Europe's Refugee Influx Crisis

[General Patton]

It is interesting that Orban went to Oxford with a grant from Soros... Controlled opposition, anyone?

Maybe, but probably not.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... ken-europe
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused billionaire investor George Soros of being a prominent member of a circle of "activists" trying to undermine European nations by supporting refugees heading to the continent from the Middle East and beyond.

[DrEvil]

Here's the actual plan: http://www.georgesoros.com/essays/rebui ... um-system/

[zangtang]

Not afraid of laying down the law on all our behalf.....could get mistaken for leadership like that.

I started to gagg roundabout the 5/6th paragraph, so i haven't read it all.

Think he needs things doing to him until there's white stars everywhere.

[American Dream]

https://cbmilstein.wordpress.com/2015/1 ... lacements/

Unbearable Displacements



It was hard for me to comprehend, given the increasingly sanitized streets of most North American cities, the commonplace magnitude of street art in Athens during my recent trip to Greece. Or rather, it was impossible to contain the exuberance I felt on seeing it. Nearly every time I set out for a walk, I ended up kilometers or hours from my “destination,” instead pulled along, as if a pup following a scent, by one graffiti-covered wall or stencil-covered building after another — and another and…

The millions and billions of individual pieces of street scribblings — conversations and warnings and commentary — spell life still, spell resistance still, even if the life and resistance are being drained by austerity. In North American cities, it largely feels like the life and resistance have been displaced, like so many of the urban inhabitants who don’t fit in what are now largely refuges for the super rich (and trashbins for the remaining super poor, before they, too, are disposed of). I kept seeing Athens as someday “cleansed” of its aliveness — meaning anything or anyone that doesn’t fit into the narrative of the world’s global elites.

All of the anarchists in Athens I spoke with brushed off the possibility of their city’s core being transformed into a playground similar to Manhattan or San Francisco, Vancouver or Toronto. “Too poor,” “too chaotic,” “too crumbling,” “too big,” “economic crisis.” Maybe they’re right, and Athens will be left alone — alone to suffer, alone to rot, alone to still, at the same time, contain more humanity because it’s not on the map of capitalism. Already, out of necessity, there are burgeoning amounts of “solidarity” projects — the bare minimum to stave off complete unemployment and depression, while offering the bare-bones of mutual aid in order to get by, somehow.

Yet I also heard talk of the Troika, the European Union, the IMF, Chinese investors, US German investors, other investors, already circling like vultures to pick off big pieces of Athens and Greece for an enormous feeding frenzy of profit later on. Once austerity has broken backs, sent more to suicide, sent many young folks packing. Athens reminded me so much of Manhattan and San Francisco when they, too, were meccas for rebellious walls — walls that can be criminalized and silenced and cleaned steel-gray-dull sleek. Call me cynical, but after seeing the unfolding logic of how Manhattan and San Francisco were battered into shadows of themselves, it’s clear Athens can be made anew for the few, too.

Maybe, like this innocent-looking Paddington Bear stencil on a wall in the anarchist neighborhood of Exarchia in Athens, people have to hang onto “navïeté” that is actually a cover for not tail-spinning into total despair. “Migration is not a crime.” But we know it is.

Athenians watch a wave of refugees — cold, hungry, dirty, scared, anxious… — pass through, quickly, because they’re more worried than ever about getting north as borders, left and right, close to them. Some in Athens offer squatted refugee houses and other forms of mutual aid to those made migrant, made people without home, with a future uncertain. Yet somehow, Athens is presumed “safe” from becoming a place that will displace its own inhabitants, sold off and remodeled for the rich, with street art a thing of coffee-table “history” books. Or if not renovated, then made worse by memorandums and austerity measures and governments that do nothing and capitalism that destroys everything, until the only ways to stay live all become a crime, until people “voluntarily” must migrate elsewhere.

Life right now, where one can still find it, is being written on walls as anonymous cries against all that is and all that should be.

Meanwhile, borders and fences are going up at an accelerated rate, new detention centers and hot-spots are being created willy-nilly to “concentrate” people in “camps,” luxury high-rises and lavish startups are growing like mushrooms on top of places that used to be neighborhoods, wars and disappearances along with militarized rape and torture are scattering and shattering people.

On my return to Turtle Island, instead of street art, I scan the walls of social media. That is also a sign of “no life” in North American cities. That we are largely compelled to seek “the art of resistance” online not on the urban geography we walk by daily.

So instead of walks that joyfully lead me further and further astray, I’m stuck to my seat, feeling helpless or hopeless, or both, looking at a myriad of images and reading personal accounts of the mass displacement and mega-migration being forced and enforced on most of humanity, especially the harrowing accounts of the “refugee crisis” — always at the cost of life.

That is the crime.

* * *

If you want to get word when I put out new musings, sign up at cbmilstein.wordpress.com. Enjoy, share, reprint, post, tweet any of my writings as long as it’s free as in “free water” and “freedom.”

(Photo by Cindy Milstein, art of resistance, Athens, Greece, Oct. 2015.)

[AlicetheKurious]

Why should anyone pay attention to the crocodile tears of internationalists? The same people that advocate for the dissolution of nation states, while effectively achieving their goals displacing and causing untold amounts of suffering in the Middle East, are now calling for Europeans to ‘humanely’ accept the refugees into their countries?

The people calling for the dissolution of nation states are the ones with no compassion, and they are not going to turn that around on me if I can help it.

Here is George to lay it out for you, speaking in reference to Mr. Orban.

“His plan treats the protection of national borders as the objective and the refugees as an obstacle,” Mr Soros added. “Our plan treats the protection of refugees as the objective and national borders as the obstacle.”

The following is a fair picture of George’s ‘humanitarian’ methods.

http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/10/28/p ... cutioners/

Yeah boy, George is such a fine exemplar of love and caring.

Precisely.

[Sounder]

Precisely.

Thanks Alice, but it will not stop the avalanche of propaganda that is ongoing, will it?

These folk cannot stop in their attempts to redirect culpability away from themselves and put it on 'right-wingers' or/and heartless Europeans.

[American Dream]

“Home” by Warsan Shire



no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here



Main photograph by Daniet Etter/New York Times/Redux /eyevine. Laith Majid cries tears of joy and relief that he and his children have made it to Europe.

Warsan Shire is a Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer and educator based in London. Born in 1988, Warsan has read her work extensively all over Britain and internationally – including recent readings in South Africa, Italy, Germany, Canada, North America and Kenya- and her début book, ‘TEACHING MY MOTHER HOW TO GIVE BIRTH’ (flipped eye), was published in 2011. Her poems have been published in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the anthology ‘The Salt Book of Younger Poets’ (Salt, 2011). She is the current poetry editor at SPOOK magazine. In 2012 she represented Somalia at the Poetry Parnassus, the festival of the world poets at the Southbank, London. She is a Complete Works II poet. Her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Warsan is also the unanimous winner of the 2013 Inaugural Brunel University African Poetry Prize.

[Sounder]

While AD is quite adept at capitalizing on the pain of unfortunates, (so anarchic), he cannot answer the charge that he supports the machinery that produces the refugees in the first place.

These nation destroying zealots have no compassion for the lives of the average human, and yet all they can talk about is others lack of compassion. Funny that.

[coffin_dodger]

Let's imagine that the government of a country in chaos, possibly somewhere that's being systematically disassembled by outside forces, is looking for (amongst a great many other pressing problems) a way to unload some of it's State obligations.

From a sociological standpoint, which citizens of this crumbling State are the least productive, that in turn cost the State resources, money and time to deal with?

The prison population.

How could a crumbling State relieve itself of this problem, whilst covertly exporting the problem to one of the beligerant entities that is exacerbating the problems?

With a packed lunch, the promise of a 'new start' and a ride to the border.

And before the chants of racism begin, I'm not suggesting all refugees are ex-cons, but I am suggesting there is no way of discerning.

[American Dream]

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e. the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e. the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

-Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 1958

[General Patton]

https://translate.google.com/translate? ... edit-text=
GUN CRIME At an asylum accommodation in Krokom in Jämtland were found last week a weapons cache inside the property's heating chamber. According to reliable sources Avpixlat been in contact with both the police and the Security Service were contacted and seized weapons, but said nothing to the media or the residents of the matter.

That was when staff from a local energy company would enter and read the meters of the boiler as it was detected. They could not get in because the door was locked. After having arranged with the master key, so the staff could get in and then got to see what had been hidden in there, probably by the asylum seekers.

It was not a question of a small hunting guns, but several real firearms according to respondents. They then called the local police who in turn contacted the security police. At the County Police Department in Östersund was not known to the task of arms cache when Avpixlat called and could not refer to someone.

[American Dream]

The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

... fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of "mobilizing passions" that shape fascist action than to a consistent and fully articulated philosophy. At bottom is a passionate nationalism. Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure and the corrupt, in which one's own community or nation has been the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have been weakened by political parties, social classes, inassimilable minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack the necessary sense of community. These "mobilizing passions," mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism's foundations:

* a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;

* the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;

* the belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;

* dread of the group's decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;

* the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;

* the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny;

* the superiority of the leader's instincts over abstract and universal reason;

* the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;

* the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

The entire book is available here.

[American Dream]

We Refugees

By Hannah Arendt


Greek refugees in Aleppo, in the course of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, undated black-and-white photograph


In the first place, we don’t like to be called “refugees.” We ourselves call each other “newcomers” or “immigrants.” Our newspapers are papers for “Americans of German language”; and, as far as I know, there is not and never was any club founded by Hitler-persecuted people whose name indicated that its members were refugees.

A refugee used to be a person driven to seek refuge because of some act committed or some political opinion held. Well, it is true we have had to seek refuge; but we committed no acts and most of us never dreamt of having any radical opinion. With us the meaning of the term “refugee” has changed. Now “refugees” are those of us who have been so unfortunate as to arrive in a new country without means and have to be helped by Refugee Committees.

Before this war broke out we were even more sensitive about being called refugees. We did our best to prove to other people that we were just ordinary immigrants. We declared that we had departed of our own free will to countries of our choice, and we denied that our situation had anything to do with “so-called Jewish problems.” Yes, we were “immigrants” or “newcomers” who had left our country because, one fine day, it no longer suited us to stay, or for purely economic reasons. We wanted to rebuild our lives, that was all. In order to rebuild one’s life one has to be strong and an optimist. So we are very optimistic.

Our optimism, indeed, is admirable, even if we say so ourselves. The story of our struggle has finally become known. We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives.

Nevertheless, as soon as we were saved—and most of us had to be saved several times—we started our new lives and tried to follow as closely as possible all the good advice our saviors passed on to us. We were told to forget; and we forgot quicker than anybody ever could imagine. In a friendly way we were reminded that the new country would become a new home; and after four weeks in France or six weeks in America, we pretended to be Frenchmen or Americans. The most optimistic among us would even add that their whole former life had been passed in a kind of unconscious exile and only their new country now taught them what a home really looks like. It is true we sometimes raise objections when we are told to forget about our former work; and our former ideals are usually hard to throw over if our social standard is at stake. With the language, however, we find no difficulties: after a single year optimists are convinced they speak English as well as their mother tongue; and after two years they swear solemnly that they speak English better than any other language—their German is a language they hardly remember.

In order to forget more efficiently we rather avoid any allusion to concentration or internment camps we experienced in nearly all European countries—it might be interpreted as pessimism or lack of confidence in the new homeland. Besides, how often have we been told that nobody likes to listen to all that; hell is no longer a religious belief or a fantasy, but something as real as houses and stones and trees. Apparently nobody wants to know that contemporary history has created a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.

Even among ourselves we don’t speak about this past. Instead, we have found our own way of mastering an uncertain future. Since everybody plans and wishes and hopes, so do we. Apart from the general human attitudes, however, we try to clear up the future more scientifically. After so much bad luck we want a course as sure as a gun. Therefore, we leave the earth with all its uncertainties behind and we cast our eyes up to the sky. The stars tell us—rather than the newspapers—when Hitler will be defeated and when we shall become American citizens. We think the stars more reliable advisers than all our friends; we learn from the stars when we should have lunch with our benefactors and on what day we have the best chances of filling out one of these countless questionnaires which accompany our present lives. Sometimes we don’t rely even on the stars but rather on the lines of our hand or the signs of our handwriting. Thus we learn less about political events but more about our own dear selves, even though somehow psychoanalysis has gone out of fashion. Those happier times are past when bored ladies and gentlemen of high society conversed about the genial misdemeanors of their early childhood. They don’t want ghost-stories any more; it is real experiences that make their flesh creep. There is no longer any need of bewitching the past; it is spellbound enough in reality. Thus, in spite of our outspoken optimism, we use all sorts of magical tricks to conjure up the spirits of the future.

I don’t know which memories and which thoughts nightly dwell in our dreams. I dare not ask for information, since I, too, had rather be an optimist. But sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved. I could even understand how our friends of the West coast, during the curfew, should have had such curious notions as to believe that we are not only “prospective citizens” but present “enemy aliens.” In daylight, of course, we become only “technically” enemy aliens—all refugees know this. But when technical reasons prevented you from leaving your home during the dark house, it certainly was not easy to avoid some dark speculations about the relation between technicality and reality.

No, there is something wrong with our optimism. There are those odd optimists among us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go home and turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in quite an unexpected way. They seem to prove that our proclaimed cheerfulness is based on a dangerous readiness for death. Brought up in the conviction that life is the highest good and death the greatest dismay, we became witnesses and victims of worse terrors than death—without having been able to discover a higher ideal than life. Thus, although death lost its horror for us, we became neither willing nor capable to risk our lives for a cause. Instead of fighting—or thinking about how to become able to fight back—refugees have got used to wishing death to friends or relatives; if somebody dies, we cheerfully imagine all the trouble he has been saved. Finally many of us end by wishing that we, too, could be saved some trouble, and act accordingly.

Continues at: http://www.documenta14.de/en/south/35_we_refugees

[coffin_dodger]

I'm bored of AD. I don't want to read any more of the same thing, over and over and over again. I don't want to view 'active topics' and see topic after topic based around a single premise. I don't want to be bothered with reading the same copy and paste articles spread across multiple threads.

You've won AD. Pat yourself on the back for a job well done.

[General Patton]

19 year old girl in German city becomes victim of "refugee" rape gang, 4th this month in Magdeburg