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.
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| David Cameron - taken by surprise |
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.
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.
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.
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Trump applauded Britain's decision and said he "hoped America
was watching".
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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.
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.
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| Boris Johnson - clueless |
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.”
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.
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.
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| Murdered Labour MP and immigrant rights defender Jo Cox. |
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.
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| Blair joined Bush in waging an illegal war on false pretenses. |
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.
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.”
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Conservative icon Winston Churchill: We must build a kind of
United States of Europe.
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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.”
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.
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