Forget Nazis, Britain’s cruel refugee plan mimics its own history
JVL Introduction
In the light of the furore surrounding Gary Lineker’s remarkably moderate statement, that the language surrounding the government’s asylum policy was redolent of Germany in the thirties, Priyamvada Gopal points out that we don’t need to stray so far.
There is history of white supremacy, racial terror and ethnic cleansing closer at hand: it lies on our doorstep, in Britain’s imperial past.
One example from Gopal:
“Enslavement literally turned human beings into cargo while indenture ripped many desperate people from homelands in Asia and deposited them to work on British plantations for pitiable wages. These extraordinary renditions took place on large ships rather than the small boats decried by Sunak and his ministers but the dehumanising of people on the high seas is not new to Britain. The dismissive attitude to desperate people on inflatable dinghies braving danger to get to British shores is faintly evocative of the callous spirit of those ship captains who threw enslaved people overboard in order to be able to claim merchandise insurance…”
This article was originally published by Al Jazeera on Wed 15 Mar 2023. Read the original here.
Forget Nazis, Britain’s cruel refugee plan mimics its own history
Britain has historically been more a refugee-making country than a refugee-taking one. It refuses to confront that truth.
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It’s beyond irony that two East Asians are fronting this. Man hands on misery to man, I guess. The colonisers would be thrilled to see how well their bigotry has embedded in the descendants of people whose ancestors may well have been harmed by it in the past. That they are now leading the charge to push back …
Also interesting would be to look at the response of Britain to the idea of refugees arriving from Germany. We remember now the Kindertransport and so on, but I think there would have been many examples of turning refugees away, using exactly the language that Braverman et all are using.
The issues raised in this article relate to individual identity and to group identity. This was critical in Apartheid South Africa, when the Afrikaans settlers and their descendants would say: “We are being swamped”. It takes a lot of courage and determination to scrap your group and build a new one with new people.
What the British Empire was doing has similarities with what many countries have done in history and comparative degrees of wickedness are hard to determine. It is facile to say: “I, or my country, may have done this in the past, but look what your lot has done”, because that does not solve any problems.
Central Asia has had a fair share of genocides in the past, which are continuing, with the sanctity of life not a high priority. One can think of the caste system in India and ask how long that will last.
Competition amongst human beings is an ongoing business. I fear that, without huge restraint (?imposed by whom), the world is heading towards disaster.
Two things that enormously inspired Hitler:
The British Empire
The treatment meted out to native Americans by colonial settlers.
Excellent article. She says what we think. However she’s omitted the atrocities to Australia and New Zealand’s indigenous people and probably others…the story continues.