Xenophobia – I Don’t Think That Word Means What YOU Think It Means

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – “Let’s talk about xenophobia.  Apparently Christiane Amanpour is not very well educated because she doesn’t even know how to use xenophobia correctly in a sentence.  If that guy was actually a xenophobe, and if he was out there in public, he would have to have been inside some sort of plastic bubble.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest….

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Let’s talk about xenophobia.  Apparently Christiane Amanpour is not very well educated because she doesn’t even know how to use xenophobia correctly in a sentence.  If that guy was actually a xenophobe, and if he was out there in public, he would have to have been inside some sort of plastic bubble.  Xenophobia is the fear of people that don’t look like you.  What’s going on here?  Is he correct or is she correct?

Laurie Calhoun:  I think that there’s a big confusion, and I wrote about this yesterday, specifically citing that poster.  There’s a big poster.  It shows an outflux of Syrian refugees into Europe.  The poster says “Breaking Point” and Nigel Farage is standing in front of it.  The point is, he’s saying we can’t keep taking hundreds of thousands of more immigrants.  Okay, so people reacted very adversely to this poster.  I want to say that what’s being missed in this entire debate is the source of those refugees.  Those refugees have nothing intrinsically to do with Europe at all.  Those refugees emerged because of military intervention, nonstop military intervention in the Middle East.  No one talked about that.  Everyone just assumed the war stuff, that’s perfectly fine.  One of the consequences is hundreds of thousands of refugees.  The whole reason why there came to be an EU crisis was because of this outpouring of refugees from the Middle into Europe, of people who were just trying to escape the bombing.

It’s really funny because everything is getting mixed up.  People are saying because you don’t want all of these refugees from the Middle East to come into Europe, suddenly you’re racist.  Nigel Farage and his group are, I think, legitimately concerned.  I can’t say I’m a fan of his, but they’re legitimately concerned about the fact that when new member states join the EU, it’s always more likely that the new member citizens are going to want to come to Britain than vice versa.  As an example, Albania and Croatia are about to join.  How many Brits want to go live in Albania?  I’m guessing the number is probably single digit.  It’s very small whatever it is.  Of course, everyone conducts themselves according to what they perceive to be their self-interest.  An Albanian who suddenly is granted access to the European community is going to make a beeline for Britain.  Why not?  You’re going to try to do the best that you can for your family and that makes perfect sense.

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So what they’re saying is basically – I believe that what the British people said yesterday in the vote is that enough is enough.  We’ve gone above and beyond and we can’t continue to do this.  That’s what the poster says in a way, but it’s a little bit strange because it’s connecting of an influx of Syrian refugees to the whole EU question.  The reason why it became problematic is because the Eurocrats decided to allow these refugees to come in.  I believe Merkel was the one that led the charge on that before recanting later on when they realized it was overwhelming and they couldn’t deal with it.  The problem is, these refugees are cutting into the eastern part of Europe.  They’re just crushing these poor nations like Greece.  They’re like the gateway of all refugees.  The point of the article I wrote yesterday is that maybe what we should really do is stop bombing these people so they’ll be happy and able to live in their own homelands.

Mike:  What a novel idea.

Calhoun:  Can you believe it?  I know.

Mike:  Laurie Calhoun, author of We Kill Because We Can is on the Skype Maker Hotline.  What is the quaint little hamlet that you’re in in the UK?

Calhoun:  I’ve moved on since we last spoke.  I am now in the eastern coast of England.  I’m in a place called Cramlington, which is north of Newcastle.  It’s in a region called Northumberland.  What’s interesting is I’m finding the same sort of sentiment wherever I go.  This is my big UK experience.  I’m dipping into all sorts of villages.  I’m finding the same reactions from people on the ground, you might say.  The peasants, as you said.  These people have legitimate concerns about whether the EU has overreached and affected their personal lives by their rules and regulations and extracting funds from them and basically redistributing the wealth of the British people around the EU.  The British economy is very strong, a little bit less strong today after the earth-shattering vote, but much stronger than most of the other members of the EU.  When you redistribute, of course, the wealthy give to the less wealthy.  That’s what’s happening.  These people are feeling it.  The fishing industry was completely –

Mike:  Decimated.

Calhoun:  Yeah, completely by the EU.  Basically, imagine this.  You’re a fisherman.  Suddenly the EU has decided that your waters can be fished by anyone else in the EU.  You have to share all of the water and the fish and you have quotas.  You can no longer shoot for the sky.  You can only catch so many fish in British waters.  This has really affected workers in a very negative way, and fishermen are just one example.  That’s why they revolted yesterday.  They just said: No, we don’t think that what you think is good for Britain is good for us.  I think it’s perfectly legitimate for these people to vote out of self-interest.  That’s exactly what the Eurocrats do.

Mike:  That’s exactly right.  The irony of that is, and you just nailed it, Laurie.  You said these people are voting to – we don’t think that what you think is good for Great Britain is good for us.  There’s a confusion amongst most people today because they don’t really understand, and no one explores this question, of what a State is.  When I say State, I don’t mean you’re from New Jersey.  I don’t mean New Jersey a state, but I do mean New Jersey State.  I mean State as in when Mrs. Clinton was Secretary of State and she would visit France or Spain or whatever the case may be.  We regard the term State today in a manner in which we would use the word country.  The two are synonymous.  I’ve done this exercise here on this show many times.

What is a State?  If you leave aside the geographical boundaries of rivers or whatever divides one State from another, a State is – the people make up a State.  The Albanian – you mentioned the Albanians.  The Albanian people, that is the State.  If they govern themselves, they can choose to have a monarchy.  They could choose to have democracy.  They can choose to have a canton republic like the Swiss have.  That’s just an expression of how they’re governing themselves, but the people are the State.

What I just heard you say, and what I saw in the movie Brexit, those fishermen, they are the State.  They certainly know what’s best for them.  They would certainly know more about what’s best for them than anyone that was an MP in parliament or anyone certainly that was a Eurocrat going to the EU meetings in Brussels.  What really happened yesterday was just rolling the clock back.  This was understood for over a millennia in all the countries of Europe.  It seems to me that that’s what’s happening here.

I’ll tell you one more thing about the immigration problem in the UK.  The United Kingdom, as you well know, at one time was a Catholic country and Henry VIII comes along, the Protestant revolt, then it’s a Protestant country.  Then the Church of England, the Anglican Church.  The religious content of the UK has been on the decline for quite some time.  It is a part of history, factual history that the Anglo-Saxon people of that island had to, for over a thousand years, deal with Mohammedan pirates and deal with attempts by Syrians or Libyans, or Albanians for that matter, that may have been forced into becoming Muslim, they had to deal with them and they had war.  They were always trying to keep them out.  The Spanish fought an 813-year-long war to kick the Mohammedans out.  The Mohammedans always wanted to take the Vatican.  They were always attacking Italy.  Just never-ending war with these people.  No one in Christendom, as it was known, would ever have fathomed the idea that we ought to invite them in and try to get along with them.

The UK, where you are currently at, has immigrated what, 2 million?  Every indication is that I read – and I read a lot of papers every day ‘cause I like reading London papers.  They’re good papers, some of them.  Every indication is that these Mohammedans, Muslims have basically cloistered themselves into factions.  They have no intention of assimilating and becoming part of British culture or part of the culture of the United Kingdom.  Farage is more correct with that poster than Christiane Amanpour ever could be.  Don’t you think?

Calhoun:  I think, again, the real problem here is not that there necessarily has to be a warlike conflict between the British and the people of the Middle East.  The problem is, we’re rendering their homeland uninhabitable.  They have to go somewhere.  They come over here.  They can’t reach the United States, which is where, if there were, I suppose, a form of retributive justice, they should actually go to the United States because most of the bombs are coming from the United States.  We render their homeland uninhabitable and they say: Look, we’re trying to escape the bombs.  We need shelter.  They move to the closest place that’s safe, and that’s Europe.

I think we have to look at the root of the refugee crisis, not pretend that these refugees just somehow emerged spontaneously out of nowhere.  We’re actually causing this exodus.  If we want to solve that problem, we have to stop destroying, wrecking their countries.  When we invaded Iraq in 2003, millions of Iraqis left because it was unsafe.  The security conditions were so bad that almost all of the middle class and upper middle class Iraqis fled.  There was this huge brain drain from the country.  The place was just left in shackles.  The same thing is happening now in all these countries that Obama is bombing: Syria, Yemen, Libya, Pakistan.  He’s bombing something like seven different countries simultaneously.  What are you going to do if you see bombs coming down from the sky?  You’re going to flee.  It’s a perfectly natural response.

Mike:  Laurie Calhoun, the author of We Kill Because We Can is live from where?

Calhoun:  I’m in Cramlington, which is on the east side of England in a province known as Northumberland.  It’s a little bit north of Newcastle.

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Mike:  I know where Newcastle is.  Laurie is a US-based writer, but she’s traveling abroad this summer.  She just happens to be visiting the UK.  I’m looking at your post yesterday and I now see the poster you were talking about.  Your headline is, “What’s Conspicuously Missing from the Big Bad Brexit Debate Drama?”  As you just pointed out, it’s a fact that we kind of created the refugee crisis, and the EU helped create the crisis, so actually this does address a very existential problem that the United Kingdom and its citizens are going to have to deal with and will be dealing with for decades into the future.  It seems to me that the correct choice was made.

Let me say something else to you that you said about – so if you’re a member state in the EU, that means you can travel freely in between countries.  When I was in Scotland two summers ago, about this time two years ago, when I stayed at a B&B in Edinburgh, all of the domestic help – here in the United States we have Latinas that perform many, many, a large share of the domestic services in hotels.  They’re maids and janitors and what have you here.  That’s not a knock; that’s just a statistic.  You know who was maintaining the two B&B’s that I stayed at in Edinburgh?

Calhoun:  Who?

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Mike:  Polish immigrants.  I struck a conversation up with her.  She said: There are tens of thousands of us here.  They weren’t bombed, that I know of, but tens of thousands of Poles took the opportunity that the EU provided them and relocated to Scotland.  This is what I find just irreconcilable.  When the Scots voted to secede from the EU or to withdraw, one of the reasons they cited was what I just told you, that they were being force fed immigrants from countries like Poland and Albania that were taking all of the entry-level jobs away from the young people.

Calhoun:  That’s right, and also driving the wages down.  There’s so much competition – unskilled workers can travel freely within the entire region of the European Union.  What happens to unskilled workers in Britain is that they have to compete with hundreds or thousands of Eastern Europeans or people from other parts of Europe who are also unskilled.  That drives the wages down.  It’s really devastating for people in the lower classes, for unskilled British people.  They can’t really pick up and move and get a job somewhere else in the way that the Eastern Europeans can come over here and compete for lower wages and force the native Brits to accept lower wages if they want to work.  It’s very bad for the lower classes.  The Brits who go abroad tend to be professionals.  They go to Paris to work or they go to Germany.  They tend to be professionals.  They’re not unskilled laborers.  The unskilled laborers are kind of stuck here competing with this huge influx of Eastern Europeans, who, by the way, are Caucasians.  This isn’t really a race question at all.  It’s a straight immigration question.  It has nothing to do intrinsically with questions of race.  You may or may not be a racist and be worried about immigration, but you can be worried about immigration without being a racist.

End Mike Church Show Transcript