Ethnic cleansing

The invasion and occupation of what is now Israel by the Jews prompts me, from time to time, to ponder about other examples of this sort of land grabbing.

So, for example, we have the Spaniards who grabbed Mexico, a heavily populated country at the time, as now, and solved the problem by converting the natives to the truth faith and then assimilating with them. As I understand things, while there is still racial origin snobbery there, it does not get much worse than that, and the Spaniards are now well worked into the mix. A trick we did not manage when we shipped a whole lot of Scots into Northern Ireland a few centuries later.

More recently, the Poles and the Czechs avoided the problem by simply expelling all the Germans from the land in question, with the exception of a few who got left behind, in and around what was then Breslau and who still speak a version of German rather than a version of Polish. I wonder how well they fit into the life of what is now, their country? I think the Indians avoided an ongoing problem with the Brits because there were never very many of us there in the first place, and virtually all of those that were, left at the time of independence - leaving the Indians to their own racial, religious & language problems. And very considerable they are too.

I have been reminded by the Ebola epidemic of the example of Liberia, a west African country, not much more than a third the area of the UK, small by African standards. A country invented by anti-slavery people in the US in the first half of the nineteenth century and populated in part by a transfusion of freed slaves, who might well claim some west African genetic heritage, but who were born and bred in the United States.

So this morning I get to investigate how things went down there, to find that Americo-Liberians make up maybe one percent of the population of around 4 million. Supported by the US, they were in comfortable charge for about 150 years, after which the aboriginal peoples got fed up and had about 20 years of brutal & catastrophic civil war, from which the country is only now emerging, and one legacy of which (according to a recent article in the NYRB) is scant regard for government, law and order, which in turn accounts in large part for their difficulty in containing the Ebola epidemic.

One can see why some otherwise thinking people come round to the idea that migration, immigration & mixing are bad, even though they are very wrong.

With thanks to wikipedia for the picture.