When our consciences are pricked by our ‘pull the shutters down’ response to population movements resulting from famine, war, natural disaster or those pesky migrants who just want to better themselves and build a better life for their children (AKA economic migrants…well at least the poor ones), it’s because we want to believe we’re better than we are.
In fact the 21st century response is pretty well the same as earlier ones. The historic response to large scale population movements has usually been violence and repression springing from fear and suspicion of difference, of ‘the other’, whether it be religion, colour, language or anything else we can spot.
There have been, and still are, exceptions of course, many at the level of individual conscience and action and some on a larger scale. In the UK we still remember the kinder transport which brought 10,000 Jewish children to the UK before the outbreak of war, a magnificent gesture in the context of the times and by comparison with other countries. Perhaps we should not be surprised though that some of the children were ill-treated and exploited when they came – anti-semitism was not unique to Germany or, come to that, the 20th century (see https://tiredandemotional.org.uk/us-and-them).
However, despite separation, alienation, the internment of many as enemy aliens and all the rest, the 10,000 were profoundly grateful to the UK. Of course we didn’t accept 10,000 sets of parents, many of whom consequently endured and then died in the Shoah.
Attitudes and policies to incomers can shift very quickly, particularly if fires are stoked by right wing politicians and media. France in the 1930s had a huge number of foreign workers and families. The First War had taken a huge toll of adult males1. By 1934 a combination of France’s need for labour, repression and anti-semitism in eastern Europe, and the rise of Nazism in Germany and Austria had brought over three million foreign workers to France.
In 1939 the Spanish Civil War ended in Republican defeat. Approaching 340,000 refugees crossed the Pyrenees into France2. Most of them walked! It’s been described as ‘the greatest movement of people in this part of Europe since the expulsion of Arabs and Jews from Spain in 1492′3.
The French response was punitive. Refugees were herded into concentration camps, where conditions were brutal. The camps also came in useful pre-war when communists and anti-Nazi Germans living in France were detained.
French citizenship, had been granted freely under 1927 legislation until the inevitable backlash following defeat in 1940. Following the Franco-German armistice the same camps and new ones held Jews, Gypsies and dissidents. The new Vichy regime ‘withdrew’ citizenship from 15,000 foreigners, including 6,000 Jews. Foreign Jews were rounded up, detained and sent to German forced labour or extermination camps by the Vichy regime long before the German authorities occupied and ‘governed’ Vichy.
When things get tough most of us look for difference not common cause.
Here’s another example to depress us all:
In 1947 Indian independence involved partition and massive population exchanges occurred between the two newly formed states.
Once the lines were established, about 14.5 million people crossed the borders to what they hoped was the relative safety of religious majority. 6.5 million Muslims moved from India to West Pakistan, and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs moved from West Pakistan to India. 2.6 million moved from East Pakistan to India and 0.7 million moved from India to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh. The newly formed governments were completely unequipped to deal with migrations of such staggering magnitude, and massive violence and slaughter occurred on both sides of the border. Estimates of the number of deaths vary, with low estimates at 200,000 and high estimates at 2,000,0004.
A crowd of Muslims at the Old Fort (Purana Qila) in Delhi, which had been converted into a vast camp for Muslim refugees waiting to be transported to Pakistan. Manchester Guardian, 27 September 1947.
It’s not always the migrants who suffer the most though. If the numbers are right migrants can do pretty well and it’s the indigenous population that gets screwed, or, more accurately, killed. Have a look at: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/358040.Rivers_of_Blood_Rivers_of_Gold, or
https://tiredandemotional.org.uk/what-a-piece-of-work-is-man-2
In the 19th century, over 50 million people left Europe for the Americas. The local populations or tribes in North America, Brazil, and Argentina were usually outnumbered and overwhelmed by the settlers. There were a few exceptions when ‘the white man’s’ arrogance and conceit gave a whole new meaning to tragic hubris – Isandlwana in South Africa and the Big Horn in the United States spring to mind. In the US national myths such as the plucky pioneer families trekking to the promised land and fighting off primitive savages, served to justify the near extermination of native Americans and the ruthless exploitation of natural resources by east-coast corporations. Pastoral people were herded onto reservations because they were in the way and there was
‘gold in them thar (sacred) hills’.
If they wouldn’t go or left again because they faced starvation, they were termed hostiles and hunted down by frequently drunken ambassadors of western and Western civilisation like Custer’s Seventh cavalry5. The 7th attempted to surprise and destroy what seemed to be a sizeable (and peaceful) settlement and, not realising it continued out of sight round the river bend, blundered into the largest native American camp ever seen and were annihilated.
The 7th weren’t seasoned ‘Indian fighters’ – 40% of the 7th were born outside the US6. Places like England, Ireland, Italy, or Germany. Most of the rest had grown up east of the Mississippi. They looked good though. Horses were allocated to troops on the basis of colour so that they looked the part when they rode out and generally, though not in this case, Custer took the band along to play as the 7th charged.
Nowadays it’s fashionable again to focus on difference, as the right and far right are empowered by Brexit in England and Northern Ireland and Trump in the US. In the UK, as almost a matter of course, married couples are separated if one of them is foreign unless they both leave the country; see, for example, the Guardian of:
28.12.16, “Dutch woman with two British children told to leave UK after 24 years”,
or
28.2.17, “Outcry as grandmother deported after decades in Britain”,
or
1.3.17, “We can’t risk family being split by Brexit.”,
or
2.3.17, “Britain among worst in Europe for dealing with asylum seekers.”,
or
yesterday or next week.
Apparently the Home Office feels that exiled spouses can communicate via Skype, email or letter writing and don’t need to be physically close – yet more proof that the habit of sending small children away to boarding school leads to very serious attachment disorders and empathy deficits in the higher ranks of the civil service or government. Still, they’re only running the country.
In a ‘post-truth’ world reasoned argument supported by evidence may not carry the day. Here’s an observation of one politician’s electioneering technique; guess who it is: …
he advanced no coherent policies, merely a rag-tag of emotional appeals.
One supporter wrote:
I’m delighted at *******’s lack of a programme for a programme is either lies, weakness or designed to catch silly birds. Strength acts from the necessity of a serious situation and can’t allow itself to be bound7.
Here’s another quote which resonates with me because it seems to capture exactly our government’s approach to leaving the EU.
A… Government interested only in stoking-up endless constitutional grievance and furthering their obsession with independence, at the expense of …. public services like the NHS and education, ….given a free pass by Labour8.
Small steps can take us to the precipice as easily as giant ones. Traditionally in the West, the far right don’t storm into power and change everything in a moment. Even Trump seems to have decided it might take more than a few weeks to get back to the 1950s. Instead right-wing governments nibble away at rights and freedoms a little at a time, citing internal and external dangers in justification (think Turkey or Poland). What they do is not always popular but few would take to the streets these days for relatively minor changes. Heavy focusing of blame on outsiders shifts blame away from government until it’s too late to protest or object legally.
So here we are, in the month Article 50 will be triggered, increasingly looking down the wrong end of a telescope at a smaller and narrower world. We’re a million miles away from pre-war Germany, though the values and attitudes found in places like Yarls Wood Immigrant Detention Centre should make anyone uneasy. This is what their website says:
We focus on decency and respect in all aspects of care for our residents and use continuous innovation to further improve and develop our service.
and these are some of their Wikipedia entry section headings:
Controversies
February 2002 fire
Hunger strikes
Sexual abuse
Detention of children
Deaths
Inquiries into provision at Yarl’s Wood
The UK is not in danger of becoming the 4th Reich any time soon – it’s the direction of travel that worries me.
Footnotes
- A total of around 1.7 million citizens lost their lives, about 1 in 20 of the total population.
- 17,000 women and children, 60,000 male civilians, 250,000 soldiers and 10,000 wounded.
- Stourton, Edward, ‘Cruel Crossing’, Black Swan, 2014.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India#Independence.2C_population_transfer.2C_and_violence
- Echoes here of the ‘Free Fire Zones’ in Vietnam. Farming populations were forcibly relocated. When they returned to cultivate their crops they were grouped with every other living thing in the zones and targeted – a strategy technically termed ‘not winning hearts and minds’. Echoes too of the current administration’s disregard of native American land rights in the pipe-line battles.
- Philbrick, Nathaniel, The Last Stand, Vintage, 2011.
- ‘The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany’, 5 Aug 2004.
- Theresa May speaking against SNP policies on at the Scottish Tory conference on Friday March 3rd.
