An Open Letter to Certain Christians
An Open Letter to Certain Christians
One of the Christian duties outlined
by St. Thomas Aquinas is fraternal correction. This duty can be discharged
privately in any area of life but it can also involve public protest as is
exemplified, for instance, by Hebrew prophets such as Amos. It should involve protest at some points
especially when people are preferring illusion to truth. This is because people
prefer illusion to truth only when they prefer illusion to love. It is much
easier to delude ourselves about the world when the alternative to doing so is
to show charity to people we would rather not show charity to, whether because
of an ethnic or class difference or because of a religious divide. This is why
I want to examine the false beliefs many of you are propagating concerning
immigration and the refugee/migrant ‘crisis’. Some mistakes are innocent such
as when I do an equation in algebra incorrectly. Other mistakes are not as when
I believe the worst of my neighbor because I harbor some ill will against her.
The mistaken beliefs many of you have about refugees are not of the former kind
but of the latter. You are attempting to evade the truth about your neighbors
in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere because you are uncomfortable acknowledging them
as your neighbors. Empathy for people so different from yourselves is
uncomfortable and (like all of us at some point) you would rather avoid it.
This is why, for instance, you are so ready to believe in absurd conspiracies
rather than acknowledge the atrocities committed in the New Zealand and Quebec
mosque shootings.[1] Your
failure is one of will not intellect.
Let’s get some basic realities about the world straight
before we proceed. Many Christians believe (and deeply WANT to believe) in
three delusions. The first concerns the way our privilege as westerners is
sustained by a corrupt global economic order. It is a systemic and total
delusion to think that we in the Western world can hoard the lion's share of the
globe’s wealth without 'economic migrants' (who range from near destitute to
destitute) coming to our doors not by means of ‘ordinary’ immigration channels
which are difficult, costly and designed to admit only the privileged but by
any means they can. This is why your insistence that proper ‘immigrants’ follow
the ‘rules’ is legalistic and hollow. This is also why you believe there is a
crisis of ‘illegal’ migrants at our border even though crossing the Canadian
border is not illegal and there is no such crisis. This is why you assert that
refugees are at our border not because of the heated anti-immigrant rhetoric of
the 2016 U.S. election but because of a tweet from the prime minister (because
they are just that frivolous). It is also why you believe, without evidence,
that migrants at our border are just looking for ‘cushy jobs’ or ‘welfare
benefits’ even though there is no way of determining the truth about their aims
without admitting them and assessing their cases. This is also why you believe
that any media or academic source that calls you on these deceptions is part of
some vast and nebulous ‘cover up’. You believe all these things without
evidence and indeed in the teeth of conflicting evidence because you want to
believe they are true and you want to believe they are true because you have a
different idea of who your neighbor is than God does.
It is also a systemic and total
delusion to think that we can wage imperial wars in Iraq and elsewhere without
having to care for the people displaced by them. You seem to have this odd
notion that no one could have an honest reason to flee pleasant countries like
Haiti, Honduras or Syria. Some of you take this belief to an absolutely absurd
and conspiratorial level: do you really think Guatemala is so rosy a place that
George Soros has to bribe people to leave it? On what do you base this
preposterous notion? I think I can see where you are coming from here and it is
not a nice place. It is far easier and far more pleasant to think the poor we
look down on merit their fate than it is to confront the fact that our comfort
contributes to their poverty. It is easier to believe that Hondurans are crisis
actors than to confront the terrible legacy of the exploitation and colonialism
left there even by ‘good’ politicians like Jimmy Carter or F.D.R. It is easier
to believe that people fleeing the wonderful paradises of Syria and Iraq are
terrorists trying to infiltrate our country than face the fact that our own
reckless wars have made their countries unlivable. This, I must say, is almost
the basest hypocrisy imaginable yet you refuse to consider the refugee crisis
in any larger global context than your own petty resentment and moralistic
suspicion of ‘freeloaders’ extending your contempt of ‘welfare bums’ to people
YOU have literally made homeless by your reflexive support for the ‘war on
drugs’ and the equally futile ‘war on terror’. You would laugh at a thief who
mugged a man and then argued that he was poor because of his own laziness but
that is exactly what you argue with a
solemn face and tone of gravitas.
The third delusion concerns climate
change, of course, whose existence you vehemently deny even as people from
northern Africa flee their farms that are now deserts. Here again you would
rather believe the most preposterous conspiracies than countenance anything
that might threaten your false ‘prosperity’ gospel.[2]
Indeed, you want me, a university instructor, to believe that my colleagues in
the sciences are ‘cultural Marxists’ pushing a ‘Chinese hoax’ because they hate
‘prosperity and freedom’ even though I can talk to them myself and see,
directly, with my own eyes, that they are ordinary people just like you and me.
You slander people I directly know (and you do not) and expect me to believe
your slander over the evidence of my own senses. If, however, you are so
concerned with keeping strange people away from our shores I suggest you take a
second look at this issue. Climate change will speed desertification in some of
the poorest parts of the globe. Are you thinking that in some Camp of the Saints type scenario we will
simply mow these people down when they flee drought and starvation? Would you
have the gall to suggest this and still call yourselves Christians? I hold out
hope that at the end of the day you will turn from ‘life boat ethics’ and other
moral enormities that are in the spirit of anti-Christ not the gospel.
It is hard and depressing to think
about all these things. It is much easier just to blame the migrants and apply
derogatory terms to them like 'economic migrant’ (a meaningless phrase by the
way; every migrant is by definition ‘economic’). There are many legitimate
criticisms to be made of any government organization and I'm sure our refugee
board is no exception but what you are doing is not criticizing the Government
except by way of implying there is something wrong with the 'migrants'. Thus
you assert, falsely, that there is a massive free for all at our border and
that bad scary people are flooding in as if our borders were no longer being
policed (a lie) and the persons crossing it not vetted (also a lie). You are
doing this to cast suspicion on PERSONS, some of the poorest persons in the
world whose poverty our own policies have helped create. Here, however, is the
bottom line. We don't have a choice in the matter. Workers go where the labor
market is; that's capitalism 101. Western Societies can't survive without
migrant labor unless we have a reproductive miracle (not happening) and people
can't stay in the countries our wars, economic policies, and greed for fossil
fuels have gutted. Put two and two together here and you will see that it
equals only four. While you go on about the evils of supposed 'open borders'
governments seek only a regular, ordered flow of people from devastated regions
of Africa and the Middle East to the west or wherever else they can find a
better life. As Louise Arbour says, we must accept the fact that migrants are a
permanent feature of our global system and refrain from creating a rhetorical
environment where evil and insane policies (such as jailing toddlers) become
respectable and the previously unthinkable things suddenly thinkable.
So, migrants and refugees are a FACT
as objective as gravity: take your own advice on the dangers of relativism and
the denial of objective truth. They are an absolutely predictable result of the
global order we (the west) have created. What is more, they are not a temporary
'problem' but a permanent feature of that Global order. We are not keeping
these people out. We CAN"T do that because we have no future without their
labor. Arithmetic does not lie and closing our borders is demographic suicide.
You are not keeping brown folk out because you cannot. Nor is it moral or
Christian for us to do so. SO if you flirt with anti-immigrant rhetoric, if you
demonize refugees as terrorists or (gasp!) economic migrants, if you try to
change laws to weaken the protections of Canadian citizenship, if you do all
these things you are NOT laying the groundwork for a 'white European future'.
There is no such future. What you are laying the groundwork for is a Fascist
response to an escalating movement of workers to jobs. We will have millions of
nasty brown folk who follow the Koran or other outlandish faiths but they will
be second class wage serfs without the rights of 'real Canadians' (like you)
and of course so will their children because 'birthright' citizenship will be a
thing of the past as a response to your own thoughtless lobbying.[3] If
that is your future vision of Canada (actually present vision-ask Philipino
people who work at Wendy's) and something you can contemplate with pride, then
God love you for someone must.
[1]
Here I must address a festering issue. Christians complain endlessly about how
they are persecuted minorities in many cultures around the globe and that
people on the left are indifferent to this fact. This complaint has some merit
however suspect the motivations of the people who circulate such stories (they
are trying to generate a revenge narrative that justifies their Islamophobia).
Still, progressives are foolish to help them in this as they do when they can
draw no distinction between Pat Robertson and historic communities like the
Copts. Indeed, one such person once informed me that the Copts were getting
what they deserved because of the inquisition! Anyone who can utter such a
statement has no right to call fundamentalists stupid. The problem of course is
parallel to Islamophobia. Progressives are not comfortable with regarding
Christians as objects of empathy and would rather not be called on to do so.
This is exactly how Evangelicals feel about Muslims and why their reaction to
mosque shootings is so insincere, forced and resentful.
2] By
the way speaking of preposterous conspiracies many of you believe that our
current prime minister is a secret Muslim. What a coincidence given that
president Obama was also a secret Muslim. You would think that having two
secret Muslims in row as North American heads of state would be subject to
pretty long odds. Coincidences do happen however and of course I am not so
jaded and cynical as to think you would simply borrow a popular and successful
talking point from American Republicans.
[3]
The depth of your current folly is revealed to me by the fact that you wish to
alter the very definition of Canadian citizenship for the pettiest possible
reason: revenge on the Khadr family. It was not until a Canadian court shredded
the pretensions under which Omar Khadr was held in Guantanamo Bay that you
suddenly became worried about Chinese ‘birth tourism’ on the bizarre pretense
that affluent Chinese having babies in private Canadian clinics were somehow a
drain on the health system. So rigid is the connection in your mind between
immigrants and ‘freeloaders’ that you even apply it to Chinese millionaires
whose manifest aim is to make and SPEND money in Canada. So, you would risk
diluting the protections of Canadian citizenship and even possibly rendering
individuals stateless for the sake of sticking it to one person. I congratulate
you on your zeal for making the world a better place.
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