Posts
"I would never vote Republican in a presidential race. That staves off the disaster. Things have to fall hard before they get any better.”
Paul Gottfried
"It seemed to me singularly ill-contrived for the British government to be going to war with Hitler when Hitler might have been about to attack the Russians, and even more ill-contrived that, when Hitler did attack the Russians, he had already defeated the French army. What I'm saying is that the war shouldn't have been started in September 1939...from the point of view of Britain, the war was really not a good thing and I would regard it as, in effect, a defeat."
Maurice Cowling
"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
Calvin Coolidge
Saki
Herwig Muenkler, a leading German war historian, defended the admission of three quarters of a million Syrians by Angela Merkel in 2015 with the image of an "overflow basin." As such, Germany would provide the "overflow" of young Arabs with humane care for a few years — with a budget of 100 billion euros — in order to return them to their homeland after the end of the war.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Berlin's experts hadn't considered that the Syrians themselves had fled from a "basin" that was not only constantly "overflowing," but also being replenished to the brim by their own offspring. The pressure of this population growth kept pushing their society toward war, over and over again.
As the author knows from his Turkish students (diplomats and commanders) at NATO Defense College (Rome), Ankara, too, did not think about the demographics behind Syria's civil war when it admitted 3.5 million refugees. That's a lot for a nation of 80 million (war index 2). Applied to the population of the USA (16,000 Syrians), this would be 15 million refugees. Their expenses are partly covered by Berlin and Brussels so that Turkey does not pass them on to Europe. Erdoğan also assumed they would return soon but now understood that he was in the same trap as Germany and the other host countries. The costs and the corresponding friction would only keep increasing. Now Erdoğan wants to get rid of the Syrians even if it costs him his nimbus as anti-Israel hero of the Arabs. For, despite the up to 500,000 civil war deaths between 2010 and 2020, Syria's total population grew from 21 to 25–26 million. Of these, 17 to 19 million live within the country's borders, six times more than lived there in 1945. By 2040, the internal figure is expected to rise to 30 million. The country's capacity to absorb losses will persist for another ten to twenty years.
Syria's government cannot therefore want the soon to be 7 million exiles back. Their youthful pressure would immediately reignite the violence that has just significantly subsided. Moreover, the Alawite, Christian, and Kurdish minorities would have to fear a bloody revenge, since Sunnis would again become a massive majority. Bashar Assad has unequivocally expressed this concern: "We have lost the best of our youth, but in exchange we won a healthier and more homogeneous society".
Turkey and Germany in the Syrian refugees trap
By Gunnar Heinsohn, October 30, 2019
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/turkey_and_germany_in_the_syrian_refugees_trap.html
Very interesting. This suggests that many of the refugees really are political opponents of the regime and therefore dangerous, to Assad and possibly to others. I think they are economic refugees and should go back to Syria. The courageous fighters fought against the Syrian government or for it. Many refugees have returned which proves that it is not dangerous despite the misinformation in papers like the Washington Post. However Mr Heinsohn is right that ethnically cleansing a lot of Syrians is helpful to the Assad gang. Donald Trump should have made some deal with Russia Assad and Israel whereby the refugees were taken back. Or rather the EU should have done so - refugees are Europe's (biggest) problem.
DeleteI have a question: how come Rod Liddle’s joke about disenfranchising Muslims in the forthcoming election caused more outrage than the revelation earlier this week that many young people actually want to disenfranchise older voters?
ReplyDeleteWe all know the answer to this question. It’s because in the world of the woke, in the ruthless and quite racist hierarchy of identities these people have constructed, the Muslim community must be protected from everything, even humour, while old people, especially those nasty white working-class ones who voted for Brexit, are fair game for whatever shit you want to throw at them.
Brendan O'Neill
Rod Liddle was joking, you idiots
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/11/01/rod-liddle-was-joking-you-idiots/