An Analysis You Don't Get From the PC CBC
I once wrote that the CBC was an infallible guide as to what was not happening at home or abroad. It was like a weathervane that if it pointed in one direction, it offered me the assurance that the wind was blowing in exactly the opposite direction. Yet so many people for so many generations have been spoon fed information from Mother Corp that they have come to accept it as gospel when it is not. Pull the plug and maybe, just maybe, these people might learn to shop around , compare sources, match them with reality and feed themselves. Then bingo, a generation of smart, self-sufficient information consumers might emerge in this country.
The CBC treatment of the South African riots presented a case history of prefabricated politically correct journalism. The CBC reporter on assignment need not have bothered going to South Africa—he could have simply huddled with his former journalism professor in Ottawa at Carleton and written up a good storyline about xenophobic rioters who take out their misery upon poor foreigners who have a right to displace their jobs. The xenophobia template has served the CBC well for stories about riots in France, Germany, Cronulla and elsewhere—there is really no need for complexity or idiosyncratic national difference. The theme is the same. The rioters are an ignorant, reactionary, racist, evil bunch who are being manipulated by sinister forces. The foreign element must be accommodated without restriction.
Watching the CBC cover such events is like eating at MacDonalds. It is fast food journalism. It is news in a hurry all right, but it doesn't go down well. And it is the same old crap. Not very nutritious for the mind. Surely we are better off without the CBC. We are better off on a diet. Better just to shut our eyes rather than look at the world through their lens. Ordinary Canadians have an instinct for truth and balance that public broadcasting apparently doesn't have, as evidenced by this commentary I received from James Schipper of London, Ontario. It is about the tyranny in Zimbabwe that led to the riots in South Africa that the CBC allegedly was "covering". The CBC, however, did not take his holistic view of the problem which would have made the South African situation comprehensible. Schipper's common sense is the kind that our journalism schools filter out and the CBC doesn't hire. Schipper on emigration as a safety valve for dictators:
Zimbabwe illustrates how emigration allows countries to export problems and how emigration can delay political reforms. It should be obvious that Zimbabwe has massive problems. This has led millions of Zimbabweans to go abroad to SA, where they are competing against domestic unskilled labor, which is already superabundant and therefore plagued by high unemployment and low wages. The results have been the recent "xenophobic" attacks on foreigners. Zimbabwe simply exported its self-inflicted economic problems to SA.
Of course, this would not have been possible without the indulgence of the SA government, which has done very little to stem the massive inflow of Zimbabweans into its territory. Countries can't export their problems through emigration unless the country that is importing them allows it to happen.
What would have happened if no Zimbabweans had been permitted to settle abroad? Most likely, the economic situation in Zimbabwe would have become so desperate that there would have been a massive popular uprising and the overthrow of Mugabe's regime. In the short term, the situation might have been even worse, but the long- term prospects of Zimbabwe would have been better.
Emigration is a safety valve that helps tyrants to stay in power. When people know that they can't go abroad to escape the problems of their country, they have a very strong incentive to try to solve or mitigate those problems, while governments, knowing that the safety valve of emigration does not exist anymore, have stronger incentives to improve their performance.
As a postscript to Schipper's commentary I am moved to pose the question that many have asked before. Why then should special allowances be made to "refugees", or in the parlance of those outside Canada, "asylum seekers". I am puzzled why men like Dr. William Rees who have made a career talking about the need not to exceed our "carrying capacity" should, at the drop of a hat, be willing to accept literally tens of millions of refugees into my country because they are a different category of humanity than "immigrant". Excuse me, does the environment know this? Do refugees have no footprint Dr. Rees? James Schipper has just made the case, a case that a great many of us have long silently supported, that bulking up our countries with political refugees in the long term does neither us nor the country of emigration any good on many different levels. #comment-473317">Senator Bartlett take note.
Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
July 5, 2008
See also: CBC condemns South African rioters of 25 May 08, Will the great immigration debate take place of 21 May 08
Comments
James Sinnamon
Sun, 2008-07-06 15:06
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Australia's own epitome of enlightened Political Correctness
Tim,
Philip Adams, Australia's own epitome of 'enlightened' Political Correctness
You raise an important question. In Australia, an archetypal politically correct supposed dissident is Phillip Adams who hosts Late Night Live on the ABC's Radio National. I recall similar sanctimonious words of denunciation of the South African rioters coming from the lips of both Adams and his featured guest from South African academia shortly after the riots commenced. (Will endeavour to transcribe at some later point.)
Adams has for years succeeded in giving me, as one member of his audience who has never completely embraced his over-the-top celebration of multiculturalism and high immigration, the impression that the difference is due to his superior degree of enlightenment and his greater capacity for compassion to fellow human beings.
It has since become apparent to me that for many such people, that, in fact, they either have vested interests in maintianing populatin growth or are not as personally as threatened by immigration as many other members of the Australian community. I would like to see how the likes of Adams would behave if they were put in the shoes of South African blacks who face economic hardship and insecurity as a result of both the uncontrolled immigration across their borders and the economic neoliberal policies that they were saddled with by their African National Congress misleaders at the point when they were supposedly liberated from Apartheid (as chronicled in Democracy Born in Chains, Chapter 10 of The Shock Doctrine (2007) pp194-217 by Naomi Klein).
Should sanctuary be granted to all who come from countries ruled by oppressive regimes?
I don't believe that offering sanctuary from fugitives oppressive regimes is a black and white issue. Where someone is in fear for their life, it would normally be wrong to turn them back. However, in western democracies and in South Africa, offering sanctuary seems to have become a substitute to helping people from these countries remove oppressive dictatorships. If we give unlimited right to absolutely everyone in the world who has reason to fear persecution from these regimes, then we will ultimately only create the same conditions in our own countries that would allow similar regimes to came to power.
I distinctly recall hearing a news item in 2002 (or possibly 2003) in which the Zimbabwean opposition Movement for Democratic Reform complained that many economic migrants from Zimbabwe were fraudulently claiming to be political refugees. The generosity of countries like the UK in granting these people asylum was actually undermining the struggle of the MDR.
Obviously, since then the Zimbabwean opposition has not succeeded, and it is difficult to know for certain whether a more careful scrutiny of the claims of Zimbabweans for asylum would have made the critical difference. My heart goes out to those who, unlike the phoney political refugees, have taken serious personal risks in order to stand up to Mugabe and they are worthy of being granted asylum. However, I still feel that people in every country have some responsibility to rectify unsatisfactory political and economic circumstances in their own country, as we do in our own.
Tim M. (not verified)
Sun, 2008-07-06 20:02
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Canada the dumping ground for the world's right wing refugees
James, what angered me most about Canadian refugee policy was that from my vantage point Canada was becoming the dumping ground for all the right wing refugees of the world. Some of the most virulent reactionary people I ever met fled Hungary, Cuba and Vietnam. A lot of Hong Kong immigrants were in fact refugees from mainland China. They were welcomed with open arms and no restrictions were placed on their activities. By contrast, victims of Pinochet who found refuge here were often subjected to humiliating political scrutiny. The freedom fighters from Hungary, Cuba and Vietnam were fighting for a kind of freedom to the government's liking. Freedom of enterprise. The freedom that the Chileans were fighting for, the freedom of workers to organize into unions, to fight for a fair wage, to fight for decent housing, for medical care, for education—that kind of freedom the Canadian government did not like so much.
Now the accent is on multiculturalism. But behind that is a hidden agenda. The Big Five, that is the banks who run our economy and manipulate our politics, want to almost double our annual immigration take, already the highest of G8 countries, but more than that, they hope to draw those numbers from Asian countries under the noble cloak of multiculturalism. Why? Asians make better clients. They save money like demons and take out big mortgages. The banks in turn chase them by promoting diversity in their ranks, celebrating various religious holidays, having mulitilingual calendars, ATMS, diversity awareness and sensitivity courses, and the latest, Scotia bank has made a deal with an Indian bank. Canadians travelling in India who deal with Scotia are sent to this Indian bank and the India Bank in turn refers Indians to Scotia Bank if they go to Canada. Canadian banks recognize that the Asian market is huge and that Multiculturalism paves the way. This Yellow Canada policy is de facto just as exclusive as the White Australia policy was. The Asian orientation of our immigration policy is now set in stone. Off the tangent from refugee policy but an illustration, I think, that Canadian immigration and refugee policy has always been marred by ideological or commercial bias.
dave
Mon, 2008-07-07 13:29
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Asian focus
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