From The Phoenix Principle and The Coming Dark Age by Marc Widdowson, 2001
Marc Widdowson wrote:The western nations have spread an enormous amount of bad blood around the world in the present era, interfering everywhere and imposing their values with a degree of insensitivity that future historians will truly wonder at. The dark age may see the opportunity for old scores to be settled and to be paid back not once but three times over, as centuries of resentment are relieved in a few intense years. When the plunderers arrive, they will head first for the big cities, where the pickings are richest and thickest on the ground. They will be looking for everything from petrol to slaves and precious metals. Unplanned migration is already a problem in the west. The number of people seeking political asylum has increased dramatically in the last few years. Between a third and a half have their applications refused, but in Britain that still means thousands being admitted every year.2890 In an increasingly disordered world, one might expect that the proportion of admissions should rise, since claims of fleeing oppression will seem increasingly just. Besides which, large numbers of asylum seekers lose patience with the bureaucratic process and go underground as illegal immigrants. In Britain, at least 60,000 have thus evaded the authorities in the past decade. Smuggling third worlders into the rich countries is now a multibillion, dollar criminal business.2891 Fishing vessels carry them across the Mediterranean and truckers speed them overland.2892 Bangladeshis, Iraqis and Indians were recently found to be riding in to Britain on freight trains going through the Channel tunnel.2893 New laws, tougher rules and more vigilant border controls may slow this tide, but they will not halt it. The would-be immigrants are extraordinarily determined. Five Ukrainian men were recently intercepted trying to row across the English Channel in a child’s inflatable dinghy.2894 Today, third worlders come surreptitiously rather than bearing down on the rich countries in their hordes because they perceive that the latter, who not so long ago directly ruled the third world, are well able to defend themselves. Today, they are probably correct. However, with every decade, the reality is changing and so eventually will the perception. In Sierra Leone’s recent civil war, teenage soldiers, both girls and boys, were required to eat the organs and drink the blood of their victims as a military initiation rite.2895 By contrast, trainees at Britain’s school of naval gunnery were being asked to shout ‘bang’ rather than fire real ammunition, in a bid to contain costs.2896 It is increasingly doubtful whether these western youths, whose only taste of violence is in computer games, will really be any match for the blooddrinking, machete-wielding Africans in a serious, face-to-face fight. The Sierra Leone teenagers conduct military actions that they call Operation No Living Thing and Operation Pay Yourself (i.e. looting). How long can it be before they start bringing these ‘operations’ to feebler and far more lucrative Europe? Although they are seldom in western thoughts, today’s underprivileged peoples are well informed of the richness of northern lands, of the vulnerabilities of those lands, and of the existence of others dissatisfied like themselves. They are fully engaged in the world and they show an astute understanding of how to operate within it. Ugandan conmen posing as underprivileged schoolchildren were recently found to be raking it in with begging letters sent to prominent Britons.2897 Other scams have originated in Nigeria. In 1999, refugees in Tanzania were rioting because fleeing Kosovans seemed to be receiving better rations than they were.2898 Clearly these people know exactly what is going on elsewhere – and they are not happy about it. In August 1998, Moroccan and Tunisian asylum seekers who were being held on the Italian island of Lampedusa destroyed their detention centre in a night-long orgy of violence. For fifteen days they had watched through barbed wire fencing as western tourists sunned themselves on a nearby beach, laughing and joking, enjoying good food and copious quantities of wine and beer. Eventually they could take no more and, with temperatures touching 40 degrees, erupted in a spasm of riot and arson.2899 This is a microcosm and a warning of what the future holds in a world where large numbers of hungry, brutalised, third world youths are daily being televised the image of fat, spoilt white people living it up at a party from which they have been thoroughly excluded. The west’s present insouciance may be thought breathtaking. The neo-barbarian invaders of 2050 will leave little clear record of their activity, for they will destroy as they go. Future archaeologists will have to guess at the horrors that might have occurred. They will have to judge from the rubble, the signs of burning, the apparent changes in racial mix of local populations, and the abrupt silencing of a once articulate and exuberant civilisation.
