My first impression of the film was that this "post-apocalyptic dystopia" already exists. It is here, in 2015, that people of color and even non-British whites are detained and deported and held in inhumane conditions, because here, today, in 2015, these people are considered undesirable. No excuses like mass infertility are needed, because every first world country has always behaved in this manner.
Domenico Losurdo, in his book, Liberalism: A Counter History, details the history of liberalism. It chronicles liberal theory from the eighteenth century right up to WWI, citing the works of liberal darlings such as Calhoun, Tocqueville, Locke, and the revered Founding Fathers as creators and leaders of the liberal movement. What we quickly discover is that right beneath the beautiful prose about how wonderful and important liberty is to flourishing democracies is a desire and need to subject undesirables to oppression. Liberalism is fairly contradictory but at a certain point it simply makes accommodations for these inconsistencies.
Black people need to be enslaved. It's the natural order of things. The English poor need to be treated with contempt and live in disgusting, inhumane conditions. It's the natural order of things. The Irish must live in a police state. It's the natural order of things. Africa needs to be dissected and deformed and mutilated and its people enslaved. It's the natural order of things.
And so on.
Losurdo leaves off right before the first world war for a reason, concluding that liberalism must have had some part in the horrors of the twentieth century that ensued, namely the Holocaust. Liberalism enabled such an event to occur, just as liberalism enabled the slave trade and the continued oppression of black people in America, the occupation of Ireland, the exploitation of the English working class, and the bloodletting and extermination of native populations in European colonies all over the world.
Here I return to Children of Men and the present day.
Even in the film, the British are largely left alone, provided they have their papers. Terrorism exists, as the first five minutes of the film will inform you, but the state itself is not targeting the British themselves. It is implied later on in the film by one of the members of an underground resistance movement that race isn't necessarily an issue to the government. Kee's baby would probably be given to a "posh black woman". Kee's fate is not speculated but it seems obvious that she would probably be deported like anyone else. The literal mother of a new world would be deported for not being British.
This bit of dialogue is the only part of the film I take issue with, as Brits of color are indeed subjected to state terror alongside their undocumented counterparts. Even certain white demographics, even when legally permitted to work in the United Kingdom, are treated with contempt, such as Irish Travelers and Eastern Europeans. However, Children of Men does imply that racism exists, even from white non Brits being deported. In the scene where Theo is boarding a train, you can hear a white Polish woman behind a gate with other deportees complaining in Polish about being grouped together with black people. This, of course, happens in reality as well.
This scene, I think, is significant. The recent terrorist attacks committed by ISIS in Paris have set off a wave of anti immigrant and Islamaphobic hate crimes. Countries such as Poland, barely accepted by the European Union, much less the snobs in the UK, are closing their borders to Syrian refugees.
Children of Men takes place in some future very similar to ours, but I believe that a Children of Men scenario exists today. It is happening at this moment, and has been, for centuries. The dispossessed, those purposely exploited and murdered and outcast by white society, appear in the media as terrorists and opportunists. It is liberalism at play, enforcing a white supremacist (herrenvolk) democracy that requires the dehumanization of more than two-thirds of the global population to work. Herrenvolk democracy provides liberty and freedom for a select few, always white.
In Children of Men, Theo visits a friend who lives in a virtual fortress, where all sorts of rare animals and works of art live. It is completely disconnected from the outside world by heavy security and walls. Inside, the obscenely wealthy live in a fantasy world, laughing. Here we can see color, whereas outside there is only grey and black, with the occasional red blood spilling from some immigrant's brains.
The white population is generally content to eat up propaganda and discuss how they are possible targets for violence, and how they must "retaliate" against the brown people who threaten them. This outrage is merely the herrenvolk democracy's enforcement becoming visible to them for the first time. The first world is outraged that the army is on their streets, because the army should be in the streets, hospitals, homes, and schools of the third world instead, armed with drones and bombs and guns and missiles to wipe out and control the brown hordes threatening their fragile, porcelain white democracy.
To them, Europe is a stronghold of civilization in a world filled with barbaric black and yellow and brown hordes who threaten to break down their thick walls. To see the army on the Champs-Élysées is an outrage! How dare they treat us like this! Meanwhile, mere hours after the terrorist attacks in Paris, hospitals and schools were deliberately targeted and bombed in Raqqa! Fuck civilians, they are all guilty for the crime of being Syrian, of being brown, of being third world. Herrenvolk democracy means never having to see it enforced, and the militarized domestic response is a massive insult to first world white people who believe democracy is a right reserved only for them. I get liberté, egalité, fraternité. You get drones, sweat shops, imperialism. You get pushed in front of trains, you get your places of worship desecrated, you get your image plastered all over the world as a terrorist, you get arrested and detained without just cause, you get your people slandered, you get harassed, you get insulted, you get what you deserve! How dare you violate our democracy, our way of living -- how dare you be brown, how dare you be black, how dare you worship differently, how fucking dare you make me see cops on my streets instead of in your neighborhoods and in your home countries! How fucking dare you!
What these people don't understand is that without our exploitation and murder, they cannot have their fucking precious democracies and civilizations. Without the profits generated from constant warfare, the utter destruction of our environments and economies, forcing us to migrate to the first world in search of scraps and met instead with guns, tasers, police batons, cells, deportation, violence, hatred, bile, blood--without us, without our blood and tears and labor, you have nothing. Your outrage is fucking despicable because you believe that terrorist attacks are acceptable in Beirut but not in Paris, because it is okay to see the French army terrorizing citizens in Timbuktu but not forcing you to see them harassing French people of color in front of you, because the army isn't there to terrorize white French people but to protect them from the evil brown people who dare to be brown and in sight.
My heart truly goes out to the victims of the terrorist attack in Paris. Yet my fears, that any vaguely ethnic person in the west and elsewhere will be attacked and held responsible for the actions of a few, have been confirmed, over and over again, repeatedly, by the same people who scream LIBERTÉ! EGALITÉ! FRATERNITÉ! Because they know that democracy - indeed, life itself - is a right reserved only for a select few, and anyone who threatens this with their existence must be wiped out.
Children of Men may as well be a documentary. That world -- it exists, and has existed, and will exist, for millions of people of color. This is the legacy of liberalism, of racism, of herrenvolk democracy. This is what the west has to offer: terrorism, but with a shiny, friendly veneer.
