--Germany and Refugees,
Arend van Dam
Sufficient to have stood,
though free to fall
--Paradise Lost, John Milton
This isn't right.
It's not even wrong
-Wolfang Pauli
____________________________
Sufficient to have stood,
though free to fall
--Paradise Lost, John Milton
This isn't right.
It's not even wrong
-Wolfang Pauli
____________________________
Subtitle: Duckspeak on the Prolefeed.
Ranger and I are growing tired of the Duckspeak on the Prolefeed (thank you, Mr. Orwell), specifically surrounding the latest immigration crisis. The wailing, the babies, the fences. We should all shed crocodile tears and open up the borders, yes? No, not really.
Why has the number of refugees the U.S has agreed to accept tripled in the ten days since 10 September? And why is the United States so enthusiastically encouraging the Europeans to open the floodgates?
The majority of these people are not political refugees fleeing for their lives. They are instead, Discretionary Émigrés seeking to illegally force their entree into cowed Western nations for economic and educational benefit. Discretionary emigrés following a discretionary war.
The photographs in the news show well-fed and well-dressed people vociferously demanding entrance, circumventing the legal protocol which all previous asylum-seekers have had to pursue. We would not honor this mass exodus to those from persecuted African nations; in fact, Greece, Italy and the others ship them back.
So why the carte blanche to the Syrians, the Iraqis, et al.? Could it have something to do with the fact that their skin color is more in line with ours?
Sure, the U.S. has had a major hand in fomenting this madness by unleashing the roiling secularism which strongmen like Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Libya's Muammer Qadaffi had held under wraps, but that does not mean it or any other nation is responsible for setting these nations aright and instilling 21st century modes of behavior. Yes it was fatuous to imagine a garden of democracy would spring up in the desert wasteland, but our job, poorly-executed as it may have been, is done.
Perhaps the only people leaving their home countries who deserve the title "refugee" would be the Syrian and Iraqi Christians. Much as Syria obliterated its Jewish population in the decades before, so now is it attempting to purge this next group of undesirables.
The remaining travelers are largely Sunni or Shiite Muslims, and their internecine warfare is their own gift that keeps on giving. The U.S. removed the strongmen of the Middle East (Assad is still hanging on) as a gift to the peoples of those nations (said with some sarcasm), with the thought was that the residents would now carve out their new heaven. That is what a people must do in their homeland, so why are these people leaving, and why is it our responsibility to house them?
No case has yet been made that the Islamic State (IS) is composed of dead-enders who are out of step with the population, and we straddle the fence. Either the populations of these countries don't like this form of "radical" Islam, or they are fine with it. If it is the former, they do not seem able or willing to step up to the plate (with massive U.S. aid) to confront their "nemesis".
Do we now recognize the IS as a new nation, a caliphate? If so, who will be defined as undesirables in that state? This is the undefined moment for those who will not fight to exploit the guilt-laden Western nations, so the non-fighters are bolting -- and maybe some of the fighters, too.
Notice the appearance of most refugees: Besides being well-fed and dressed, and the women all wear the Hijab, Niqab or burkha. These are not people renouncing their ways or clamoring for Western-style humanitarianism; if it were so, they would have had it at home.
But they all want to bypass the Eastern European hard-scrabble lives which would await them in Serbia, Croatia and Hungary -- nations which do not want them, anyway -- to get to Germany and Scandinavia. They're not fools.
Are the emigres majority Sunni? Are they Shiite? Will they carry their long-standing racial and ethnic animus in to their new lands? For those who settle in the U.S., will they carry their resentments against the Great Satan? This is surely some kind of Mobius strip which, as we endeavor to rout out radical Islam in our midst, folds back upon itself and opens the floodgates to unvetted Muslims.
It's a nice day for Middle Easterners hedging their bets, and for having your cake and eating it, too.
[cross-posted @ RangerAgainstWar]
I believe that the Syrian Arab Army is trying to do something about IS. I don't see any massive US aid heading its way, however.
ReplyDeleteOur church is trying to sponsor a couple of Syrian refugee families. It is being tied up by Canadian government red tape.
In the past, Canada has done very well by taking in people who want to do better for themselves. I don't see that changing.
How true! How true! I've seen all those pictures of ragged, barefoot Frenchwomen and half-naked, thin-flanked, starving Belgians fleeing before the panzer divisions in 1940!
ReplyDeleteI'll be the first one to agree that the uncritical sobbing over displaced persons is ridiculous. But so is the notion that because you have shoes and a hijab that you aren't trying to avoid having your ass killed in a war.
The individual reasons these people are on the move aren't really the "thing"; the question is, rather, is there some sort of workable political/economic/military/combination-of-all-the-above solution to this migration. Just saying "fk these ragheads" isn't a solution, it's just Trumpism. I thought better of you two...
More to the point, Lisa, snark aside about designer hijabs...what do you propose these countries DO with them?
ReplyDeleteBuild a Scott-Walker-style Canadian border fence, and shoot the ones that cross the deadline? Herd 'em into detention camps along the Turkish border and keep 'em there until they give up and go home?
To try and prevent public mawkery about refugees is like being against Internet cat videos; good luck. Human beings throughout history have had sadz about bedraggled refugees that hasn't prevented them for a moment from killing, raping, robbing, and beating them when they get the chance. The bigger problem I see here is that these people are on the move. It doesn't really matter whether they're being pushed out of their homelands by IS, drought, the Mongols, or the hopes of a job at I.G. Farben. They're moving, they're moving West (no, duh, because Egypt is a shithole already and who wants to go there?) and the West needs to have some sort of intelligent plan to deal with that.
Al had some good observations on the earlier thread about how it seems like the EU and the European governments (and our own) who are the ones who SHOULD be the ones doing the actual thinking about this - unlike the press and the public they are "supposed" to have harder heads and be about more than Internet cat videos - have crammed their experience dealing with refugees in the late Forties down the memory hole and are acting as internet-cat-video-stupid as everyone else.
And I'll be the first to admit; I'm not sure what the hell you do.
Clearly it seems risible to just open a hole in Europe or North America for millions of DPs; that's costly as hell and doesn't solve the actual problems that generated the DPs. But it's also risible to assume that there's an easy or simple solution to this, or that wagging a finger at people boo-hooing over refugee internet-cat-videos is going to help.
So I turn it back on you; how would you deal with these people?
Well, first I disagree with some of your premises.
ReplyDeleteRe. : "what do you propose these countries DO with them?" -- not as simple a question as it appears.
Can you define "these countries"? If we are talking Syria, Iraq, and other nations with names, then these people are bona fide citizens of these countries. They and their countries get to decide what they will do within their borders, just like you and I get to decide what to do within the U.S. (to the degree we get to decide.)
However, if we are going to re-configure our Rand McNally world atlases, and give it up for Islamic State, then IS gets to broker what to do with people within their borders who do not think being their brand of uber-Muslim is too cool. IF we are ready to concede that IS is the newest State on the bloc, THEN they get to negotiate as power brokers on the world scene.
THEN, IS gets to hash out what to do with its less patriotic citizens, and perhaps the ever-efficient UN can figure out a plan for them, if IS has no use for them, and they are unwilling to integrate or accept a concession.
Per, "Human beings throughout history have had sadz about bedraggled refugees ... " Nah, not really.
Think about the SS St. Louis in 1939. Think about the various African refugees being turned back from ports in Italy and Greece today. What we have is the confluence of 24/7 shock media combined with groomed (mostly) liberal guilt over the discretionary wars.
Rather than having gone through the whole bloody mess of the last 12 years, do you think we would have been game to have said, "Hey, Muslims, get off of that cloud and come to Europe and the U.S." Yes or no? And yet, the most obvious result of the discretionary wars was to light the powder keg that is the M.E.
Did we not know just HOW crazy some of the newly liberated folks would be? Do we not read history?
How the refugee crisis is teaching us the value of Hussein, Mubarak, and Gadhafi says what we should already have known. Given that we can't take Saddam's head back out of the noose, we (EUR) can send these people back to their home nations. Aside from the Christians, the majority of these people's lives are not in danger.
Social networking is the new "leaf drops", so send them messages on their cellphones not to immigrate.
And knowing that the ME needs its strongmen, and yet removing the lid from Pandora's Box, does not encumber anyone else to do for them what they must do for themselves, i.e., make their nations work, sans the "dictators" they so gleefully toppled. (Or, let us topple?)
Here's another proposal to deal with the immigrant situation:
ReplyDelete1) [per above] First, stem the flash-mob immigration via the means it was started: social media messages declaring they will be returned to their home states.
2) House those who have already come in home country and Red Cross supervised areas (facilities much better than we provided our own Hurricane Katrina victims), replete with all basic necessities. The purpose would be to keep them well until John Kerrry, EU leaders, et al. can do their wonders in brokering with the home nations for the safe return of these people. [You may call them "internment centers", but they would not be concentration camps, and the people would not be worked, nor would they be harmed or killed. Their time there would be limited.]
3) This would be a prime opportunity to attempt realpolitik and possibly establish some credibility via conferring it upon the actors we have fought to emplace as the New ME leaders. We will have to deal with this large swath of the world at some point, so why not now?
Why are living amidst this vague miasma of unknowing, as though walking through a zombie film? These people belong to nations, so let's talk to the heads of these nations (or confederations, or tribal zones, or caliphate or whatever the space is called.)
4) Very likely the nations with whom we attempt brokerage would refuse the return of certain "undesirables" (though it is hard to guess how they will define that term), and it is those people who may apply for asylum status.
Likely, as with Castro and the Marielitos, the U.S. will then throw the door open to those people (though the EU should assimilate a fair share].
Chief,
ReplyDeleteHadrian built a wall.
Didn't the Roman Empire fall because they could not defend their borders and could not prevent unwanted population movements?
Do these supposed immigrants meet the UN definition of refugees?
jim hruska
Jim goes "all Roman" on Chief!
DeleteHaving just returned from a visit to our offspring in The Colonies, if there is one thing that folks in the US completely misunderstand, it's the nature of the Syrian Refugee Crisis. The bulk of these folks are middle class, reasonably educated people who have lost, or are about to lose everything due to the civil war in Syria. They are predominantly families. US media coverage confuses Afghan and other migrants, predominantly male, with the Syrians, and since fear has become the national obsession in the US, these young males are most assuredly jihadists.
ReplyDeleteThe reason these refugees are creating pandemonium in Europe has been due to the rank amateurism of EU and national politicians here. Having served on the Cuban Refugee Task Force staff at Ft Chaffee for 6 months, starting on Day One, I can assure you that we were much more prepared to receive, process and house tens of thousands of refugees on the 15th day after receiving our alert order than the EU and member states are some two years after declaring a migration "crisis".
For example, The Dublin Protocol, which governs how EU member states handle requests for assylum, makes the country of entry responsible for the administrative burden of asylum applications. Frau Merkel, in her infinite German wisdom, announced to the world that Germany would waive the country of entry requirement, telling refugees to simply come to Germany to start the process, thereby encouraging hundreds of thousands more to attempt the trip. She did not specify where in Germany, just Germany. Equally lacking in her proclamation was any consideration that the refugees had to pass through other sovereign states, many of which are suffering signific economic difficulties, to reach Germany. But then, Germany has never been known for giving a rat's fuck about the sovereignty or economic well being of other nations.
Additionally, no consideration has been given to providing reception stations, medical, resettlement and processing centers or the like. Nor has a program for what to do with economic migrants, who are not refugees, been developed. Just make it up as you go along.
Thus the goat screw currently in process. The other day, in stridently criticizing what is going on in the EU, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said that the EU approach is going to be a disaster simply because it is a bureaucratic/technocratic approach to a humanitarian problem. But then, that's the German approach to all problems. Crunch the numbers and ignore humanity.