Antiglobalization 101 - as anyone who reads the laststraw group knows I am a tireless monomaniac on PC, secular humanism, and transnational finance globalization which I generally regard as one evil with multiple names. For today's idiocy NPR did a little piece on the 12K Somali Bantus we are taking into the US for 'humanitarian resettlement'. Now you would think in our current economic and security situation we would think carefully about taking in people who bring no educational, occupational or financial benefits merely to 'do good'. But no we are taking people that no one else wants just because they are in need. Now I have nothing against any of these people personally or collectively. However I am a notably unsentimental type [except as concerns my cats]. Some centuries ago Omani and Somali slavers took what were then called Bantu slaves [politically incorrect term as Bantu is a language group and besides we are not allowed to admit that Muslims were slavers as bad or worse than the EEEEEVIL dead patriarchial white males but that is another rant] from what is now Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi. Basically there were Muslim slave bases / ports on the coast who raided into the interior as well as buying slaves from local African warlords. Same as happened in West Africa with Europeans. Most were of course taken back to Arabia for sale into the Arab world. Some were taken to Somalia where despite the usual crossbreeding there remained a distinct substrata of people with what we would call African features - they didn't look Somali or Arab. They were no longer slaves. They were now Muslims. They were at the bottom of the social caste system and outside the protections [such as they were] of the Somali clan system. When Somalia turned into Mad Max land in the 90's, they were everyone's favorite murder / rape / robbery victims. So some 12K of them were rescued by friendly NGO's. As the NGO's couldn't protect them worth a damn in Somalia [the NGO's could barely protect themselves by hiring some bad boys to safeguard them from the others - which they and the correspondets hid on their budgets as technical expenses - the name evolved from the bad boys to the heavy weapon armed pickups trucks], they eventually managed to relocate them to camps in Tanzania and Mozambique. Where they were not exactly received with open arms. Whatever their prior ethnic derivation they were now a separate social group outside the local clan structure and therefore at the bottom of the scale and fair prey for everyone. Besides these countries are desperately poor and export people. They had little use for outsiders without capital, education, skills...So some genius came up with the idea of sending them to the US. Your tax dollars at work - we are training people that you don't cook in an American kitchen by lighting a fire o the floor. You don't piss in the kitchen sink, etc. Now as African Muslims they are an obvious potential security risk as some of them WON'T assimilate and will thus be ripe for some Saudi funded mosque to convince them that it is all the fault of the Great Satan. Not their fault. Pity about their troubles. However one has to ask whether in the midst of our many other problems we really need these people. We cannot take in every stray cat with a sad story on the planet. So why these? Why now? What does it say about the values, logic, intelligece, sanity of those who rule us and rule our new globalizaed world. Now it is not Bush that is at fault per se. I highly doubt that any of the top 1,000 people in the two party duopoly that runs the US is any more aware of this program than I am and then only because there is the odd story in the media that they might catch the way I did on the driving route between picking up the mail and buying a can of compressed air to get cat hair out from under the keyboard [my formerly skittish cat has blossomed since he became the last cat in the household and his way of showing love is to lie next to or over the keyboard while shedding vigerously]. And yes 12K more charity cases are spare change given a continental sized country, 300 million people and an 11 trillion dollar economy. However the little things add up. The old GOP Senate Leader from my youth, Dirkson of Illinois, had a good phrase - a billion here, a billion there, soon we are talking about real money. Add to that 12K here and 12K there and we keep adding to our current digestion problems on new immigrants. Actions have consequences.
posted by scott 6:09 PM