En Passant

Some commentators are rightly beginning (at last) to see the similarities between Rudd and Howard on refugees. 

They have begun talking about the Indonesian solution (mentioned here well before the bright lights of the mainstream media picked up on it).

Some are even drawing comparisons between Rudd and Howard over the Tampa and the Oceanic Viking; between the Indonesian solution and the Pacific solution; between Rudd’s’ tough but humane’ racism and Howard’s racism.

Eventually one or two of them might even conclude that Howard’s 2001 election pitch – we shall decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come – is actually the policy foundation for Rudd’s refugee racism. 

But it’s not just the Tampa that comes to mind.

There is also a striking similarity with another refugee boat, the St Louis. This boat left Europe in May 1939 with over 900 passengers on board, most of them Jews fleeing the Nazis.  Many paid a corrupt Cuban official in Germany for entry visas to Cuba. 

When the boat arrived in Cuban waters the Cuban Government refused to allow most of the refugees to disembark. So the boat headed to the land of the free. You know the one.

 It has inscribed on its Statue of Liberty the following words:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The US would not allow the Jewish refugees into America. Apparently they weren’t huddled or wretched enough.

I can imagine the reasons for rejecting Jewish refugees from the Nazis.

Taking the St Louis refugees might open the floodgates. America won’t be able to handle the extra people. We don’t want queue jumpers, or economic refugees.

And there might be terrorists among them.

Ok, maybe not that last one exactly, but I can imagine something along the following lines – there might be communists or socialists among them.

This is unlikely since tickets on the St Louis were expensive and in any event the Nazis had imprisoned or killed most of the left’s leaders in the early years of their rule in the concentration camps.

Any lie would do to keep the refugees out.

The St Louis sailed back to Europe and the jews on board found sanctuary of sorts in 4 European countries.  France, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium granted them temporary asylum.

Then Hitler invaded Western Europe. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates in a video of the story that 250 of the St Louis refugees died at the hands of the Nazis.

Kevin Rudd continues a grand tradition.

Readers might also like to look at Let the asylum seekers into Australia!; Unions: Support refugees; Howes on refugees; Razor Wire and beatings: Labor’s ‘humane’ racism; Tuckey: Rudd’s bastard son; Are the Liberals to blame for Rudd’s racist refugee policy?; Rudd’s refugee racism; Refugees: from Howard to Rudd the racist song remains the same and Refugees: Rudd continues Howard’s brutality