Refugees in the EU

Um...hmmm...is that what we really did, though?

Saudi and the UAE are busy in Yemen (with our help, believe it, but I am only telling you because it is a secret so don't tell anybody, ok?) making sure that that country has no discernable infrastructure, and each and every building is bombed to rubble so the refugees have a proper place to huddle...and then they send millions in aid, with their own people to distribute it, so "unstable elements cannot steal it and sell it to the black market and other unscrupulous groups."

(Quote from UAE Foreign Minister)

Don't forget the friendly and welcoming Frauleins with large steins of cold beer and winning smiles!

Yeah, like Proper Refugees, gathered around a tiny fire, singing the Old Songs, as the dust from the rafters sifts down from the incessant bombing. And the tear streaks on the Little Girl Refugee's face. Oh, and the amputated doll she is clutching and soothing, saying to it, "...don't worry..." over and over, in one of those funny-sounding foreign refugee languages.

"...spread a religious agenda there UAE, yeesh."

??? Did this last part get typo-ed, Chemahkuu?

 

Despite being a pagan, i must say that christian kindness is a beautiful thing. Taking in a potiential of millions of refugees from the middle east, while rich muslim gulf countries have done little.

 

So we really didn't invade Iraq? I guess those last thirteen years have been a hallucination and all these hundreds of thousands of people aren't really dead. Good to know.

 

Nope. Your claim that liberalism and fascism are the only options and that the former is the only way to fight the latter is wrong. In fact liberalism and fasciam actually reenforce each (anybody is nowadays a politicall correct multicultural liberal, even a hardcore Thatcherite like Cameron.) other so the only way to actually fight racism, xenophobia, fascism and so on is via left-wing solidarity and not via fake (the worst racists are probably PC upper middle class folk, they like blacks as long as they live far away) poltiical correct liberal multiculturalism.
There are numerous examples for this. The European societies reached their historically most liberal phase during the 20s, shortly before the rise of fascism. Nowadays we face a rise of xenophobia despite the clear dominance of liberal multiculturalism. Same with Islamic fundamentalism, it is not becoming more powerful in spite of Western liberalism but because of it. Admittedly the following examples are more about real politics than pure ideology. Everywhere in the Middle East you see the same pattern, a decline of the left and the rise of fundamentalism with the West often being the catalyst, be it Afghanistan, (fighting communists with mujaheddin), Palestine (Israel having been happy about the rise of Hamas because it led to infighting with the secular Fatah) or Iraq (a secular dictator was exchanged for Shiitte and Sunni miltia violence that has gone on for over a decade now).

Of course I do not expect somebody liek you who claims that any left-winger who is against political correctness to understand any of this. You are too deep in this binary 'either liberalism or fascism' world.

If you meet somebody from another culture the worst thing to do is to play the multicultural game of "what interesting food/music/traditions you have". The best way is to either ignore cultural idiosyncracies or mock them, you own and those of the other guy. Or in other words, the best way to fight racism is via using it on everybody (this is e.g. why black people use the word "nigga", to use it all the time such that it loses its racist meaning).

You can also see the differences between distanced, politicall correct liberal multiculturalism and actual solidarity/friendship via analyzing how you behave when you become friends with somebody. You start to playfully insult each other and so on precisely to signal to the other that you are beyond the superficial level of distanced politeness.

I am not saying anything original here, Zizek has elaborated on how liberalism without a left leads to fascism in numerous books and articles. Not that it takes a genius to understand that a world without a left will inevitably tend towards the right.

 

Öhm, this is not christian kindness, this is humanism in it's purest form.
It is the Christian Democratic Union's representatives, the senior partner in the government coalition, who push for closing EU borders, with Merkel having no choice but to deal with the situation because the refugees are already here and spin it to her advantage.
If she had her way countries like Hungary would tighten their border, but she let's lower party members take the fire for making statements like that and managed to keep her hands clean.

It is the Social Democrats in the coalition who embrace their responsibilities here.

Never mind the non goverment parties in the Bundestag.

Still, I am kinda glad we don't have an election coming up. I am pretty sure left parties would win in a landslide on this issue alone, but actual right wing parties like NPD and others might have a real shot at getting in the Bundestag as well.

 

What a joke.

German social democrats are like most centre-left parties in Europe virtually indistinguishable from centre-right parties.
Gee, you talk about a party which is totally in line with the horrible German policies against Greece, which did nada to stop weapon exports (we might wanna talk about how to solve the source of the problem instead of dealing just with the symptoms) and which even admitted that they are basically happy with the centre-right party continuing to wield executive power.

 

Not a problem, I dropped off a lot more than I originally planned yesterday including a large sports bag worth of clothes I don't actually need and some tenting equipment that has been gathering dust for a few years now.

And I forgot that concerning the Police and public servants, I just hope it goes with out any problems.

 

No, no, Hound, you take my words, perhaps, a little too narrowly.


invade
verb
(of an armed force) enter (a country or region) so as to subjugate or occupy it.

It was only and ever about the Oil. Not to occupy as a whole, or even to subjugate it in the common, contemporary meaning. Just to maneuver things to have control of the Oil.

If you will, read this and see what you think. I know it is older, but...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/jul/28/iraq.usa

 

television news

There was a story yesterday regarding refugee camps in Hungary. It seems that the camps are dirty and the refugees underfed.

Reminds me of the Goths fleeing the Huns, the ones who entered the Roman Empire. They were poorly fed, and generally poorly treated. This would help to make the Goths militant.

 

Actually I didn't say that. I said that if your way of fighting fascism involves things like democratic freedoms and a lack of xenophobic racism, you're a liberal whether you like the term or not. (Of course you could also go the route of anarchism, which professes to be based on a purer variant of freedom than "democratic freedom." I would question both the effectiveness of this approach and its ability to programmatically reject xenophobia, but it is another alternative.)

The two things that reinforce fascism most effectively are left authoritarianism and government dysfunction (in fact authoritarian groups generally try to promote the latter wherever they can because they know it favours them). The latter of which is alarmingly present in both the EU and the United States today -- and which both have reinforced in the Middle East with a confused, contradictory and ill-informed mess of policies and military adventures -- but all of that has nothing much directly to do with "liberalism," your confusion about that (and pretty much every other) point in your post notwithstanding.

As for this:

This whole tangent being quite irrelevant to anything much politically viz. fascism, left authoritarianism, liberalism or parliamentary dysfunction, I would leave it alone entirely... but I feel like I should let you know something. I really hope you're not out there trying to be the white guy bridging cultural gaps by "mocking our cultural idiosyncrasies" just like those black guys who say "nigga." It mostly comes across as casual racism and -- speaking as one of those black guys in question, who has "enjoyed" being the target of this wondrous multicultural bonding technique -- very frequently people who are pretending to laugh along with it deeply resent it. So if you think you're making friends that way, you probably aren't, to them you're likely just a clueless jerk using "just jokes" as an excuse. Just FYI. (And if you don't do that and this comment isn't relevant to you, then forget I said anything.)

Honestly though, it would be interesting to hear what your "third way" and completely not liberal solution to the refugee crisis would be. By all means have at it.

 

In retrospect, oil was undoubtedly was all Bush was interested in. But I believe they were interested in occupation by necessity especially Cheney and those in the first Bush Administration since they were so afraid of the Iranian Bogeyman, but also because previous Imperial strategies in Asia required an army of occupation or a large buffer zone of some sorts.

 

Yes, I would agree with the notion that Bush wanted Occupation, for a time, and did need, as you so correctly say, a buffer zone. That said, I wonder what things would look like if we had stayed, and added to our presence. I mean, sure, Wal Marts, fo'schizzle, and KFC and the like. But seriously, I wonder what would be happening in the region, had we decided to make a go of it?

 

I always figured peace would come quickly if Iraqis could get air conditioners for low, low prices!

 

I'm not a conservative, not a Christian and not a fan of Merkel, but I strongly disagree with that. It was Merkel herself who in large part directly caused this influx of refugees right now. I don't think there can really be any doubt about that, the refugees themselves say this.
And btw. for months before that many Syrians I talked to wanted to move on to Germany because (whether true or not) they thought the risk of being deported back to Hungary is smaller there than in Austria. This is not a new thing, it just all came together with Merkel explicitely announcing the end of deportations to Hungary.

I think her stand on this was incredibly principled and impressive, and whatever else she's done, she deserves massive applause for this imo. This was not a reactive decision from Merkel, it was decidedly active and I believe intentionally also.

 

The money, will and interest to rebuild Iraq like what America did post-WW2 was just never there. There was enthusiasm as we say with individual examples of people who went there to Iraq like Nick Berg. But compared to say the American rebuilding of Japan following WW2, Iraq was just botched from day one.

 

Well that is unfortunate.

 

Well, that was a big concern for me from the start, because Austria taking in 10K people a day is just ridiculous.

 

I was just going to suggest the same thing. From what I've read, it's a tempory stop on so that the local authorities can get a better handle on the situation and process who is already there. It's not ideal, but it's a lot more than my own nation is doing at the moment.