The Political Correctness of the Center

I hate-listened to The 1A on the road to northern Indiana this morning, which at least kept me alert during the three-hour drive.

Today being Friday, the program covered the week's news in summary, which may account for the rushed, breathless pace at which the commentators had to work.  As usual, today's commentators were from the corporate media and the Beltway.  They weren't stupid, but neither did they have anything to say that you wouldn't be able to hear on CNN or MSNBC.  (On the other hand, I heard that the historian Kevin M. Kruse, who's been correcting right-wing historical discussion to great effect on Twitter, appeared on The 1A earlier this week; I'll have to listen to that segment.)

The dominant topic during the domestic segment was immigration.  I don't intend to dissect the discussion in any detail.  It stayed well within the bounds of the mainstream, framing the issues in terms set by the Republicans: if you want to "decriminalize" crossing the border, for instance, you're in favor of "open borders."  The commentators were, I think, aware that this is a false dichotomy, but they didn't have time to explain why, so they just quoted it.  Noam Chomsky's strictures on concision were confirmed once again: if you aren't given time to explain complex issues, soundbytes and slogans are all the audience will get, and then you can dismiss the masses as brainwashed sheeple incapable of understanding, unworthy of having input.

I noticed that the people being held in our concentration camps were almost always referred to as "migrants."  One of the commentators called them "asylum-seekers" once, but returned to "migrants" after that.  I realize that journalists seeking the phantasm of objectivity have a difficult time with terminology, and I suppose that "migrants" is the best our corporate media can do.  It seems to have become the word of choice all over the media, from what I can tell, so it would be surprising if The 1A strayed from the consensus.

But "migrant" isn't the right word for people who are fleeing from intense economic and political misery.  True, many such people do migrate in search of work and/or safety; the first Mexicans I encountered in Indiana were migrant farm workers who came north in the summers and returned south, even back to Mexico, when the work was done.  (It's worth remembering that most Mexicans who came north returned home periodically until undocumented crossing was criminalized during the George W. Bush administration: that had the effect, not of keeping them out, but of keeping them in.)  There have also been American migrants, most famously the Okies who fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s (see Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath), and African Americans who fled southern poverty and Jim Crow to the north at around the same time.  Internal migrants, as both those precedents remind us, are not more welcome, or treated better, than refugees from abroad.

"Asylum-seekers" is more specific and accurate for the people who are crowding the US/Mexico border now, but "refugees" is also specific and accurate, and I don't believe it was used once today.  (Nor do I recall encountering it often in most respectable media coverage these days.)  "Refugee" has emotional connotations and might generate sympathy, so of course objective journalists shy away from it, but the disinclination to use it is also a choice -- what could and should be called the Political Correctness of the Center.

Once I noticed this, it was easier to notice that "migrant" was the word of choice by a different batch of commentators in today's international segment for refugees from Africa and the Middle East trying to reach Europe.  I believe "refugee" was used more often for such people before, during the Obama administration; why "migrant" has replaced it, I don't know, but it does seem to have happened.

Among numerous other matters that annoyed me was the discussion of the power-sharing agreement that has just been reached in the Sudan between the military junta currently in charge there and the civilian opposition.  The main question for The 1A's team was whether it would last.  It's a pointless question, because no one can answer it -- certainly none of them really tried.  So why waste time on it?  Because it's the kind of question that such people love to chuckle over.

At that, The 1A wasn't as bad as a BBC segment I heard earlier this morning: the newscaster interviewed one of the civilian negotiators, and tried repeatedly to badger him into saying on the air that he didn't trust the military to hold up their end of the agreement.  The negotiator did his best to evade the question, but even to ask it was irresponsible; I could hear the smirk in the newscaster's voice as he pressed for the answer he wanted, which would have been a handy excuse for the military to accuse the civilians of bad faith, and even put the negotiator in danger.  We're talking here about a country struggling to emerge from decades of one-man rule, in which the military has killed over a hundred civilians recently to, um, "restore order" I think the term is.  Whatever happens, it won't happen to James Copnall.

Nostalgia Is Just Amnesia Turned Around

If only we had a President like this today: classy, compassionate, inclusive!  That is what a lot of diehard Obama cultists are still saying in social media, conveniently forgetting his actual record.

The quotation is authentic.  Also, "Obama said this year’s influx reflects 'the desperation and the violence that exists in some of these Central American countries.'"  That was true, as Obama knew well, for he had encouraged and supported the violence in some of those Central American countries - Honduras, for one, which suffered a military coup followed by state killings of dissidents.  But he has a history of smirking disdain for the suffering inflicted by the US and its proxies, to say nothing of his embrace of dictators around the world.

Even if the US had no share of responsibility for the violence and desperation these refugees are fleeing, we would still have an obligation to help them when they arrive.  Refugees are not illegal immigrants: under the law they have a right to seek asylum here.  And given the US' reluctance to honor that right, it's hardly surprising that many of them would try to bypass the official process -- especially since, as the ABC story admits, many of them have relatives here, including parents, who could take them in.  The whole aim of US immigration policy for the past several decades has been to make it more difficult for immigrants, or migrant workers, or refugees to cross the border safely.  That so many risk death anyway doesn't speak badly for them, it speaks badly for the US.

Comparisons to the Holocaust are distasteful to many, and aren't really necessary to condemn Obama and Trump, but it's worth remembering that many Jewish refugees found it difficult to escape Nazi Germany or occupied Europe, not only because the Nazis wouldn't let them out, but because other countries, including the US, wouldn't let them in.  That's as much a stain on our history as the internment of Japanese American citizens, though it's less remembered now.  It should be remembered: it's as relevant to current events as the concentration camps.

On the Shoulders of Settler-Colonialists

Here's a question: At what historical point do "colonizers" become "immigrants"?

This morning on Democracy Now! a New Zealand Muslim scholar discussed, among other matters, the history of Muslim colonists there.  Apparently the first known Muslim colonists arrived in New Zealand in 1850, about a decade after the first British invasion force.  She didn't use those terms, of course; I believe (it's too early for the transcript to be up) she used the term "immigrant."

Yesterday someone posted on Twitter something to the effect that there are no "settlers," only "colonists."  I think this was meant as a comment on terms like "settler-colonialist society," used to describe countries like the United States, Australia, Canada, Israel, South Africa, and New Zealand.  Apparently the tweeter considered "settler" a relatively neutral term, though I don't think that's the case in "settler-colonialist"), and "colonist" the hard word that speaks truth to power.  So I began wondering about the status of those first Muslim colonists in New Zealand. True, they weren't the initial shock troops, they followed in their footsteps as it were; but why, if the British were invaders (as they were), why were those who followed under their aegis seen as somehow legitimate, even innocent?

This is not, of course, to imply that the Christchurch massacre was justified because Muslims are invaders; very much the opposite.  (If I had meant to imply such a thing, it would mean that massacres of "white" settler colonialists in New Zealand and Australia, inter alia, would also be justified.)  As the DN segment made clear, many of the Christchurch victims were refugees.  But as many critics have noted, the "nation of immigrants" motto is problematic for settler-colonialist societies.  I raised the same question a couple of years ago about a Canadian Muslim college student who overlooked her own dubious status as a settler-colonialist polluting "sacred" First Nations soil.  She seemed to assume that she stood with the aboriginal inhabitants by virtue of being a person of color, though I doubt she'd thought that deeply about it.  She herself has massacred no Natives, but she stands on the shoulders of those who did.

What I am saying is that evidently at some ill-defined point, the non-Polynesian settler-colonialists in New Zealand, or their descendants, seem to have metamorphosed into a nation of immigrants who are entitled to welcome yet more settler-colonialists as immigrants to the land their ancestors stole.  I am genuinely curious to know what that point is.  There is a great deal of confusion about this, and I'll try to explore it further soon.

Christian Charity

I haven't heard much lately, here in the United States of Amnesia, about the Syrian refugees that so exercised good American Christians only a month or two ago.  Today, though, I was reading a novel* set partly during World War I, in a Scottish town.  The narrator, who was ten years old at the time, remembers:

It was through eavesdropping on my mother and [our neighbor] Miss Miller that I discovered that the people who had come to the Paddies were called Belgian refugees and now another of these curious incomprehensible attitudes of the adult world made itself manifest.  I had often heard my mother and Miss Miller and many other people, including my schoolteacher, talk about poor little Belgium and gallant little Belgium, and Miss Miller was the one who told most of the blood-curdling stories, which her brother had heard at first hand from soldiers, about the terrible things that the Germans did to the Belgian women and children.  But now that the Belgians had come to the Paddies, there was no more about poor little Belgium and gallant little Belgium.

'Disgraceful,' Miss Miller said, 'letting them live down in that place.  They've no business in Lochfoot at all.  They are very dirty people, the Belgians, I've always heard.  They live next door to the French and eat frogs and snails and everything.'

'They seem to be a queer vulgar lot right enough,' my mother agreed, and she told me that if I went near those dirty foreign Belgian brats, I would suffer for it.

This is a novel, of course, but the situation described is so familiar that I feel sure it's accurate.  Remember that the Belgians were not swarthy Muslims but white Christians, and that only a few Belgians, perhaps a few dozen, had come to live in Lochfoot, paying their own way.  They spoke little or no English, but even if they had, even if they were simply from another part of Britain, would it have made a difference?  Their English would have been different from the local dialect, and that would be reason enough to render them Other in the eyes of decent Christian folk.

The right-wing Christians I observe are happy to denounce the brutality of the dirty Islamic State, beheading people and burning them alive (though both of these are time-honored Christian practices), but letting foreigners escape that brutality is another, wholly unacceptable matter.  The excuses they make (security, they're Mooslims) are transparently bogus; even if the refugees were white Christians they'd never be white or Christian enough, and their whiteness and Christianity would be reflexively and dishonestly denied.

Reading this novel, with its richly observed and described depiction of children's "tribal" culture and its adult counterparts, I was reminded of Ruth Moore's Maine villagers and fishermen, and of April Sinclair's South-Side Chicago African-Americans.  Time goes on, the world turns, but little changes.

*Janet Sandison, Jean in the Morning, Pan Books, 1969, pp. 106-107.

My Grandfather Didn't Flee the Potato Famine for America to See This Country Overrun by Refugees

John Scalzi's got another post up about the refugee question, this one titled "Frightened, Ignorant and Cowardly Is No Way to Go Through Life, Son."  (I don't know about that: it seems to work for a lot of people.)  One commenter especially amused me, by saying that "Refugees are less likely, statistically, to commit mass murder than white people are." I love the assumption embedded there, that refugees aren't white; it's similar to the popular assumption, now being challenged, that terrorists aren't white.  (Or that "Hispanics" or Mexicans aren't white.)  It's not even clear that Syrians aren't "white," but then such words mean what we choose them to mean.

Along the same lines, a meme I saw today features Ron Paul saying "Here is the solution to the refugee problem: stop meddling in the the affairs of other countries."  Once again Paul shows his great knowledge, wisdom, and compassion.  Leave aside that the issue right now is what to do with the refugees we and others have already created.  Refugees can be generated simply by oppressive government action within a country. An obvious example: Nazi Germany created many refugees. The US created internal refugees by its treatment of Indians and people of African descent. So yes, not interfering in other countries' affairs is a good idea, though it's not always easy to determine what is interference and what is wise interaction. But it won't solve "the refugee problem."

But back to Scalzi.  He wrote that, "as many have noted, there is irony in the freakout about Syrian refugees coming into a season which celebrates a notable middle eastern family who famously were refugees at one point in their history, according to some tales."  This trope has been popular among liberals on social media lately, but it has problems.

Scalzi presumably was referring to Joseph and Mary, who indeed could be viewed as refugees at one point in their lives.  That would be when King Herod, alerted by the Three Wise Men that his replacement had been born in Bethlehem, ordered the killing of all male children two years old and younger in Bethlehem and its vicinity (Matthew 2:16).  An angel warned Joseph and Mary of the coming trouble, and they decamped to Egypt, where they remained until Herod died.  One might ask why Yahweh couldn't have somehow prevented the Slaughter of the Innocents altogether, perhaps by giving Herod an embolism; killing turbulent kings is certainly in his repertoire.  The answer is that the killing was Yahweh's plan and will, in order to fulfill a prophecy of Jeremiah's (Matthew 2:17-18).  Otherwise prophecy would not be fulfilled, which would undermine God's credibility.  When Herod died, an angel let Joseph know it was safe for the Holy Family to go back home.

On this analogy, we should suppose that ISIS is an instrument of the Lord, carrying out his murky and mysterious intentions.  Who knows?  If Babylon was doing his work by conquering Jerusalem, destroying Solomon's temple, and carrying the children of Israel into exile, then perhaps ISIS is doing the same.

But as the meme I posted above shows, the Flight into Egypt isn't what these folks have in mind.  When I've seen Joseph and Mary referred to as refugees (or, sometimes, "homeless"), it has always been in connection with the Nativity as told by the gospel of Luke, which depicts Mary depositing the baby Jesus in a manger, "because there was no room for them in the inn" (Luke 2:16).  Luke, who doesn't seem to know about the Slaughter of the Innocents or the Flight into Egypt, isn't depicting Joseph and Mary as refugees.  According to him, they were in Bethlehem because Caesar Augustus had ordered a census of the Empire, which required that "all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.  And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David) ..." (2:3-4).  So he wasn't in Bethlehem to seek refuge from state violence, nor was he homeless; he had a home in Nazareth.

It seems odd that Joseph had no relatives to stay with in Bethlehem, but according to Luke he had to go there because he was remotely descended from King David.  Also, Yahweh couldn't arrange housing for his only begotten son, though he could send vast heavenly choirs to announce the blessed event and send shepherds to pay homage.  None of this makes any sense, and there is no evidence either of a Roman census at the time Jesus was probably born, nor that men had to uproot their households and travel to the hometowns of their distant ancestors to be counted.  Luke's Nativity story is almost certainly a fiction he invented, as is Matthew's.  Matthew, by the way, has the baby Jesus and his parents staying in a house in Bethlehem (Matthew 2:11).  Why they moved to Nazareth when they returned from Egypt is not explained, unless it's to fulfill a bogus prophecy that Teh Christ would be a "Nazarene."  (I say "bogus" because there's no such prophecy in the Hebrew Bible.)

Still, both Matthew and Luke probably intended to move their audiences with the pathos of the Messiah, the Son of God, passing his infancy in humble, even difficult circumstances, just as Scalzi and other people today want to move us with the plight of Syrian and other refugees.  And of course it's hypocritical of American right-wing Christians to try to gin up panic about people who are refugees as a direct result of US policy and aggression in the Middle East.  If you're going to mock their ignorance and distortion of the Bible, though, you need to be more scrupulous in your own account than they are in theirs.  After all, there are plenty of other Biblical passages that could be used, on the theme "Do not oppress or mistreat a foreigner, for you were foreigners in the land of Egypt" (Exodus 22:21; compare Exodus 23:9, Deuteronomy 10:19, Leviticus 19:34) This fine sentiment was honored by Israel more in the breach than in the observance, like most of the Torah's ethical teachings; especially when you consider that Israel occupied its land by massacring and enslaving its inhabitants rather than coexisting with them.  And besides, Christians are free from the restrictive Old Testament law.

It's fun to throw Christians' hypocrisy in their faces, as long as they're the right Christians.  (Liberals aren't hypocrites by definition.)  As Christmas approaches we're going to see more convenient distortions of biblical material by all and sundry; I figure it's not too early to start the corrections.