Tuesday 24 June 2008

Immigration Racism

Pim Fortuyn, a dutch politician once commented in a column about foreign immigration into the Netherlands bringing with them their own customs, values and traditions that he perceived disturbed the more liberal state and constitution: "How dare you! This is our country, and if you can't conform, you should get the hell out, back to your own country and culture."
This view I feel is common amongst many in the world on all sides of the table. If you don't like it the way it is, then go back to where you came from. But how can such an idea be logical or sound in a world that is so affected by each other, with globalization, multi-national capitalism, and the effects of a devastating age of colonialism that has hardly left our sights, let alone our memories. I am sure many immigrants would love to just go home, but our home is not ours anymore. It is the dictators and tyrants that you have empowered and supply with money, weapons and a blind eye that forces immigrants into leaving their homes. It is your economic policies, your unbalanced deals, your broken promises that has destroyed my home and caused me to come to yours. And I remain a thorn at YOUR side even now, as you are the thorn in mine. My very existence bothers you, my food, my language, my difference bothers you. That causes you to hate me, but you hated me before you ever cared about differences, when you cut up my land and split up its families. I allowed it to happen, and I must clean up the mess, but I cannot even use my own land as a base, since my words are my very own death sentence. You built your country on by stealing, conning and raping my home, and with your elite ideology, you insult me. And now you want me to conform and convert my identity to yours, to the identity that raped me. You want me to become the rapist that raped me! And if I do not, I go home, to my culture, the culture that has been violated, the land destroyed, the families murdered, the voices silenced. Violated, destroyed, murdered and silenced with YOUR weapons, with your "culture", with your ideology. How dare you! How dare you!

1 comment:

Culture Shock said...

Some further thoughts:

"Europe is great treating the immigrants like inferior citizens, and even though it is a generalization it is a wide enough one, and their policies dictate that very mentality, with the extreme left still in existence and referred to as democratic. And that is not the legacy of the enlightenment, which Europeans fought for, and died for. And to betray that ideal is a betrayal of their identity and their history. If are a patriot, you are not a blind one, but rather a thoughtful one, patriotism to the ideals of your nation stands for before your nation itself, and patriotic to your nation only if it remains to uphold the ideals it fought so long to gain, in europe that was against the tyrannies of the monarchies and the church, a dark period. Let us not repeat the same mistakes, but this time instead of the name of God, we invoke the name of Europe in place of God, or Democracy, or the Nation. Let's keep our histories in mind, as well as our future."