Frozen Hearts

 

 

 

As Jon Snow wistfully looked back to the rocky shore and witnessed the top dog of the White Walkers perform his Undertaker schtick, raise his arms in the air and awake the dead Wildlings…I started to think about themes that arose during the episode.
 

You could make the argument that ‘Hardhome’ was the latest contribution to the now annual Game of Thrones episode where you’re supposed to mentally switch off and enjoy the zombie-chopping, giant-stomping, Valyrian sword-swinging action and forget about the repercussions, the political intrigue for a week.
 

Those fans of the show who ‘heard that Game of Thrones was quite good, got tits in it’, jumped on the wagon late in the journey and have been half-watching this season, spending each episode dipping in between the show and their mobile phones before moaning ‘nuffin’s happening this season, it’s too slow’ – well, this was the episode for them. They left the Farmville to fend for itself for 50 minutes and enjoyed the battle. The episode received universal acclaim.
 

But I couldn’t help but think about Jon Snow’s proposal to the Wildlings. This offer to allow them to settle south of the wall, take over some land, farm it, and spend the rest of their days there…and it threw up loads of controversial ideas about immigration.
 

Just how sensible is Snow’s relocation proposal? Is it naïve? Is it progressive? You’ll each have your own view depending on your world view…and, of course, depending on whether you’re a hideous book pig who already knows how it pans out.
 

Looking back, I have to admit that I left school in a pretty dangerous mental state. I saw the best in all people, I assumed that everybody, more or less, had a similar ethical and moral code to myself [not that I’m a saint, by the way] and as long as you were fair to people, they’d generally, as a rule of thumb, be fair back to you.
 

And that might well remain the case for a sizeable proportion of the general public….but crucially, it isn’t the case for the other sizeable chunk.
 

I remember the first time I saw Jasper Carrot’s ‘Golden Balls’ television programme, where contestants would build up a pot of money and in the final round, the last two remaining contestants would vote on whether to ‘take’ or ‘share’ the money. Just before they placed their votes they’d have a 2 minute spiel about why they should share the pot, how much debt they were in, why they needed the money, why it’s in their mutual interest to split the cash.
 

If both players voted to take, nobody wins anything. If both players vote to share, then the prize is split 50/50. But if one player votes to share, and the other votes to take…the person who voted to take, steals the whole pot.
 

Well, you don’t need to watch too many episodes of Golden Balls before your faith in humanity and your whole world view shatters to a terrible end. Time and time again good, honest people who needed the cash to pay off debt, or medical bills, or for their kids’ education would vote to share and be utterly shafted by the other player.
 

Drive the roads through any UK inner city. Note how many people pull out on you, drive down side roads and try to cut in at the front of the queue. It’s a free for all.
 

On leaving university I was unemployed for six months and struggled to find work due to a lack of experience. I signed on at the Job Centre, in the naïve hope they’d help me get a step on the ladder, and of course for some help with my finances and debt. I was often suggested to apply for jobs that were totally out of my skillset, 30 miles away and were nigh on impractical options. Once I overheard staff members talking about how they needed to shift 10 of us into any job, ‘don’t matter which’ this week, otherwise their Christmas bonus wouldn’t be as large. This was a turkey factory. And these turkeys were being shoved in all kinds of boxes.

You only have to look at the reason why we’re in an economic mess at the moment. Mortgage providers were incentivised to flog off as many mortgages as they could, to people who couldn’t afford to pay them, in order to get bigger and bigger bonuses.
 

There are one million different examples you can use to show just how ‘wankerish’ [for want of a better word] a large number of humanity is - from people who ring up advertising watchdogs to get commercials pulled to what ISIS are doing to the innocents in Iraq and Syria. You’ve got your own examples. Plenty of them. I could spend a whole blog entry talking about it. 

That naïve kid who left school seeing the best in people, was soon given a rude awakening as the real world hit, as more and more Baelishes emerged.



 

So when Jon Snow offers to take the Wildlings south of the wall, when he offers the golden ball of Westeros to the Wildings and Jon Snow votes to ‘share’….some Wildings will also vote to share, but is he forgetting those who will vote to take?
 

What if the Wildlings, on settling south of the wall, decide they want a bit more land and invade the North? What if they bring a hitherto unseen disease into the realm that Southerners’ immune systems can’t handle?  What if they slaughter whole villages, engage in genocide?
 

They might just stay in their tiny corner and live peacefully…but what happens if they don’t?
 

Will Jon Snow be reviled as the idiot who opened Pandora’s Box, opened the gate for the barbarians?
 

Sure, the Wildlings might help the rest of Westeros in its fight with the White Walkers, but what’s the long term picture once/if the winter subsides?
 

Is the enemy of your enemy always your friend?
 

Here in Britain we like to call ourselves the ‘Anglo-Saxons’. If you’re white, and you’re filling out a form asking your ethnicity, you’ll sometimes see ‘Anglo-Saxon’ listed [although it’s becoming increasingly rarer in Cameron’s Britain], but the Anglo-Saxons weren’t the original inhabitants of these lands.
 

The Ancient Britons were here for eons.
 

The Romans pulled out, left the Britons to fend for themselves, and the land was immediately beset with opportunist invaders. The Picts in Scotland caused the Britons all kinds of problems.
 

So the British lord of the realm, a chap named Vortigern, invited in the Anglo-Saxons to help them fight the Picts, and in recompense the Anglo-Saxons would be given land, in the South East of Britain to farm and build their homes upon.
 

You know what happened next. There’s a reason that the modern day English are said to be ‘Anglo-Saxon’. For the Germans didn’t stay in their small corner of Britain for too long.
 

Soon the Ancient Britons were on the run, the language of the Anglo-Saxons had taken over and they were the ‘rulers’ of this proto-England…this Angle-land…..land of the Angles [and Saxons, who must have been off sick when the meeting about naming the nation took place].
 

History tells us that seeing the best in all people can be a pretty destructive mentality to have. The Anglo-Saxon invitation turning into an occupation is just one such example in history’s rich tapestry of lessons we oft ignore.
 

In the south of Europe we’re seeing a comparable situation with African and Syrian refugees clinging to rafts and trying to sail to a better life.
 

If you’re from a small Greek island that has existed for thousands of years. A community that saw off countless greater powers, countless invasions, kept the Persians at the door, and you live in a small fishing town of 15,000 people when you see Ahmed, a former market stall owner from Damascus drowning in the sea...as a human being you’d offer your hand, pull Ahmed from the sea, wrap a blanket around him, and offer him a warm meal. You’d probably champion his right to stay and live in your idyllic Greek Mediterranean community and avoid going back to the Syrian warzone.

 

But what if the personal story of Ahmed the market seller turns from the personal into a hard, emotionless statistic?
 

What happens if Ahmed becomes 650,000 Ahmeds, annually, and they’re sailing on rafts towards Europe?
 

When does it cease being a touching story of humanity, and mutate into an existential crisis?
 

If your idyllic Greek fishing village of 15,000 has 45,000 Syrian migrants descend upon you. When do you start asking questions about how feasible this is? The existence of your people and your community is in severe threat.
 

Soon the language starts to change, the racial makeup of the people starts to change, the architecture starts to change, the religion starts to change…and that Greek Ionian fishing village that has lasted thousands of years is all but wiped out from history.
 

Do you then start to take a colder look towards immigration and population displacement?
 

I don’t know.
 

The narrative in Game of Thrones is that ‘winter is coming’ and Jon Snow and his ilk seemingly don’t particularly care about life after the White Walker battle. They’d argue that they need to guarantee there is a country to live in before they start worrying about the long term picture. Jon Snow is living in the moment, a leader worrying about the short term only.


Can we criticise him for it? Hardly. These uncomfortable questions about immigration are difficult to answer in the world of Game of Thrones, but are just as difficult to ponder in our own world.
 

Sometimes opening the gates for the barbarians results in an exchange of ideas, the introduction of trade and a cultural enrichment, perhaps an idealist stance but it can produce positive results.
 

But sometimes, just sometimes….you can be, unwittingly, opening up the gates of hell and putting into motion wheels of change you just can't halt.