The Double Standard on Deportations

There is, today, a great deal of ‘storm and stress’ over the issue of migrants/refugees/illegal immigrants across the western world. Whatever term one chooses to use, it involves a minority group of people living in a country who are a different people than the majority. This has caused quite heated divisions in these countries over how to deal with these non-native minority elements. Some want more, some want less and some want those already present to be sent back to their country of origin. The rhetoric around these differences is escalated by accusations of racism and “Islamophobia” which itself is often used synonymously with the term ‘racism’ and that is regarded as the worst thing someone in the western world can be accused of. Even being found guilty of murder or child rape does not lead to the pariah status that even being accused of racism will. Filmmaker Roman Polanski, for example, pled guilty to raping a 13-year old girl in 1977 and yet continued to have a lucrative film career and win numerous Academy Awards and European Film Awards from his peers. Martin McGuinness, a leader of the PIRA, was responsible for numerous murders but rose to become Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. Enoch Powell gave one speech that attracted accusations of racism and immediately lost his job. American comedian Michael Richards used racial slurs in response to some hecklers in 2007 and social pressure ended his stand-up career. The taint of racism can easily render a public figure untouchable.

However, what is odd, is that the same people who usually push this strategy are the same people who consider being “Euro-centric” a terrible insult even while they themselves display an extremely Eurocentric attitude by holding European or European-descended people to a vastly different standard from non-European peoples. This ranges from accusations of racism to issues of civil rights to the issue of immigration. For example, in Japan, it is not uncommon to find restaurants that refuse service to anyone who is not obviously Japanese. Japan attracts considerable criticism for things like whale hunting but no one seems unduly outraged about businesses that refuse service to White people or Black people whereas in a western country, a restaurant that refused to serve people of a different race would be considered outrageous and, in the United States certainly, illegal. Now, it should be said, I do not think the Japanese should be criticized for this. Usually, the reason behind such a policy is that the business has had trouble with rowdy foreigners in the past and I think they should be able to serve or not serve whoever they choose. It is *their* business after all. However, the lack of similar criticism, unfair though I think it would be, is noteworthy.

The non-immigration issues have often been brought up by those on the political right to highlight the double-standard of the left and, though they do not say so, their “Eurocentric” view or one could call it a type of western supremacy that says western people are so lofty and so much better than everyone else that they must be judged by a higher standard than other people. So, it has been pointed out how western feminists are more concerned about an imaginary “pay gap” between men and women than they are about women in certain Arab countries who have virtually no rights at all (and before anyone complains, it is a *fact* that, in America at least, it is against the law to pay women less for doing the same job as a man and if this is happening to you, female, feminist reader, you can sue your employer right now and easily win). The people who are staunch defenders of freedom of religion for Muslims in traditionally Christian, western countries, have nothing to say about the total lack of religious freedom in Muslim or atheistic countries like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the People’s Republic of China. One could go on, and I have, so there is no need to highlight it more here.

Immigration and/or immigration-related issues have, however, not received the same push-back that has been seen on issues related to women’s rights, gay rights or religious freedom. Yet, this is just as true and generally dates to the shift away from traditional authority, old European colonialism and the Cold War. There are numerous examples, undoubtedly more than I could relate here, that illustrate the point that the exclusion, expulsion or mass deportation of a minority people from a country by the native majority only seems to attract widespread criticism and condemnation when it is contemplated by western countries but not when it is actually carried out by non-western countries. It is not considered outrageous by the majority population in non-western countries nor is it considered wrong or racist by mainstream opinion in western countries themselves. Sometimes this was done by legal means, in other cases it was simply a case of the western minority fleeing in the face of certain death if they remained.

Expelled Dutch & mixed race people arrive in Rotterdam

The Republic of Indonesia, for example, had prior to independence been a colony of The Netherlands, known as the Dutch East Indies. When pressure from the United Nations and the United States forced the Dutch to relinquish the East Indies, the Indonesians afterward moved to purge non-native elements from the country. Dutch owned businesses and property were seized by the Indonesian republic and in December of 1957 all Dutch nationals, some 50,000 people, were forced to leave Indonesia. Dutch aircraft were forbidden to land in Indonesian territory and all Dutch publications were banned from the country. Most readers have probably never heard of this which is itself part of the point. Indonesia did not become a pariah in the international community, was not accused of being racist or xenophobic but, while some Dutch people and those directly involved certainly spoke up about it, wider opinion was that the Indonesians were justified in wanting ‘Indonesia for the Indonesians’ and that subjects of the Queen of the Netherlands did not belong in Indonesia, most by this time also believing they never had in the first place. Many more people left Indonesia on their own because they were of partial Dutch ancestry and were subject to often extreme social pressure to leave, from housing difficulties, employment difficulties to people of mixed race background being unable to even buy food from many Indonesian grocers.

In the countries of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, previously united under colonial rule as French Indochina, likewise never had a large population of French people who lived there. However, there were some and in some cases French families had lived in Indochina for generations. The 1937 census of French Indochina showed that there were 42,345 French people living in Indochina. By comparison, there were over 300,000 Chinese people living in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia according to the same census in 1937. However, as Vietnam became independent, first in north and (year later) in the south, the French population was either killed or forced to flee to avoid being killed. Their presence, regardless of whether they had anything to do with the colonial government or the regime of the French-backed Vietnamese emperor, was simply not tolerated by the ruling Vietnamese Communist Party and today the French population in Vietnam is non-existent.

Human "dust" left in Vietnam

Similar to the situation in Indonesia, people of mixed-race background in Vietnam were not tolerated once the Vietnamese were completely governing their country themselves. Most Franco-Vietnamese fled with the end of French influence in Vietnam, knowing what fate would befall them if they were to remain. Likewise, at the end of the American involvement in Vietnam, there were about 35,000 mixed race children born to Vietnamese women by American fathers. Some took their children home with them to the USA when America began withdrawing from Vietnam, some married the mothers but unfortunately most of these mixed race children were abandoned and those that were not killed outright faced a lifetime of scorn and discrimination. The Vietnamese referred to them as “the dust of life” as most went from state orphanages to lives as homeless beggars on the streets. Their mothers often abandoned them since a half-White or half-Black child would cause the mother to be regarded as a prostitute and a collaborator, whether she had been or not, by post-war Vietnamese society. The children of Black soldiers often fared worse than the children of White soldiers since they were more likely to be visibly the most different from the rest of the population. Needless to say, the left-wing “flower power” protestors of the era had nothing to say about this and did not denounce the victorious Vietnamese as racist or bigoted because of their actions toward racial or mixed-race minorities in their country.

One area where the minority community was quite large, though still small compared to the overall population, was the Empire of India. Anglo-Indians which included both mixed race people of British and Indian parentage or simply British people who were born and raised in India, were originally marginalized by both the Indian population and the British colonial authorities. However, they made a life for themselves on their own and ultimately became a distinct and fairly important new group of people in the British Raj. They became instrumental in the functioning of the empire due to their widespread employment in handling Customs, the Post Office, the telegraph network, the teaching profession and the Indian railroad industry. However, with the coming of independence and the conversion of the Empire of India to the Republic of India, the Anglo-Indians came under increased social pressure and discrimination by the majority population which considered them both alien and, in the increased militancy of the times, as collaborators with the enemy. In 1947 this pressure drove many Anglo-Indians to leave the country and relocate to the United Kingdom or one of the Commonwealth Realms. Social pressure did not relent with time and in the ensuing decades the vast majority of Anglo-Indians ultimately left the country and the tiny minority remaining are almost unanimous in wishing to live somewhere else. With all of the international sympathy for India and hero-worship of Gandhi, the plight of the Anglo-Indians went largely unnoticed and India was not vilified for how the White and mixed-race population was treated.

The same story can be found across the continent of Africa, though in most countries the non-African minority was always extremely small, in some cases to the point of being statistically irrelevant. However, in those areas with large non-African (generally European) minorities such as South Africa or the former Rhodesia, this population has been drastically reduced since these African countries came under African rule. Again, the circumstances of the White minority in South Africa or the former Rhodesia goes almost completely unreported with mainstream liberal opinion in the west being that this should be ignored at best or at worst that the White minority deserves no sympathy as they have been deemed the “bad guys” regardless of whether they were actually around during the era of White rule. In Algeria, in north Africa, at the height of the colonial period there were about a million French people living in the country, roughly 10% of the total population. With the achievement of Algerian independence, however, those million people suddenly vanished and no one seems to mind about it. The French minority being driven from the country by the Algerian minority has attracted no condemnations.

Again, one could cite many examples similar to these. How many people objected to the forced removal of over a million Greeks from Turkey in 1923 (when about half as many Turks were expelled from Greece) or the dwindling of the Greek minority to statistical irrelevance today? I am sure some will say that the current situation in the western world is not equivalent to these examples of Indonesia, Indochina, India or Algeria since these were places under colonial rule and it was, frankly, justified that the people with the same blood and skin color of the former rulers be removed from the country when those rulers were overthrown. Yet, this same attitude, again, does not apply to western countries. The Spanish are still vilified for the expulsion of the Moors and Jews following their long war of liberation from Moorish rule and the subsequent establishment of the fallaciously notorious Spanish Inquisition. The fact that Islamic forces once ruled over southern Italy does not shelter Italians who want to stop the influx of Islamic immigrants from being labeled racist or Islamophobic today. The same could be said for European countries from Greece to Hungary which were under Islamic rule for centuries.

Loyalists arrive in Canada

That, however, is ultimately beside the point of any fundamental moral issue. The countries of the western world today are not under the rule of a foreign people and the countries of Asia or Africa were no longer under foreign rule when they expelled or forced into exile their racial minority populations. Furthermore, even if one were to regard it as unfortunate or even immoral, that does not necessarily mean it was an unwise policy. I have previously, while admitting it distresses me to say so, put forward the possibility that one reason for the relative stability of the United States after independence, as compared to the neighboring country of Mexico, is because the loyalist population in America left the country and thus, while divisions certainly existed between the Federalists and anti-Federalists and so on, there was unity on the fundamental form and character of the country. There were differences in how to best govern but there was unity in terms of the fundamental structure of the country as a constitutional republic. In general, differences cause problems and the greater the differences, the greater the problems will arise to the point that a country can go from disagreements over policy to being dominated by total, internal, ideological warfare over the most basic idea of who they are and what they are about.

Finally, this illustrates, I think, the basic point that mainstream, western, liberal thought has gone so far off the rails that they are eating their own tail. They have become so lost in civilizational self-hatred and racial guilt while at the same time being assured that their own point of view is the only right and moral way of thinking that they have become a walking, talking contradiction. Their current view regarding this mass movement of peoples is that White, western, historically Christian people are the worst people in the world, that they are cruel, oppressive and exploitative while simultaneously arguing that everyone who is not of this cursed breed should come and live in White, western, historically Christian countries! One would think they would be the first to advocate building walls and shutting off all immigration to save the non-European peoples from these terrible racists who are so genetically inferior in moral terms that they cannot help being racist and will never not be racist or exploitative. One would think they would be telling the other peoples of the world to stay as far away from White, western people as possible. Yet, they seem anxious to invite more and more people to come and be oppressed and exploited.

There is simply no way the liberals and leftists who currently advocate open borders and regard cutting down on immigration, enforcing immigration laws or deporting people to their homelands as a fate worse than death emerge from this encounter with the facts as honest or honorable people. They must either accept that all peoples have a right to keep their homelands for themselves or they must denounce the expulsion of minorities no matter who does it. The only other alternative is that they are complete liars when it comes to their insistence on equality, which many of the more radical elements do not even give lip-service to anymore, and must admit that they only consider western societies fit to live in. As it stands now, the only possible explanation for their behavior is that they are so hate filled that they are truly committed to the total destruction of their own peoples and civilization or that they are more convinced of the superiority of their own worldview than any crusaders or missionaries ever were and wish to see all peoples of all cultures ground beneath their ideological boot heels. Personally, I would prefer for everyone having their own space to maintain their own cultures, peoples and customs. We used to call that diversity...