If this doesn’t make you wake up, then probably nothing will. Largely as a result of war, driven primarily by the USA and its various coalition allies, millions of innocent people around the world have been displaced and forced to flee their homes and homelands. Humans have a survival instinct and will do pretty much anything to continue life. As such, rules and supposed national borders mean very little.
Around 4 million people fleeing the war in Syria have already registered with UNHCR (United Nations high commissioner for refugees). This shows clearly that aggressor nations are happy to spend money causing mayhem, that they then use to gain business opportunities for their military-industrial complexes; but they are entirely neglecting the impact of their activities. They then expect other people to pay for and accommodate the refugees. Add in to this environmental destruction and biodiversity loss, and gross greenhouse gas emissions then we can only conclude that these aggressor nations lack any morality. Actions speak louder than words.
The Amnesty International report can be downloaded from the first paragraph of the link below.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/15/worst-refugee-crisis-since-second-world-war-report-middle-east-africa-syria
The war in Middle-East, in which ISIS has a pretty large stake, is just one factor in today’s refugee crisis, what I see as a clear sign of the fact that our world is heavily overpopulated. There are countries which became literally emptied by their inhabitants. Natural resources had been consumed or sold, arable land occupied, forests and other natural areas devastated. Other countries became ‘full’. China official subsidize families to relocate into other countries since many years. The news about the refugee crisis we can read about these weeks, are triggered by the fact that it has by now escalated into a level which can’t remain hidden any more especially in the southern states of Europe. But other corners of the world are also impacted, I’ve just heard about the way Australian government handles refugees: they simply move them to islands of Papua New Guinea.
Thanks Janos. All of these are, unfortunately, correct. Australia has for a while been preventing refugees from entering its territory. The conditions in their concentration camps are appalling. They have used Christmas Island (the Indian Ocean one) and Nauru for such purposes. Abbott’s government has been heavily criticised, but cares nothing.
The Near East & Middle East remain a geostrategic task for the USA. It intends to keep this region destabilised, and in fact is funding and arming both sides of the various conflicts. Most curiously is that we now have Israel (notoriously bad record on Human Rights, as well as the war crime of occupation) and Saudi Arabia more or less on the same side: attacking Syria and the Kurds, as well as IS. They both fear Iran.
When I lived on Lampedusa for six years most of our refugees were from West Africa (Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Benin, Mali etc), but the gateway to Europe for the traffickers was still Libya and southern Tunisia. Now many, if not most, of the refugees are from Syria, Kurdistan, Iraq, Eritirea, Yemen, Sudan, as well as Libya itself ~ all destabilised by the USA (& puppies).
Before that I lived in the Greek Islands for five years. We only ever saw Rom (Romanies), a few travelling moslem families (probably Turks or Kurds), and of course Albanians. Albania shares a border with Greece, and 20% of Greece’s population are Albanians: some legal and some illegal. They do most of the work (building, waiting, hotel amenities, taxis etc) and send consumer goods and funds back to their families at home. Now, however, Greece suffers the same problem as Italy with the overwhelming arrival of refugees from Africa, the Near East, and directly across the border with Turkey.
My idea to address the global population issue is just allow people to live wherever they wish to. You point out that some places are empty, because all the resources are used up, and others are ‘full’ ~ too much population pressure in too small an area (i.e. inside a notional national border). As has happened throughout history, people have moved to where they feel comfortable, so I don’t see my suggestion as being unworkable. Some people like cold weather and would suffer greatly in the tropics (hot, humid, mosquitoes and various parasites), others head to warmer climes (e.g. European retirees moving to the Mediterranean coast to minimise arthritis & rheumatism). Some like cities and 24-hour lifestyles (the consumer world), others prefer a more simple way of life in remote or quieter places.
I believe it could work. We certainly need to reassess the present arrangements. Half of the global population is now urban (until 2013 the majority was still, just, rural). So what is already happening is that countries rich in resources are being attacked or threatened by the capitalist nations, in order to steal their resources to sustain the cities. Even though cities are unsustainable: no food growing, little water, too much pollution etc. The ‘water wars’ are only going to get worse, especially in southern Europe where the Sahara is steadily encroaching. There will be scare stories about terrorism and upsetting stablility, but these are mostly propaganda by the vested interests. People do not normally blow up their own neighbourhood, mostly it’s someone else’s. Even in Northern Ireland, or during the Serbian atrocities in the Balkans, most terror acts were against another community, even if living near by, and NOT your own. The multicultural cities (like London) have always changed: people come and go.
We’ve already seen this in the EU with people from the eastern countries migrating west & north. Visit Dublin and most of the airport workers are from the Baltic nations ~ quickly flying home on budget airlines. Before that all the menial jobs were done by the lowest strata of Ireland’s workers; in this case both sets of people have benefited: the Irish have stepped up a level, and the eastern Europeans now have better paid jobs. I’m interested in hearing other viewpoints, not least because sooner, rather than later, things will have to change … in the face of climate change, population growth, and loss of biodiversity, habitats and ecological services. We’ve already got a ‘globalised’ world. Mike 🙂