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Lost Lessons from a Toddler’s Death

September 18, 2015

Lost Lessons from a Toddler’s Death

The world’s conscience was touched by the photo of a toddler who drowned while fleeing the war in Syria — and Europe’s cohesion is threatened by the growing flood of Syrian refugees. But Western leaders won’t let go of their “regime change” fixation which is making matters worse, writes Rick Sterling.

Around 3:30 a.m. on Sept. 2, toddler Aylan Kurdi, his brother, mother and nine others drowned trying to reach a Greek island from Bodrum, Turkey. Around 6 a.m., the staff photographer from Dogan News Agency came upon Aylan’s body on the beach and took the famous photograph of the little boy lying face down on a beach.

In a few hours it was published online and “went viral” on Turkish then English language social media. Washington Post Beirut chief Liz Sly posted the photo with comment that Aylan’s death is “emblematic of world’s failure in Syria.” Minutes later, Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch (HRW) posted the photo with comment that it’s an “indictment of collective failure.”

Turkish President Recep Erdogan.

Media worldwide began featuring video and stories showing refugees traveling by land in Europe. The crisis that burst into view on Sept. 2 has been building for years. But can the raised consciousness address the root cause of the crisis?

The media and numerous organizations have shone a bright light on the refugee crisis. North European countries with low birth rates and aging populations are accepting more refugees. Germany will reportedly accept 800,000 over the next year. Many other countries including the U.S. are promising to accept more refugees from Syria. This is welcome news. However it’s not a solution because:

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Fortress Europe: a wall to keep foreigners out?

September 14, 2015

Fortress Europe: a wall to keep foreigners out?

 
“….. the buffer zone has disappeared. The geographical transition from civilization to barbarism is now no longer gradual but it is abrupt. To use the appropriate Latin words, which bring out both the kinship and the contrast between the two types of contact, a limen, or threshold, which was a zone, has been replaced by a limes or military frontier. Across this line, a baffled dominant minority and an unconquered external proletariat now face one another under arms; and this military front is a bar to the passage of all social radiation except that of military technique – an article of exchange which makes for war and not for peace between those who give and take it. ….. the cardinal fact (is) that this temporary and precarious balance of forces inevitably tilts, with the passage of time, in favour of the Barbarians.” From Arnold Toynbee, “”A study of History.” (image above from Wikipedia)
 
The more I look at what’s happening in the world today, the more it seems to me that we are following an already beaten path: we are going along the same way that the Roman Empire followed a couple of millennia ago, only faster. For every event that takes place today, you can find a parallel event that led the old Empire to its end. So, the present refugee crisis in Europe has a parallel in the crisis of the 1st century AD that led the empire to lock itself inside a set of fortifications. Is that the destiny that Europe faces today? Are we going to build a wall to keep the invaders out? A look of what happened to the Romans may tell us something about this point.
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Forget the Greek Crisis, Immigration Will Divide Europe Against Itself

September 12, 2015

Forget the Greek Crisis, Immigration Will Divide Europe Against Itself

Europe has complex immigration rules. As the EU web site shows, there are multiple layers of immigration regulations encompassing both the local national level and the EU level.

But, as the recent influx of refugees and economic migrants has shown, the EU government is able to flex its  muscle in an ad hocfashion in the service of compelling member states to accept the migrants and refugees. The “quota plan” being forwarded by the EU government would divide up migrants and refugees among the EU member states, and, of course, over time, these migrants would qualify for those member states’ taxpayer funded public benefits. In Germany, for example, officials “estimate that as many as 460,000 more people could be entitled [next year] to social benefits.”

Big Countries vs. Little Ones  

The proposal could become a mandate if approved by a “qualified majority” of EU member governments, a type of majority that is weighed in favor of the larger members. Most of those larger members are in favor. If adopted, however, one doesn’t need to be exceptionally perceptive to see how mandates apposed on dissenting member states could be a source of significant division among member states, and especially, their populations.

Writing in the UK independent yesterday, John Lichfield avers:

North vs south; east vs west; Britain vs the rest; German leadership or German dominance. The refugee crisis is like a diabolical stress test devised to expose simultaneously all the moral and political fault lines of the European Union.

Germany leads to way in calling for more migrants. While part of it is no doubt Germany’s ongoing attempt to rehabilitate itself from its fascist past,  there may be other considerations as well. Claire Groden in Fortunenotes:

 

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So you really want to make Syrian Refugees an Election Issue?

September 9, 2015

So you really want to make Syrian Refugees an Election Issue?

Thomas Pynchon once wrote:  ‘If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.’  Words to live by for the  the major political parties in Canadian Federal politics.

The refugee crisis in Syria, Iraq and spilling into Europe has become an election issue, with each of the major parties pulling magic numbers out of their ears around “how many” is the “right number” of refugees to admit to Canada, which once again underscores the Libertarian criticism that the both major political parties espouse largely uniform campaign platforms in which the issues are for the most part homogenous while the really important questions are rendered conveniently out-of-scope (and even the NDP’s, sniffing a faint shot at power, are pivoting off their principles in order to get it)

If we peer behind the veil of mainstream media oversimplification we find that the humanitarian crisis we are faced with today are the straight line consequences of a decades-old policy on the part of the West (defined as the US, the UK, Israel and including complicit Canada) to subvert and destabilize the very nations that are submerged in civil war and strife.

A String of Coup D’Etats

Syria and Iran were both once full-on democracies who’s duly elected governments committed the literal, mortal sins of offending Western corporate powers. Iran’s Mohammad Mosaddegh wanted to audit the books of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and was instead overthrown and replaced with the Shah. We’re all aware how that turned out why Iran is so fond of the West to this day.

Foreign Policy FTW

 

Syria’s plight is not as well known, our (meaning the West’s) first political coup d’etat against their elected government was in 1949, when the CIA over throws  Shure al-Quwatly and replaces him with the first of many military strongmen in Syria, Colonel Husni al-Zaim.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

Impunity, Functional Equivalent of Genocide: Collapse of Social Institutions

September 7, 2015

Impunity, Functional Equivalent of Genocide: Collapse of Social Institutions

The horrific refugee problem we see today, so reminiscent of population movements during World War II, next to the Holocaust itself in the historical annals of Crimes Against Humanity, and to which it was then related, remains in our times below the moral radar screen as though somehow inevitable, beyond solution, something that just happens. That is how jaded the world has become. Human flotsam, period; humanity, as the central organizing principle of life, stinks in the nostrils of nations preoccupied with other things to do. This is what I mean by the collapse of social institutions, with no guiding hand (where in all of this, e.g., is the UN or some suitable alternative if such were possible?) to prevent the humanitarian crater where a power vacuum reigns and the bottom has dropped out of global responsibility for the lives and dignity of people.

Events (i.e., human suffering) have already gone beyond what self-proclaimed civilization would allow, raising questions about whether or not there is a moral order shaping, defining, underpinning the international political system and its capacity for ensuring, or at least working toward, social justice and even human sustainability. Children and their mother drown, trucks sealed tight become mass graves, ordinary people, their belongings on their backs, pushing baby carriages, marching/walking along railroad tracks—from a descriptive point of view, prelude to World War III? Perhaps not. The world can contain (somewhat) volatility, but does a lousy job at removing the causes of human misery, indeed seems to require such a condition as validation of power and national sovereignty.

Why do present-day actors, starting with alliances, nations, social movements, and corporate units of the great chain of capitalistic being, finally, individuals in their asocial behavior, have and enjoy the capacity to act with impunity—no effective whistles blown, the smugglers of human traffic (impersonalization as seldom seen in recent years) serving as a microcosm of the whole. 

 

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U.S. Drops Bombs; EU Gets Refugees & Blame. This Is Insane

September 7, 2015

U.S. Drops Bombs; EU Gets Refugees & Blame. This Is Insane

 

 

 

 

Starting in 2011 in Libya, the United States dropped bombs on Libya in order to replace its pro-Russian dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. The EU is now tearing itself apart with guilt-feelings at European nations’ responses to the refugee-crisis that was caused by this American bombing-campaign in Libya, and then by the one in Syria.

Europe has also received refugees from the American-sponsored bombing-campaign in eastern Ukraine (the bombing-campaign that the 2014 American-installed anti-Russian Ukrainian government calls an ‘Anti-Terrorist Operation,’ or ‘ATO,’ which labels the residents in that pro-Russian area — where the residents reject the February 2014 U.S. coup — as ‘Terrorists’ and thus as being suitable to be bombed, and even firebombed).

And yet, despite these millions of U.S.-caused refugees into Europe, European nations still permit U.S. troops to remain stationed on European soil decades after the entire reason for NATO’s very existence (which was protection of Europe against a communist invasion from the east) ended. (The Soviet Union’s equivalent Warsaw Pact had dissolved and ended in 1991, when the Soviet Union itself did — yet NATO continued on, and constantly touts ‘the Russian threat,’ just as it did the Soviet threat, as if there were no change when communism collapsed, as if the ideological reason for the Cold War had been fake all along. There is no justification whatsoever for «the New Cold War».) Russia is now responding to this new American-created hostility of Europeans against Russia, by its matching this newly transformed now anti-Russian NATO’s war-games against Russia, with similar Russian defensive maneuvers to prepare for an increasingly possible NATO invasion into Russia.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

Harper’s Worst Offense against Refugees May Be His Climate Record

September 7, 2015

Harper’s Worst Offense against Refugees May Be His Climate Record

Scorching effects of rising temperatures add to chaos in the Middle East, scientists say.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is right about the Syrian refugee crisis, for all the wrong reasons. His government is being battered by outrage over Canada’s wretched response to this humanitarian emergency. Our country of once-proud humanitarian leadership has so far admitted a mere 622 government-sponsored refugees when in past crises we admitted tens of thousands and were a better nation for it.

However, Harper correctly observed that no amount of charity and shelter would solve this dire situation. People are being displaced from their homes in the millions, and many more are on the way. His solution is more bombing of ISIS militants by CF-18s. In Harper’s simplistic worldview, what the people of Syria really need is more explosives from the sky.

Yet a recent study from the University of California reveals another plausible scenario for why Syria has become so dangerously destabilized, with troubling implications for Canada. Researchers looked at the role that climate change played in the Syrian civil war and concluded that an unprecedented drought in the Fertile Crescent forced 1.5 million rural farmers off their land and into the crowded suburbs of Syria’s already overcrowded cities, exacerbating unrest in the region.

This was occurring just as millions more were arriving from war-torn Iraq, fleeing the disastrous decade-long conflict sponsored by the U.S. (and enthusiastically supported by Harper when he was in opposition). Obviously climate change is not the only factor contributing to the crisis, but the authors believe their data supports the grim conclusion that our warming world will see many more families forced from their countries and homes in the future.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

War Begets War Refugees: The Moral Bankruptcy of Italy and NATO

August 18, 2015

War Begets War Refugees: The Moral Bankruptcy of Italy and NATO

On April 26, 2011, a meeting that can only be described as sinister took place between the then Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and French President, Nicolas Sarkozy. The most pressing issue discussed at the meeting in Rome was how to deal with African immigrants. 

Sarkozy, who was under pressure from his right-wing and far-right constituencies to halt immigration originating from North Africa (resulting from the Tunisian uprising), desired to strike a deal with the opportunistic Italian leader. In exchange for an Italian agreement to join a French initiative aimed at tightening border control (Italy being accused of allowing immigrants to cross through its borders to the rest of Europe), France, in turn, would resolve major disputes involving a series of takeovers, involving French and Italian companies. Moreover, Italy would then secure French support for a bid by Italian Economist and Banker, Mario Draghi, to become the Head of the European Central Bank. 

Another point on the French agenda was active Italian participation in the war on Libya, initially spearheaded by France, Britain and the United States, and later championed by NATO. 

Initially, Berlusconi hesitated to take part in the war, although certainly not for any moral reasons: for example, because the war was deliberately based on a misconstrued interpretation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 of March 17, 2011. The Resolution called for an ‘immediate ceasefire’, the establishment of a ‘no-fly zone’ and using all means, except foreign occupation, to ‘protect civilians’. The war, however, achieved entirely different objectives from the ones stated in the Resolution. It achieved a regime change, the bloody capture and murder of Libyan leader, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and resulted in a bloodbath in which thousands of civilians were killed, and continue to die, due to the chaos and civil war that has gripped Libya since then.  

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ancient landscapes point to dramatic climate change

February 27, 2015

Ancient landscapes point to dramatic climate change

Scientists believe Chinese civilisation could have been founded by climate refugees after the collapse of an Inner Mongolian culture over 4,000 years ago.

LONDON, 26 February, 2015 − Chinese and US scientists have uncovered prehistoric evidence of mass migration triggered by climate change.

Something occurred 4,200 years ago – a collapse of the monsoon system, the sapping of the groundwater, the sudden drainage of a lake – that brought a Neolithic culture to an end and left nothing but sandy landscapes in China’s Inner Mongolia region.

Archaeological evidence has revealed the jade carvings that once marked the Hongshan culture, along with evidence of hunting, fishing and even commercial traffic with Mongolian shepherds. And then the artefacts stop.

There is a 600-year period marked by no evidence of human settlement at all. Where there had once been streams, lakes grassland and forest, and a flourishing new Stone Age culture, only shifting sand dunes remained.

Recent origin

Xiaoping Yang, professor in the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, and research colleagues from China, New Mexico, Hawaii and Texas report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they used a new laboratory technique to show that the northern Chinese deserts were not – as many had thought – millions of years old.

Instead, they are of very recent origin, and the researchers found evidence of dramatic change during human settlement.

In addition, the exploration of artefacts in the region – and the discovery, among other things, of a jade object that might be a dragon − now suggests that Chinese culture and identity may have its origins in the far north, rather than in the Yellow River basin, which has been the archaeologists’ working hypothesis until now.

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