Europe’s refugee crisis: A view from South Africa

‘Europe Must Take Responsibility for Refugee Crisis, Which It Created!’ blared President Jacob Zuma from the front-page a few days ago. For once shower-head Zuma is right.

Terrorists, freedom fighters, refugees, failed states … all are created by the elites; they are not born. I know, I was a Rhodesian. As happened in near identical terms in South Africa we few whites - protectors of the defunct Capitalist Greed system - isolated, disparaged and terrorised the majority. We did this not to simply retain our highly privileged position but to enhance it. And for a time it worked.

Now Zimbabwe lies in ruins while the new South Africa boasts an elite comprised of the old white oppressors working with the new ANC. They are boosted by a willing and supportive mixed-race middle class because they are getting more than their fair share.

Below them sits a poverty stricken lower class. It’s these that do all the manual labour including the waiting about for a job, and it’s from here that there has arisen millions of home-grown, local refugees.

They are the folk we find convenient to call ‘squatters’, or more nasty, ‘beggars looking for a chance to steal’ and ‘social welfare professionals’. We declare that as though they are that, and there of their own free will.

Thankfully the majority of black people of Southern Africa don’t have evil in their hearts. Mostly they have dismissed the past as past and are trying to live in the present. They are living with desperation, though, let it be said.

In the latest cycle of bringing democracy to (in the order of most recent) the Horn of Africa, the Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Iraq, ongoing in the wider Congo region and without letup in South America, the western capitalists have killed or have caused millions to be killed under contract.

‘Bringing democracy’ is the marketing phrase but the reality is that wherever the US, UK, France and scavengers like Canada and Australia have gone they have destroyed the very fabric of society’s functions. They have dismantled every aspect of socialism or opposition to the capitalist process,[1] stolen all and pissed off home with the loot leaving no workable processes or honest governments behind, only chaos.

The results of the West’s total aggression (which is no more than amazing money making opportunities) is civil war(s) and the displacement of hundreds of millions of people. Those displaced people were always simply civilians operating as best they could in their respective economic and religious systems; they were not ‘terrorists’.

The reverse ‘terrorism’ from these horror campaigns conducted for money and oil power will arrive in (my guess) 2050 onwards. The new aggressors will be children of the victims of today. Murder, rape, pillage, inexpressible horrors … these hurts run deep.

But being human, crying over pictures of dead babies and agreeing to thousands upon thousands of refugees isn’t going to work. The differences between the receiving countries and them is just too great. In the long run there will be more and more unresolvable aggression - Saudi Arabia is already making sure of that with its offer to build 200 mosques in Germany. The fighting of the future will be happening inside the borders of the 'generous'.

There are only two ways to resolve the refugee crisis: One: Solidly refuse them entry. Look into their eyes and deny their existence, knowing that ultimately the refusal is a death sentence. Leave them to their fate.

Two: Correct the wrong, accept responsibility and accept the refugees as temporary residents. Convert the bombers, troop ships and personnel carriers and send engineers, doctors, teachers, managers, uranium waste collectors and so on to re-build, using the fortunes stolen to cover the cost. But send people and companies committed to rebuilding lives, not the junk heads Bush sent to Iraq to make a profit on the $25 million a day reconstruction work, with the paperwork “largely missing.”[2]

A resolution by all of Europe to send the problem to its maker by dispatching, say, a million refugees to the US may make a difference in the future, but right now the coming reality staring Europe in the face is in place, and it looks just like South Africa’s informal settlements.

Just as Europe has been taken by surprise so Vorster and his fascist Nationalist Party didn’t expect the flood of squatters who began arriving on the fringes of white cities and town strongholds in the late 1970s. For 60 years the downtrodden and deliberately impoverished had stayed meekly at home out in the countryside. There they had starved, watched their children grow up missing vitals and died quietly, unrecorded, without upsetting the white Capitalist government. Then the trigger.

In Algeria it was when the French finally pulled their dominating 300,000 armed and murderous bullies out that the masses started crossing over into Europe. In Rhodesia/South Africa, where domination was never complete, the move began when the white administrators withdrew support and basic facilities and instead sent in white goons who kicked and traumatised and moved on, only to come back another day.

It was De Klerk, big business and the whites’ inability to share that created South Africa’s own Libyas, Ethiopias and Syrias. The black folk of those decimated ‘homelands’ zones, evictees from ‘white’ farms and residential areas, were left with nothing except their courage, their desire for life and to get up and do it. And do it they did, as the Syrians are doing, moving in search of hope.

It’s ironic that it was their move (and not the ANC or its armed wing) that was the straw that broke the white elite’s economic back. Today those refugees include about 20% of the white population.

Any student who wishes to have a crack at forecasting the future of South Africa only has to look at the conditions under which South Africa’s squatting refugees exist. Today they live in much the same squalor as I first saw 40 years ago when arriving in Cape Town, one of the world’s top ten destinations, for a holiday. But the problem is much, much bigger.

The successive governments from the Nats into the three ANC administrations (including the DA in the Western Cape) don’t care. They don’t because the ANC has simply slipped on the Nat-suit and the money continues to flow upwards into places and accounts where it does no good, and often where there are no records.

They have learnt that the poorer the base population, the more desperate they are for jobs and the greater the wage/salary competition, the bigger the profits at corporate level. Sitting pretty at corporate level are big business’ puppets, the ANC stalwarts who start with Zuma and president-elect Cyril Ramaphosa, and run right down the rotten hierarchy through provincial and into municipal level – just like the old days.

The step-up on farmer murders (not only white), isolated small business owners and lately foreigners is an obvious reaction to the fact that poverty is climbing – even the once immune middle class is feeling it.

The BEE exercise, police corruption, the undermining of the NPA and the continued flow out of money existing alongside a further failing of government in the fields of education, health and you-name-it, has proved that profit at any cost is in control. The only goal in sight is self-enrichment, both of the new black elite and the old white one.

What is happening throughout society is shocking, intolerable. But what exactly did the world expect, what exactly do South Africans expect?

For every one decent, hard-working individual killed violently, thousands die an unnatural death long before their allotted time. They die because of desperate living conditions and desperate people, because of the refugees we willingly accepted as a short term move and now accept as part of the furniture. Because we are unwilling to think about what to do.

Caring is not a once a year, making a wide appeal for blankets and kids toys, or being brave enough to pick up an indigent hitch-hiker and take him to town affair. That’s as good as praying: ‘There you are, I’ve prayed for you!’ (Now away, and be grateful for the sandwich).

Caring for them, for myself, for the country and for my long term future in it is about going back to the homelands. It’s about taking every under-used farm and the near empty old time settler towns, disused golf courses, idle factories and bending the rules to near breaking point, pumping in some big money to make places where people can live, grow and begin once again to contribute to society simply by trading. Me-to-you-trading, nothing complicated.

There is no such thing as a sustainable project. There will be a start-up and maintenance cost. The government (and the wealthy need to join) has to pump in money. And if money can’t be ‘found’ remember that we own the Rand, not the foreign banks, and if it gets really desperate Ramaphosa and De Klerk have a bundle.

As George Galloway of the UK said last week, ‘those who rule us brought us this. They are lower than vermin.’ In South Africa those who rule are a combination of all the wealthy – say every one earning over R26,000 p/m – and the voters.

Today Syrian refugees are flooding Europe. Today Europe has come face to face with the world it created. But let’s not be foolish. It’s a phenomenon as old as the royals, that all the privileged had a part in, and have the ability to change.

Unless South Africans start caring, my advice is join the queue in Europe.

A former soldier and District Commissioner in then Rhodesia, Douglas Schorr is today a committed critic of capitalism and colonial legacies, citing them as the source of poverty in Africa. His first book, The Myth of Smith, an autobiographical account of his awakening to the reality of the Rhodesian Bush War while involved in it, is available for sale on Amazon Kindle. His second book Mr Boomslang & 7 Other Rhodesian Fireside Tales is available on the same platform. Schorr blogs at www.douglasschorr.com Follow him on Facebook and Twitter for regular updates.

END NOTES

[1] In the Horn of Africa the people are fighting to rid themselves of west imposed leaders. In strategic Syria, Assad was the first man to achieve anything near unity among the diverse players - hence the funded, trained and put into the field by the USA, Saudi Arabia and Britain ‘rebels’ – many who broke away to become ISIS. Libya had a flourishing socialist-type economy - too much money, oil and designs on an Africa united under a single currency, hence the British pseudo troops and 100 straight days of ‘UN’ bombing. Saddam broke his contract with his US masters. He was building a sound welfare economy and distributing more to the people, and he was talking about selling oil in currencies other than the US$. Capitalism doesn’t allow either – it can’t.
[2] 'An occupation conducted through under-scrutinized emergency appropriations enabled dozens, if not hundreds, of private companies to act like pigs at the trough – wasting taxpayer dollars on frivolous expenses while the insurgency raged around them. These private companies were able to behave so rapaciously because they were so desperately needed by the US government to run the Iraq war without revealing its true cost to the American public' ... see ‘How the US public was defrauded by the hidden cost of the Iraq war' by Michael Boyle

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