The African Refugee Crisis of 2121
Alex Dembele chided himself for making inferences based on people’s phenotype but when he spotted the group approaching him he immediately knew that they were refugees. Their blonde hair and almost glowing blue eyes gave it away.
The group was the epitome of toxic masculinity. They were loud and testosterone-charged. Aggression oozed from each of their pores. And due to the extensive use of germline engineering in their home country, they were equipped with huge muscular bodies.
Alex decided to enter the grocery store to his left in order to buy something for dinner. It was a rationalization to avoid the group. But he couldn’t admit this fact to himself. After all, he despised his xenophobic compatriots who wanted to keep the Germans out. Alex knew better. His country needed more people and the refugees would create an economic boom.
—
In the latter half of the 21st century, to everyone’s surprise, and dismay, Germany had started to radicalize again. But the real shock came when a technological breakthrough by German scientists gave them the necessary strength to maintain a balance of terror and pursue their ideas unhindered.
The enormous power of this technology had been demonstrated when a single German warship managed to destroy a Chinese drone swarm in the South China Sea. Previously, these swarms had proven to be decisive in beating the U.S. Navy in the annexation of Taiwan. But the swarms proved no match for the new German superweapon.
To this day, nobody had been able to figure out how the German gravity lasers worked. Most researchers suspect that the knowledge has been lost. And even if the blueprints still exist somewhere, on some encrypted data storage medium, it is doubtful that anyone still has the ability to manufacture what is necessary to build those weapons.
After world war 3, humanity had barely retained enough technical proficiency to spot the asteroid and calculate where it would hit, but not enough to deflect it in time. And people were not keen on preventing its impact when they learned where it would hit: the remnants of the Fourth Reich.
And so it came to one of the greatest ironies in human history: millions of Neo-Nazis were looking for refuge in Africa
—
Sub-Saharan Africa had survived world war 3 pretty much unscathed. And due to the almost three decades of German military presence in Alex Dembele’s country during the first half of the 21st century, it was a predestined destination for Germans fleeing the impending destruction of central Europe. Alex was aware of how the German forces had helped stabilize his country and protect it from being taken over by extremists. Now it was their turn to help the Germans.
When Alex entered the grocery store it was difficult not to notice how the refugee crisis had already shaped his country. It seemed that almost half of the customers were white. And the majority were teenagers, since having a lot of children was an essential part of their ideology.
Doubts arose in him when he heard the rude white woman at the cash register yelling in German at the checkout girl. “How long will it take them to learn French? Does his country even have enough teachers?”, Alex wondered. But he brushed the doubts aside. Just yesterday he had watched a documentary on state television showing how quickly the Germans were integrating. Several of the interviewed refugees had mastered speaking French quite fluently.
Populist politicians claimed that the Germans hated his people and the values his culture stands for. Some even went as far as demanding to build a wall to protect the country against the influx of refugees. They called it an “anti-fascist protection barrier”. Alex despised them. He would happily accept a hundred Germans for each of his hateful compatriots.
Yes, the German ideology had its fundamentalists, as the recent terror attack against a mosque in the capital showed. But those people were not representative of Germans as a whole. Most of them were quite apolitical and only followed a moderate form of Neo-Nazism. Alex was confident that they would soon learn to reject this ideology, as they did after the second world war.
On his way home, Alex Dembele again came across the roaring group of young men he had previously tried to avoid. They now seemed to be heavily intoxicated. When one of the men yelled at him “Was glotzt du so, Kanake?”, he wished his ear implant would still be working and translate what was being said. But after the war, the required infrastructure had either been wiped out or repurposed. And his own country had been unable to maintain their own local data centers.
—
Alex Dembele died in the hospital of severe head injuries. A small report in the local newspaper would later describe the incident as an argument between “young men” that ended in a fight. The authorities registered the crime as bodily harm resulting in death. The ethnic identity of the perpetrators was not registered. It had been made illegal to collect such data after crime statistics had previously been misused to incite hatred against refugees.