Migration is something that has been with us for a long time, true, and probably will always be with us. The flow of people across borders is inevitable, and should even be encouraged so that people get a wider view of what the world really looks like. But the modern world has changed considerably, and in recent times especially. more change is coming: automation is going to advance faster than you expect, causing massive unemployment rates if we’re not careful and we don’t manage it, and the answer is not to increase the amount of available workers driving down the cost of labour even more. as a result, we won’t really need huge populations, so having a steadily increasing population is fine (japan comes to mind; they have an aging population but the future is going to require less workers for an even more productive economy, and robots should be able to help support old people and the medical system – for more on this, please see CGP Grey’s Humans Need Not Apply: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

So you want unrestricted flow of migrants into your countries? Why? To replace the existing aging population with desperate immigrants that come with almost nothing except their clothes and minds, educated or otherwise, that will take any jobs available for any amount of cash to support themselves and their families, sometimes even working at Tim Horton’s even though they have better qualifications? That is never going to work, and has proven not to work in the US because illegal immigrants disproportionately burden the tax and school systems, building a lot of resentment in many Americans along the southern border. There must be some restrictions in place; in Canada there is a system that applicants must go through to become citizens, and its hard for me to be critical of immigration when my parents were immigrants so I understand that there will always be some benefits. But ultimately I think that countries should be more invested in the next generation of their own people, and the enrichment of them, and should prioritize that over letting in anyone that wants to come for any reason.

If we can build up the places that the migrants come from, then perhaps there won’t be convoys of refugees? Calling for free migration is only treating a symptom of the real problem; there wouldn’t be migrants if those countries were in better situations and didnt fear from their lives from drug cartels, warlords or terrorists. We face a global crisis that must be addressed honestly. The “General Crisis” of the 21st century is multifaceted and interconnected, but I think I can break it down with Orwell’s help.

In 1984, he references a constant war being waged over the natural resources in the poorest continent of the world. Today, we have constant wars and unrest in Africa and the Middle-East, and we exploit the poor living conditions of the population to keep prices of valuable trade goods such as oil, minerals, gems, and precious metals very low. In other places, such as the Oceanic continent and South America, this unrest is exploited to keep a steady flow of drugs into the First World, along with keeping the price of other trade goods such as coffee and tropical fruit very low relative to the First World. The drugs coming from the Middle-East are also staggering in magnitude. He’s right when he says that we have to address global warming, and that will never be properly done because in a society as capitalistic as this, money equals power. And Oil companies are swimming in it, so they can bend congress over their desk and lobby all night long to prevent any real progress on this front, because that would mean less future money for Oil companies. The richest of them don’t care because they’ll be fine, as they always are throughout history: they’ll just flee from the consequences and shield themselves because they have the means to do so. When the ocean boils and we have to flee to the poles to survive, they’ll have bunkers already built.

After WW1 and the great depression, followed by WW2 and the economic resurgence brought by the victory of the war, America got a little addicted to fighting wars on foreign soil. It was a great economic consumer, and keeps a lot of people employed making rounds, guns, tanks and so on, saying nothing of the soldiers themselves. So after that we had… Korea, then Vietnam, then Desert Storm, Iraq, and Afghanistan brings us up to today. Now, many of these wars had good reason behind them, but if you look back then you can see that many of them produced unimaginable suffering on both sides, in both soldiers and civilians. Vietnam in particular was terrible for the US, but looking back their tactics were not the greatest when compared to the Australians when it came to actually dealing blows against the insurgency. In fact, the Americans were generally known to increase the insurgency presence because of their treatment of the civilian population while searching for the enemy. So they kept fighting, losing soldiers, and eventually just left.

The trend of sending soldiers to places without doing any good is one that seems to persist throughout much of America’s history. After 9/11, soldiers went to Iraq to take out Saddam and search for WMDs, along with Bin Laden, who would eventually be found in Pakistan. They never found any nerve gas during their time there. But there was tons of oil and opium coming out of the place. It’s a question that I often ask: why do we take oil out of Canada and ship it all over the world, just to buy it back? Why can’t we refine it locally? Oh it’s too expensive. Why is it so much cheaper to ship it out and then back in? Oh because they’re Third World countries so they use slave labour and pay pennies. Great, as long as gas isn’t too pricy, I gotta go to the drive-thru and order a big mac.

The money being made from drugs, oil and war is powerful enough to keep us going on this slope to apocalypse, because enough people are living comfortably enough to keep their mouths shut and just live in blissful ignorance.

History is important. Why? Well, I’ve always come back to a couple conclusions as to why, with a few supporting arguments. In recent history, the world has changed at in unprecedented ways and at rates humanity has never seen before. The industrialization of society has been built upon the technologies and lessons that have all taken thousands of years to develop. Perhaps most recently entered the public concious is the use of the internet for mass political communication, along with various other integrations with society and the economy: Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Google… these platforms have seemingly sprung out of nowhere in the span of a few decades; the largest creation of new businesses ever seen before. As a kid, I honestly had a hard time understanding how it all worked and grew so fast (back in my day google was in a lot worse condition than it is now), but as an adult it’s clear that a lot of it works on the income created by interest, investment, and ad revenue.

But the strange thing about this phenomenon is that, while on one hand society has developed in more ways with more opportunites than ever (in exciting new ways as well), it still bears several sympoms and attributes of the empires and societies that have come before. War, poverty, crime, disease; some of which can just be explained away as the nature of the physical universe we inhabit. Others are preventable, and we often know this but at times extenuating circumstances can force our hand.

Another thing that was always in the background of my childhood was this image of a soldier in green, walking through a jungle with a peace sign on his helmet, or perhaps an ace of spades. What war were these soldiers fighting, I thought as I watched fearful eighteen year old kid, same age as my brother, walk fearfully through a river in the middle of the night. That’s all I remember of that TV program before it was changed. I never really understood it, but eventually I learned of the Vietnam War that would see more than 58,000 American soldiers dead, more than 300,000 wounded, and 2 million Vietnamese civilians killed in the fires of war. So much of American culture (and thus, Canadian culture) was influenced by the aftermath of the war. Many draftees actually deserted rather than fight a war they did not believe in, into my home country.

But the reach of the war’s effect can be seen even further than that when closely examined, and in recent years the war that has brought about perhaps the most suffering in modern history seems to have been forgotten. It’s distanced from polite conversations for several reasons, but one must learn of the suffering brought about by thoughtless actions at the risk of repeating the same mistakes. The deaths of so many, already such a waste of life and potential, is even made even more sorrowful if their suffering comes to mean nothing. It is an injustice plain for all to see, and it’s a disrespect to discount the courage of some of the finest humanity has to offer, along with the needless suffering experienced by so many in the wake of such a gruesome war. While it may sting to face the pain and loss of the past, one must learn as much as possible from it in order to prevent such suffering from taking place in the future.

The reasons for so much death, as well as the war itself, have been unclear to the public for most of the period surrounding it. Such a shadowy period of time, with the war starting under a President who was assassinated (JFK), continued under one that would routinely underprovide for the war (Truman), still perpetuated by one that ended his presidency by impeachment(Nixon), and then finally ended by the president following this unrest: Gerald Ford. Americans were involved in the war since 1950 to aid the French in their colonization effort of the region, and then continued the war in an effort to stop the spread of the communistic system, which had spread through most of Asia (with drastic economic consequences, human rights infractions, and high death tolls).

So what can we learn from such an ugly mess? To start, conventional warfare (get ALL the guns, ALL the tanks, ALL the planes, ALL the ships) is countered by insurgency warfare (we can blend in to the local population and environment to launch surprise attacks), and there are several factors that can influence this: the terrain, the culture of the people, and the technology available to each opposing side. In Vietnam we saw what happens when the huge amounts of firepower unleashed by a misguided, but powerful military like America’s is thrown at a country of insurgents and fierce nationals that fought for a home to live in, along with true conviction that their cause was just. America lost, and was forced to leave the country after having sent men to fight there for ten years, suffering unimaginable losses due to poor tactics and knowledge of the dense jungle terrain, inadequate leadership, and political interference that ultimately worsened the situation and drew it out for longer and longer.

In the modern day, we fight a “war on terror” that requires us to send our young men to the harshest corners of the world (Depends on where you’re from: Canada sends troops to Afghanistan and Syria to fight terror) to fight a counter insurgency that can have impact that is very hard to measure. The impact to us is clear: soldiers return home maimed from battle, but the terrorists still strike into our society in their cruel way. How do we truly solve the issue, to prevent future generations from suffering the danger that we must endure?

Many arguments exist, but it seems that we have found ourselves involved in the middle-east, similar to the way the Americans of the last generations found themselves in Vietnam. The situation is a complex one, with uncomfortable realities that must be grappled with. The West’s involvement in the middle-east stretches back a long time, so it can be argued that we are paying for the mistakes of generations past and we have a responsibility to set injustice right. What do you think the best way is to make the situation better? Does your solution make it better for just western society, or both parties, in your opinion? Should the West care about the Middle-East? Societies have their own problems, but in world that has become increasingly global (largely by economics) it seems that some problems are linked in certain ways.

So why is history important? Because it explains the events that have lead to the current state of affairs. The Vietnam War, having happened such a short time ago, has been etched into history. So many have suffered, and suffer on. To prevent even more death and pain, we should learn what we can from the past.