N for Nightmares and Naive Notions of Nationalism

Reflections on current conflicts and consequent migration

Back in April 2016 I participated in an atoz blogathon. The challenge was to write a blog every day for 26 days, each post about a subject beginning with a different letter of the alphabet, from A to Z. For the letter N, I wrote an opinion piece about the many conflicts underway in various parts of the world, the nightmare conditions endured by the inhabitants of those places, and the perilous journeys being undertaken by those who decided to seek refuge elsewhere.

At the beginning of August this year, as I revisited that short essay with a view to revising it for this series of personal reflections, rioting erupted on the streets of many of the UK's urban centres as a consequence of false information having been circulated linking a heinous crime to a particular religious group. Mosques became the target for far right protests. Missiles were hurled at police. Hotels and other buildings housing asylum seekers came under attack as did any individual or group helping them.

My blood boiled at the sight of people wrapped in the Union Jack or St George's flag shouting hate filled slogans. This was not the Britain that I know and love.

A week later I was heartened to see thousands reclaim the streets as communities up and down the country reasserted the traditional values those flags represent for me and for millions of ordinary people. People spontaneously shook hands with neighbours of different religions and skin tones. They came out and cleared away the wreckage left behind by the ignorant thugs.

I shared a few posts on X expressing the same feelings of disgust. Scrolling down to see the responses to those posts I was horrified by the tone of some of the comments. I decided that it was time I left Elon Musk's cesspit. Not, however, before I saw the comment of someone who claimed that the 'indigenous people of Britain' were being ignored in favour of immigrants and asylum seekers.

I can't decide whether to laugh or cry at the ignorance of the person who coined that phrase. It's alright to talk about the indigenous people of the Americas, Africa or Australia and New Zealand. It's easy to understand that there are groups of individuals whose ancestors were present in those places long before the arrival of European settlers. They are now minorities in those places. Until recently they were discriminated against. To some extent they still are. But their displacement by Europeans is comparatively recent.

Europe and Great Britain are very different. The majority population is the result of millennia of intermingling of peoples from across the continent and further afield. The Romans dominated for five centuries ending fifteen hundred years ago. Their occupation forces in Britain included men and women from across their empire, including from the Middle East and North Africa.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Britain was invaded by Danes, Vikings, Saxons and, finally a thousand years ago, by Normans. The latter were, of course, descended from Vikings who had colonised an area of what is now northern France.

For most of the last thousand years Britain has been under the control of the descendants of those Norman invaders. William I parceled out vast areas of England to his cousins and close associates. Subsequent monarchs did the same. Wars were fought between those families for centuries. And not only across England. Most of northern Europe was similarly involved, right up to the first world war. None of the Kings, Princes and other nobility cared much about the peasantry that provided the wealth they fought each other to control.

There is, of course, a long tradition of rebellion running alongside the international conflicts. It is the battle between the dispossessed and those in power. People fought against the imposition of new religious practices in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They rioted against the enclosure of land previously held in common. They destroyed machines that made it impossible to continue earning a living from home based crafts. They tore down barriers that forced them to pay to use long established thoroughfares. Only rarely did they attack other dispossessed people in the belief that they were undeserving. They did not see themselves as 'indigenous people' under threat from 'others'. They protested about the injustice of having their livelihoods destroyed by the actions of landlords and rentiers.

Among those landlords were some who hijacked such causes, turning the anger against fellow citizens instead of those in power. Which is exactly what is happening today. Wherever someone in power starts to tell you that it's foreigners, immigrants, or the followers of a particular religion that are at the root of your suffering, stop and think. What does that person stand to gain by pitting you against his enemies? Are you sure that the people they point to are your enemies?

And if you are told that you are 'the indigenous people of Britain' or anywhere else that has been home to a diverse range of people for millennia remind whoever says it that he is, at best, naïve and, at worst, being duped by someone who certainly does not have his best interests at heart.

And now here is that original piece from 8 years ago. Scenes like those described at the start are still prevalent on our TV screens. Only the locations – or some of them – have changed. Now it's Ukraine, Yemen, Myanmar, Sudan and the so called Holy Land.

N for Nightmare: #atozchallenge

Warning: this is a rant. Some readers may be offended.

I'm talking living nightmares here, not bad dreams. I watch, nightly, scenes of ravaged cities that, a few years ago were bustling, modern metropolises teeming with people going about their business and tourists photographing historic buildings. I watch, too, over-loaded boats ferrying people, men, women and frightened children, across the Mediterranean or Aegean seas. And my television also shows me lines of similar people trekking across country or, more often these days, camping in unbelievably squalid conditions beside hastily erected fences. Many of these dispossessed people are the former citizens of those wrecked and ruined cities.

I cannot begin to imagine what it must have been like to see one's home become a war zone. By 'home' I do not just mean the house one occupies with one's family, I mean the familiar neighbourhood where you conduct your business at the corner shop, attend religious ceremonies at the church, mosque or temple around that same corner, where every morning you take your children to the nearby school.

I do not know what is worst: to be confined indoors because of street fighting, snipers on rooftops hiding behind the parapets, or to be afraid to remain indoors for fear of being shelled or bombed. Maybe you'd hope the nightmare would end soon. That the fighting would stop. That basic services would be restored. That the empty shelves in the corner shop would be replenished. At what point would you come to realise that the nightmare was not going to end? That the only escape was to leave what remains of the place you used to call home and to seek something closer to normality elsewhere.

To get to that new place involves another nightmare, almost, but perhaps not quite, as bad as the one you are leaving. Trekking for days across a hot desert, finding someone to carry you across an ocean, albeit, if you are lucky, a small ocean. Selling your most treasured possessions in order to pay for that part of the journey. Seeing friends, neighbours, close relatives, drown, having already lost many to the bullets and bombs of the war. And then to discover that all that is on offer is a makeshift tent in a filthy encampment.

That, surely, is the worst nightmare anyone can imagine. And yet it is the daily experience of tens of millions. We, the fortunate ones, have become so inured to seeing these human tragedies unfold on our screens. We worry about what is to become of these victims of the insanity of war, only to the extent that our own comfortable lives might be disrupted. That these migrants will place pressure on public services. Our own access to quality health, education and housing will be impaired if we allow 'this flood' to reach our own shores.

We are even prepared to risk all that has been good about Europe since our own cities were destroyed by bombs as we lived through our own nightmare more than 70 years ago. We learned the lessons – or I thought we had.

We learned that it is better to try to rub along together, to accept, even celebrate, differences in culture and religion. To share our good fortune with those less fortunate than ourselves, within the boundaries of Europe and further afield.

The fact that others are still slaves to intolerance and prejudice to the extent they are prepared to kill each other, and to attempt to terrorise us, out of whatever twisted motives, is hard to understand. And I wonder when our politicians will learn that our attempts to interfere in these disputes are making things worse. I am grateful for having been born at a time and in a place that made me a member of the most fortunate generation this planet has known. And I'm ashamed that our grandchildren will be unable to share much of that good fortune because of the greed and ignorance of many of my contemporaries.