Why are people who truly need asylum or a place of refuge being refused such humanitarian gestures -- even as this country and all Western countries throw the gates wide open for every hard luck case from the Third World?
James Edwards writes about the unconscionable situation in which certain people, just by virtue of who they are, are being ignored by the media and turned away from the very countries which claim to provide a haven for 'oppressed' peoples.
This is something about which I feel very strongly, but yet I haven't really written about it, apart from an allusion or two. The situation is so dire and the stories about what is happening are so troubling that I don't know where to begin. The first-hand sources of information about what is happening are few, and often silenced by the forces of political correctness.
I have to admit to a certain amount of confusion on my own part about this situation. I watched a documentary about some Afrikaans people in Rhodesia (now 'Zimbabwe') and I didn't fully understand their determination to stay there and to seek reconciliation with the very people who eventually burned them out, after having brutalized them. I realize that for many folk there, the attachments to the land and way of life are strong, and there is a kind of stoic acceptance of their troubling fate that amounts to what seems (to me, at least) as a kind of martyr-like attitude. I can't quite fathom that.
I also become angry with the many people who should, in a sane and just world, sympathize and try to help the Afrikaans people: for example the Dutch-Americans, who often have a strong sense of their Dutch identity -- why is there not more support for their Afrikaner kinsmen on the other side of the ocean? I have asked this of some Dutch-Americans I know; their charity efforts seem devoted almost 100 percent to 'digging wells for the poor Africans', yet they don't seem to be moved to help their kinsmen -- so strong is liberal bleeding-heartism among even formerly conservative church people. What is the old saying, that a liberal won't take his own side in an argument? Liberals by definition sympathize mostly with the Third World and very rarely with their own, whether here or across the ocean.
I have a little Dutch ancestry from my New Amsterdam colonist ancestors, and I feel a kinship with the Afrikaners. Even if I did not have such ancestry, I think I would still feel a sense of connection and still have a heart for these people.
Apparently there are people in the Netherlands who work to help the Afrikaner farmers, and that's commendable, but more needs to be done. Unfortunately, the media refuse to cover this story because it does not fit their politically correct template. So they turn their backs, and the world at large is ignorant of what is happening. This is a shame, and we are not the enlightened and compassionate people we think we are if we don't burn with indignation about what is happening.
