No More Walls: Part Two — Trying to fence out Responsibilities from the Past

There can be little doubt that the result of last week’s referendum in Britain on whether or not to remain within the European Union (EU) was not about liberal economics or overlapping legal boundaries, but about immigration and radical nationalism. By extension, it was also about shirking accountability in the Middle East, and about trying to turn back the clock to a time when Europeans themselves were divided by borders, language and cultural jingoism. Ultimately, it was about racism and fundamentalism, about suspicion and fear, and about isolationism and the ill-feelings that it necessarily engenders.

As a leading Conservative politician, Cameron had worked hard to distance himself from far-right nationalists, both within and outside of his own party, who were pushing “Brexit” (Britain’s exit). He had been campaigning for weeks on end to keep the United Kingdom within the European Union, arguing that the country had far more to gain by forming part of a united Europe than by erecting a political and psychological wall around its island borders and withdrawing into itself. He sought to convince Britons, in no uncertain terms, that they should vote to remain in the EU, not to “save” Europe, but because it was what was best for Great Britain.The so-called Brexit Referendum came as a staggering surprise to just about everyone who still believes that this is a world where, despite abundant controversies, everyone basically wants to work together. Not among the least surprised was Britain’s own Prime Minister David Cameron, who, almost immediately following the vote—in which Britons voted decisively to no longer form part of Europe—announced his resignation, although he will apparently carry on for a few more months in order to ensure a smooth transition.

But in the end, it was Cameron himself who called the referendum that has given rise to what has already been described as the most momentous event since the fall of the Berlin Wall a quarter-century ago. Clearly, it should be added that Brexit’s importance is just the opposite of that of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was a joyous and unifying factor on the European continent and, indeed, throughout the world, whereas Brexit marks a trend toward the brand of radical rightwing nationalism that has recently reared its ugly head in both the United States and parts of Europe.

The British prime minister’s apocalyptic stance against Britain’s withdrawal from the EU proved prescient as soon as the vote was in and both Britain and the world reacted. In the immediate post-referendum carnage, the pound sterling plummeted to a 30-year low, in pace with a sell-off on financial markets not only in the UK, but throughout the West and elsewhere around the world. It is likely that newly volatile markets will eventually cope with the news and settle down, but they provided a clear message marking a negative reaction from business to Britain’s withdrawal, and genuine concern regarding the meaning of the British referendum, which both signals and forms a key part of a Western trend toward radicalization that is seething just beneath the surface and that implies a threat to world peace and cooperation.

Nor was Prime Minister Cameron the only one in England to be knocked for a loop by the referendum’s outcome. Boris Johnson, who bitterly opposed the prime minister’s pro-European stance within his own Conservative Party, and who campaigned boisterously for Brexit, apparently didn’t believe his political line’s jingoistic anti-immigration campaign would ever actually draw a majority. When the vote was over and his side had “won”, it quickly became clear that he and his pro-exit cohorts had absolutely no idea what should come next, nor did they have any plan to deal with the major upheaval that announcing Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union would obviously cause.It wasn’t only liberal analysts who were quick to grasp this situation—the referendum was a veritable shot in the arm for nationalist isolationism—but iconic representatives of the quickly expanding far-right as well. Not surprisingly, few were more enthused about the outcome than the US radical nationalist Republican candidate for the presidency and billionaire Donald Trump. Trump praised Britons for “taking their country back” and added that he “hoped America was watching.” Typical of the ever hostile, inappropriate and clueless Trump, he made his pro-Brexit statements from Scotland, where he was inaugurating a new golf course—just one more of the billionaire’s countless properties around the world. He tweeted that Scotland was going wild over the referendum results—wild as in happy he seemed to intimate—when, in fact, a vast majority of Scottish citizens had voted to remain in the EU, and are now considering the possibility of a second plebiscite on whether to secede from Great Britain, become an independent nation and re-join the European Union. And it is rumored that the long-troubled British province of Northern Ireland may also be contemplating such a move.

The one who crowed the loudest about the win was Independent Party leader and radical nationalist Nigel Farage, who disgusted no few decent people with his tasteless and braggadocios post-referendum comments. The worst of these was when he shockingly boasted that his constituency had won the Brexit vote “without a single shot being fired.” The mere suggestion that divisions were so deep that they could have precipitated gunplay was bad enough. But the fact that the statement came on the heels of the brutal murder of Labour MP and pro-immigrant rights campaigner Jo Cox made it heinous and unforgivable from any standpoint.So why campaign against his own party’s leader, if he had no plan of his own to offer? Obviously, as a political ploy to boost his own “rating” at a grassroots level.  But if that was his rather short-sighted plan, any advance that Johnson made in that direction he probably gave up, when, at mid-week this week, he announced that he would not run for prime minister when Cameron steps down later this year.  Well-known actor Ewan McGregor probably spoke for a lot of anti-Brexit and pro-Brexit voters alike when he tweeted:  “@BorisJohnson:  You spineless c$&t You lead this ludicrous campaign to leave EU. Win, and now fuc& off to let someone else clear up your mess.”

Cox was murdered in the early afternoon of June 16 in Birstall, West Yorkshire, where she was about to go into a public library to make a presentation. She was attacked by a man wielding a knife and a sawn-off shotgun and shouting, “Put Britain first!” A 77-year-old retired rescue miner, who was sitting in his car waiting for his wife, witnessed the attack and rushed to Cox’s aid, but was also stabbed in the stomach. Cox died on the scene of multiple knife and gunshot wounds.

Cox’s killer, 53-year-old Tommy Mair, was a local resident who had lived in the area for 40 years. It seems that, over the years, he’d had mental health issues, having long suffered from chronic depression. But it appears just as true that he’d had xenophobic and race issues as well, having had ties at different times throughout his life with British nationalist, pro-Apartheid and neo-Nazi groups.  In 1991, Mair had written a letter to the editor of the pro-Apartheid publication SA Patriot in Exile in which he railed against “white liberals and traitors” who were “the greatest enemies of Apartheid.” He added: “I still have faith that the White Race will prevail, both in Britain and in South Africa, but I fear that it’s going to be a very long and very bloody struggle.” If Tommy Mair had restrained his xenophobic impulses for all those years up to then, the bitter Brexit debate evidently goaded him into action. And while, fortunately, not everyone took the leave-or-stay debate to such extremes, there can be little doubt that the referendum brought out all of the ugliness of the clash between genuine liberal democratic principles and the roots of radical nationalism, racism and isolationism, long obscured by a thin cloak of political correctness.

And Britain has done precious little to lessen its role in Middle East tensions even in more contemporary times. Despite representing the Labour Party, former Prime Minister Tony Blair was quick to throw in his lot with far-right former US President George W. Bush when, in 2003, he decided to defy the United Nations and, on false pretenses, wage an illegal war of aggression against the people of Iraq. As such, Britain joined the US in unwittingly giving birth to the Islamic State (ISIL) terrorist organization that today has a powerful foothold in the Middle East region and is waging terrorist attacks around the world against targets connected with the Western powers. Nor have the United States, Britain or any of the other Western powers done nearly enough to help bring an end to the devastating war in Syria (where the vast majority of displaced people seeking foreign asylum are hemorrhaging from today). Russia, for its part, has done much to both maintain and expand that war, which is now in its fifth year, by putting its strategic interests—opposed to those of the West—before a just peace in the Middle East and upholding the ruthless and bloody dictatorship of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. Thus, world leaders (Britain and the US foremost among them) have, to a large extent, kept to the sidelines and watched the tragic Syrian drama unfold, only now and then providing air support when it behooves their own strategic interests to do so.Leading Western European nations, Russia and the United States clearly have a moral stake in the migration crisis that is today burgeoning out of control and, in one way or another, affecting these regions as a whole.  Many if not most of the rivalries that are today causing armed conflicts and terrorism throughout much of the Middle East can find their roots in the European and American imperialism and Russian expansionism that set the boundaries and vied for power in the region throughout most of the twentieth century—and that are still doing so today in all of their post-colonial manifestations.  These leading country’s seeking to pretend  that the migrant crisis is an external phenomenon that they don’t understand or that has nothing to do with them is as intentionally disingenuous as lighting a wildfire downwind from one’s home and then being shocked that it’s coming your way once the wind changes.

The migrant crisis is, then, the wildfire that the victors in both world wars have lit downwind from their own homes. But now that the geopolitical winds have changed, the flames of that crisis are coming their way. Throwing up walls won’t stop it. As former US President Bill Clinton once said, “A world without walls is the only sustainable world. If the world is dominated by people who believe that their races, their religions, their ethnic differences are the most important factors, then a huge number of people will perish in this century.”

Britons today would do well—as would Americans—to recall the words of this Conservative icon and put aside their renewed flirtation with radical nationalism, isolationism and island-mentality wall-building.On a final note, it is worthwhile reflecting that one of the first thinkers to promote the creation of a united Europe in the traumatic days following World War II was the most renowned Conservative that England ever produced: Sir Winston Churchill. The iconic British leader saw European unity as the only way to ensure the elimination, once and for all, of what he viewed as the innate European ills of nationalism and war-mongering. In a public speech that he gave in 1946, shortly after World War II, he said: “There is a remedy which … would in a few years make all Europe free and happy. It is to re-create the European family…and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, in safety and in freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe.”