Originally posted by procrastinato
I'm sorry I made you feel sad. But unfortunately I have to also say this: you are completely wrong on all counts, insofar as your ramblings and thought bubbles achieve some coherence.
Firstly, yes we do owe something to the people we are accommodating. This is not just for their sake, but our own. Dysfunction and violence are the result an unwelcoming coexistence. This is universal. As the examples above show, when people are not unwelcoming, immigrants thrive. Besides, the vast majority of the Sudanese in question are grateful and have made positive contributions despite the ongoing moral panic around their presence. It is particular youths in particular areas that are causing all the problems, and that obviously suggests that it isn't being an "African youth" that is the problem, as we have eliminated both African ethnicity and youth as variables. Hence the rest of my post that you didn't respond to.
Now let's examine the rest of your tangents and generalisations.
Polish immigration. Moral panic, anti-semitism
Italians/Greeks/Macedonians. Moral panic. Importing their racial violence!
Vietnamese. Moral panic. Heroin anyone?
The difference between the above moral panics and the "African Gang" hysteria is that the above migrations
had government support who actively discouraged racism and xenophobia. Quite the opposite with our Sudanese population.
"Africans are prone to violence and criminality". This is so absurd a statement it is hard to know where to start.
"Peace is a rarity in Africa".
Another unfair generalisation, unfair to the peaceable countries of Africa which do exist, and unfair to history, where countries were forced under violent imperialism from feudalist and other pre-modern social arrangements into brutal colonial regimes, not least in South Africa, where apartheid subjugated former slaves as a dislocated, propertyless, disenfranchised, and controlled workforce. It was decades of oppression and repressed freedom before they rose up to correct this injustice.
Looking at just the history of the 20thC, we could say Europeans are also a violent criminal people with justification, given the mass wars and plundering that occurred. So perhaps humans are violent? Where is a society that has been without violence for at least a century? We've contained militias and internecine conflict in the West since WWII, but this is largely due to the enormous success of post-war economic planning, which not only gave everyone something to do, but justly rewarded them for it too (but didn't stop external belligerence).
Why can't African countries do that as well? No time here to address that major question properly, but I would imagine it has a lot to do with 1. the colonial and feudal mindset of current rulers 2. corruption 3. an international economic development consensus that prevents developing countries from protecting nascent industries 4. the subsequent necessity to rely on foreign currency to import essential goods like medicine, technology, resources not present in the country, etc: these conditions effectively reproduce colonial status under a new arrangement where states have to export primary commodities to survive, and are unable to materially progress. Politics then becomes about control of current wealth rather than aspirations to grow. This in turn leads to coveting thy neighbours stuff, and conflict, especially as states run low on foreign currency and face regime collapse. In total contrast, Western countries rebuilt after the war using tariff protections and state owned enterprises which rapidly increased social wealth for all and the creation of a vast middle class. One rule for us, another for them.
"They don’t call Africa the dark continent for nothing. They don’t call Oz the lucky country for no reason. It’s a lot easier to make a lucky country go downhill that it is to make a dark continent come in to the light."
Leaving aside the plain crazy ignorance of this, I will make just one point: the term "Lucky Country" was coined by Donald Horne. It doesn't mean what you think it means.
"Never forget that we’re dealing with people fresh from a place where ‘kill the White farmer’ & other horrid songs like that are commonplace."
That's a highly specific historical thing that needs contextualisation, and cannot be branded across the entire
continent. Africa, as we teach the children, is not a country.
I can't be bothered going through all of this, but the final point deserves some attention, the apparent hypocrisy in language when the media talks about over-representation and high rates. It's a simple distinction between absolute and relative measures, not a lefty conspiracy to cover up crimes of minorities. Besides, it's over-representation that is more shocking, and duly used by the shock media, because on the absolute scale, "African crime" is of a tiny rate!
However there are real disparities in language that appear in the media. For instance, the gangs that attacked Indian students were not branded gangs, nor did they stir a moral panic. White mass shooters are always assumed to be psychopaths, yet non-whites are always assumed to be rational organised terrorist operatives, completely leaving out the possibility of a home-grown right-wing terrorism, which so often it obviously is, and the possibility that nutcases can be inspired by terrorist radicalism of all brands (a good reason to fight radicalism).
Yes, there's a pattern. Sudanese violence is leapt upon by the media, and labelled endemic and inevitable, particularly when elections are nearby, despite the fact that very real targeted violence occurs everyday and nobody cares (one woman on average murdered every week). When a large group of white youths go on a drug fuelled crime wave, they are not only not a gang, but are merely delinquents and ne'er go wells needing a spanking and two weeks picking up litter.
Sheez you have high level public servant written all over you, are you a Victorian judge? Or work in a Uni
servity?
