Frontiers abroad … and at home
Insights Magazine
Wed, 24th Apr 2024
Go Back to Where You Came From
(M) Madman DVD
This was a bold social experiment that put six people with no idea about asylum seekers and their plight instantly out of their comfort zones by filming them as they lived with and as refugees for a month.
The program aired over three nights during Refugee Week in June and quickly garnered international attention for its frank approach as it traced, in reverse, the journeys that real refugees take to reachAustralia.
The idea that we Westerners should walk a mile in the shoes of people who have to look for a life free of persecution was both well-timed and necessary in our increasingly intolerant culture.
Whatever your views on our immigration laws, this program deconstructs them by exposing the myriad problems refugees face.
The series confronts but never sensationalises the plight of refugees.
One of the participants told the media talking that the program enforced empathy on them and the series was criticised for making people empathise with the plight of asylum seekers and engineering situations for their emotional impact.
At least one of the participants remained largely unchanged by her exposure to the experience.
This is an issue that requires policy, empathy and compassion and Go Back to Where You Came From will no doubt continue the debate around a very complex problem.
Adrian Drayton
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1 thought on “Go Back to Where You Came From”
It’s fine to be compassionate toward people who obviously have suffered a great deal, but not if it means cutting off our nose to spite our face, or destroying the future social structure of our country.
Most refugees are Muslims, and their religion is a totalitarian creed, completely opposed to our western democratic parliamentary system of government, freedoms, and rule of law. Anyone who thinks that militancy is just a modern aberration of Islam, is misinformed. Islam has been an authoritarian, aggressive creed which has fought against and slaughtered non-Muslims for 1400 years – and it is no different now. Sure there are those who are not militant, but in the politics of Islamic expansion they are irrelevant. And to make things worse, the Muslim birthrate is more than double the normal Australian birthrate.
Many refugees have escaped the ill-conceived wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also many refugees are fleeing from the jihads being waged by Islamic warlords against their non-Muslim neighbours, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Colonel Gadaffi let the cat out of the bag last year when he remarked, “This [Muslim migration] is bloodless jihad. Islam will conquer the West without having to fire a single shot!” I think Muslims will have a somewhat more difficult time of it than just watching the Dhimmies roll over and submit to Allah, but it will require a hardening of the attitude of many Western do-gooder politicians, and their not-so-street-smart supporters. If not, the people will eventually rebel and throw them out of office.