No Country for Refugees
POETRY FORMAT, 3 Nov 2014
Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service
Sit back, relax and drown
The White Man (and increasingly Woman)
He(she) came. He(she) killed. He(she) looted. He (she) colonized.
Sir/M’am, did you have entry visa to our shores?
What entry visa! Entry visa my arse!!!
Like Jehovah’s Witness, the man in red coat, blue coat, 3 piece suits, 2 piece suits, said (with laughter):
“Let me in or I’d blow your head off.
For me and my lot were to save you from yourself!”
Fast forward to modernity.
Enter INGOs:
“human rights! human rights!
but bite not your ‘donors’ hands’, all you destitute lot.”
“Civil Society, Civil Society!
Let us show you the way to Civil Society.”
Let Telenor and Statoil bring Development to your land.
GE and GMOs are good for your spirituality.
Drink CokaCola.
It’s cleaner and safer than your water!
Thank you, Madam Albright!
C is for Coke and D is for Democracy, ex-Madam Secretary happily screams.
Why didn’t we realize the essence of your American Dream!?
Now back to the Basics, that History of the World.
Europe came to others’ shores.
No visa.
No food.
But, plenty of gun powder to sell, alcohol to distribute and exploitative greed to loot.
The White Man left, having discharged His burden.
Having plundered other peoples’ homes.
Having left communities of ‘natives’ the world over messier & deadlier,
and more pathological than they were ever before.
Heard of Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Burma, Palestine, – you got the drift.
Ah, ‘Civilization’ has been served up.
Carnage, corpses, debris – in sight.
Do’t be distressed.
That’s just a small price for ‘Progress’.
It’s the native’s gain, damn it!
So, don’t you dare complain about your stupid country’s pain!
Heard of Africa and Caribbean, with their finely built “potential servants/slaves”?
Heard of the Silk-roaded China with her glittering riches?
The Spice Islands and Nippon’s shoguns?
Siam and Pegu?
And the Crown Jewel of Indian sub-continent where the Raj grew opium for export to Hong Kong as “the emerging market”?
Now, refugees, what refugees?
Let these greedy petty, half-clad creatures drown.
Lest they pollute our cultures, rot our social fabric and take our jobs!
No!
Oh No! These pests will NOT make our “(genocidal) Australia” their home, thunders Tony Oxford-educated Abbot, All Mighty Fascist Lord of Down-Under.
Send them to post-genocidal Cambodia.
Hell, yes, we’ll let them drown, Yippies!
That’s our NAVY!
Not here.
Not in a million years!
Not there.
Go anywhere but here.
Only on our dead bodies!
S-O-R-R-Y.
No humane country for refugees!
No British rescue missions for drowning Afro-refugees.
Really, it’s in their Karma, in their DNAs to suffer.
Give them Burmese “Buddhism” or cheap opium from Afghanistan.
Have they no wit to know Foreign Policies ain’t about human welfare?
Governments ain’t no churches. We ain’t your Messiah.
Churches ain’t exactly life-saving institutions either.
Ask the Holy See and Father Popes who wouldn’t make you happier.
Human Rights are western luxuries
preserved like pickles for the beheaded western journos and aid workers!
Gentlemen, let ‘s just be frank.
This is the core of our Western Values.
Europe and We the White Men (and Women) are, all about resources, cheap labor, seaports, and land routes.
We are after your trees, your estates, your market, your “walking dictionaries”, ah, native ladies, etc.
So, don’t you dare scream foul.
We Europe – and the West – want it all.
We are destroyers of life one moment – heard of Drones?? Precision Bombing? Air Strikes?? – while playing Keeper of Life, Livelihoods, and Liberalism.
Ah, us and our “colonialist nostalgia”!
The West and Its Terminal Schizophrenia.
Here is good news for you:
Sit back, relax and drown!
UK Axes Support for Mediterranean Migrant Rescue Operation
Refugees and human rights organisations react with anger as minister says saving people encourages others to risk voyage.
__________________________
Dr. Maung Zarni, Associate Fellow, the University of Malaya, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment, founder and director of the Free Burma Coalition (1995-2004), and a visiting fellow (2011-13) at the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit, Department of International Development, London School of Economics. His forthcoming book on Burma will be published by Yale University Press. He was educated in the US where he lived and worked for 17 years. Visit his website http://www.maungzarni.net.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 3 Nov 2014.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: No Country for Refugees, is included. Thank you.
If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.