Michael: Here’s a wild thought, Kevin: What if the biggest threat to Western democracy isn't terrorism or immigration, but our own reaction to it? The central argument we’re exploring today is that the panic-driven backlash is causing us to dismantle our own societies from the inside out. Kevin: That's a huge claim. You're saying the defense is worse than the attack? That feels incredibly counter-intuitive. Where is this coming from? Michael: It’s the core thesis of a really powerful and, frankly, unsettling book. Today we’re diving into Sasha Polakow-Suransky's Go Back to Where You Came From: The Backlash Against Immigration and the Fate of Western Democracy. And what's fascinating about Polakow-Suransky is his background—he's not just a journalist; he's a historian with a doctorate from Oxford, and his own family were anti-apartheid activists in South Africa. Kevin: Oh, wow. So he has a personal connection to this. Michael: A deep one. That personal history with race, exclusion, and democracy really shapes the book's powerful perspective. It’s widely acclaimed for its deep reportage, but it’s also been seen as controversial because it forces you to look at some very uncomfortable truths. And it all starts with a history that most people have completely forgotten, a history of problems created almost by accident.

Michael: After World War II, countries like the Netherlands and Germany had booming economies but not enough workers. So, they came up with what seemed like a simple solution: guest worker programs. They invited thousands of men from Turkey and Morocco to come work in factories and on construction sites. Kevin: Right, the 'gastarbeiter'. I've heard that term. But the key word there is 'guest,' which implies they're not staying for dinner, so to speak. Michael: Exactly. The official assumption, the entire policy, was built on the idea that these men would work for a few years, send money home, and then leave. The Dutch government literally did not plan for them to stay. They didn't build housing, they didn't create integration programs. It was a purely economic transaction. Kevin: Wait, so they genuinely thought millions of people would just pack up and leave after a few years? That seems incredibly naive. People build lives. They fall in love, they have kids. Michael: It was profoundly naive. And when the 1973 oil crisis hit and the jobs dried up, the workers didn't go home. Instead, they brought their families over. Suddenly, these 'temporary guests' were permanent residents, concentrated in working-class neighborhoods. And the perception shifted. They were no longer seen as helpful strangers, but as competitors for scarce jobs and a drain on the welfare state. The book describes this as a problem created "in a fit of absence of mind." Kevin: A fit of absence of mind that created decades of social tension. That's a massive oversight. Michael: It's a recurring theme. And there's an even more tragic story that illustrates this: the Moluccans in the Netherlands. The Moluccans were soldiers from a small group of islands in what is now Indonesia, and they had fought for the Dutch during Indonesia's war for independence. When the Dutch lost, the Moluccans were seen as traitors by the new Indonesian government. Kevin: So they were stuck. They couldn't stay in Indonesia. Michael: They couldn't. So the Dutch government evacuated about 12,500 of them to the Netherlands in 1951, promising them they'd be able to return home soon. But that return never happened. And where do you think the Dutch government housed these loyal soldiers and their families? Kevin: I have a bad feeling about this. Michael: They housed them in Westerbork, a former Nazi transit camp where Anne Frank had been held before being sent to her death. Kevin: Hold on, they put their allies in a Nazi camp? That's unbelievably cynical. It sounds less like 'unplanned' and more like 'we don't want to deal with this.' Michael: It was the epitome of a temporary solution that became a permanent, painful reality. They were kept in limbo for decades, not integrated into Dutch society, always told they'd be going home. It fostered generations of resentment. So you have these two streams of immigration—guest workers and post-colonial refugees—both arriving without any real long-term plan for integration. Kevin: And this simmering tension, this 'us vs. them' mentality that was baked in from the start, must have created the perfect environment for political opportunists. Michael: Exactly. And that simmering tension created the perfect breeding ground for a new kind of politics. This is where the story gets really chilling, because the far-right learned to stop sounding like old-school racists and start sounding... well, a lot like liberals.

Kevin: What do you mean, 'sounding like liberals'? The far-right is usually associated with very different values. Michael: This is the new playbook Polakow-Suransky documents so well. The old far-right was overtly racist and anti-Semitic. The new far-right is much smarter. They rebranded. They argue they aren't against immigrants; they're defending enlightened, progressive Western values from immigrants. Kevin: So they're framing it as a defense of modernity against backwardness? Michael: Precisely. The perfect example is the Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, a flamboyant, openly gay man who became a political rockstar in the early 2000s. He wasn't some skinhead in boots. He was a charismatic academic who said he was defending Dutch tolerance. He famously said, "I have no desire… to have to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again." He was framing Islam as a threat to the very liberal values the left championed. Kevin: That is a brilliant, and terrifying, political maneuver. He's co-opting the language of his opponents. He's essentially saying, "I'm the real progressive here, because I'm protecting us from intolerance." Michael: And it worked. He was poised to become Prime Minister. But then, in 2002, he was assassinated—not by an Islamist, but by an animal rights activist. His political martyrdom, however, cemented his ideas in the mainstream. And just two years later, something happened that poured gasoline on the fire. Kevin: This is the Theo van Gogh murder, isn't it? Michael: Yes. Theo van Gogh was a deliberately provocative filmmaker, a kind of Dutch shock jock. He collaborated with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born Dutch politician and fierce critic of Islam, on a short film called Submission. It was highly critical of the treatment of women in Islam. In November 2004, van Gogh was riding his bike to work in Amsterdam when a young Dutch-Moroccan man, Mohammed Bouyeri, shot him, slit his throat, and pinned a five-page manifesto to his chest with a knife. Kevin: My god. That's not just a murder; it's a ritualistic execution in broad daylight. Michael: It was a shockwave. The letter pinned to his body was a death threat to Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The country went into a state of shock. And for the rising far-right, this was the ultimate validation. It wasn't a theory anymore. It was proof: Islam was incompatible with Western freedom of speech. The debate shifted overnight from a question of integration to a clash of civilizations. Kevin: Okay, but this is the tricky part, isn't it? Van Gogh's murder was a real event. The Danish Cartoon Crisis a year later did cause real violence. How do you separate legitimate security concerns from cynical political exploitation? Michael: That's the central dilemma the book explores. The fear is real, and the threat from a tiny minority of extremists is real. But populist leaders exploit that fear by conflating all Muslims, or all refugees, with that threat. They use the actions of a few to justify policies against the many. It's a classic scapegoating mechanism, and it has a very dark history. Kevin: So the fear is real, but it's being manipulated. Which brings us back to your opening hook—how does this backlash become more dangerous than the threat itself?

Michael: This is the book's most powerful argument. Polakow-Suransky quotes a key insight: "The greatest threat to liberal democracies does not come from immigrants and refugees but from the backlash against them by those on the inside who exploit fear of outsiders to chip away at the values and institutions that make our societies liberal." Kevin: It's a self-inflicted wound. We become the thing we claim to be fighting. Michael: Exactly. And the book uses a chilling historical parallel to show how this playbook works. It's the story of Herschel Grynszpan. In 1938, Grynszpan was a 17-year-old Polish-Jewish refugee living in Paris. He was distraught after his family was expelled from Germany in horrific conditions. In an act of desperate protest, he walked into the German embassy and shot a minor diplomat, Ernst vom Rath. Kevin: A lone, desperate act of violence. Michael: Yes. And the Nazi regime was waiting for just such a pretext. When the diplomat died two days later, Goebbels and Hitler used the shooting as the excuse to launch Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass." They unleashed a massive, coordinated, state-sponsored wave of violence against Jews across Germany—burning synagogues, destroying businesses, and murdering nearly a hundred people. Kevin: Wow. So they took the act of one individual and used it to justify a pogrom against an entire population. The pattern is identical. Michael: The pattern is the same: exploit an isolated incident to demonize an entire group and justify stripping them of their rights and safety. The book argues we're seeing echoes of this logic today. And for a modern example of a liberal democracy sacrificing its own values, Polakow-Suransky points to Australia. Kevin: Australia? I usually think of it as a pretty laid-back place. Michael: Not on immigration. Since 2001, Australia has had a policy of "offshoring." Any asylum seeker who arrives by boat is sent to detention centers on remote Pacific islands like Nauru or Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. They are told they will never be resettled in Australia. The conditions are horrific—reports of abuse, violence, and severe psychological trauma are rampant. Kevin: So they've essentially created their own Guantánamo for refugees. Michael: That's a perfect analogy. It's an extra-legal system designed to be a deterrent. The government's slogan is "Stop the Boats," and they claim it's a humanitarian policy to prevent people from drowning at sea. But the book exposes this as an Orwellian justification. They're creating so much suffering in these camps that people "voluntarily" choose to go back to the warzones they fled. Kevin: That's horrifying. It's forcing a choice between two impossible situations. So the pattern is the same: use a perceived threat—in this case, boats of asylum seekers—to justify creating a brutal system that operates outside the normal rule of law. It's a self-inflicted wound on their own democratic values. Michael: Precisely. And that's the book's ultimate warning. The fear of the "other" is leading Western democracies to betray their own principles of liberty, justice, and human rights.

Michael: So we see this arc: it starts with the accidental creation of permanent minority communities through unplanned guest worker and post-colonial migrations. This creates social tensions that are then expertly exploited by a rebranded far-right, which uses the language of liberalism to push an anti-immigrant agenda. Kevin: And that political exploitation, fueled by real fears after events like 9/11 or the Bataclan attacks, leads to the final, most dangerous stage. Michael: The backlash itself. The point where a society, in the name of protecting itself, starts dismantling its own democratic immune system. It creates legal black holes like Australia's offshore camps, it scapegoats entire populations for the actions of a few, and it erodes the very idea that liberty and justice should apply to everyone. Kevin: The book's warning is that once you start carving out exceptions to liberty for one group, the logic of exclusion doesn't stop. It’s a slippery slope. Michael: It is. And it’s not just a European or Australian problem. The book ends by looking at the rise of the same rhetoric in the United States. The title itself, Go Back to Where You Came From, is a phrase heard in schoolyards and political rallies across the Western world. Kevin: It leaves you with a really unsettling question: What are we willing to sacrifice in the name of feeling safe? And are we even looking at the right threats? The book seems to argue that we're so busy guarding the gates from a phantom invasion that we're letting the real enemy—our own intolerance—burn the house down from the inside. Michael: That's the core of it. It's a question every citizen in a democracy has to grapple with. We'd love to hear what you think. Join the conversation on our social channels and let us know your thoughts on this. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.