and harassing the migrants.
If anyone should be described as heroes, ie, persons who struggle against great odds and dangers while often putting themselves at risk helping others, etc, to achieve an objective, it is these people in camp Jungle whom we are invited by bourgeois politicians and the Western media alike to despise. The individual stories relating to the imperialist intrusions into their countries, the family and friends lost in those conflicts and the further losses in epic journeys to escape carnage and rebuild lives crossing dangerous seas (see Lalkar, March/April issue 2015; ‘Behind the tragedy of the Libyan boat people‘), travelling through highly hostile lands etc. are heart-rending. But when you realise that facing all the dangers and losses of their journey is still preferable to staying where they were originally, then you begin to understand the enormity of the crimes of imperialism and its supporters and apologists.
Instead, Britain, to ‘protect its border’, which apparently now extends to the outskirts of Calais, has sent more sniffer dogs and razor wire at huge expense. The Eurotunnel management at one time even dramatically scaled back its overnight freight service to reduce the opportunities for stowaways, a decision which some estimate could have drastic implications for the UK economy, which is claimed to be losing some £250million a day because of the chaos. To either whip up further enmity between British workers and these brave survivors stuck in camp ‘Jungle’ or to use truck drivers as unpaid border guards, in all probability both, the British Government is fining drivers up to £200 if a refugee is found on their vehicle even where it is obviously without the driver’s knowledge leading to drivers constantly searching their loads often while carrying hammers or iron bars to drive any stowaways off. It can only be a matter of time before something really horrible happens. Ten of these refugees from imperialism’s wars have died attempting to get to Britain since June, untold hundreds have received non-lethal injuries falling from vehicles, breaking bones and/or getting serious burns from electrical wires etc.
These people have been described by the Prime Minister, David Cameron, as a “swarm” while his foreign secretary, Phillip Hammond, used no less inflammatory language talking of “marauding” Africans and warning that they could threaten Europe’s living standards and social structures – reminding those who choose to remember of the dehumanising names and descriptions used on European Jews by the leaders of German fascism and their press in the early thirties of the last century. The British press have followed the government lead (and surpassed it in many cases) some even calling for troops to be sent to Calais to confront these victims of imperialist greed and bloody repression.
British workers must speak up for their foreign brothers and sisters trapped at a border and treated like animals. We must stand with these refugees and demand that they be given entry. We must demand that British imperialism stop its rapacious wars of spoilage and plunder and when enough understand that imperialism simply cannot do that we must mercilessly destroy the beast that is British imperialism and lay the footings for a socialist Britain.
Reproduced from the latest edition of Lalkar