That Old Time Religion
28th August 2015
Richard Fernandez turns over a rock.
They come from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Kosovo. Forth they stream from Bangladesh and the Muslim parts of Burma. They sail past Indonesia and Malaysia toward the hell-hole of Australia. A huge number are making their way overland through Macedonia and Serbia and are even now burrowing under the frontier wire of Hungary. On they come in boats from Libya, South Sudan, Eritrea and Nigeria, pausing only to catch their breath in Greece, Italy and France before going onward to the Promised Land. Not Israel in this case but Great Britain and Germany.
They come from everywhere, even in Europe masses of people have fled the fighting in Ukraine, half a million from Donetsk alone. They are swarming everywhere. The director of Human Rights Watch asks, ‘why does nobody care’ not just about the masses of refugees themselves the carnage they are fleeing from? After all, the West cared enough once so what changed in the interim?
…
What changed in the interval was Western confidence in the normativeness of its values and its ability to intervene in global events. The political delegitimization of Operation Iraqi Freedom added to the disappointment in the Arab Spring has pretty much soured the West on anything except watching the tragedy passively unfold. The “skepticism about America’s right, power and duty to lead the world”, the logical consequence of ‘no more Vietnams’, ‘no more Iraqs’ is no mas, period.
This has set the stage for a self-sustaining chain reaction in failing states. For example, thousands of Pakistani Christians are stuck in Thailand, persecuted at home and unwelcome abroad; even in the West, perhaps especially in the West. Refugees often carry with them the last, best hope of their failing countries. They are too frequently the repository of the its greatest human capital, the seed corn of lands plagued by the new locusts.