The flow of so-called “asylum seekers” out of Africa and the Middle East has become an epidemic.

The underlying cause was the British and US imperialist drive to access cheap raw materials and cheap energy, and their interventionist policy of forcing free market capitalism on the Third World in order to create markets for their goods and services.

All this under the hypocritical banners of Freedom and Democracy, and the assumption of the “The White Mans’ Burden” to educate, and impart their (Christian) values to primitive and ignorant savages, which was just an excuse for colonialism.

Along the way Europe and America destroyed well established and stable tribal structures in Africa and The MidEast, and supported the growth of amenable totalitarian and corrupt governments – the various African dictatorships in Africa (the most notable Robert Mugabe), The Shah in Iran, Mubarak in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Assad in Syria. And as a consequence the turmoil and chaos that now exists around the World as people try to overthrow these regimes has led to this tsunami of illegal immigrants flooding into Europe.

It was Rudyard Kipling who coined the phrase THE WHITE MANS’ BURDEN in a poem subtitled “The United States and The Phillipine Islands”. This was an exhortation to the US to pick up the burden of imperialism and educate the “half devil/halfchild” Filipinos – an idea picked up enthusiastically by Theodore Roosevelt who thought it was America’s “manifest destiny” to develop less technologically educated nations.

But reading Kipling’s poem more than one hundred years later it has a deeply ironic resonance with its talk of “The Savage Wars of Peace”. That phrase deserves its own poem when you think of the blatant Liberal lies about WMDs that took us into Iraq. And his lines “The blame of those ye better – the hate of those ye guard” has an even deeper resonance when you think of Palestine where British Tommies tried to keep the peace between Jews and Arabs, and were blamed and hated, and slaughtered, by both sides. The Balfour Declaration, and Britain’s intervention in Palestine was surely one of the biggest political/diplomatic blunders in History? It is not our fight.

For all its faults, Europe, and its off-shoot the USA, remain the ultimate goal for millions of people seeking a better life. But this wonderful, free, democratic and deeply faulted society we are fortunate to live in is the consequence of 2000 years of struggle, bloodshed and sacrifice. Its affluence and freedoms have really only existed for the mass of the people in the 20th Century and specifically since the end of World War 2 and the rise of Socialist and Social Democratic priciples.

In comparison, Africa and The Middle East are in The Dark Ages. But they (quite rightly) asked and fought for their independence, and now they have to take on the responsibilties of independence and fight, and struggle and sacrifice to achieve a decent and just society. This is not our battle and we should not intervene.

It is the ultimate irony that while hundreds and thousands of young and active Africans and Arabs decamp to The West and live on welfare, Europeans, Americans and Anzacs pick up the modern White Mans’ Burden and go to their countries to fight and die in their battles.

I am opposed to illegal immigrants/asylum seekers. Seeking the soft option they will live for long periods on benefits and destabilize European society by overburdening the already strained health, welfare and education systems. Large numbers without education and language skills will function only in the black economy – and many of them will turn to a life of crime when they realize they are at the bottom of Western society’s competitive greasy pole. My admiration is reserved for those who stay and do battle for their country. To quote just two of them one “I won’t accept being a weak link in a 2,000 year old chain.” And “We are worth nothing if we are forced to live abroad.” These are people to be admired.

However, being a pragmatist, and accepting that the unholy alliance between the capitalist/industrial/military complex that wants perpetual war, and the Liberal urban elite who lie in their teeth to achieve their ends, I have a suggestion. Allow these illegal immigrants in if you will, but all men (and women?) between the ages of 18 and 40 should be given 12 month’s compulsory military training, and sent back to their countries for 2 years to fight. Those who object to potentially killing their brothers and cousins should be given medical training and serve as front line medics.

Then and only then will they earn the right to live in The West.

I have little experience of Africa – just two trips to Kenya in the space of 10 years. But I have lived and worked in The Arabian/Persian Gulf region over a period of 40 years.

If you want insights into the Middle East, and its harsh and apparently barbaric societies, and its corruption, from the perspective of weird and wonderful oilfield trash, expatriate characters who washed up there in the oil patch from 1960 to 2001, preview my book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” at:

www.amazon.com

and download it if you have a Kindle.

Or if you prefer a real book you can order the paperback edition from:

www.thebookdepository.co.uk

Using the ISBN number is 978-1908147097

They offer free delivery worldwide.

              That is amount Australia spends on “Defence” . It seems like an unbelievable burden on the Australian taxpayer until your realize that the American taxpayers have donated some US$ 8 Billion to Iraq and in the past 20 years have given almost US$ 130 Billion to Israel – approximately one third of its total overseas aid budget – mostly to be spent on arms. 

Why does a medium size country like Australia need to spend that much on so-called defence?. What is the perceived threat that justifies a standing Army, a high tech Air Force and Navy? Invasion by illegal immigrants? But worse is all that US money pouring into the hothouse of the Middle East enabling the conflict to continue indefinitely.

There is no political will to resolve the conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere because the value of arms dealing for governments – and wealthy and powerful arms dealers – is just too vast. And where would thy test the efficacy of their latest weaponry without these proxy wars?

Imagine the turndown in government revenues if peace broke out. And where would the megalomaniac arms dealers look to earn their vast profits? Drug or people smuggling?The Middle East conflict will never be resolved as long as The West intervenes and keeps on supplying money and arms.

For whatever motives the British government intervened in Northern Ireland, and the US (because of the powerful Irish lobby) kept supplying funds to the IRA to buy arms. This enabled “The Troubles” to continue for 25 years. If the British Army had not intervened, and the US had not supplied funds, it would have been over in a year – and maybe would never have happened.

Never mind the lies that where told about WMD, regime change has been a complete failure in Iraq. A brutal and corrupt but efficient dictator was replaced by a brutal and corrupt and inefficient dictator who fanned the flames of a sectarian conflict that has opened the door to the atavistic ISIS.

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a matter only for those who live in that region, and not a matter for Western intervention, or the powerful Jewish lobby in the USA. It is a domestic dispute between Arab tribes, and should be left to them as responsible adults to sort out for themselves. It is not even a matter for the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas to provide support in the form of money for arms. It can only be resolved by the Israelis and the Palestinians negotiating face to face without intervention.

Some hope.

If you want insights into how the region got itself into such a mess read my book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind”.  It is not  polemic or a dry as dust academic treatise – but a series of character driven stories from the perspective of expatriates washed up in the region over the 40 years from ’60s to the events of 9/11. Flotsam and jetsam battered by geopolitics beyond their control and comprehension.

You can preview my book at:

amazon.com

and download it if you have a Kindle – or purchase the paperback if you prefer hard copy.

     Surprise . . . Surprise, it seems that FIFA have finally admitted – or been forced to admit – rampant corruption. But surprise, surprise, Blatter was re-elected without opposition, only to resign abruptly under threat of investigation by the FBI.

     Like the Olympic Committee before it, like World Cricket and the betting scandals in the UAE, the mix of wealthy developed nations and poor Third World countries (with the wealthy countries controlling the management) does not work. Votes can, and are, bought cheaply to make sure the “right” decision is reached. Any scandals can be covered up because the majority are involved in the scandal and have a vested interest in not being found out.

      It makes you wonder if democracy itself can ever work? One man one vote is a fine principal – but big money easily corrupts the process. The politician with the biggest war chest – who can afford the best spin doctors, PR advisors and lawyers – wins. In Western societies the poor working man, if not bribed directly, is easily duped and misled. And in Third World countries where the majority are barely surviving, they are quite easily and cheaply bribed.

      This is demonstrated in organisations like FIFA, and it even extends to the dysfunctional United Nations. Funded almost entirely by the USA and Europe, these paymasters can be easily outvoted by various Third World blocks intent on taking their revenge against the colonialists. But the Big Money West control them via the Security Council, and by making sure the Secretariat is in safe hands. Disenfranchised as they are these Third World Charlies use their position any way they can – and from my personal experience nepotism, cronieism and corruption exist within the UN (and Aid agencies like The World Bank and The Asian Development Bank).

      This is shown by my story FALSE ECONOMY in my book THE GULF. Like all the other stories in the book it is journalistic, based on my 40 years experience in the region – a dramatization of real events. Since the five fold increase in crude oil prices in the early 1970s crude oil and its derivatives have been the single largest commodity in international trade.

      Big Oil Money is the biggest money of all. It funded the rapid and dazzling development of the Middle East, and in particular The Gulf States of Shia Iran, and Sunni Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Limitless supplies of this black gold, and America’s insatiable greed for cheap energy, funded the rapid growth of the region from a collection of tribal and feudal Emirates living at existence levels into glittering arenas of hedonistic Western capitalism such as Tehran in the time of The Shah, and then Dubai and Bahrain and now Riyadh.

      And it is this that has caused the Clash of Cultures between the fundamental puritan Islam of the Iranian Ayotollahs and the Saudi Wahhabs, and uninhibited permissive Western hedonism.

     It’s all about oil – and religion. If oil had never been found, the only expatriates in the MidEast would be a few biblical scholars and archaelogists trying to cope with the heat, the dust, thieving Bedouins and corrupt bureacrats.

     If you want insights into the Middle East, and its harsh and apparently barbaric societies, and its corruption, from the perspective of weird and wonderful oilfield trash, expatriate characters who washed up there in the oil patch from 1960 to 2001, preview my book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” at:

www.amazon.com

and download it if you have a Kindle.

Or if you prefer a real book you can order the paperback edition from:

www.thebookdepository.co.uk

Using the ISBN number is 978-1908147097

They offer free delivery worldwide.

     Last week I attended the Sydney Writers’ Festival, and it made me realize how ignorant I have become about world affairs. Australia is geographically, and almost perversely culturally remote from the rest of the Western World.

   To a great extent the Festival was concerned with Australian issues, which confirmed in that sense at least they are not so remote. Just like Europe and America, Australian public life is corrupt from top to bottom at Federal and State levels (read the book HE WHO MUST BE OBEID). But one outstanding international contribution came from the British journalist Christina Lamb, and her recent book LEAVING KABUL that details how The West, after spending in excess of a Trillion dollars, and the loss of more than 7,000 young lives (and the maiming and traumatizing of hundreds of thousands of young soldiers and civilians) has lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

    Probably because she is an intelligent and attractive woman she had access at the top levels to Presidents and Generals – but it is her interviews with the ordinary Afghans that are most insightful (they are not pushing a political agenda and/or preening their egos). In particular one elderly man said “If you keep sending the money, the war will never end.” In particular he meant US Aid that flowed to Pakistan, where a lot of that money was diverted to support The Taliban.

    In my direct experience of managing World Bank and Asian Development Bank contracts in Africa and Bangaldesh, Aid has done more damage than AIDS in the Third World. Big Easy Money causes corruption – and strangely enough that was the conclusion at the Sydney Writers Festival about the rampant corruption in Australia. The booming real estate market is attracting, and being fuelled, by black money from corrupt Chinese, and outright criminal money from drug dealers laundering their profits. And property developers are using that Big Easy Money to corrupt politicians.

     And to a great extent the endless conflict in The Middle East has been prolonged by direct US Aid to Israel (in excess of US$20 million per day used to buy arms and ammunition) and massive Aid to Egypt to buy their neutrality. And now with the attention of the World diverted by the threat of The Islamic State, Israel is able to accelerate its annexation of the West Bank in contempt of President Obama’s wishes, and with the direct support of the hard-right Republican Neo-Cons of The US Senate.

      If you want insights into the Middle East conflict, and its harsh and apparently barbaric societies, based on my 40 years experience there from the perspective of the weird and wonderful oilfield trash, expatriate characters who washed up there in the oil patch from 1960 to 2001, preview my book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” at:

www.amazon.com

and download it if you have a Kindle.

Or if you prefer a real book you can order the paperback edition from:

www.thebookdepository.co.uk

Using the ISBN number is 978-1908147097

They offer free delivery worldwide.

The song with the above title was written in 1919 shortly after the end of WWI. Intended to be a cheerful little upbeat number, in fact it subconsciously tapped into deep underlying concerns in America – as so many popular songs do.

Even before the cataclysmic 1914-18 conflict young people were leaving the farms of the mid-West for the bright lights and perceived glamour of city life in LA, Chicago and New York. After the war the returning soldiers had enormous problems settling into plain and simple rural America after the sophistication of Europe – and, let’s face it, the excitement, cameraderie and terror of trench warfare where under the threat of violent death they experienced life more fully in one day than most people live in a lifetime. And so they became the “Lost Generation”.

Nowhere was this more manifest than in the incredible fevered artistic scene in Paris after WWI, where artists like Picasso, Braque and Miro, and musicians like Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky and Manuel de Falla were joined by American expatriate writers like Gertrude Stein, John dos Passos, Henry Miller and Ezra Pound.

The most outstanding example of this lost generation was of course my hero, Ernest Hemingway. Let’s face it, although his father was a suburban doctor, Hemingway was a naïve Kansas backwoodsman until at 19 he volunteered as an ambulance driver, was badly wounded on the Italian front, and found it impossible to settle back into the USA. He spent his struggling indigent and most fruitful artistic formative years in Paris – and that city was his only true love.

Perhaps it was because of his simple and innocent mid-American background that Hemingway was able to see with fresh and childlike eyes the breadth, the depth and the beauty of European culture?

In these more scientific times we diagnose soldiers returning from Afghanistan and the Gulf Wars as suffering from PTSD and feed them antidepressants to block out their experiences, instead of letting them work through the culture shock of being exposed to a violent and elemental tribal life far removed from the synthetic Big Mac/CocaCola lifestyle they have been force fed all their young and innocent lives. And who knows how many Hemingways we have lost in the process – although ironically it was depression that forced Hemingway to take his ownlife?

In the story “Ya Hear what Ah’m Saying” in my book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” I deal with the struggles of a traumatized soldier returning from the Viet Nam War – the second of America’s post WWII disastrous attempts to impose their one-size-fits-all free market so-called democracy on the world (think Korea and watch MASH). Like many Viet Nam vets he found it impossible to settle back into the USA after exposure to the brutality of American foreign policy and the subtle charms of Asia. Read Graham Greene’s THE QUIET AMERICAN for insights into the Viet Nam conflict.

If you want insights into the disease that afflicts The West’s relationship with the Middle East and its complexity from an expatriate perspective, preview my book THE GULF “Reaping the Whirlwind” at:

www.amazon.com/author/mikerichards

and download it if you have a Kindle.

Or if you prefer a real book you can order the paperback edition from:

www.thebookdepository.co.uk

The ISBN number is 978-1908147097

They offer free delivery worldwide.