Where in hell can they go?

Motherland

Where in hell can you go

Far from the things that you know

Far from the sprawl of concrete

That keeps crawling its way

About a thousand miles a day

 

Take one last look behind

Commit this to memory and mind

Don’t miss this wasteland

This terrible place, when you leave

Keep your heart on your sleeve

 

Motherland, cradle me

Close  my eyes lullaby me to sleep

Keep me safe

Lie with me

Stay beside me

Don’t go

Don’t you go

(Natalie Merchant)

Gaza has been reduced to rubble, the West Bank is being ‘cleansed’ of Bedouin and other Arabs, South Lebanon is being obliterated, people are being shoved aside and if they don’t move when instructed, blown to hell along with their homes.

There is nothing new in this; it is just a continuation of what has happened throughout history. The difference is that it is happening before our eyes, and we cannot escape the carnage and the impact it has on our lives. We get the photos of destruction, the TV news broadcast into our homes, images on computers and phones, pod casts, YouTube, all carefully curated to the support the side we are supposed to support, to look beyond the human suffering being inflicted to filtering that through a narrative which project the sufferers less than human, less worthy, evil and deserving of whatever is thrown at them.

Those who survive the obliteration become homeless, become refugees, initially in their homelands but for many, inevitably joining the flood of refugees, of stateless people looking for somewhere, anywhere  to make a home, to live in relative peace, in some semblance of dignity. In the meantime, adding to the endless stream of people looking for somewhere safe.

The 2017 Ai Weiwei Movie, Human Flow puts together in the plight of over 65 million people at that time who have been forced to flee their homes, their ‘motherlands’ to escape the ravages of famine, whether induced through oppression or through the effects of climate change, the fears and realities of wars, of discriminations based on religion, race or ethnic based persecutions. The film highlights the desperation and seeming endless helplessness of people from many countries, both the homes people have left and the barriers faced to finding some where else to live.

Since the movie was made, the numbers of people have grown as new flashpoints are ignited and old flashpoints just keep blazing.

Refugees escaping the invasion of Ukraine, the Sudanese civil wars, Democratic Congo, Central African Republic, Lebanon, Iran and other gulf states caught in the crossfire of Israeli/US and Iranian belligerence has seen the number of refugees and stateless people in the world climb to 120 million. That is about 15 people for every 1,000 people in the world, either as refugees, asylum seekers, people in need of international protection or internally displaced through war or famine. In nine years, the number has almost doubled! And we haven’t had time to consider those impacted by the latest from Iran and other countries caught up in that maelstrom.

The most recent wars have depended very much on air power rather than ‘troops on the ground’ as a tactic from the aggressors, a hangover from the carnage of trench warfare in WWI, instead taking a leaf from the Fascist era Italian General Giulio Douhet who is credited with having said:

“Victory in the future will no longer come from grinding trench combat of the great war. Instead it means large scale aerial bombardments, targeting not just combatants but civilians and civilian infrastructure and logistics.

It is much more important to destroy a railroad, a bakery, a war plant, or to machine gun a a supply column, moving trains, or any other behind-the-lines objective, than to strafe or bomb a trench.”

The damage done through that style of warfare is incredible. Cities are reduced to rubble. The only two atomic weapons used basically flattened Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Were the bombs the reason Japan  finally capitulated? Historians have questioned that: Japan was on the cusp of surrender and the Russians were encroaching on the Japanese archipelago, which may have been a motivator in using the weapons. We cannot know the answer, but there is doubt. In almost every other case aerial bombing has been used, it has tended to unify the attacked population in opposition to the attackers, as in the London Blitz, and the various wars including Vietnam, Iraq 1 and 2, Kosovo, the Syrian civil war with Russian assistance, Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon twice and now Iran. The list is not comprehensive but the bombing has not resulted in breaking populations. Instead, it has increased the resolve of those populations to resist invaders and rebuild on their terms.

The most devastating effect of the aerial bombardments is that homes and civilian infrastructure are destroyed, innocent civilians become ‘collateral damage’, but that is probably the most ridiculous bullshit term ever invented, its like ‘sorry, didn’t see you’ as a pedestrian is run over on a crosswalk with the red light on to stop traffic. Collateral damage dehumanises the victims, women, children, non-combatants. And for those who ‘survive’ the bombardments, there is no where for them to go. Two million Gazans are camped on the beach, within walking distance to the remains of their homes, the rubble heaps, back a few years to the siege of, no the destruction of, one of the most ancient cities in the Middle East, Aleppo in Syria, again a rubble heap which was home to over 3 million Syrians before the civil war. Those who survived were rendered homeless, joining the ranks of stateless refugees seeking somewhere, anywhere.

So great a part of the tragedy of war is that these ancient cities, populated for thousands of years with the history of civilisation engraved in the ancient architecture, and which is so embedded in the cultures of those lands are permanently erased, along with the people who trace their heritages back those thousands of years. The term ‘Philistines’ is used to describe barbaric, uncivilised people, yet Gaza City was home to the Biblical Philistines. I guess that raises the question of who are today’s ‘Philistines’? In the same sort of thinking, when terror is rained down, destroying cities, killing innocents, we ask who the real ‘terrorists’.

I could go on and on and on some more, listing the wars, listing the dispossessions, the victims of power struggles, religious and ethnic discriminations, political ideologic struggles. That is as much a part of our history as any other nation, such as our involvement in so many wars since WWII, through ANZAC, an alliance with the US and their cold war arm wrestle with the USSR.

When the war in Vietnam was lost and boatloads of refugees risked their lives as they  sought safety, we were not the most welcoming of people. We were quite content to conscript our young men to fight that war, but resisted the flow of refugees, which several generations later are respected members of our communities. Likewise in following the US into Iraq and Afghanistan. Quite content to send our soldiers into war, but refugees?

The sight of war refugees, endless lines of emaciated people, dishevelled, poor, with distant looks I their eyes, faces blank, emotionless, seemingly only half alive are nothing new. Whether from current conflicts, or going back in time.

The shock of finding survivors in the Nazi death camps, freed, but to go where? Marching rivers of people, looking for somewhere to be processed, but oh so difficult with no papers to prove identity, and uncertain where to go. Transit camps set up and when available transport was found sent to refuges in all parts of the world, including here in Australia.

Sometimes the checking didn’t really happen, and included were Holocaust survivors and some of the guards who had kept them imprisoned. People from all over Europe found refuge in ‘the west’, Canada, the USA, Argentine, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, taking up the offers to settle in new lands, safe from wars and the religious, political and cultural divides of Europe.

But there was another flow of refugees, another flow of unwanted, superfluous people – the Palestinians who had lived for generations in what became Mandated Palestine, ceded to the Jewish survivors to take up the Biblical promised land, and so just as peace returned to Europe, new conflicts, new refugee flows, new unwanted expelled from their homelands, which if we take the stops and restarts of that conflict from 1948 to the present, probably the longest lasting was since the Hundred Year wars in Europe, since the Reformation, a wrestle to decide whose god ruled where. Catholic, Lutheran, or any number of divisions which emerged in those days. And those wars too had their flows of refugees, settling in the ‘New World’, establishing colonies in the Americas, in South Africa and in Australia.

So where in hell can they go, those unwanted, those who from the accident of being born black or brown, or discriminated against for believing one ideology over another, whether it be religion, ethnic, race, or any other form of definition, any other ‘belief’. To find a place of comfort, of peace, of acceptance.

As we consider a new flow of refugees, those seeking a new ‘motherland’ leaving the harshness of Iran are being denied entry here because they are Iranian, they are Muslim, they are brown, they are whatever, but we don’t have anything to do with Iran because of their (the regime’s, not those seeking shelter) links to terrorism, to the antisemitism which has surfaced here in recent times.

We have become a motherland for so many generations, for people from so many conflicts, from so many desperate situations. We are home to people from almost every country on earth. So many who reject the immigration of refugees can trace their very existence here to a not-dissimilar situation, some reason they or their forebears left to make this country their new ‘Motherland’.

Take one last look behind,

Commit this to memory and mind,

Don’t miss this wasteland,

This terrible place when you leave,

Keep your heart off your sleeve.

 

Motherland cradle me,

Close my eyes lullaby me to sleep,

Keep me safe, lie with me,

Stay beside me don’t go,

Don’t you go.

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