Go to hell, Bobby Jindal.
The xenophobia and/or naked opportunism of US government officials in the wake of the recent attacks in Paris (I’d say, “and Beirut”, if I thought some of these cretins could find Lebanon using Google Maps) — from CIA Director John Brennan and Senator Ted Cruz to anencephalic governors like Bobby Jindal and Greg Abbott — is totally unacceptable. Someday the Earth will choke on the taste of their bones.
Geoff Manaugh (of BLDGBLOG) wrote a blog post recently about bizarre relocation plans for Syrian refugees called “Human Chess” which I encourage you to read: I found the Svalbard idea particularly upsetting (in part, I’ll admit, because I look at that remote Arctic archipelago through the lens of science & adventure tourism, and badly want to go there).
Geoff cites a writer who makes an analogy between the Global Seed Vault (which is in Svalbard) and Svalbard itself — as if Syrian refugees were a sort of resource that could be cold stored against future calamity. And then some idiot Norwegian pol who suggests they could be moved into the same mines the GSV was repurposed from, and put to work. To make themselves economically useful while being “protected”, presumably. Meanwhile, the first-ever withdrawal from the vault took place just last month. And for what? To help replenish a gene bank destroyed in the SYRIAN CIVIL WAR!
Seeds out, humans in? God, I hope not. I mean, if you want to make a science fiction film combining Matewan with the polar prison planet in Star Trek VI, I’d watch the hell out of it. But it’s no way to even think about these millions of desperate, displaced, actual people.
Never mind the millions more seeking refuge that will surely follow them in the years to come due to direct & indirect effects of global warming, escalating regional conflicts, drone bombing campaigns that stabilize from dangerous weather into unholy climate, and so forth. And so on.
I know refugees and nomads are categorically different. Just for example, refugees are in flight; nomads, in motion. But I can all too easily imagine a near-future tense in which media-reinforced xenophobia and short-sighted economic protectionism ultimately prevent (and don’t just impede) permanent resettlements. Instead, by necessitating perpetual relocations, a sort of hybridization of refugee diasporas with a post-pastoral (post-industrial, even) nomadism might be engendered at an unprecedented scale. The sort of thing that bumps individual tragedy up to the level of (un)natural catastrophe: great braided human rivers — carving borders, sweeping up available resources, migratory jobs, and anything/everything else they can within their flows, simply to endure. A nightmare of human need. A humanitarian nightmare from which it would get harder and harder to wake up.
If the experience of Syrians fleeing this war (or of so many Africans in recent decades) is any indication, these vulnerable, already-traumatized populations would probably be treated like a Golden Horde by increasingly reactionary politicians and media (whether or not any of them harbored an actual war machine) — reinforcing their otherness, shutting off more and more degrees of their freedom of movement, withholding more and more resources & assistance — warping whole societies and economies around the futile task of controlling their flows; sandbagging against the perceived threat of their flood.
When the sun finally goes down on Westphalianism, the last of the light will be blood red.
Originally published at wchambliss.tumblr.com.
