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‘They call us Nazis’: inside the wealthy German town where the far right is on the rise
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 26 May 2024
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So you're telling me it's as easy to integrate your average Syrian into a labour market with dearth of opportunities for people with low educational attainment as it is to integrate your average Nigerian. One's an illiterate refugee (that is, can't even read Arabic, knows no second language), the other, in my experience, has a master's degree and couldn't find a job back home as the state of Nigeria's education system is quite a bit better than the rest of their infrastructure as well as economy.
And, sure, there's educated Syrians. There's uneducated Nigerians. More so in their home countries than when looking at the people who arrive here, and seen at the population level yes we can integrate way more Nigerians than Syrians on account of the former taking up way less integration capacity.
No, not everybody is the same. Not every source country is the same, either. Material conditions are not subject to universalism. It's called "material conditions", after all, not "ideal conditions".
Second thing to note is that the countries that are still growing population-wise will stop doing that within the next decades, and with that their economy and emigration pattern will shift: We can't keep relying on immigrants to plug our pension funds, it's not sustainable. Or do you suppose we should make sure there's always enough war abroad to generate enough refugees.
So... are we gonna pretend that colonialism played no part, and continues to play no part (via capitalism), in today's "material conditions"?
You mean while Syria spent 400 years under Ottoman rule Nigeria was busy raiding for slaves and selling them? The socio-political conditions in the countries are almost flipped in comparison to the past, Nigeria has some vaguely but not terribly authoritarian socdem-thirdway thing, while Syria is straight-up fascist: Modern-day Syrians are practically slaves, Nigerians aren't.
Or did you just want to use the c-words as a thought-terminating cliches? Is any of those forces stopping the Syrian government from increasing literacy? Are those forces in the room here with us? Maybe if the Syrian government spent money on throwing books at people instead of poison gas canisters the situation would look different. But it doesn't. Syria is a hellhole. Modulo Rojava, of course, but that's not where the refugees are from that's where refugees go.
What do you suppose we do with Syria? Invade and rule it for a while to teach them our superior ways? I'd say that'd be quite colonial. I certainly wouldn't mind the US stopping to implicitly back Turkey in its anti-Kurdish stance as well as Russia going so bankrupt they can't prop up Assad any longer.
Look, I'm always down for learning more about history, but who's "Nigeria"? To who was "Nigeria" selling slaves to? Modern states are never representative of specific / homogeneous cultures, let alone individual peoples, let alone societies from before the state was even formed. After skimming a few wiki articles, it's clear that the region has had its own fair share of struggles against authorities, slavery, and racism, even before European colonisation, some of which continue currently.
Still, none of this reached the scale of european colonisation / "the scramble for Africa", and the continued political and economic influence and control that 'the West' continues to hold and wield (neocolonialism / recolonisation). I know nowhere near enough about critical theory, but I'm sure these processes can be understood as a form of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (I wasn't able to find a freely available copy, but this article seems like it could be a relevant, interesting read: Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization of the Orisha Religion in Africa and the New World (Nigeria, Cuba and the United States).)
Regarding Syria, "my approach" would be simply to support more movements / projects like Rojava (which is clearly not something that 'western' political powers are interested in doing). As an anarchist I don't think liberation from state authority can be achieved through state authority.
The broad geographical area, inhibited by neighbouring tribes. Nigeria stayed Nigeria in that sense same as Europe stayed Europe.
Regarding the sheer size of the unit -- most of Nigeria was unified by Cameroon (same approximate geographical thing) jihading the Hausas. Hausas have always been a single polity in the same sense that Greeks already were a polity when they were separate city states, the concept of nation didn't suddenly spring up with the age of the national state. Similar things apply to the other groups.
You don't want to open the can of worms that is "Should there be Yorubaland, Igboland, and Hausaland". Not to be too geographically determinist but creating a land-locked state in is a rather courageous idea. Also see Ethiopia. And that's before all the other trouble that it'd cause for the 300+ other ethnicities.
So... Orisha, a Yoruba religion, is spreading to the Americas. That has anything to do with governance in Nigeria vs. Syria... how? Syria isn't poor as such. They have the same if not more resources to pour into their own development as Nigeria, as can be seen in Rojava, they're making rapid progress. Syria before the civil war had 5x of Nigeria's current gdp/capita. Their education system still sucked, social mobility, completely absent you're either in the right clan or aren't. And no, Europeans didn't come up with the Arab clan system. I guess an argument can be made that Russia propping up the Assad regime over the port in Tartus is colonialism, but Syria's problem didn't start there, Russia didn't cause them as-such they're merely exploiting.
Ah, fuck, I usually at the very least skim things before I share but this time I just assumed from the title... my bad, the article has nothing to do with this topic.
Still, my general point is that European colonialism in Africa can't be considered a "solved" issue, because of capitalism's (and 'western' capitalists') roles in continuing to exploit its natural resources and perpetuating systemic wealth inequalities. I think that profling populations by nation/culture is a fundamentally flawed way of approaching the difficulties of (mass) immigration, plus it's an even more dangerous road to go down. Whatever the qualities of cultures and hegemonies that persist in whichever regions, populations aren't homogenous, and states fail to represent their peoples.
Of course, there are many factors and actors involved in the many social instabillties / conflicts plaguing the world, and anything I might value as an anarchist (e.g. open borders and mutual / humanitarian aid) would be nonsensical to apply as government policies. I don't have a 'counter' solution to propose.
lf all this is "thought terminating" in the sense that I'm unwlling to go down the path of 'pragmatism' in which peoples' worth is profiled and measured and weighed, then so be it. As I see it, that kind of thinking as part of problem, not the solution.
I mostly counter-steered here because of another pragmatism: The corrupt domestic powers that be in plenty of African states love to blame everything on colonialism, skirting responsibility for their own role in their country's abject poverty. They're the ones commanding the armies letting Wagner run around exploiting mineral resources and massacring people. And that isn't even capitalism as such it's plain ole feudalism.
The Ukrainian thing is not by culture or anything, it's by "has a Ukrainian passport". Which means you have a good educational standard because the basically one thing that the Soviets got right was education, and Ukraine kept that intact and even built on it.
I'm quite sure if those Ukrainian refugees were South Africans they'd get the same treatment, 95% literacy are nothing to scoff at.
Oh I don't doubt that those in power are complicit in the exploitation (I disagree with calling it feudalism, however). Ridding themselves of responsibility by blaming colonialism sounds akin to Israel deflecting criticism by claiming anti-semitism.
The statist perspective is unable to properly address these inequalities and injustices because it cannot reject the hierarchical power structures that caused them in the first place. Foreign intervention is just colonialism 2.0, but the more "reactive" alternative is just leading to a situation where measuring immigrants by their worth as 'skilled workers' and 'ease of integration' is pragmatic. I'm not gonna deny that there's a kind of sense to this, because that's exactly what makes it so worrying. At least with the old racist pseudoscience we can point and laugh at how nonsensical it was.
I mean I can reject them all I want doesn't mean that Wagner rolling tanks through my village wouldn't upend the idealism quite quickly as I'm staring straight down hierarchy's barrel. It sucks, yes, but there's also shit all that could currently be done without breaking means-ends unity.
Which doesn't mean that nothing at all can be done -- but even the most hardcore anarchist will have to become a mere liberal in practice as making a pact with the devil might be the only way to fuck him over. To assuage your conscience, that goes both ways: Even the Pentagon has taken note of Rojava's unparalleled capacity to stop those ISIS fucks in their tracks and they'd rather have the headache of yet another hundred anarchist (or at least anarchisty) places than the instability that the likes of ISIS bring. As they say a compromise is when both sides are unhappy. I'm sure that they'd be happier with more Rwandas (which is currently in the progress of becoming Africa's Singapore) but the conditions that bring about authoritarian regimes which are neither corrupt nor power-mad are so fickle as to be impossible to bring about by design.