I am certain there were such oxymorons as “Somali-Americans” in 1993. But none of which I had ever heard. As far as most people I knew were concerned that cultural eon ago, a little bit of Africans went a long way. The tacit agreement being that our own black native stock was quite sufficient to provide the country’s welfare workers and prison guards with ample employment security without need of additional stimulus. And so whatever it is Africans did was best done there.
Unfortunately, that’s the sort of quixotic reasoning that doesn’t long survive the pen of neocon presidencies. And Bush 1 had a lot of ink to spill. Of course there was the Immigration Act of 1990 signed by GHWB after being sponsored in congress by Edward Kennedy (naturally). But laws like that take time to season into civil war, and George’s clock was ticking. So the first Iraq-attaq commenced a year later.
Unfortunately, that contest didn’t separate nearly enough limbs from American torsos, and so in 1992 an electorally-defeated lame duck Herbert Walker Bush launched Operation Restore Hope in Somalia.
Hope. It would be fascinating to know how much death and decay have marched under the banner of such platitudes. If men knew the truth of what was coming, I imagine the only words to strike more fear than hope would be “freedom” and “democracy.”
But returning back to 1992, Somalia had not so much deteriorated as it had simply maintained its native war/famine footing. And were Alabama farm boys just supposed to sit around and live while epicene globalists watched history’s constant in horror? Obviously not. So Bush gave the country he shat on one last grunt before decamping from the White House, and in December of that year the first Marines landed in the Horn of Africa.
The point of the military’s mission was for American politicians and NGOs to earn cheap grace on the backs and blood of their soldiers. But that intent was understandably concealed behind the nominal mission, which was to stop Somalis from killing each other and stealing all the food/aid. How hard could it be? All American commanders had to do was force Africans to share their gibs while smiling for the media. Predictably though, this became a task with equal rates of success as ordering officers to lift off the ground by flapping their arms and yelling “caw! caw!”
Instead of providing feel-good photo-ops, Somalis continued to behave like Somalis. Food continued to be stolen and skulls continued sprouting holes. For the Americans, this had to be like trying to catch rain-water in your hands. But someone had to get shots of smiling full-bellied black kids, by god.
So troops were vainly deployed through 1993 to force-feed unreceptive Africans so as to reinflate their fertility in hopes Mr. Malthus would quickly return to begin the famine/photo-op cycle anew. Thus began an interminable series of aid-raids and cat and mouse with Mogadishu’s warlords, particularly the nefarious Aidid.
None of which was admittedly all that interesting to people 8,000 miles away…until the evening news of October 3 and 4. These were the days of Black Hawk Down. I still remember watching video feeds of feral Somalis desecrating the bodies of fallen American servicemen as they were dragged through the dirt ruts of that pre-civ hell. I was at a friend’s apartment as a few of us just stared at the screen. Someone muttered with murder in their voice: “Fucking animals.”
I suppose what we should have muttered instead was, “Welcome to the neighborhood!” Because mass importation is now the certain response to foreign savagery. Docile aliens do themselves no favors at all, when only the most flamboyant barbarism ever catches the appreciative eye of the western refugee apparatus. If you want to establish metastasizing colonies in our country, you better be handy with a machete in yours.
But this was an unknown phenomenon at the time. And so just as few would have believed that 9/11 would represent the inflection point for huge increases in muslim immigration, none at all could at the time conceive of what was about to come from Somalia. Youthful bigots may not intuitively grasp the utter disbelief of watching Somali migration turn vertical after the scenes below.
Of course Mogadishu is a great distance away, and liberals don’t want to travel that far. So they seek to reenact those scenes in places like Ohio State University. Where, as all of you know, a Somali student, Abdul Razak Ali Artan, offered up another example of renowned East African gratitude by running over multiple students and then stabbing several on the ground. It was only by an act of sheer cultural appropriation that a responding officer shot the assailant dead before he was able to mount his victims on the bumper for an old-fashioned Islamic street dragging. Though for liberals, being run over and stabbed by foreign nationals just has that exotic flair of ethnic cuisine.
Though that enticement aside, I’ll mention a few fundamental points that CNN’s coverage will be certain to omit: We actually don’t have to live like this. We don’t have to accept Muslim violence or Somali colonization. Immigration is not like gravity or the rains. We can decide exactly who and how many. Or we can decide no more at all. They won’t lack for real estate. They have a country. They all have countries. This is what we have. Somalia will remain stocked with millions of indifferent Somalis, regardless. So many people believe “values” compel us to such national sacrifice. They do not. Values are what we use to make society livable. There is no value worth having that makes it misery.