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Stolen wisdom
Just lolling around in the US (that's Canada's unruly southern neighbor), recovering from a very very long flight, and the sun coming up at bedtime, I stumbled across some commentary on the BNP, Britain's anti-immigrant party (among whatever else they are. I don't follow or understand much of foreign politics). The following popped up in the comments, and in my somewhat impaired state, seems to be simple and powerful enough to be worthy of mention:
A thought experiment of a kind. If anyone cares to reply, please don't get bogged down into whether this actually maps onto any particular actual real situation. Just consider it within its own parameters.
There are two countries, Happyland and Angryland. In Happyland, the people brew beer. They love to drink their beer, and this makes them happy. Because they are happy, they are very productive and Happyland is contented and wealthy. Sadly, because of Brewer's Droop, they barely have enough babies to replace their population, but they don't mind because they love the babies they do have very much, and can always have a beer anyway.
In Angryland, beer is illegal. Because of this the people are very unhappy and angry all the time, so they are not very productive and not at all wealthy. Angryland is not a nice place to live. But because the Angrylanders can't go down the pub, they have many babies. Many of the Angrylanders would like to move to Happyland, where there is wealth and happiness. But when they get there, they will become part of Happyland's demos and, reproducing rapidly, ultimately be able to vote to ban beer in Happyland, so it will end up just like Angryland. None of the Happylanders want to live in Angryland, because there is no beer.
Is it wise for Happyland to have an open immigration policy?
Posted by Ian B
There is a third way (oh god no!) The Happylanders, instead of allowing Angrylanders to aspire to happiness and freedom in Happyland by opening the doors to them, could close the doors and explain quite rationally that if the Angrylanders want to be happy then they have to change Angryland so it is more like Happyland. The Angrylanders may find that happiness earned in this way is far more fulfilling than leeching off the happiness of others, eventually destroying it. Could it not be that the very things that the Angrylanders condemn as being decadent and sinful are the same things that make Happyland so Happy? They need to change their opinion rather than their location, a much harder prospect but more certain to work in the long run.
Posted by mandrill
2 comments
No actually, I do.
The BNP is not an anti-immigration party. It's a fascist, Jew-hating, Hitler loving Nazi party. No, that's not me trying to use Godwin's law on you, all you need to do is listen to them:
Nick Griffin:
Writing in his own publication, The Rune, Griffin stated that: "I am well aware that orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated or turned into soup and lampshades. I have reached the conclusion that the 'extermination' tale is a mixture of Allied wartime propaganda, extremely profitable lie, and latter witch-hysteria."
More for good old Nick:
"There is no doubt that hundreds, probably thousands of Jews were shot to death in Eastern Europe, because they were rightly or wrongly seen as communists or potential partisan supporters. That was awful. But this nonsense about gas chambers is exposed as a total lie."
More rational views:
The Sunday Times revealed that Holocaust News, a publication that claimed the holocaust was an "evil hoax", was being published by the BNP's then deputy leader, Richard Edmonds, on behalf of a BNP front organisation, the Centre for Historical Review, and distributed by members. John Tyndall, the party's leader, said he was not involved in the publication but that it had his full support.
BNP youth leader Mark Collett:
"...the Jews have been thrown out of every country including England. It's not just persecution. There's no smoke without fire."
And here's more wisdom:
When asked if the BNP was racist, its deputy leader Richard Edmonds said, "We are 100 per cent racist, yes"
Founder John Tyndall proclaimed that "Mein Kampf is my bible"
But of course, then they realised that hating Jews were not getting them the power they so much wanted so they flip-flopped to the new hate: the hate for Islam:
"The BNP has moved on in recent years, casting off the leg-irons of conspiracy theories and the thinly veiled anti-semitism which has held this party back for two decades. The real enemies of the British people are home grown Anglo-Saxon Celtic liberal-leftists ... and the Crescent Horde – the endless wave of Islamics who are flocking to our shores to bring our island nations into the embrace of their barbaric desert religion."
Oh, and they mean it too. Honest! It's not just for getting more power:
Nick Griffin has made it clear that this shift in emphasis is designed to increase the party's appeal. On one occasion, he stated, "We should be positioning ourselves to take advantage for our own political ends of the growing wave of public hostility to Islam currently being whipped up by the mass media."
And of course they claim that their freedom of speech is being oppressed (it's not, it;s just that nobody wants to hear their tripe) and they have very close relations to other lovely folks like the British National Front, the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, the terrorist group Combat 18 and the US National Alliance, amongst others.
Wise people, sure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party
Since I know little about BNP, the comments, standing alone, make lots of sense to me. I'm not racist or jew-hater, but a sensibly restricted immigration policy makes lots of sense. We in the US admit Mexicans pretty freely, but it's because they mostly want what the US offers, without wanting to remake it into something different.
The commenters above sound anti-Muslim, but if they mean anti-fundamentalist who want to impose Sharia, I'm with them. I'd take a damn close look at immigrants from angry-land before admitting them freely. If they really want to "be a part of" happy-land, no problem.
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