There was simply no debate back then [in the aftermath of the Great War] that a mass influx of European refugees to Africa would have been a conquest, not a “humanitarian crisis” that Africans, with their ample space and nutrient-rich soil, had some kind of responsibility to sit back and accept. And to be clear, many of the European refugees who would have trekked across Sörgel’s newly reclaimed land were genuinely in need. They were impoverished, homeless, destitute. And a lot of them were fleeing political violence. Those folks were as poor, wretched, and persecuted as any Honduran is today. But in fully rejecting Atlantropa as a goal to be pursued, the international community took the position that “it sucks that you’re impoverished and mistreated in your home country, but it ain’t Africa’s problem. Stay where you are.”
See, in those days, the elites believed in keeping people in their own damn land. Hard as that might be to fathom now, that used to be a mantra of the progressive internationalists. There was a die-hard belief that the key to world peace was the separation of people, the segregation of populations by race, religion, and ethnicity. That was the entire point of the Greek/Turkish population exchange of 1923, overseen by the League in the name of keeping Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims separated for the sake of peace. As UNC Chapel Hill history professor Sarah Shields wrote in her 2016 essay in the Journal of the History of International Law, the prevailing belief at that time was that “Muslims and non-Muslims could not live together peacefully, and modernity required rejecting a diverse past in favor of a nation-state along European (unmixed) lines.”
Separation was the future, diversity was the past. Damn near 1.6 million Greeks and Turks were sent from the land of their birth to the land where they could live with those of a similar faith. Many of the other population transfers and redrawn boundaries that followed World War I were based on that same concept of giving people their “own” homeland based on characteristics like religion or ethnicity. It was simply taken as fact back then that nations function better with some level of homogeneity. That was canon back then. By the time the U.N. came around, that notion was still very much a guiding principle, as the internationalists realized that a vision of a multireligious, multiethnic Palestine was unrealistic and unattainable. And the Jews and the Arabs realized that too, which is why they started slaughtering each other, because they couldn’t bear to live in a partitioned state. Being separate but equal was not enough. They wanted to be separate and separated.
David Cole, “When Refugees Were Conquerors”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-10-29.
