In the dark ages before the Internet, what did the masses of the hellish Third World know about the First World?

Not much, unless the First World came colonizing, which turned parts of the hellholes into pockets of civilization.

The Internet changed everything. The dwellers in darkness saw the light. From their huts, their slums, their shanty towns, their hovels, they viewed the great cities of the West, the goods in the stores, the size of the houses, the millions of cars on smooth roads; they saw the plenty, the ease, the pleasantness, the manifest wealth. And they wanted to go and live there.

So they did, by the thousands and tens of thousands. And so they continue to do.

Tides of people are flowing from the lands of poverty into the lands of plenty. They flow from south to north, into the lands of “the West”. (And into its branch, Australia.) They will not ebb away again.

What fools they would be not to go where the grass really is greener.

I, the migrant, know that the journey will not be easy. I have a perilous sea to cross. Or a desert.

I may have to work and save for years to pay for a passage over the sea or a guide over the desert.

I know that I risk drowning. Of dying of heat and exhaustion. Of being robbed. If I, the migrant, am a woman I will almost certainly be sexually assaulted.

But it is worth taking the risks to get there.

If I can just get there, it will not be hard to get in. There are no barriers to speak of.

There, I will be given a house, and money without working for it. There, my children will go to school free of charge. There, if I get sick, I will be cured free of charge.

Clearly, from the point of view of the immigrant, coming from hell to western Europe or Canada or the United States is a highly rational decision.

But why is the First World letting them in, the millions of them? Is the decision of First World governments to do so also rational? What benefits do they reckon accrue to them, to their countries through this demographic tsunami?

Here’s someone with an explanation –

Sean Byrne wrote in February 2018 on the RTÉ (Ireland’s National Television and Radio) website:

Over the past three years, Europe has experienced the worst refugee and migration crisis since World War II.  While the flow of refugees from Syria has diminished as some eastern European countries have closed their borders and the EU has given €6 billion to Turkey to persuade it to keep Syrian refugees within its borders, the flow of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa across the Mediterranean continues unabated.

The number of refugees entering Europe peaked in 2015 at just over one million. Half were Syrian, 20 percent from Afghanistan and seven percent from Iraq, with most of the remaining 33 per cent coming from Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2015, 3,771 people drowned while crossing the Mediterraneancrammed into unseaworthy and overcrowded boats by traffickers. Most of the migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are trying to reach Europe through Libya. The lack of an effective government in Libya has enabled people traffickers to operate almost unhindered out of Libyan ports and there are reports that some migrants are being sold as slaves in Libya. …

The hopeless poverty of sub-Saharan Africa, where populations are growing faster than output, causes many people from the region to risk their lives to reach Europe. …

The writer believes that the massive immigration into Europe is a Good Thing:

As Europe’s population declines and ages, it must accept significant immigration or face economic and social decline.

We should all appreciate that. Economic and social decline! That (does he mean? or hasn’t the question crossed his mind?)  would be far worse than losing our countries to an alien population. Yet some of us are – he thinks – hard-heartedly and stupidly against it.

Even when the immigration was “limited” we were already fussing about it:

Yet the limited immigration that has taken place over the past 30 years has already led to the rise of anti-immigration political movements and some of these, including Germany’s Alternativ fur Deutschland are achieving electoral success. The new Austrian government includes the vehemently anti-immigration Freedom Party, while Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are all refusing to take their share of the refugees that the EU has agreed to accept from Syria. …

But what of the …?

He knew what we were about to protest and answers us:

Because of the inexorable decline of birth rates, Europe will need large numbers of migrants over the next 50 years. Some of these migrants will want the economic benefits of living in Europe while maintaining their own cultures, including such practices as forced marriages, honour killings, female genital mutilation and the persecution of gay people. Many immigrants to Europe will reject the rights and freedoms painfully achieved by western democracies over the past 200 years. Resolving this conflict of cultures will be the greatest challenge facing Europe over the next 50 years.

It’s a challenge. That’s all. A little courage, some planning, lots of tolerance and humility are all we need to … what?

Byrne’s defense is no defense at all.

Is there another? Can someone else tell us why we must adapt ourselves cheerfully to a huge change in our culture and tolerate (among other appalling practices of the Third World) forced marriages, honor killings, female genital mutilation and the murder of homosexuals?

Yes. Here’s one.

Matthew Boose writes at American Greatness:

The New York Times recently published an op-ed advancing a rather peculiar argument. Author Suketu Mehta builds on the familiar, hackneyed debate over reparations for slavery to make an even bolder, but more politically contemporary proposal: as penance for colonialism, the West should open its borders to the Third World.

Mehta suggests immigration quotas for Western countries that correspond with their respective historical sins. Mehta categorizes the nations of the world into “creditors” and “debtors,” according to their legacy as oppressors or oppressed within roughly the past 500 years.

By this token, “Britain should have quotas for Indians and Nigerians; France for Malians and Tunisians; Belgium for very large numbers of Congolese”. The West should accept 12 million African laborers, one for every African enslaved by the colonialists of the past.

While audacious, this argument expresses what many on the Left believe, but are often careful to avoid stating frankly: that mass migration should be seen as a form of just punishment for the West’s history.

We interrupt to state firmly that the era of Western colonialism on the whole brought more good than harm to the “underdeveloped” world. That is certainly true of the British Empire (though in the case of the American Revolution right was on the side of the rebels). The British took the rule of law, impartial justice, a free press, and higher standards of living to their colonies. On the other hand, we grant, German colonial rule in South West Africa (now Namibia) was oppressive and murderous. And Belgian rule of the Congo in the time of evil King Leopold was a horror story, told memorably by Joseph Conrad in his story The Heart of Darkness. Later the Belgians did better. Now the Congo has reverted to what it was in Conrad’s story. The plight of the African peoples in general is, in all but a few cases, worse now than under colonial rule.

As for the slave trade, it is important to remember that the victims were first enslaved by Africans and Arabs before Christians bought them.

In general, immigration activists try to disguise their malice as sympathy for “refugees”, many of whom are in fact economic migrants seeking a better life. Of course, one need not be so cynical as to imagine that their concern for the well-being of would-be immigrants is entirely fake. But once in a while, the mask will slip, and it becomes apparent that they are motivated at least as much by resentment towards the destination countries as they are by compassion for migrants.

From the “walls are immoral, but we don’t really want open borders” denialism of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to those openly calling for immigration as a form of reparations, there is a growing consensus on the Left that all restrictions on migration are motivated by xenophobia, borders are immoral because they are exclusionary, and Western countries are morally obligated to accept an unlimited number of migrants because of past wrongs.

How would these immigration quotas be drawn up? As with slavery reparations, the price is levied indiscriminately and with great prejudice. People who had nothing to do with the negative effects of colonialism are saddled with collective, generational guilt for the sins of distant, forgotten ancestors.

Mehta mentions more recent ravages as well, such as the Iraq War. National sovereignty doesn’t absolve America’s leaders from the responsibility of making smart, and ethical, foreign policy decisions. The United States should not invade the world and then expect the world to stay behind in the blast crater. But why should American workers pay for Iraq, when it is America’s irresponsible leaders who deserve the blame?

An exact accounting of who the “debtors” are, and what they owe, is beside the point. How would one go about determining who deserves to pay for King Leopold II’s brutal exploitation of the Congo? The enterprise is no more workable than figuring out which Americans living today should pay for slavery. Never mind the specifics; all Westerners are assumed guilty for the wrongs of all Western history.

The classes that comprise America’s elite are pushing this narrative. Journalists, academics, educators, entertainers, and activists are all popularizing academic, anti-American histories that invert the story of America’s founding and legitimize unlimited migration as a form of just deserts.

This new radicalism marks a shift from traditional American heritage, history, and identity. No one can deny that immigrants have had a profound impact on American history and society. But until recently, immigration has been understood as adding to, not defining, American identity; as something that should occur within legal and reasonable boundaries, not endlessly and without consideration for the economic welfare and social fabric of the existing nation.

Put simply, immigration always has been regarded as a privilege. Immigrants would come to America through a legal process. They would be vetted and accepted as American citizens, with certain expectations. They would assimilate to American society and pledge loyalty to their new home. They would contribute more than they would take. The would learn English, and be good neighbors and citizens.

In sum, immigration worked best when it had benefits for America and the migrants it accepted alike. There was no malice or malevolence toward the United States or its existing people involved.

This is a path that countless migrants have followed and continue to follow. But for numberless thousands of migrants coming more with the mindset of invaders than immigrants, a set of powerful interests exists to justify their illegal entry as an entitlement. …

Lawful process has been replaced with lawlessness, gratitude and respect with brazen entitlement.

For the Left today, immigration is a universal human right that can brook no restrictions, whether by national sovereignty or mere economic realism. …

To justify this universal right of entry, the Left employs a foundational myth. In this myth, America, and the West broadly, is the villain and debtor to the suffering masses around the globe. Citizenship is not a privilege but a right owed by Westerners to every “citizen of the world”. 

In this founding myth, the settlers of America were illegitimate brutes who despoiled the verdant plains and stole the birthright of today’s rightful heirs to the continent. American history begins not with 1492, but with the beginning of the struggle for social justice and the rise of modern progressivism in the 20th century, particularly the mid-century. The American “history” that has been written is illegitimate and needs to be written anew, by the erstwhile, rightful occupants of the land. In fact, the real Americans need not have any historical ties to the American continent at all, other than having been on the receiving end of America’s might.

This academic narrative typically writes off the Founders as irredeemable racists, discrediting their nobility, wisdom, and efforts to build a lasting constitutional republic. Once relegated to humanities departments in America’s universities, this “de-colonialist” ideology has seeped into the wider public consciousness through various left-wing channels. Today’s students learn more in K-12 education about what is wrong with America and its past than what made it great.

At its core, this anti-founding myth denies that America has a core identity at all. There is nothing greater about American life than the sum of the countless job seekers searching for a better life from abroad. America has no history, since that history is illegitimate; it has no culture that rises above what can be bought on the market, including the various commodified “cuisines” brought from afar and sized down to American palates; it has no border, since borders are restrictive. America is simply a giant  casino in which all and sundry may seek their fortune, with special preference given to those shut out by the prejudices of the past.

In this narrative, migration, being a right rather than a privilege, comes with no obligation for the migrant.

What nation would there be to render any obligation to, anyway, when America is merely a “nation of immigrants”? …

In an excerpt of his book, This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, Mehta argues the West is being “destroyed, not by migrants, but by the fear of migrants” and describes fears of mass migration as “irrational”. Millions of Westerners somehow have been duped into working against their own interests by populist strong men playing off atavistic hatred.

But if immigration is a form of punishment, payment of the “debt” for the West’s wrongs, is this not an admission that those “irrational fears” are simply clear perceptions of the costs of mass migration?

When they’re not forwarding shallow, disingenuous arguments for mass immigration as a boost to the GDP, today’s most ardent proponents of open borders—however much they might deny it—agree in their most honest moments that mass immigration, rather than being a net boon, brings burdens that Americans may be loath to accommodate—but must bear, as payback. How, then, are the fears of immigration restrictionists irrational?

In their haste, the open borders proponents are giving the game away. Does their confidence stem from a belief that they have already won? That through their combined institutional powers, the media, activist judges, the administrative state, academia, an education system thoroughly co-opted by anti-American ideology, and corporate interests seeking cheap labor, dissenters are powerless to resist their agenda?

Can anything stop the vast migration from the impoverished and wretched south into the prosperous north? Will walls do it? Will laws do it?

Perhaps only the economic ruin of the north will put a stop to it. So will the migration itself cause economic ruin? Or keep the welfare states going, as the Merkels and Macrons and Trudeaus and Newsoms who hold the gates open insist that it will?

Contrary to the story told by Rep. Rashida Tlaib that the Arabs of Palestine tried “to create a safe haven” for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, they supported and actively aided Hitler’s massacre of the European Jews with passionate enthusiasm, and did all they could violently to keep the region from becoming the Jewish homeland promised by the Balfour Declaration.

Karin McQuillan writes at American Greatness:

Representative Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and the Democratic Party leadership defending her indefensible comments on the Holocaust are now promoting the Big Lie about Arabs as innocent victims of World War II. Nazism was widely popular among Palestinians, who played a key role in the Holocaust. Adolf Eichmann himself went to Cairo to train the Muslim Brotherhood in anti-Semitic propaganda, military sabotage, and terrorism—launching the modern jihadi movement in the process. Without Arab Nazism, 6 million Jews would not have been murdered.

Not sure about that. But it’s a plausible conjecture. And certainly the Arab role in the Nazi ‘s attempted genocide can hardly be overestimated.

This is a history Americans should know, since it is a war we are still fighting today.

Tlaib and her colleague, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), are not on America’s side in this battle. Nor, it seems, is the Democratic Party.

Are they on America’s side at all?

Before Hitler adopted the Muslim Brotherhood, its Islamist message focused on the sexual decadence of the West, the evil of treating women as equals, and calls to reject modernity. This got them exactly nowhere, languishing with a membership of 800 cranks. With Nazi funding and training, the Brotherhood adopted the Third Reich’s obsession with anti-Semitism.

But – as the author goes on to acknowledge – Arab Muslims already hated the Jews as the Koran commanded them to:

Hitler’s message was fused with the Koran’s anti-Semitic teachings into a toxic mix. The Muslim Brothers grew a thousand-fold during the war, emerging triumphant with 1 million members. Thus the jihadi movement was born. The history of the Middle East was changed forever.

The Democrats’ embrace of multicultural anti-Semites such as Tlaib, Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) poses a danger to our country—both morally and politically. No nation has ever embraced anti-Semitism and remained a decent country for its own citizens. This is a path we do not want to go down, because down it leads.

We have a warning about our forgetfulness, like words in a bottle, launched right after the war by members of the Greatest Generation.

Years ago, I was poking around in the basement of Brandeis University’s library and came across a slender volume that changed my understanding of the Palestinian role in the Holocaust forever. In 1947, with memories of Nazism fresh in their minds, New York City Mayor Robert Wagner, along with Fiorello LaGuardia, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and two dozen other prominent citizens, published a report titled “The Arab War Effort.”

Their words from 72 years ago would be well directed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and all the other Democrats appeasing the anti-Semites in their ranks today.

“The tendency to forget the lessons of the past has always been one of man’s most dangerous characteristics,” the report begins. The authors continue:

One of those hard-earned lessons is simply this: that appeasement does not work. The enemies of human freedom could neither be bribed nor cajoled.  . . . Yet now in 1947 we seem to be returning to the policy of appeasement in dealing with precisely those Arab leaders who did their utmost to aid the Axis powers. . . . It is not claimed that the facts stated in this document constitute a revelation. They do not appear to be in dispute in any responsible quarter. There seems, however, to be a tendency to ignore them as no longer politically relevant. This [is] unfortunate, for the data herewith presented point to conclusions that are still valid with regard to the political reasoning prevalent among the Arab peoples.

The authors’ stated goal was to record for posterity—that is, for us living today—that the Arab populace, not simply a few leaders, were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazis. They were wise enough to foresee we would reap the whirlwind from politicians’ foolish appeasement and erasing of the Arab Nazi past. Pelosi and company, under pressure from the black and socialist caucuses, are repeating the mistakes of past appeasement.

The message to us from 1947:

[S]ympathy with the Axis powers were widespread among the common people of the Arab countries… these feelings permeated the majority of the population, while the leaders often cooperated directly with the Axis. Fascist and Nazi ideologies were not so much imitated as paralleled in the Arab world; they fitted into modes of thought already in being and were taken up by existing political clubs and associations.

Palestinian involvement in the Final Solution was crucial to Hitler’s success. The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust published by Yad Vashem (Israel’s famous Holocaust Museum) devotes more pages to the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, Haj Amin al-Husseini elevated by British appeasement to become the Mufti of Jerusalem, than to any Nazi leader other than Hitler himself. This indicates how important the Palestinian role was in the genocide of Europe’s Jews.

Winston Churchill spoke against the appeasement of Palestinian Nazism, and Britain restricting Jewish immigration, while allowing Arabs to pour in to the Jewish Homeland from their impoverished, backward countries all around, trying to outnumber the Jews there. “So far from being persecuted, the Arabs have crowded into the country and multiplied till their population has increased more than even all world Jewry could lift up the Jewish population. …We are now asked to submit, and this is what rankles most with me, to an agitation which is fed with foreign money and ceaselessly inflamed by Nazi and by Fascist propaganda.”

The most famous Palestinian Nazi, the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini traveled to Germany to meet Hitler in 1941. They shook hands on a plan to exterminate the Jews of the Middle East. The Reich preserved the memo, the minutes, and a photo of their handshake.

The Mufti returned to Berlin the next year for the duration of the war. Goebbels recruited him as the Nazi voice to the Middle East, with a radio program broadcast daily into every café. This Nazi station was listened to by practically the entire male population during the long war years. Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini recalled it fondly. Listeners enjoyed the mix of music, jihad, and anti-Semitism.

According to testimony from the Nuremberg trials by Dieter Wisliceny, Adolf Eichmann’s deputy: “The Mufti was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and advisor of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of the plan. He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures.”

A popular Arab song during the war went, “Allah in heaven, Hitler on earth.” Palestinians founded a division of the Nazi Scouts.

Unlike Germans, following the war Palestinian Arabs did not end their Nazi propaganda and terrorism. Members of the PLO often use noms de guerre such as Hitler and Rommel. Arafat’s personal bodyguard named his two sons Hitler and Eichmann.

Arafat took the name Yasser in memory of a leader of the Mufti’s terror campaign of the 1930s funded by Hitler. They murdered thousands of moderate Palestinians who were willing to live peacefully with Jews. They threw live victims into pits of scorpions and snakes. They drove 40,000 Arabs into exile. The corpses of their victims would be left in the street for days, a shoe stuck in their mouth, as a lesson for any Arab who believed in tolerating a Jewish homeland.

The Mufti boasted of visiting the gas chambers of Auschwitz. He pressured the Nazis to let no Jew escape, focusing especially on Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia—Axis countries that were willing to allow Jews to flee.

Palestinian participation in the Nazi cause posed a genuine threat to the British. They created espionage, parachute and sabotage networks covering Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Palestine that reported to German Intelligence. They formed Muslim legions in the Balkans, Crimea, Azerbaijan, and Turkistan for the Wehrmacht and a plan to recruit half a million soldiers.

The most threatening accomplishment of the Palestinians on behalf of the Axis came in 1941, the darkest days of World War II when Britain was battling alone and seemed to be losing. Seizing Iraq was a major German goal. It would have deprived Britain of her chief source of oil, cut the sea lanes to India, a crucial source of raw materials, and cut the British empire in two. It would also have allowed the Axis to invade Russia along a second front from Iraq.

In the words of the American Christian Palestine Committee:

In the spring of 1941 Britain’s forces were at their lowest ebb. Neither Russia nor the U.S. had yet entered the war. … It was indeed a critical moment that the Iraqi rebels, prodded and aided by the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem [Haj Amin al-Husseini], chose for their uprising. For two months the fight hung in the balance. British troops were rushed to Basra from India… At the call of Haj Amin …subversive elements throughout the Middle East were touched off into activity. Looking back, one sees that it was by sheer miracle … most of all by the heroic Greek and British resistance in Greece and Crete…preventing the Germans from transporting reinforcements of men and material to Iraq—that the Iraqi revolt was quelled.

The Palestinian’s efforts to cut England off from the oil fields and the sea lane to India were foiled, but the British were now frightened of the Palestinian’s alliance with the Third Reich. The news of the Final Solution and the gas chambers reached Britain in 1942 and led to a public outcry to help Jews escape, but the British government remained adamant that the doors of the Jewish National Home, mandated by international law, must remain shut to Jews.

The enormity of Arab Nazism is sanitized, hidden and justified as nationalism—much as German Nazi Jew-hatred was during the 1930s. Far from occupying a moral high ground, Palestinian Arabs worked alongside and for Hitler with all the means available to them, and they succeeded in helping him destroy European Jewry. 

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, visiting his friend Adolf Hitler

This is a fulcrum moment in history.

If the Democrats succeed in “kicking down the door”, “crossing the threshold”, “vaulting over the fence” – to use Pelosi-Obama metaphors – by passing their “health care” bill, which is actually a bill to turn America towards unstoppable socialism, they will have a clear field in front of them.

The Left’s “long march through the institutions” brought Obama to the most powerful position in the world. Now the purpose of the long march can be realized: a collectivist world.

Then the brief American experiment in liberty – successful though it has been while it lasted – will be over: over for America, and so for the world. There have been only a few periods and places in which people have been able to live in freedom under law. Britain managed it for a while. The United States has managed it triumphantly for about 234 years. Ahead, if the bill passes and the Democrats continue in the direction Obama and Pelosi are leading them, lies collectivism, poverty, serfdom, misery. There will be hunger and want as there was in collectivist Russia and collectivist China; not immediately, but once the Capitalist Goose is killed, there can be no more golden eggs and the store will soon be bare.

However the swing to socialism is accomplished, whether by majority vote in a corrupt Congress, or by hook-and-crook, deem-and-wangle, if this measure becomes law it will be a victory for evil.

Jillian Becker March 19, 2010.

Among the corrupt hypocritical bleeding-heart lefties who like to live high and party up there at the tax-payer’s expense, is Drinker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

From Judicial Watch:

Last year, Judicial Watch made big news by exposing Nancy Pelosi’s boorish demands for military travel. According to the internal DOD correspondence we uncovered the Speaker has been treating the U.S. Air Force as her own personal airline. And not only was her staff demanding, arrogant and rude, but the Speaker cost taxpayers a lot of money by making last minute cancellations and changes to the itinerary.

This week, Judicial Watch obtained documents from the Air Force that shed a bit more light on this ugly story.

According to the documents, which we obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Speaker’s military travel cost the Air Force $2,100,744.59 over a two-year period — $101,429.14 for in-flight expenses, including food and alcohol. (Lots and lots of alcohol.) The following are highlights from the recent release of about 2,000 documents …

Speaker Pelosi used Air Force aircraft to travel back to her district at an average cost of $28,210.51 per flight. The average cost of an international congressional delegation (CODEL) is $228,563.33. Of the 103 Pelosi-led CODELs, 31 trips included members of the House Speaker’s family.

One CODEL traveling from Washington, D.C. through Tel Aviv, Israel to Baghdad, Iraq from May 15-20, 2008, “to discuss matters of mutual concern with government leaders” included members of Congress and their spouses and cost $17,931 per hour in aircraft alone. Purchases for the CODEL included: Johnny Walker Red scotch, Grey Goose vodka, E&J brandy, Bailey’s Irish Crème, Maker’s Mark whiskey, Courvoisier cognac, Bacardi Light rum, Jim Beam whiskey, Beefeater gin, Dewars scotch, Bombay Sapphire gin, Jack Daniels whiskey, Corona beer and several bottles of wine.

According to a “Memo for Record” from a CODEL March 29 – April 7, 2007, that involved a stop in Israel, “CODEL could only bring Kosher items into the Hotel. Kosher alcohol for mixing beverages in the Delegation room was purchased on the local economy i.e. Bourbon, Whiskey, Scotch, Vodka, Gin, Triple Sec, Tequila, etc.”

The Department of Defense advanced a CODEL of 56 members of Congress and staff $60,000 to travel to Louisiana and Mississippi July 19-22, 2008, to “view flood relief advances from Hurricane Katrina.” The three-day trip cost the U.S. Air Force $65,505.46, exceeding authorized funding by $5,505.46. ..

At the heart of the issue of corruption, is a sense of entitlement on the part of our elected officials. Nancy Pelosi clearly believes she deserves special treatment at taxpayer expense. This message comes across loud and clear in the disrespect she has demonstrated towards the U.S. Air Force and the American taxpayer.