Tell Me A Story

Tell me a story

History gets re-written, and re-interpreted.  My poet’s sensibility takes history and wants to make it a lesson on our current reality.

Let me try and stick with facts:

13^th May 1939 937 Jews escaping Nazi-gripped Germany aboard the MS St. Louis, refused entry from Cuba, America and Canada.

288 managed to make it to the United Kingdom, the rest to the Netherlands, France and Belgium.  If you know your history, you might guess these 254 died after invasion, internment and genocide.

Compared with the 6 million Jewish people murdered by the Nazi machine, this seems a drop in the ocean.  But that’s 254 that could have lived beyond 1945 had they been welcomed.

So the story goes humans crammed into boats.  How can I put into words, in this space, the elation at escaping, only to be told you are the threat to the destination nation?

The fact is, humans remember events in 75-100 year cycles.  The mass wars of the Napoleonic era were a memory when once again the soil of Europe was red and bloody and my Grandpa landed in Normandy. 

On Holocaust Memorial Day, 2017, the Republican Party banned people from 7 countries from entering the United States of America, including Syrian refugees.  As these countries were mostly Muslim so we refer to this as the Muslim Ban, if you want to mince words and say it wasn’t so, fine, but an anti-Muslim agenda is part of the Western Government plans.

On Facebook someone assured me there are no Nazis anymore.  They assured me that the racism that persists will not then permit fascism to exist.

But we remember the world in 75-100 year cycles, and I want to stick to the facts.

If you drag migration into the centre of the political discourse

If you allow right-wing marches in the street to mask incitement of a race war

You allow this wave to rise high under the guise of a free speech

The wave will strike hard against this beach

And the Mediterranean sea is already wetted red

And detention centres will spread

And their cause will be far darker than to simply detain and deport.