desperate migrants. Their values are being eroded by mega-corporations and billionaires who can set up shop where they like, live where they like, while the rest of us have to live by completely different laws.
But for some time now, as many of us have recognized, there are virtually no real “laws,” period. Only rules that can be changed on the whims of oligarchs and grey men in bureaucratic offices. Trump has pulled the curtain off the charade with his talk of deporting natural citizens, and with the thugs for his Gestapo ICE snatching people off the street who have the legal right to study and live in the U.S.
This is why I argue that we have entered a new age of spite. Justin Trudeau, like many a Liberal whether it’s big L or small l, basked for a while in the undeserved reputation that he was a progressive — and then in his final days as Canada’s prime minister, he ushered in restrictions on international students. This amounted to shooting post-secondary institutions in the leg and telling the world we don’t want to welcome talented newcomers.
But he’s not alone. His replacement, Mark Carney, has caved to Trump over border security, and as I draft this, Britain’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron, grinning like wolves, have congratulated themselves on a new immigration policy. No surprise, it’s meant as a deterrent to migration and won’t do squat for those desperate to find asylum. As Al Jazeera has reported, “The deal is aimed at deterring migrants from making dangerous trips across the English Channel from France to the UK in small boats.”
This wasn’t done because of touching concern for migrants at the mercy of smugglers. It’s a deal to keep brown people out of Britain.
The pitch of “one in, one out,” is disingenuous on its face. It’ll work on the lie that “for each migrant France takes back, the UK will grant asylum to one migrant from France who can prove a family connection to the UK.”
I will be very curious to see in a year how many migrants were actually let in versus the number of those shipped back to France.
That’s because I know many anxious Ethiopians of ethnic Amhara descent, fleeing the ethnic cleansing of Abiy Ahmed’s government, who don’t necessarily have family ties to Britain or France or Canada. Yet they still need safe harbor. What are they supposed to do if they don’t have a cousin in Nottingham or Vancouver?
The reason why so many migrants risk the dangerous trip across the Channel is because Britain, France and the rest of Europe have rigged the game to make it harder for them to use legal avenues.
It is only recently that I got word that after much lobbying and legal wrangling, activist Yeshihareg Bekele has been allowed to stay in Norway for the time being.
What is “Samuel,” whose case I recently profiled, supposed to do as his student visa expires in Geneva?
What can I tell the steady tide of Amhara refugees who hope to come into Canada?
I can think of no more disgusting hypocrisy than the Westerner (usually a liberal) who sneers at the injustices and slaughter in Ethiopia or the Kenyan police using whips and teargas against protesters… but who insist Africans can’t move to their country.
Such critics pass by the tents of refugees in the public parks and beneath the overpasses in Paris, London, or Toronto, and they say, Well, we’ve got to tighten up immigration! We can’t have this! But the reason we have these tent towns is not because the migrants are coming, it’s because we’ve failed them. We can’t be bothered to provide them with anything beyond the bare minimums for shelter, food, income, etc, and even those pathetic offerings are often temporary.
So, no, I don’t give a festering, bleeding, suppurating damn about your nation that needs to be “protected.” I want people protected from you.
I do not recognize any nation’s right to scoop up those it deems inconvenient and dump them in a gulag, whether it’s one surrounded by alligators in Florida or built like some grotesque bunker in El Salvador or the nasty complexes that Europe has arranged in sinister deals with Rwanda and countries in north Africa.
It is a contemptible premise that simply for the “crime” of trying to escape persecution, attempted murder, rape, and poverty that you can be branded a criminal and tossed into a cage. These cages are the new and improved “debtor’s prisons” that were once the nightmares of Victorian England. Only the debt today is collectively ours, because we have allowed the law to become a farce as a concept, and we treat the essential value of compassion as some joke that’s now in bad taste, given the times.
I refuse to accept this.
It should be the right of any person, whatever their skin color, whatever their faith or culture, to move freely in this world and to find a home where they want. Freedom of movement has been warped and reduced to a privilege for the well-off few instead of a basic right that should be accessible to every human being.
And I can’t wait for someone to get the brave but doomed idea to get organized, grab a few vehicles and storm one of these migrant prisons like a modern Bastille to try to free its inmates. In a world of insane laws where the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses get finger-printed, photographed and shackled, such a revolutionary effort might be bound to fail, but it would still be heroic.
