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Showing posts with the label "fortress europe"

The Berlin Wall

"There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty." —Stathis Kouvelakis, New Left Review, March-April 2018 Today, the same powers that preached "freedoms" and "democracy" for the Eastern Europeans, have erected more and longer walls and fences. Fortress Europe, the American-Mexican border, and the Apartheid Wall built by the Israeli state have killed thousands of people, "unwanted", ...
Alongside the conservative nationalism of the right, which emphasises tradition, religion or ethnicity, there are liberal nationalisms that can be just as powerful and as exclusionary. Think of the way that British governments, from the 1990s on, have made a forceful distinction between deserving and undeserving migrants: for instance, in policing access to the welfare state. Or of the way in which supposedly European values of tolerance and free speech are deployed in order to stigmatise outsiders who, for religious or cultural reasons, are assumed not to share them. 'Protecting the European way of life' from migrants

Fortress Europe

A recent  press release  from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) quotes Frédéric Penard, director of operations of the NGO SOS Méditerranée: “The reality is, even with fewer and fewer humanitarian vessels at sea, people with little alternatives will continue to undertake this deadly sea crossing regardless of the risks.” Penard continues: “The only difference now is people are nearly four times more likely to die compared to last year, according to the International Organization for Migration.” Fortress Europe is Sociopathic Related: Scott Daniel Warren
Capitalism, democracy, climate, war, “globalism” and “national statehood” are off the agenda while purists ineffectually worry about the “niceties of national and international asylum law”. Reinventing the Anti-Immigrant Wheel