One [CounterPunch] Article Made Me Think About African Refugees

 

I have a lot of problems with some of the stuff that Jeffrey St Clair of CounterPunch writes and publishes.  But this is a good article: "Global Complicity: Who Kills in the Congo?"

Rather than delivering prosperity, Congo’s extraordinary mineral wealth has produced a “resource curse.” Competition for coltan, cobalt, gold, and diamonds drives violent conflict, forcing miners, often children, into brutal, unsafe conditions while forests are cleared and rivers contaminated in the scramble for profit. In November 2025, dozens were killed when a bridge at a mine collapsed, a tragedy that illustrates how extraction proceeds with total disregard for human life. Because the richest deposits lie in the eastern provinces, these territories have become the epicentre of militarization, where armed groups, militias, and even state forces battle for control while communities are displaced and terrorized.

The environmental destruction deepens the crisis: forests are cleared to reach mineral deposits, mining releases vast amounts of carbon and nitrogen dioxide, and toxic mining waste poisons rivers and lakes, wiping out agriculture and fishing, the very means by which people survive.

The humanitarian consequences are catastrophic. By 2025, there are over 6.9 million people internally displaced, the highest number in Africa, 1.2 million refugees in neighbouring countries, and 28 million people suffering from malnutrition. Furthermore, more than 3 million people in eastern Congo are in the emergency phase of hunger. Children as young as five work in dangerous artisanal mines, digging by hand, inhaling toxic dust and risking suffocation or burial in tunnel collapses. Conflict-related sexual violence affects thousands, with almost 40% of sexual violence survivors being children. Armed groups are committing gang rapes, abductions, attacks on hospitals, and unlawful detentions, abuses that may constitute war crimes. This is not simply a story of conflict happening near minerals; it is a system in which minerals fund the conflict, and conflict makes the minerals easier to steal.

It does a good job of identifying the international scumbags who contribute to this nightmare, this infrastructure of horror and misery.  But the facts presented about poisoned waters and soil and violence and desperation got me thinking about the waves of refugees from Africa trying to reach Europe.

Right-wingers in both North America and Europe are constantly bloviating about "hordes" of black and brown people flooding their shores.  They believe that "globalists" are deliberately trying to dilute the white "race" for various nefarious reasons.  They appear completely ignorant of the true causes of refugees, which is often wars and economic catastrophes caused by international capitalism.

When we look at the tent cities in North American cities that are now looked upon as the new normal, with right-wing voters and their politicians blaming the victims of rapacious oligarchy, and we reflect that this is happening in the core countries of the international capitalist system, we have to wonder about how bad things are in the exploited periphery.

So, in the Congo, there's about 7 million internally displaced people. Libya was turned from the highest quality of life in North Africa to a failed state.  There's the wars in Sudan and Ethiopia where tens of millions of people live.  There's the horrors of US-American and Israeli barbarism in West Asia.

I've often mentioned the theory that the right-wing brain is more prone to fight or flight than it is to rational thinking.  But poverty and uncertainty and the social ills caused by these can turn brains into reactive, right-wing versions.  This causes more people in the core countries to respond to refugees with aggression and fear rather than with rational analysis and compassion.

Just one more example of how decaying capitalism creates fascism.