Fasces, a bundle of rods tied around an axe, was an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of the civic magistrate. The Italian fascists took their name and symbol from this. Many state authorities in countries all over the world may not use these symbols but their actions in substance remain highly authoritarian to put it mildly.
The same symbol is however still used by various U.S. authorities (maybe the police that shoot first and ask questions only after that - even more expedient than leading questions maybe) and the République française. Indeed, it is highly appropriate that the French republic should use such a fascist symbol, considering the brutality of the French riot police – Compagnies républicaines de sécurité, CRS – in harassing asylum seekers, including children, in Calais, Dunkirk, and elsewhere in France, as reported by Human Rights Watch and others – hate in a cold climate. J'accuse...!
Asylum-seeking children in France learn not to be alone on streets without eyewitnesses as that is likely to lead to a beating by French police, leaving asylum-seekers almost in safer hands with criminals - liberté, égalité, fraternité, rather the Pays des Frères Fouettards. These vague and general principles seem to be interpreted selectively and 'liberally' (to put it politely) like in the old joke, 'shall we divide this fraternally or half and half?!' There is however something supremely wonderful about French politics, bins are named poubelles after the politician Eugène-René Poubelle who made them compulsory, something that was rather progressive in fact, by no means the worst politician, it would seem.
Much seems to have changed in a century and not for the better. One of the first child refugees to make the journey from Greece across Europe to France and the UK was one Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark who's grandmother was an Imperial Russian Grand Duchess who had already a few years earlier lost her country of birth... 'Following the First World War a platoon of African-American soldiers, known as the Harlem Hell Fighters, had been so enamoured of France's practice of liberty, equality and fraternity that they remained there', making Paris 'for any jazz lover... a slice of heaven known as 'Harlem in Montmartre' (The Baroness by Hannah Rothschild, p. 102).
Even people traffickers for all their evil and violence at least bring their victims to safe countries sometimes which is in some sense more than one can say of modern or contemporary western governments' record of offering protection by doing much to stop people seeking protection. By government design of both major parties, there is no lawful way to enter the UK to claim asylum. (By comparison, for example, the Dutch authorities returned Jews to Nazi Germany if their documents were not deemed to be in order in the late 1930s.) Otherwise, there would be no or little business for the traffickers. The Channel walker was convicted for his way of entry by the UK justice system despite even being accepted as a genuine refugee, but the government is clearly largely above the law and justice.
It is a criminal offence to traffic somebody to the UK and it is also an offence to enter the UK in any way to claim asylum, but it seems to be no crime at all to sell weapons to dictatorial regimes that commit crimes against humanity and whose persecution of their own people causes migration.
The vulgar bigots of contemporary Western politics and parvenu profiteurs are the big crooks compared to which people traffickers are but little fish. What the vulgar politicians and big business do not say is how, for example, the EU abuses its economical power by driving down African agriculture to artificially subsidise failing European agriculture while also driving down the quality of agriculture - nouveau fascist economical policy. Contemporary global material inequality and exploitation may be even worse than colonialism, all a major cause of the migration from Africa, Asia and Southern America to Europe and the Western world. A more egalitarian international agricultural policy could help significantly to reduce or eliminate this problem. Useless, self-serving, and feeble political leaders in Africa and Asia and Southern America are not helping their people either.
The Janus-faced politicians criticise people traffickers for seeking to profit from the misery of refugees. Profiting from the misery of refugees is of course a prerogative of politicians who win elections through hate speech against refugees and the companies to which western governments outsource immigration detention centres, other asylum "accommodation" and deportation to dictatorial countries. These companies owned by people close to politicians are paid from taxpayers' money from which the companies try to keep as much profit as possible by delivering the cheapest poor-quality service to the vulnerable recipient – daylight corruption and even worse daylight hypocrisy of knowingly profiting from trafficking and modern day slavery by big companies connected to politicians. The hypocrisy with ignorance and stupidity is of course one of the most common forms of government and society of all times all over the world.
Indeed the biggest crooks are in politics (left, right and even centre), government and big business (plus quam imperfectum). The Marquis de Sade as a true Platonic philosopher aristocrat wrote about them in a letter to a friend in 1783:
By what right does this pack of leeches – which laps up the people's misfortunes, and which by its outrageous monopolies plunges this unfortunate class (whose sole crime is to be weak and poor) into the cruel necessity of losing either its honour or it's life, and in the latter case leaving it no other choice than to lose it through poverty or on the scaffold – what right, I ask you, do these monsters have to demand virtues?
Machiavelli described them thus (to note the substantial difference between the fine aristocrat and the oligarch, the latter is described here - emphasis added):
But to make plain what I mean when I speak of gentlemen, I say that those are so to be styled who live in opulence and idleness on the revenues of their estates, without concerning themselves with the cultivation of these estates, or incurring any other fatigue for their support. Such people are very mischievous in every republic or country... men of this sort are the sworn foes of all free institutions.
This is the case even despite the detention estate including nothing less than the 19th-century hunting castle of the Dukes of Hamilton, Dungavel House in Scotland, even if more recent recipients of hospitality there have enjoyed themselves considerably less than members of the erstwhile Ducal hunting entourage. (The first illegal entrant due there even if never getting there was Rudolf Hess. When news of his departure reached the Berliners, they joked that the thousand-year Reich had become a hundred-year Reich as one zero had fallen off, as the Russian refugee, Princess Marie Wassiltschikoff recounts in her Berlin Diaries...).
Western governments are concerned about people coming to seek protection but not concerned about sending them to danger of death and lack of freedom. When children are in safer hands almost with organised criminals rather than the governments of the countries leading in human rights, then something is wrong!
As if it was not bad enough to flee one's village in Darfur as a child with a few others, running for one's life quite literally, as two of the children were caught and not only killed but slaughtered like sheep by the Janjaweed, shocking the young survivors, but after a long and dangerous journey the moment the children may have thought that they finally reached safety on being rescued from the Mediterranean Sea they find themselves brutally beaten by Italian coast guards and put in an overcrowded refugee camp with adults with fights in the big queue for the little food provided - the ugly face of modern or contemporary Western civilisation. Hitler would be proud.
Western politicians willify foreign rapists and violent criminals, making it government policy to prioritise the deportation of foreign criminals, while non-foreign criminals do not receive the same priority and Western governments generously fund systematic violence and rape overseas through funding for dictators and concentration camps for migrants to keep them away from the Western world.
While the current UK government has expressed great concern about a few small boats of migrants crossing the Channel from France to the UK, the government did very little to stop the deadly coronavirus from spreading to the UK from outside UK borders with large amounts of people entering the UK with no monitoring of their potential virus infection with over hundred thousand people dying of the virus in the UK as a result - unrepentantly conpetent government!
The British government, like other Western governments, when it comes to controlling borders or 'taking back control' is like Humpty Dumpty:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
In France, the only asylum-seekers generously welcomed are murderous dictators like Charles Taylor from Liberia, offered asylum by the French government even if he did not end up taking it up, according to Sir Desmond de Silva QC. Yet many people in Britain, including the government and many judges, continue to say or maybe even believe that France is a reasonably safe country for asylum-seekers.
There was a time however when opening the borders was rather more popular than it is now in the Western world, as illustrated by the joke of Brigitte Bardot refusing to visit the S0viet Union unless the borders were open to which the S0viet leader Brezhnev enthusiastically replied "ah, Mademoiselle wishes to be with me alone à deux!" From Brezhnev to Brexit!
Maybe it is time to carry out a survey among migrants on which European country’s police batons taste best or worst to complement French President Jacques Chirac’s comments in 2005 on English cuisine being only the second worst after Finland. Maybe French police bâtons are only the second most painful en flagellant délit in the native country of the Marquis de Sade after those in the Balkans in flagrante delicto (wonders a very distant cousin of the 20th century Regent, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, whose great-grandmother was Finnish). England and Finland may score similarly to cuisine (and let us not even go into football). Monsieur Chirac demonstrated how French diplomatic manners seem to be as fine as French child refugee policy, carrying on a long tradition, as Georges Bizet felt safer in the hands of the invading Royal Prussian Army than his fellow Frenchmen during the war of 1870.
The French President was not however entirely wrong to ridicule the English and the Finnish, as both nations considered it extremely bad table manners to take a piece of bread to finish off some tasty sauce from the plate, assuming they ever had anything tasty on their plates, until they saw someone French do that after which it became extremely civilised to do so, Babette's Feast of a kind... by the author of Out of Africa friherrinnan Karen von Blixed-Finecke where Babette is a French lady refugee who ends up in the remote western coast of Jutland in 19th-century Denmark, serving as cook to austere priest's daughters (very different from the austere priest's daughter Theresa May, the Chief Architect Albert Speer of the Hostile Environment) for the next 14 years, producing an improved version of the bland meals typical of the pious sect of the remote locality but after winning the lottery shows her gratitude for her protectors by throwing a lavish Parisian culinary feast of the kind she would have prepared as the head chef at the very appropriately named Café Anglais in Paris. As it happens one of the recipients of this feast was the Royal Swedish Cavalry General Lorens Löwenhielm whose noble aunt was the local Lady of the Manor, as a man of the world (terrible citizen of the world to horrify Theresa May) and former attaché in Paris, he is the only person at the table familiar with such cuisine, not afraid to use his hands to eat some of the dishes... cheerfully easing the austerity of the gathering ending up in a compassionate appreciation of not only the cuisine but the somewhat diverse individuals present.... (meanwhile the French seem to have sterilised their presidential inauguration ceremonies from the days of Pompidou (not to mention Pompadour) when the chain of the Grand Master of the Napoleonic Imperial Légion d'honneur was symbolically and physically literally taken off the departing president to be placed on the new president, now only shown like a museum piece at the ceremony, only the mounted Garde républicaine saving the grace, while in Finland the old and new president appear in front of the parliament still in white tie and tails in their full decorations as grand master of the national orders of chivalry also (mostly) predating the republic... not to mention British royal ceremonies.)
On the Finno-Ugric theme of fraternal flattery, at the final showdown of communism collapsing in Eastern Europe the Hungarians were quick to run to the Austrian border but over a quarter of a century later the Hungarians are considerably less welcoming to anyone scrambling towards their borders - fine for some!
The pain of European police batons and refugee children living on the streets of Calais are maybe merely idyllic or the tip of the iceberg however compared to the systematic persecution of vulnerable migrants rather than villifying traffickers, arms dealers and dictators, by all western EU governments through the modern-day slavery and violent detention conditions of migrants, including children watching their mother being tortured to death in front of them for failing to pay politician-like greedy traffickers for their release, currently not only directly and knowingly but deliberately paid for by the EU in Libya in a kind of modern-day Guernica or even worse as it is not just a one-off bombing by a couple of rogue European states but horror continuing for years with the nouveau collaboration of the whole EU, most of the leading countries of human rights and freedom paradoxically. Racism and xenophobia seems to unite European politicians in this instance at least. The hostile environment is by no means a British invention but rather an import from the EU.
"As long as the Arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel" (T. E. Lawrence).
It is 'a line drawn in water' between the internal and external affairs of a state, an expression ever more poignant with refugee children drowning in the seas around Europe now than when the fine Finnish Diplomat Max Jakobson expressed it, however much politicians and bigots may try to ignore it (the Jewish Jakobson served as an officer in the Finnish army during the second world war alongside German soldiers fighting against the Soviet Union).
Guernica is the Basque Country town where Nazy Germany and Fascist Italy on request of Spanish nationalist rebels bombed civilians on 27 April 1937. This inspired Pablo Picasso to paint Guernica the same year, one of his best known paintings, exhibited in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid.
Maybe the EU should adopt a fascist symbol to symbolise itself more accurately? "[A]ll the sophistication of the West is only a veneer. Underneath it we are a violent people", said the Chief Minister of a nawab of princely India, a Russian refugee, Count Dimitri Bronowsky during the Second World War (The Day of the Scorpion by Paul Scott, p. 90). 'Walls built for refugees are like a drug with a momentary benefit but the disadvantage, the decline of European humanism, is permanent', said Finnish Conservative politician Kai Mykkänen in 2017.
Or maybe the EU should adopt a Soviet symbol? Evil States restrict their borders like the Soviet Union with dense grim woods of pine trees oppressively planted near its borders while during the pre-revolutionary belle époque hardly anyone ever even had a passport.
During the First World War, as Sir Harold Acton said, 'the passport, of which one had never heard before, suddenly became almost as vital as one's mortal soul: one could not move, officially one did not exist without a passport' (p. 50, Memoirs of an Aesthete).
Most western politicians and their voters clearly do not mind (foreign) children being ill-treated, as long as the politicians' and their voters' own material comfort is cared for. National governments may have some defence in saying that they cannot alone solve global challenges (not that they are even trying necessarily) but the EU has even less of an excuse...
Indeed, the French republic has an impressive history of fascism, Légion d'horreur. Maurice Papon is a personification of this evil, the French civil servant and Gaullist politician. His long and successful career sprang from participating in the deportation of more than 1600 Jews from France to Nazi death camps, torturing insurgent prisoners in the Algerian War (1954–1962), overseeing the Paris police during the Paris massacre of peaceful Algerian demonstrators in 1961 and the February 1962 massacre at the Charonne metro station. In 1961, he was personally awarded the Légion d'honneur by President Charles de Gaulle. In 1998, Papon was convicted of crimes against humanity only in relation to his involvement with the deportation of the Jews (as an a... kicking footnote, C. de Gaulle was a very minor non-noble, so minor that he failed to serve the then Comte de Paris properly in restoring the only right monarchical form of government in France during his tenure as head of state... the continuation of the monarchy in France and elsewhere from the outset could have prevented much of the evil of the 20th century...)
There appear to have been no demonstrations in France against the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps while anti-Semitism had been fairly popular in France. However in Germany at least some Berliners seem to have protested against the rounding up of Jews in 1942. Ich bin ein Berliner! Any assumption that Germans might be more Nazi than the French for example would seem questionably simplistic in a more complicated world.
Meanwhile during the Mau Mau Uprising (1952–1960) the British had concentration camps in Kenya to inflict torture on civilians, inter alia, not Britain's finest hour, not to mention de jure racial segregation in the US until as late as the 1960s. In Texas, the biggest church in a town could have hanging from the steeple a rope with an effigy of a black man (The Baroness by Hannah Rothschild, p. 250). What kind of perverse, arch heretic, devil worshipping, fake Christianity is that bigoted witch craft (no offense meant to bona fide devil worshippers)? Racism however is not the sole fault of white people. Some black people have been hostile to children of mixed white and black background, for example. On the other hand, adding to the complexities, Ian Smith as Prime Minister of Rhodesia has turned out to be rather idyllic compared to his post-colonial successor Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. A simplistic one sided view will not help us much, antithesis should be taken to synthesis.
Modern or contemporary Western governments maintain regime of nouveau Apartheid where refugees and migrants are considered separate from the rest of humanity like the Black people under Apartheid regime in South Africa with which the modern or contemporary Western governments have little material difference in this respect.
No country or person can throw the first stone, but continued denial of past atrocities is no solution. One should take it philosophically. Not least a country as civilised as France should have the maturity to face its past, hopefully never to repeat the evils of the past, not to mention continuing them at present, like the current UK government recently seeking to decriminalise torture.
Only adding to the hypocrisy is to have compensated slave owners rather than slaves until as late as 2015 through repayment of state debt. What credibility does it leave with government, parliament and public authorities and voters to be trusted to defeat modern slavery, not to mention many consumers who are content to knowingly buying products of modern slavery. We all have a responsibility that we cannot simply delegate elsewhere. Refugees, immigrants, foreigners, natives, slaves etc. are no worse or better than the rest of humanity, all deserving equality of respect and opportunity.
At least something beautiful has come out of tragedy. Sami Nouri is a couturier who has worked with John Galliano and Jean Paul Gaultier. He came to France aged 15 as a refugee from Afghanistan seeing barbed wire on the many borders he crossed and that barbed wire has now in a considerably more beautiful form become a decoration in some of the clothes he has designed.
But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt...
(Leviticus 19:34, King James Version)
As long as there is massive inequality in terms of wealth and basic safety across the world, with western "democracies" continuing to sell arms to dictators, there will be massive immigration across the world. It is of course entirely a matter of choice for those with the power and money to continue or discontinue mass immigration. Rather than dealing with the causes of mass migration, building little fences on borders is but petty bureaucracy and populism in a global reality which renders such parochial petty mindedness truly reactionary, inefficient and counterproductive.
In any event, the real threat to Europe and the Western World and all civilisation is not immigration but evil dictators like Communist Put[a]in.
Like powder in a skilless soldier's flask,
Is set afire by thine own ignorance,
And thou dismembered with thine own defense.
(Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet)
