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| Afghanistan |
| Importing Enemies |
| 2021-08-31 |
| h/t Instapundit Perennial Democratic White House aide, congressman, Chicago mayor, and ambassador-in-waiting Rahm Emmanuel's sole memorable utterance‐his only candidate for Bartlett's‐is his cynical 2008 maxim that the good guys (i.e., his team) must "never let a serious crisis go to waste." He was speaking of using the financial crisis to usher in sweeping changes to law, policy, the economy, and society that would otherwise not have been possible through ordinary democratic processes. The same logic applies now to the Democrats'‐and many Republicans'‐insistence that America be flooded with Afghan "refugees." Importing as many immigrants as possible, from cultures as alien to traditional America as possible, is the ruling class's top priority, after protecting its own wealth and power. But since importing millions upon millions of foreigners is the primary tool by which the ruling class maintains that wealth and power‐by suppressing wage growth and dividing the population‐it can be hard to disaggregate these two priorities. ...And now, just like thirteen years ago, our rulers want to use a crisis they created as justification to ram through what they always wanted to do anyway. Which, in this case, is to resettle a hundred or two hundred thousand (the number varies depending on who's speaking) foreigners with no tradition of liberty‐who are indeed from a culture deeply alien, even hostile to, Western civilizational norms‐in your communities. The justification for this is already being trumpeted: we must save our "allies," translators and such, who helped us throughout our twenty-year failed experiment. This argument, though offered in bad faith, is effective because the vast majority of American consider abandoning an ally to a deadly enemy dishonorable. But does anyone really believe that America has, or ever had‐even over the duration of two decades‐200,000 "allies" in Afghanistan? That we ever employed even a fraction of that number as translators? The claim is risible on its face. The regime has in any case already admitted that, of the roughly 111,600 Afghans (as compared to 5,400 American citizens) already evacuated, it has no idea who the vast majority of them are. Our masters tell us that we must save "allies" and "translators"‐and then in the next breath admit that they're indiscriminately taking anyone. ...There surely are some translators or others who really did help American forces and who deserve to be evacuated. If Americans could trust their government to establish and operate a serious vetting system to identify those truly worthy of resettlement‐vouched for, say, by two or more of our soldiers who worked directly with the applicant in the field‐most would support refugee status for such people. But they would number at most in the thousands, not the hundreds of thousands currently in process of resettlement. ...Beyond those (few) genuine allies and translators, America has no obligation to bring over "refugees" at all. Those who claim such a reason on the basis of Colin Powell's "Pottery Barn rule"‐"you break it, you bought it," a rule that Pottery Barn does not actually impose‐are incoherent. For by this logic, the United States is perpetually bound to compound its worst disasters with further deliberate errors: wreck a country, import its citizens. Or is that simply the plan? Instead of "you break it, you bought it," how about, "when you're in a hole, stop digging"? Why do 2,500 American deaths, 20,000 injuries, and $2 trillion in losses obligate us to take on additional problems and burdens? How do our genuine obligations to a few hundred translators extend across an entire population of more than 37 million? Such arguments are a combination of sophistry and guilt-trip, in the service of ruling class pieties and political (and pecuniary) interests. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |