ANDRE VLTCHEK

Tens of millions of European and North American immigrants, legal and illegal, have been flooding both the cities and countryside in Asia, Latin America, and even Africa.

We are told that some few hundred thousand African and Asian exiles are now causing a great “refugee crises” all over Europe! Governments and media are spreading panic, borders are being re-erected and armed forces are interrupting the free movement of people. But the number of foreigners illegally entering Europe is incomparably smaller than the number of Western migrants that are inundating, often illegally, virtually all corners of the world.

No “secret paradise” can be hidden any longer and no country can maintain its reasonable price structure. Potential European, North American and Australian immigrants are determined to enrich themselves by any means, at the expense of local populations. They are constantly searching for bargains: monitoring prices everywhere, ready to move at the spur of the moment, as long as the place offers some great bargains, has lax immigration laws, and a weak legal framework.

Everything pure and untapped gets corrupted. With lightning speed, Western immigrants are snatching reasonably priced real estate and land. Then, they impose their lifestyle on all those “newly conquered territories”. As a result, entire cultures are collapsing or changing beyond recognition.

Overall, Western immigrants are arrogant and stubborn; they feel no pity for the countries they are inundating. What surrounds them is only some colorful background to their precious lives. They are unable and unwilling to “adopt” local customs, because they are used to the fact that theirs is the “leading culture” – the culture that controls the world.

They come, they demand, and they take whatever they can – often by force. If unchecked, they take everything. After, when there is almost nothing left to loot, they simply move on. After them, “no grass can grow”; everything is burned, ruined and corrupted. Like Bali, Phuket, Southern Sri Lanka, great parts of the Caribbean, Mexico and East African coast, just to name a few places.

***

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]ho represents the greater “menace”: some 300,000 “illegal” refugees escaping from the countries destabilized or outright destroyed by the West, or those millions of Westerners who are annually fleeing their depressing lifestyles and selfishly over-imposing themselves on so many economically weaker and therefore more vulnerable parts of the world?

I believe the answer is obvious.

People from devastated countries are often left with no choice: many are coming to their tormentors, forced by circumstances to accept totally unreasonable conditions, humiliation and marginalization. They have to work extremely hard. They have to accept jobs Westerners think themselves “too good for”, and they are expected, even ordered, to “adapt” culturally. They go through horrific screenings and interviews, and almost all of them have to degrade themselves just in order to survive and feed their children. Only a minority is allowed to stay. Those who do stay greatly contribute to local economies.

Of course, this is a part of the dirty trick: the West needs foreigners; it cannot survive without immigrants, without their cheap labor. But it would never admit it openly. Before “accepting them”, it has to first humiliate and break even those whom it desperately needs. It has to further demean those whose nations were already robbed of everything, and even thrown into war by the West’s imperialist foreign policy and by corporate terrorism.

The author with Noam Chomsky.

The West’s migrants are encountering totally different treatment in most of the countries they are inundating.

To begin with, Western immigrants do not even need visas to enter most countries. Decades ago, the Empire opened by force almost all “developing states”. Westerners are treated preferentially, and generally promoted as a “source of income” by local regimes.

It is mainly the Western multi-nationals that are dividing the loot from Asian, African and the Middle Eastern countries, but some part of booty always ends up in the pockets of those ordinary European and North American citizens, mainly in the form of retirement plans or other social benefits. Then, annually, tens of millions of Westerners, armed with funds that have been stolen from the “developing world” are hitting the road, trying to make their money go further in those places where their funds actually originated!

It is no secret that Western migrants are taking advantage of poverty, low prices, and corrupts legal systems. Their arrival raises prices for housing and land. It leaves millions of local people literally homeless, and it raises the prices of food and basic services for the local population.

In a way, people in many poor countries get robbed twice: by Western corporations, and then again, by Western migrants.

But damaged countries are not sending coast guard ships to intercept Western migrants. And there are hardly any deportations. Only those who dare to criticize the system get expelled.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap] saw entire islands being eaten alive by Western immigrants. Almost no coastal areas are left for local people on the Indonesian islands of Lombok and Bali. The Scandinavian mafias, the Central European mafias, Australian mafias… The theft had reached unimaginable proportions. Even when it is illegal to purchase land, the Europeans and the North Americans are teaming up with local gangs, or forging schemes that include marriages to local women. Western migrants are tremendously canny! There is always some way how to get around the laws and screw poor people in the most miserable countries on earth.

The Italian “takeover” of the Kenyan coast… the child prostitution there.

Thailand’s islands are all gone. No culture remains, almost no houses belonging to the local people… almost no coastal stretch is left untouched. There is just some banal, horrid tourist infrastructure, and millions of Western migrants baking on the sun, all year round, with their pot bellies exposed, wearing flip-flops, downing beer, hand in hand with their culturally uprooted Thai companions. What did these people bring to Thailand? Freedom? Prosperity? High culture? Seriously! Or honestly, isn’t it just a moral corruption and total cultural ruin?

There are literally millions – maybe even tens of millions – of Western (mainly European) migrants living all over Southeast Asia. Exact numbers are unknown; there are no reliable studies and statistics. Many Western immigrants in Southeast Asia are actually “illegal”. Some are “semi-legal”, with their constant “visa runs”, false marriages and shady investments.

Cambodia is one of the places that has been attracting the most depraved migrants from the West. Their sex sprees and “2 dollars per ‘shag’ bargains” have been described in detail in several colorful books.

In Cambodia, as well as many other nations where poverty is rampant, prostitution starts early, often entire families are swallowed by this sordid traffic.

I encountered many “expats” and “migrants” when I was first investigating and then helping to close down one of the most notorious child-prostitution centers on earth, so-called “Kilometer 11”, located just outside the capital city of Phnom Penh. There, thousands of kidnapped girls, many of them minors, were forced to serve predominantly European clientele. Some of them were kidnapped and gang-raped on the way by traffickers; dragged here from all over Cambodia and neighboring Vietnam. The girls lived in captivity, guarded by vicious gangsters. And all over the place, flashing their proverbial beer bellies, were cheerful middle-aged European migrants, who just moved here, as I was told, “shagging a minor is much cheaper than downing a pint of shitty beer”.

A local Reuters correspondent and I managed to interview several 14-years old girls, some of them clearly dying from AIDS. Later on, when we began photographing the scene from the car, the entire crowd of men began charging, beer bottles in their hands, shorts falling off from their backsides, ready to kill. A great gain for the country of Cambodia, those European migrants!

I fought with all my might those venomous German immigrants at Colonia Dignidad in Southern Chile. There, many European Christian religious fanatics set up their entire state inside the Chilean state, closely collaborating with the US-backed Pinochet’ dictatorship. At one point, Bormann was there, as well as other prominent Nazis. After settling in their “new fatherland”, the German immigrants went busily to “work”, raping children, performing medical experiments on local orphans, and mercilessly torturing opponents of the fascist dictatorship. Of course, they did not immigrate only to Chile; there were millions of European fascist émigrés pouring into all corners of South America. The most prominent of them were shipped there with care by US and British intelligence services.

While Western propaganda keeps talking about illegal immigrants crossing into the US from Mexico, there is very little talk about those tens of millions of people who are continuously immigrating to Latin America from all over Europe, settling in Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and elsewhere. Before the latest wave of Latin American revolutions finally guaranteed equality and respect for the indigenous people of the continent, most European immigrants managed to implant deep racial and social segregation. In some places like Peru and Bolivia, the situation closely resembled that of South African apartheid. Until recently, European immigrants had been pushing the native population to extreme margins, stealing their land and making their cultures irrelevant. It was done all over Latin America and is still done in many other parts of the world.

So, “what are we going to do with those millions of Western immigrants?”

Can we really afford having them in our countries? Can we accommodate them? Can we pay for their needs, for their aggressiveness and their wild and violent cultural and behavioral patterns? Can we allow them to take everything from those who have very little left?

***

[dropcap]L[/dropcap]ook left and right: the entire planet is full of Western immigrants. They are controlling diamond mines in South Africa as well as “conservancy areas” in Kenya. They are holding huge land expanses in Asia, and virtually all profitable commercial land and industry in Latin America.

And they are coming and coming! They are unstoppable. Most of them are sick of their gray lives in Europe and North America. They are full of superiority complexes, but in reality, they would do anything to escape their loneliness, depression and emptiness at home.

In order to be able to stay “legally” in Southeast Asia, millions of Western male immigrants are marrying maids, go-go dancers, or even sex workers. But then they treat them with spite (as many of them don’t really know how else to behave towards people from other cultures). There are tens of thousands of former US GI’s, living in the villages of Northern Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. After bombing Southeast Asia into the stone age, they “could not cope” with the treatment they received after coming back home. And so they immigrated; they returned to the land that they had already so thoroughly destroyed, poisoned and raped.

I met many of them, as I was writing about this part of the world for many years. Some former GI immigrants were now totally broke, trying to borrow money from me, and coming up with bizarre stories and schemes. Almost all of them felt spite for the local people, but were unable to return to their homeland, because they lost all contacts and skills that could allow them to live there. Some overstayed their visas, owing huge amounts of money in fines to the local authorities.

***

I heard countless desperate stories. But, unlike those profound and heartbreaking stories told by the migrants from the countries destroyed by the West, the stories of the Western immigrants were mainly selfish, centered on the desire to improve their lives, or yearning to escape unpleasant conditions in their countries of origin. Most of the time, their presence brought nothing positive to the countries where they managed to relocate.

In her iconic book “Karma Cola”, an Indian writer Gita Mehta described, already a quarter of century ago, those millions of Westerners who have been flooding Sub-Continent in search of “enlightenment”, alternative lifestyles and other mass-produced, Westernized cultural and religious trends. Many ended up as illegal migrants, rotting in ashrams and in bizarre communes, some even selling their passports in order to survive.

***

The world has been patient – I’d say too patient – with the Western immigrants!

This patience should end, because of the brutality, even savagery, that Europe has been recently demonstrating towards those desperate men, women and children who have been trying to escape from their countries resembling “sinking ships”; “ships” that were torpedoed by Western imperialism.

The world owes nothing to the West, to the contrary! Therefore, visa and immigration policies should be reciprocal, which is exactly the approach of several Latin American countries.

Practically speaking, there are many more legal and illegal Western immigrants living in Indonesia or Thailand, than the other way around. The same goes for countries like Chile.

After horrible centuries during which Western colonialism and imperialism managed to destroy billions of human lives in all corners of the world, Europe still dares to treat its desperate victims as worse than animals. I recently witnessed its spite towards refugees arriving in Greece, France, Germany and the Czech Republic.

And after what I saw, I feel indignant and appalled.

Enough is enough!

With its wars, destabilization campaigns, economic terror, and its plunder of the planet, the West continues to demonstrate how low and brutal its culture really is. The “refugee crises” is just the latest chapter of the never-ending neo-colonialist horror show.

While European ships keep intercepting pitiful boats crammed with wrecked people who are fighting for their lives, while European armies are re-erecting border controls, several Latin American countries which are now governed by progressive governments, including Argentina and Chile, have been demonstrating tremendous moral superiority, solidarity and internationalism, by inviting and taking care of thousands of Syrian and Palestinian refugees, and on top of that, treating them with great dignity and kindness!

***

In one of the hotels in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in a bar late at night, I overheard a conversation between a visiting Swiss businessman and his Chilean counterpart:

“You know, those immigrants that we call ‘paperless’”, lamented Swiss man. “It’s too many of them… too many! We should just throw them directly to the sea; we should drown them! We don’t need such scum in Europe.”

A few days earlier, my friend, an Ecuadorian government official based in Quito, told me a story:

“Lately, many Europeans keep coming to Ecuador and to other Latin American countries, searching for jobs, trying to migrate. Their economies are collapsing, but there is no humility when they come here, only arrogance. Another day, a Spaniard came to me, applying for a job. I asked him for his CV. He looked at me with total outrage: ‘But I am a Spaniard!’ he shouted. ‘So what?’ I replied. ‘These days are over, comrade; days when just being a white European man would be enough to land you a job anywhere in Latin America!’”

The non-Western world simply cannot afford to tolerate an annual influx of the millions of Western immigrants! First, it gets attacked by the West, and then robbed, and at the end, is expected to tolerate enormous hordes of ruthless, locust-like, self-centered migrants who are trying to swallow what little is left behind by the Western corporations and governments.

Reciprocal visa regimes should be introduced. Legal frameworks should be strengthened to prevent corruption and speculation with land and real estate. Potential Western immigrants should be forced to prove that their presence would benefit the country where they want to settle, that their skills are really needed, just as all African and Asian immigrants are obliged to prove when they want to settle in Europe, in North America or in Australia.

And once again: let us not forget that there are many more Western immigrants trying to settle abroad, than there are people from poor countries applying for residency in the West.

Immigration crises? Yes of course! But not really “crises” for the West!

Those who do not realize it should check the numbers!

Certainly, many of us understand how depressed many Westerners really are; how their lives in Europe and in North America are disagreeable, gray and confusing. We really understand how much they want to immigrate to a warmer (in terms of weather and in terms of human relationships) part of the world. And if they would humbly admit what they feel, instead of demonstrating arrogance and superiority… if we could have it all in open… if the same rules would apply for everyone… if they would be the same for those who want to immigrate to Europe, to the US, to Asia, Africa or Latin America… then I am sure that at least some people would be willing to show their sympathy and consider accepting at least some of the most desperate Western migrants.

But there can be no sympathy if there is no justice. While Westerners are freely immigrating wherever they desire, Europe is now deploying its military in order to intimidate, humiliate and to stop those mugged and tortured victims of Empire!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

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Nauseated by the
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Had enough of their lies, escapism,
omissions and relentless manipulation?

The US media has broadly cast the speech delivered by President Barack Obama at West Point on Wednesday as a farewell to the decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and an embrace of a more multilateral and less militaristic American foreign policy.

This interpretation willfully ignores the content of the speech, which even more than those Obama has given in the past asserts a policy of permanent and global war in pursuit of the interests of the US financial elite. The media distortion is driven, on the one hand, by the partisan motives of Obama’s Republican rivals, who seek to portray him as weak-kneed, and, on the other, by the support from a wealthy and privileged “liberal” elite for wars of aggression waged under the banners of “human rights” and “democracy.”

The real content of the speech was in sync with the venue in which the president chose to deliver it. As is so often the case, the audience selected for what was supposedly a major foreign policy address was uniformed and captive, subject to military discipline. In this case, it was the graduating cadets of the US Military Academy, who are joining an officer corps that is entrusted with organizing and leading Washington’s global military interventions.

Reflecting the ever-increasing dominance of the military and intelligence apparatus over the US government and American political life, Obama’s speech was replete with paeans to the military. He told the West Point graduates that “our military has no peer” and that they would “embody what it means for America to lead the world.”

“The military that you have joined is and always will be the backbone” of US “leadership” on the world stage, Obama declared, providing his audience with a succinct definition of American militarism in the 21st century.

In his speech, Obama quoted Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of allied forces in Europe in World War II and subsequent US president, who told the same corps of cadets in a 1947 commencement speech, “War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.”

That speech came barely half a year after the last of the trials of surviving Nazi leaders held in Nuremberg, and it was in that context that Eisenhower made his remark. The principal charge against the Nazi leaders was initiating and waging aggressive war.

In what immediately followed his quotation from Eisenhower, however, Obama elaborated a doctrine with which Adolf Hitler would have had little quarrel.

“The United States will use military force, unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it—when our people are threatened, when our livelihoods are at stake, when the security of our allies is in danger… International opinion matters, but America should never ask permission to protect our people, our homeland, or our way of life.”

Clearly Obama is not elaborating here a policy of defensive war to be waged only in response to an attack or the threat of an imminent attack. He is spelling out that the US reserves the right to intervene militarily wherever it believes its “core interests”—i.e., the access of its corporations and banks to markets, raw materials, cheap labor and profits—are involved.

When he speaks of “our livelihoods” and “our way of life,” he is referring not to the ever-declining living standards of the American worker, but to the eight-figure compensation packages of American CEOs, whose fortunes are founded on the exploitation of the working populations and resources of the entire planet.

The US president went on to assert the right to launch wars even where no case could be made that there was any threat posed to the US, but rather where there were issues that “stir our conscience.”

As recent history has proven, this “conscience” is highly flexible. When unsubstantiated claims were made in 2011 that the Libyan military was on the verge of invading the rebellious eastern city of Benghazi and massacring its inhabitants, Washington and NATO launched a full-scale bombing campaign and proxy ground war that killed tens of thousands and ended with the overthrow and lynching of the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi. Today, having already succeeded in toppling the elected president of Ukraine, Washington is providing full support to a right-wing coup regime in Kiev as its sends troops and fascist thugs to invade the eastern city of Donetsk and massacre protesters there.

And while touting “America’s support for democracy and human rights” wherever Washington seeks to carry out regime-change, Obama included a specific exception for the Sisi regime in Egypt, which overthrew an elected president, has murdered thousands, jailed tens of thousands and outlawed the country’s largest political party. “In countries like Egypt, we acknowledge that our relationship is anchored in security interests,” he said.

In America’s “humanitarian” wars of choice, Obama proclaimed, “the threshold for military action must be higher.” Washington, he said, “must mobilize allies and partners to take collective action.” He continued: “We have to broaden our tools to include diplomacy and development; sanctions and isolation; appeals to international law; and, if just, necessary and effective, multilateral military action.”

This scenario fits precisely the roadmap followed by Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, in mobilizing his “coalition of the willing” to wage the “war of choice” against Iraq.

Everything put forward by Obama is a repudiation of international law and an endorsement of the policy of aggressive war practiced by the Nazis three-quarters of a century ago.

In how many countries is the US already carrying out military interventions and proxy wars? Obama’s West Point speech was preceded by his announcement that nearly 10,000 US troops are to remain in Afghanistan after the formal end of the US occupation at the close of this year, and that a residual force will remain there indefinitely.

Drone strikes, night raids and other actions are being carried out in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan and elsewhere, while American forces are fanning out across Africa on the pretext of combating Kony, finding the Nigerian school girls or battling Islamists.

In Ukraine, Washington instigated a coup that brought it into direct confrontation with Russia, a nuclear power, and has since sent US ground troops into Poland and the former Soviet Baltic republics, while deploying warships in the Black Sea. It has carried out even more provocative naval exercises and B-52 fly-bys directed against China.

In Syria, the Obama administration is currently discussing a plan to deploy US military forces to train and arm the so-called rebels, thereby escalating and prolonging the sectarian civil war that has decimated that country. In his speech, Obama called for the creation of a new $5 billion “Counterterrorism Partnerships Fund” to promote interventions and arm and train repressive forces in the Middle East, Africa and anywhere else on the planet that falls within the crosshairs of the White House.

Obama used the speech to defend his assertion of unlimited power to carry out drone massacres and assassinations, which have already claimed at least 5,000 victims, most of them civilians. The US president made the obscene claim that such strikes are carried out only when there is “a near certainty of no civilian casualties.”

The speech comes in the immediate wake of congressional testimony in which administration officials asserted that the president has unlimited powers to launch wars and carry out drone assassinations, including against American citizens, with no need for either congressional authorization or judicial approval. This only makes explicit what is already Washington’s modus operandi, in which Congress is nothing more than a rubber stamp for the US war machine.

The executive, embodying the power of the military-intelligence apparatus, has the right to do virtually anything. But what rights are left to the American people? Those that remain are being rapidly erased. The last vestiges of democracy must be dispensed with in order to impose conditions of war, inequality and economic austerity opposed by the vast majority of the population.

Obama’s high-flown rhetoric about the US having passed through its “long season of war” notwithstanding, what his speech indicates more than anything is that American imperialism is preparing a global catastrophe of unprecedented dimensions.

Bill Van Auken is a senior member of the Social Equality Party, publisher of wsws.org.