Ireland shouldn’t take Afghan refugees for the same reason Ireland shouldn’t allow Shannon Airport to be used as a staging post for globalist wars. We should not engage in projects of empire or utopia in which vested interests, known to us all, prevail over their purported common good. It is better to stay out of such projects which —as we can see from the media’s reaction to US withdrawal —are based on self-serving fantasy. The push to take more and more migrants into the West is just another extension of that fantasy. The belief in converting the world to a certain set of values is one with the desire to harbour humanity from itself. Rejecting this point of view is essential if Ireland wishes to endure the follies of empire, the fashions of utopia and the vested interests which lie behind both. That is the good we must work towards. By enduring we secure something for the future and what’s more, we survive the present. We owe the world a Gaelic Ireland if we owe it anything, for after all it is the only thing we give the world that it does not already possess. That goal is far from completed. We do not owe the world Afghanistan nor is it in our power to give it. We do not owe Afghanistan the world nor is it in our power to give it. For ourselves, we require safe passage to the future. We do not yet have it.
The Height of Folly
Folly is in the air. It has been for a long time now. Even as the Irish special forces are sent to Kabul to assist in some unspecified way in the evacuation of “Irish citizens”, the Afghan refugees arrive in Ireland. The only opinion allowed in polite society is that we have not taken enough. As ever, these propositions (mostly concocted by NGOs and anonymous technocrats) are presented as projects of high sentiment.
These projects of sentiment are poisoned from the beginning. This is the first thing we must understand. Our government, our State officials, our “leaders” are not dealing with us in good faith. It follows that acts of good faith in these situations are not possible. If the condition for “helping others” is to pursue a project of self-negation, then we cannot consent to it.
As it is clear that these pro-migrant NGOs are acting in bad faith (in the sense that they outright view migration as a weapon against Western nations, in the sense that they proclaim a doctrine that can only be described as “racial vengeance”) then we must not allow ourselves to be emotionally blackmailed by them. If we lived in a State which protected the native demography and which viewed mass-migration strategically and nationally as a variable just like any other variable, then the situation might be different. But it is not. The condition for assistance is a priori contaminated. This is the chief problem with almost all moral claims made by those who have power in Ireland today.
It pertains not only to issues of straightforward humanitarian concern but to virtually all others. As an example, take environmentalism. If climate change is indeed the crisis of our times, as it may well be, then all other issues should pale into insignificance. But they do not. The most trivial and obscurantist of social agendas take centre stage. Would a society on the verge of apocalypse pour so much resources and attention into gender pronouns? It might well do so, but in doing so it would demonstrate a lack of seriousness that undermines its capability to deal with an imminent disaster.
If you put it to the Green Party that they should set side the promotion of “transgenderism” and “race theory” in primary schools to focus wholly on “Green issues”, how do you think they would respond? Can they even comprehend the distinction? The history of the Green movement suggests that they cannot. All of these issues have been compounded into one. They have become the liberal project. “Saving the planet” to them is just an adjunct to a broader crazier agenda. Wishing Afghanistan were a “functioning liberal democracy” is an adjunct to the same.
What Liberalism Wants
The reaction of the Western media to the “fall of Kabul” is very telling. They clearly want Afghanistan to be a country “like Sweden” even as they try to make Sweden (in practical terms) more like Afghanistan. The real politics of the US occupation are sidelined. The centrality of the opium trade, the questionable American allies, the absurdity of the “nation building” project, the inevitability of the final outcome, all of these things are tossed aside for fluff pieces on how many female university graduates US-occupied Kabul produced.
What do they want? To invade again? In pursuit of emotional goals like “gay liberation” they would take sides in a civil war in a semi-unconquerable country. And for what? An unattainable goal? It is ironic that the people most invested in the deconstruction of the West (that being the liberal media and academia) are the ones most committed to a universal set of values rooted unambiguously in the West (albeit in its greatest moment of decadence). What will become of these people and their ideology when the American Empire finally collapses? Will the liberal paradigm too simply collapse? It is difficult to see what would sustain it.
Take any of their pet projects. They expend, for instance, huge amounts of time and emotion on the injustices of the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. Putting aside their impotence in facing what would actually be necessary to “resolve” that situation, one can only wonder how they would view a liberated Palestine if such a thing were brought about. Would they immediately start fiddling with it, toying with it, even bombing it? Would they plant their insidious NGOs in it? Would they control what was taught in Palestinian schools? Would they make the rainbow flag a national emblem? Would they toss and turn at night in frustration that Palestine was not yet the Sweden of their dreams? And when Palestine rejected them? Would they demand we take the refugees of their culture war?
Behind the sentimental language of liberalism lies eternal violence. These people cannot tolerate war and they cannot tolerate peace. Though they squirm at the thought of ordered military parades, they are at war in effect with all mankind. They are not happy when the US Army are bombing Afghanistan. They are not happy when the US Army pulls out of Afghanistan. They are not happy with humanity itself. Nor will they ever be.
What liberalism refuses to countenance is that the world is imperfect, will always be imperfect and what’s more, is not subject to universal standards of human perfectibility. Even a Christian whose morality is universal in design, does not claim the Kingdom of God can be created on earth. Marxism claims that. Liberalism claims that. But no ideology with a plausible account of human nature claims that.
The End of the Line
As it stands, the nations of Europe tolerate and do trade with vast regions of the world whose forms of government do not and never shall resemble the fuzzy liberal democracy we know so well. On current projections, it does not seem likely that liberal democracy will even survive the twenty-first century. It certainly does not look like dominating it. The liberal idea is that everyone in the world is basically “just like me.” This is not humanism by the way. This is narcissism.
All these peoples “out there” are prospective refugees if you view everything outside liberalism as an affront to human decency. But who will assimilate who? Will the West (in its current mania) assimilate the incoming peoples or will they assimilate the West?
Take a look at that airport in Kabul where the militaries of the West contrive to bring order to the swarming ants of human desperation. And somewhere among them are the Irish special forces. That airport is a metaphor for the Europe we are creating, the Ireland our leaders are creating. A chaotic zone which we thought we could control, surrounded by the forces of human nature we do not understand, and given a time limit (an ultimatum) to vacate our place of assumed security. Liberalism is not universal. History does not culminate in rainbow flags. Western governments may content themselves with putting down the “reactionary” forces within (the far right as they would label it) but in the end the Dollar system will fail and the world will not resemble the Sweden of liberal daydreams.
Ireland shouldn’t take Afghan refugees, first and foremost because we are not at peace but at war. Indeed our system of franchised “liberal democracy” is not capable of peace except in longing for some globalist “Pax Romana” that never will be. Our society is adjunct to a globalist system (controlled by the enemies of mankind) which is at war with human nature. Safe passage to the future is not therefore secure. This is not a safe harbour for the Irish nation, let alone the peoples of the world. We are not bringing in migrants or refugees but cultural combatants; that is to say people who will and must take sides in the conflicts to come. We are simply populating the battlefields of the future with the armies of a post-American world. Like the fall of Kabul, certain things are now baked into the cake. We can only hope that globalism’s difficulty when it comes will be Ireland’s opportunity.
This article was submitted by a National Party member. If you would like to submit an article for publication on the National Party website, follow this link.