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Mass migration is not, as it seems, an organic emanation of humanity from poor countries, but a calculated project to repopulate the territory of the declining West, with racism its chief instrument, wrote John Waters.

In a two-part series titled ‘Europe’s Death Rattle’, John Waters explores mass migration with reference to Stephen Smith’s book ‘The Scramble for Europe: Young Africa on its way to the Old Continent’.

Part I discusses – as the culmination of a long-time plan – a global calamity of food scarcity, due to Covid measures and ‘sanctions’, which will cause record numbers of mainly African migrants to enter Europe seeking food.

As Waters’ articles are longer than most would read in one sitting, we are breaking Part II, headed ‘Open Borders, Shut Mouths’, into shorter sections and publishing them as a series titled ‘The Suicide of Europe’. This article is the fifth in our series. 

By John Waters

Irish independence vs African independence

Another of the many ironies for Ireland is that we continue to be an emigrating culture, so that, these days, as already noted, Irish emigrants and African immigrants cross paths at Dublin airport: Until the present year, we have been shedding almost as many natives as there were aliens arriving, though 2022 looks set to reverse that slight imbalance.

Meanwhile, the fact that our ancestors were forced by genocidal famines to seek a life elsewhere, and therefore went to Britain and US to build roads and bridges and skyscrapers, is used to suggest that we have no option now but to open our borders and shut our mouths. 

What nobody says is that the departures of such people was one of the primary factors in the failure of Ireland to become independent and make its way in the world by its own lights. Now, we learn that we are part of the ‘white’ world, as taunts of ‘white supremacy’ and ‘white privilege,’ issue — almost invariably, though not exclusively — from the mouths of people whose faces are themselves conspicuous by their paleness.

The comparisons to be pointed to between Ireland and many African countries are legion. The failure of Africa’s postcolonial states has been widely discussed in the academia of the West. But what we understand from this, as Stephen Smith notes in his book, purely concerns what Africa lacks: good governance, sound fiscal practice, and infrastructure — it tells us what Africa is not. But we know almost nothing of what Africa is, and why and how it has been able to survive in a sort of independence for 60 years. Its ‘lack of institutional capacity’, in World Bank parlance, remains as though a profound mystery to Western observers.

One problem, undoubtedly, is that, because the colonial state was by definition extrinsic, the colonised peoples came to see government as an extraneous phenomenon. All power resided in the metropole, to which all resources were promised and destined, including human resources in times of war. ‘In the eyes of many Africans,’ writes Smith, ‘this foreignness of the state — its extraneous character — translated into a governance that was arbitrary and alienating.’

This raises ominous possibilities: That, emerging from their dysfunctional continent to arrive in the metropole, Africans feel they have, in a sense, arrived at the centre of their own polis. What is foreign to them is the only ‘core’ their homelands possess. That is what they have been taught by the ancestors of present-day Europeans: that they are not African, but British, French, et cetera, from which they naturally adduce that Europe owes them something, at the very least a living.

Added to that they have a smattering of knowledge of Woke concepts like ‘equality’ — which seem to suggest further categories of entitlement — and the protection of the United Nations, which makes each migrant a kind of mobile jurisdiction of international law, attracting protections and rights which far exceed those of many of the current inhabitants of their chosen new European homelands. This too is a recipe for disaster.

Colonialism, bequeathing to the mentality of modern Africans an odd legacy of attitudes — hostile and submissive, acrimonious and deferential — had the paradoxical effect of empowering the side-lined categories in Africa’s prior native gerontocracies — in particular women and the young. For Africa’s powerful gerontocracy, Smith writes, quoting Nicolas Argenti, the era of the Whites became ‘the era of insolence,’ when children, ‘their mouths on fire,’ emerged from a long silence. In other words, colonialism already carried the seeds of what is nowadays called Cultural Marxism: the colonisers planted the seeds of their own future destruction.

On arriving in Ireland, then, such wayfarers, imagine themselves to have arrived in the ‘White World’, whereas they have, in fact, arrived in a post-colonial outpost not all that unlike the place they left behind. 

Colonies’ Concessions

Ireland shares not just the essence of the African experience but also many of its pathologies. Smith cites the American anthropologist Rebecca Hardin on the matter of ‘concessions’ — formal legal arrangements by which foreign actors are enabled to manage and exploit land or other natural resources of former colonies, which have long been a feature of Irish ‘economic’ policy. The ‘beauty’ of these arrangements, he explains, is that they not only satisfy rent-seeking states but even better, reinforce the sovereign power of such, despite the supplicant states’ inability to exploit their own resources themselves. This phenomenon of ‘concessions’ has been an unnamed and unacknowledged feature of Irish ‘development’ policy since the 1960s, with massive tranches of multiple natural resources being sold for a song to foreign interests.  

Today, the breadth of what our political class has been selling off is imaginative indeed; they sell, in effect, the very essence of Ireland: its resources, yes, but more so its values, culture, uniqueness, weather, laws, constitution, natural rights, landscape, particularities, citizens’ rights, citizenship, passports. The intake by stealth over the past two decades of hundreds of thousands of outsiders is yet another example of such concession-granting: the transnational tech and chemical corporations from which the Irish political class obtains its lifeline trickle of financial run-off, need low-cost labour to allow their business models operate to maximum efficiency. Many of these companies — which were supposed to hire Irish workers — are now overwhelmingly staffed by imported labour.

Smith’s description, intended as a sketch of African political reality, provides another unwitting but devastating insight into modern Ireland:

‘What is fascinating in this political alchemy is that it transmutes incapacity into profits, or base metal into gold: the less the state can act on its own, the more it has to offer to external partners. They stand-in for the state and pay it recognition rights — tribute.’  This, in under 50 words, amounts to a precise summation of Irish industrial policy since the early 1970s. 

The charge of ‘racism’ is not merely disingenuous and utterly destructive of sense and reason — it is also a projection. Those who orchestrate the replacement of the European population are engaged in an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing, but they conceal this behind a shield of misappropriated history and profoundly dishonest sleights-of-hand. 

Drawing its energy from historical acts of inhumanity — almost invariably resulting from the colonial incursions of European settlers in Africa and the Americas — the word ‘racism’ has legitimately acquired a profoundly toxic power. Themselves arguably the most appropriate candidates for such a designation, these malevolent manipulators seek to achieve the same outcome as the long-gone adventurers who first gave the term life, while dousing themselves in altruistic sanctimony.

About the Author

John Waters was a journalist, magazine editor and columnist specialising in raising unpopular issues of public importance.  He left The Irish Times after 24 years in 2014 and drew the blinds fully on Irish journalism a year later.

Since then, his articles have appeared in publications such as First Things, frontpagemag.com, The Spectator, and The Spectator USA. He has published ten books, the latest, Give Us Back the Bad Roads (2018), being a reflection on the cultural disintegration of Ireland since 1990, in the form of a letter to his late father. 

The above is an extract from his article ‘Europe’s death rattle, Part II’.  You can read Part I HERE.  Follow John Waters’ work by subscribing to his Substack HERE.

Featured image sources: British Empire, New World Encylopedia and Create Debate