There are few postures quite as serpentine as that of the bully who disguises his cruelty as some kind of love. Sadistic teachers of old were fond of it - the furrowed brow and fraudulent look of regret as they caned you “for your own good” - and the history of xenophobia is rich with creeps who dolled up their barbarism as a humane sympathy for the very people they sought to oppress. The asylum seekers who drowned off Christmas Island last night had barely taken their last breaths when such ghouls began riding their waterlogged bones, boastfully declaring the tragedy a vindication of their own contemptuous beliefs, their allergy to foreigners camouflaged behind a sick exhibition of concern for the very lives they couldn’t give two $#@&s about.
The argument - which you’ll find all over this very news portal - is that our Government today has the blood of the dead on its hands, Australia’s relaxation of its policy towards asylum seekers having lured such wretches here in the first place. The more “compassionate” policy, they say - one that would allegedly have prevented this tragedy - would be to make life more difficult for such unfortunates, to turn their boats around while at sea, to harass and intimidate them with such rigor as to make traveling to Australia by boat an entirely unattractive proposal.
This argument is lanced by the very incident such frauds are opportunistically using to mount it, for there is no greater deterrent to illegal immigration than death at sea. If deterring asylum seekers is what it’s all about, then last night’s sinking - engineered, apparently, by our Government’s soft hand - will be a far more foreboding advertisement than the prospect of simply having one’s time and money wasted by being turned around. Those who believe in tough love should be applauding the tragedy, if they can work out how to clap with iron fists in velvet gloves.
But the truth is that there’s no love in those voices at all. It’s a pretense. They speak of “deterrent” as some sort of insecticide, the creatures it’s made for mere flies and roaches that scurry about with no more determination than vermin. As if anyone who makes a journey such as this is no more desperate and intelligently resolved than a pigeon looking for somewhere to crap. Put up a scarecrow and they’ll go somewhere else. What despicably ignorant and lordly thinking.
They make a lofty distinction between “genuine asylum seekers” and those who apparently embark on treacherous one-way journeys around the world for fun, or whose efforts to enter our country are fueled by the same base desires as those who attempt to jump the queue at the supermarket. As if the responses to poverty and oppression have ever had anything to do with greed. And as if those who trumpet for the protection of “our way of life” are driven by anything more noble than small-minded avarice and jealous self regard.
The issue of immigration routinely becomes perverted by fanciers of political statistics - whether Australia is taking its “share” of asylum seekers, or at what point Australia’s population becomes “unsustainable”. The heart of the matter has nothing to do with these things. It’s a moral question about whether we have the right to declare a piece of earth our own to the exclusion of all humanity but those we deem “appropriate”. Anyone with a brain capable of a fleeting moment’s existential thought knows that we cannot possibly have that right. Whittled down to the bone, it’s a question of how many - and how much - Australians can’t tolerate wogs. The answer is evidently not a pretty one.
Since our colonial inception, Australia has been a home for the wretched, the unfortunate and the brave, those courageous enough - or stupid enough - to find themselves leaving it all behind in the pursuit of a life on the other side. That the sons and daughters of those very people are slamming the door on beggars is odious enough. That they’re claiming to do it in the name of “compassion” - today, of all days - is a sick joke, and the sick jokers peddling it should never be taken seriously again.
http://blogs.news.com.au/jackmarxlive/index.php/news/comments/showboat/
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