Aaiun Nin helps an ancient city combat intolerance

Black skin in the forsaken outback

of the world

both concrete and jungle

in varying states of decomposition

and men in a corner

ordering girls to smile

stiff with rigor mortis

all bones no flesh

Aaiun Nin was born in Angola. She is an activist and – as so many black men and women – a poet. She writes about the most important and prevalent global problem: racism and the sorry plight of people with non-heterosexual orientation. Her poems recount the sexual violence, religious fundamentalism and patriarchal society in her home country and since 2016 – the year she set foot on European soil – the discrimination against immigrants and the systematic police violence that is practised in Scandinavian countries against people of colour.

Heavy hands of grown people

Covering their mouths.

Scream in silence.

The first dying.

Body is a body

Body is a body

Flesh is not yours

Growing flesh of adolescence.

Unripe flesh ready for picking.

Aaiun Nin could not live in Angola because of the homophobia ingrained among her compatriots, because Angolan law does not recognise marriage between individuals of the same sex and because the Catholic Church frowns upon unions of such people. This outstanding woman – she has mastered six languages! – could not safely continue her residence in the country of her birth, especially with her same-sex partner, and so she left the Dark Continent straight for Denmark, where she spent a couple of years, enriching world literature with her poetry. You can read fragments of one poem in between the paragraphs.

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Ursula von der Leyen’s evangelism

On March 21st, President of the European Commission (read prime minister of the European Superstate Government) Ursula von der Leyen saw it fit to impress on Europeans – in a patronising, chaperon-like manner – the ugliness of racism that some of them display and indulge in. In a tweet, she is recorded to say that racism is ubiquitous, pervading our streets, and our workplaces and also penetrating institutions, which is the reason why the European Commission (government) has adopted the first ever EU Anti-Racist Action Plan. An ardent apostle of diversity, Ursula von der Leyen said that the Commission members were inspired upon seeing many Europeans taking to the street and shouting the slogan Black Lives Matter. She expressed her pride at the EU organizing the first ever European Anti-Racism Summit on 21st March and then went on to engage in threats aimed at racists all cross the Union, levelling at them (existing and not yet existing) criminal law provisions because – she explained as if in anticipation of possible accusations – racism could not be subsumed under the concept of free speech in – “our” as she put it – union. Who does she mean by our? Never mind. These anti-racist measures – continued the head of the EU – must be adopted by all the provinces (commonly referred to as member-states) because anti-racism is a founding principle of – again – our union, which is a red threat (obviously she meant thread) running through seventy years of history. Then, on a positive note (a piece of carrot after the stick) she waxed lyrical recalling the late eighties when eighty thousand young people had been asked to come up with a motto for “our” union and – surprise, surprise – they had chosen “Unity and Diversity”, surely without anybody prompting them to do so. At this point, Ursula von der Leyen spread her arms out, approvingly, as if she wanted to embrace the European Red Guards and she lavished praise on the politically savvy young people. What they had done was perfect, she said, what they had chosen reflected – as she put it – raison d’etre of the Union and its greatest aspiration: the Union’s starting point and the Union’s destination. Amen.
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New Cold War

By the common consent of researchers of the past, historical eras are marked by speeches that later came down as famous, as hallmarks or watersheds, as harbingers of the events to come. Such was the case with the Fulton speech given by Winston Churchill, which announced the beginning of a cold war. Such was Vladimir Putin’s speech in Munich, in which the Russian President signalled a turn in the relations between Moscow and the Western world. Such was the (plagiarized) speech delivered by Martin Luther King that put the United States on the way to sloughing off its white majority. Was Joe Biden’s ABC interview – fraught with unbridled, wild accusations – the opening salvo of a new cold war?

In this short interview President Biden managed to call Putin names and threaten Russia with a ‘price to pay’. True, the word ‘killer’ in reference to Vladimir Putin was said by the interviewer while the interviewee merely said his affirmative yes, but still. Joe Biden enriched his compliments to his Russian counterpart, stating that the Russian leader had no soul. To make things worse, the administration’s spokeswoman upon being asked whether President Biden regretted his words replied that he did not.

A few days prior to the interview, the British authorities made a statement that Russia was a national threat to the Isles. Were these two events a planned, orchestrated attack on Moscow or just a coincidence? Russia is held responsible for an ever-growing list of instances of bad conduct. Now its secret services attempt an assassination of a dissident, now they meddle in American elections; now they denigrate Western politicians, now they give support to dictators, and so on. The political world stage reminds one of a children’s story, where we have eternally innocent rabbits and eternally rapacious wolves; where we have the good guys – the United States and the European Union – and the bad guys – Russia, Iran and China plus their satellites. The world would have long been in the state of universal bliss but for Russia, but for this or that dictator, it is commonly understood.

It is strange that Moscow has not yet been held responsible for all the recent black riots in America. If the Russian tentacles are allegedly so operative as to meddle in the elections held within the borders of the only superpower, why, they should as well be capable of staging street riots and – why not? – unleashing the never-ending columns of refugees/escapees/immigrants on their way to cross the southern US border, settle down in the States and thus destabilize the socioeconomic status quo.

The topic of immigrants was also broached in the interview. American soil is being inundated by an ever increasing human avalanche. Yes, the Biden administration ostentatiously reversed the anti-immigration course of the Trump administration, but even the do-gooders like Nancy Pelosi must feel that the welfare system is going to be overwhelmed. With the pandemic restrictions and the rising debt, the future looks bleak. Who knows, maybe the establishment needs an international conflict with no less an enemy than a nuclear power? American society might be consolidated around its leader, while under such extraordinary circumstances all his domestic failures might be forgiven and forgotten. The President might also gain in popularity even among those who did not vote for him. That might be a plan.

And yet, “something is rotten in the state of America”.The great racial and ethnic replacement (nonwhites are already a majority among the school-goers), the sweeping revolution in the morals, the soaring debt, the rise of China, the failure in Syria, the return of Russia as a global player, plus the president whose senile conduct resembles that of Comrade Chernenko and Comrade Andropov – all of those bode ill for the Land of the Free. A video clip showing Joe Biden clumsily climbing the steps to Air Force One is doing the rounds. A mirror image of the United States.

President Biden falls on Air Force One stairs, YouTube.

Gefira 52: What has gone wrong with our society?

Gefira 52 concerns itself with the question of what has gone wrong with our society. Things that at least superficially are generally regarded as beneficial have turned or are being turned into their opposite. The dream about a society where differences are based on merit and merit alone and where law is the same for everyone has degenerated into a fantasy about not merely equality of chances but equity of outcomes! The farther we progress as humankind, the more numerous calamities afflict us. It is not only racism, xeno- or homophobia; these have been supplemented with such alleged ills as objectivity, paternalism, ableism, ageism, mentalism, perfectionism, power hoarding, individualism, microaggressions, and so on, and so forth, the list has no end. Some of the items enumerated above (ableism, ageism, mentalism) are words that you will have difficulties finding in a thick dictionary; the use of others, those positive words that we are all familiar with (objectivity, paternalism, perfectionism, individualism), inverted in their meaning and applied to describe social drawbacks, perplex us in their new overtones and render us dumbfounded. All these phenomena very often ending in ism are said to be ubiquitous, pervade all human activities not excepting state or social institutions, from school to government, from family to community. We all are believed to be psychologically flawed in one way or another without having the slightest awareness of it. Especially white people are a sitting duck for all manner of attackers and their detractors. White people are held to be responsible for all vileness, malevolence, iniquity and baseness of social life. Conversely, people of colour are without blemish: the eternal victims of white racism, vehicles of moral high ground. People of colour are to be elevated and placed on plinths and apologised to, genuflected to and adored. Conversely, traces of white people’s grandeour are systematically obliterated.

Non-governmental organisations, too, once conceived as auxiliary organs which would step in where governments proved to be absent or ineffective have been taken over by the world’s movers and shakers. Now NGOs are implementing and amplifying the agenda of the powers that be and, indeed, at times so brazenly and unashamedly, that state authorities are beginning to see things through and bridle or ban these organisations.

Why are social ills piling up and multiplying? Why, despite so much effort to the contrary, all the isms that we have listed above (and many more!) allegedly persist and metastasize? Are these isms natural phenomena or instruments with which a group of powerful individuals are attaining their goals through creating manageable chaos? Are the people who commit themselves to the combat against all those isms (and many that have not yet been invented!) in their right senses? Are they useful idiots, misty-eyed individuals, well-meaning trendsetters or cynical careerists? What has gone wrong?

Gefira Financial Bulletin #52 is available now

What has gone wrong with our society?
Racism, Racism Everywhere, White Supremacy Never Shrinks
NGOs and Foundations
Why Google is harmful or why you should invest in artificial intelligence

The University of Amsterdam wants to get rid of a research report on the cost of immigration

When social peace is based on people’s ability to believe in something they don’t actually believe in, paradoxical thinking prevails. In 2006, above an article in the Financial Times, the following curious headline read: “The troubled cosmopolitan: how migrants enrich an increasingly concerned host.” While there is high unemployment among non-Western immigrants in Western countries, Western intellectuals still believe that overall non Western immigration is economically beneficial to white European countries. Probably it was because of this conviction that the University of Amsterdam agreed to contribute to an extensive research on the cost or benefits of immigration.

After 3 years of extensive data analysis the researchers published their results in a report called: “Boundless Welfare State”. The report examined the public cost, like social security and public income such as taxes collected from immigrants. It turned out that especially non-Western immigration is a huge burden for Dutch society. Immigrants have cost the Dutch people 400 billion euro over the last few decades. If the Dutch state continues to accept more immigrants, the expenditure will only go up further. The report not only estimated the enormous burden of mass-immigration for the Dutch population, it also did away with the belief that education could elevate poor immigrants from Africa and Central Asia.

It came as no surprise that the academic community of Amsterdam was unhappy with the outcome. Facts are only facts whether or not they are in line with the current political and religious convictions. That was as much the case in Galileo’s day as it is now. The report was produced with the full cooperation of the University of Amsterdam, which demanded that the researchers remove the university’s name and logo from the report and all references to the sponsor of the survey.
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The future of the immigration debate

Over the last decades the immigration debate has focused on the clash of civilizations. Christian Europe, versus the Islamic migrants from the Middle-East. Algerians in France, Pakistanis in the United Kingdom, and Turks in Germany. The major groups that disturbed that demographics of Western Europe have all had in common that they are Islamic. The anti-immigration political parties have embraced this, and have portrayed Islam, rather than immigration, as being the problem. Most immigration challenges focus around religion and the barrier it forms to successful integration. Right-wing parties have been able to use this as a defense against claims of racism. Islam, clearly, is not a race, it is an ideology. This becomes apparent when we look at one of the quotes from the Dutch Party for Freedom’s leader Geert Wilders, “Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe. If we do not stop Islamification now, Eurabia and Netherabia will just be a matter of time. One century ago, there were approximately 50 Muslims in the Netherlands, today, there are about 1 million. Where will it end? We are heading for the end of European and Dutch civilisation as we know it.” Wilders does not talk about falling birth rates or the percentage of the population that is foreign half as much as he talks about the problem of Islam.

We are nevertheless experiencing a shift. The Middle East and North Africa have a relatively small population, countries like Libya and Lebanon have under seven million inhabitants each. The most populous country in that group is Egypt, but that is not the country where immigrants are coming from. A country like Syria only has seventeen million inhabitants. We shouldn’t jump to the wrong conclusion that immigrants will continue to arrive in Europe from these areas. There is a bigger source. Yes, we’re talking about Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Eternal tilting at windmills

On February 18, UN Secretary General António Guterres graced the world with another of his many uplifting speeches. Of the limited range of topics that are routinely broached – climate change, discrimination, the pandemic and racism – he chose to focus on the last of the mentioned. It went something like this: Ladies and gentlemen, in case you have not noticed, (which is even absurd to assume but never mind) racism plagues our world. Then António Guterres – in the Alfred Hitchcock style: first an earthquake, then the tension rises – hyporbelised this breathtaking gambit with the usual adjectives to the tune of “abhorrent”, “ugly”, and the noun “repudiation”. Racism – despite decades of reeducating the humanity and despite the Charter of the United Nations – is !everywhere! and so it will take a long time to combat it. The top representative of humanity went on to appealing to his worldwide audience that it must – without reservation, without hesitation, without qualification – reject and condemn racism which still permeates institutions, social structures and everyday life. Furthermore, António Guterres said that although racism, a repudiation of our common humanity, is deeply entrenched in centuries of colonialism and slavery and is a complex cultural phenomenon, especially because our world is letting go of the primacy of reason, tolerance and mutual respect, leaving place for – yes, of course – growing anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim hatred (some undefined minority Christian groups have also been thrown in), intolerance and – yes, again an easy guess – xenophobia, which, again is everywhere, around the world. António Guterres coupled the above mentioned phenomena with the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed the inequalities, systematic prejudice and discrimination against marginalized, racial and ethnic groups, against – surprise, surprise – gender, age, class, caste, religion, disability, sexual orientation as if we all did not know this string of adjectives by heart by now.

The solution? There you have it. António Guterres says that we must build a better world (since the dawn of history we are nothing but engaged in building a better world), forge a new social contract (is António Guterres another embodiment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau?) based on – now the usual fashionable buzz words – inclusivity and sustainability; we must invest in social cohesion (obviously by) making societies more and more diverse, more and more multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural. People must be made to see the benefits of diversity rather than perceiving it as a threat.
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