A poor girl with a refugee heritage had approached Chancelor Angela Merkel with a plea. Speaking excellent German she said: “I have goals like anyone else. I want to study like them … it’s very unpleasant to see how others can enjoy life, and I can’t myself.”
Merkel’s response was a fair one, and was not unexpected from any coldly calculative politician: “Politics is sometimes hard,” Merkel said. “You’re right in front of me now and you’re an extremely sympathetic person. But you also know in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon are thousands and thousands and if we were to say you can all come … we just can’t manage it.” The girl cried; politicians are rarely in a position to help anyone other than themselves after all.
British daily the Independent reported: “Viewers slammed Ms Merkel’s administration as a ‘Regierung ohne Empathie’, meaning ‘government without empathy’ and claimed the Chancellor had ‘failed as a human on all fronts’.” This view is common. But I will play Devil’s advocate here, Because I feel that the media, and the British media in particular, are being slightly slightly unfair on Merkel.
“Just in this past week, we’ve had more than 5,000 people newly arrived, most of them from the Balkans and most of whom have just been dumped at the side of the road by people smugglers. We have to find suitable accommodation for all of them,” Bavaria’s interior minister, Joachim Herrmann, told the Guardian. Germany has some 450000 refugees working there as it stands, which isn’t much when compared to countries like Turkey’s 1.5 million refugees, but is much more than the UK, which only hosts some 126000. While Merkel’s comment might be “interpreted” by certain British publications as cold, and though I have no love for her as a politician (or any politician for that matter), her country has done far more for refugees than many developed nations. Now that that issue is out of the way, I think all this “being nice to refugees” is just the developed nations’ way of pretending to give a damn about the suffering of others:
Accepting refugees immigrants is only a band-aid solution on two much larger problems: the lack of willpower on the part of developed nations to actively invest in particularly poor communities overseas… and… war.
War is something that most developed nations are overly-happy to spend on, this very thing that produces so many refugees to begin with. The war in Afghanistan that has created a state that is completely reliant on OPIUM POPPY as a source of revenue. There was the war in Iraq, which killed a million people and created countless millions of refugees. There was the Libyan conflict that turned one of Africa’s richest nations into a hell-hole… And America and Saudi Arabia were also involved in Syria recently… I do believe that Britain was more than happy to help America with two of those conflicts. I am unsure of how much Germany had contributed to THAT farce, but if the people who caused these problems were to own up to them, then the US and Britain would be filled with refugees.
Why is it that certain developed countries are so much more willing to spend on war, create millions of refugees, accept a few hundred thousand, and pretend that they are being generous simply because their politicians are better at making speeches about how sad it is for these poor people that they had just murdered? Don’t get me wrong, I feel for the crying girl… But what of the millions more that developed nations have helped create, where is their salvation? As Merkel had correctly stated, we only feel sorry for her because we see her. Yet many of us had earlier agreed to let our politicians bomb Libya….Iraq…. and now Syria (where we bomb extremists of our own creation). Merkel is not the monster. We are.
If we really care about little girls like her, we must stop supporting these conflicts. We must stop funding the military industrial complex. We must stop focusing on the one girl we can see, and start seeing the thousands we can’t.
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Well said , it seems like we are finally starting to agree 😛
The should be more girls in germany like that girl and less turkish guys who dont try to work and use the Harz IV , im not racist but …
It’s easy to say don’t fight – until you realize that if you stop fighting then the only people who will be fighting are those bent on taking control, taking away freedom, and repressing people by forcing them to follow restrictive regimes and religions. As long as those usurpers exist you have to restrict or remove them, or risk their gaining so much power that they threaten the countries that prefer peace.
Are you talking about the US? If so, I do agree.
I think Merkel was at least honest to the girl. If it had been lets say an American President he would have said something to her like we will see what we can do them move on forgetting about the girl entirely. And the girl end up in the same place. There will always be refugees whether it is because of war or economics. Letting large groups of refugees into any one country can cause problems also as some groups do not integrate well into the general population of the host country. Should the first world countries send money and supplies into the 3rd world country try to help the people there rebuild and so forth. Again it has been proven time and time again that money sent to help poor of a country instead makes it’s way into the powerful few of that country and next to nothing makes its’ way down to the people in general. How often do we see food sent into other countries to help the poor and starving get high jacked or taken by small groups within the country to feed their own and the rest of the population starve.
Thank you for atleast one objective comment that has its facts straight. Cudos to you sir.
Well you can say alot if you are sitting in the USA and watching vids or TV of this. The situation with refugees here in Germany is very hard. The thing is that there are more and more comming in because they know they can come and take our money and then they dont have to work for it, while the citizens of Germany are being robbed every penny they have, and they are giving THEIR tax money and earnings to those lazy people. Not just that, they also do harm here, they spray on the walls, rob stores, break stuff and go all gangster and do more crimes in the time they are here, than crimes in total that have been committed before they were here. Get your facts straight or fuck off.
With that said i see most of what the post says is right, but next time, try to project the whole picture please.
Give me $100 million and I will make sure all of those people are taken care of.
They can’t manage it? Why not? Are they idiots? Why are they unable to manage a few thousand people? If they can’t manage a few thousand people, then HOW THE FUCK CAN THEY POSSIBLY MANAGE A GOVERNMENT IN CHARGE OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE.
FUCKING IDIOTIC HIPOCRITS, ENJOYING THEIR RICH LIVES, WHILE THE REST OF THE WORLD SUFFERS. ARROGANT, GREEDY, EVIL, PATHETIC, NO GOOD, ROTTEN, LYING, THIEVES. ALL OF THESE POLITICIANS.
You mixup many thinks.
The refugees are not coming becouse USA and West is bombing their countries. The opposit is more truth then what you described. When US troops were in Iraq, the country was stabilized, and refugees was not coming. Then Obama pulled out army and this is result.
Even in Sadam era there was 5 milion refugees from Iraq. With others countries it is similar. West must intervene more. To stabilize these countries and make them prosperous. Like in Germany itself after WW2. There are still US troops in Germany after 70 years after war. And it is one of the most prosperous countries.