Sweden and Finland are preparing to expel a large part of the migrants they hosted in 2015: because fleeing poverty and hunger is not a valid reason to be welcomed into the world’s richest continent… As for Hollande’s France, that is not even a question since the French Government had committed to host only 24,000 migrants in two years when Sweden, a ten times less populated country, hosted 200,000 in 2015 alone. If Swedish leaders’ behavior is shameful, that of the French leaders is truly despicable.
Another step has just been crossed: the Danish representatives voted to confiscate, on entry into the country, all the migrants’ goods over 1,350 euros. In Switzerland, in Germany’s Bavaria or Baden-Württemberg, they can keep even less. Thus, Europe would finish to strip the refugees before returning them to where they left, delivered to the mafias that had already robbed them!
The consequences of imperialist interventions
As if these families had happily abandoned their lives in the territories destroyed by violence! And who is responsible for this whole mess? Those who bombed the Iraq of Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi’s Libya, putting these countries in the hands of rival armed gangs who kill and extort, spread around, creating or developing Boko Haram, AQIM and ISIS. Each bomb dropped by a Rafale plane create refugees, who are thrown on the roads by the thousands, fleeing the fighting and rushing to a European promised land… where they are chased from a camp to a “jungle” to another slum, and finally turned back and returned to their hell.
The toughness of the speech preludes that of the attacks
What a shame! We are so far from last September, when the shocking picture of a dead Syrian boy on a beach in Turkey had moved the opinion and, for a time, forced European leaders to fake compassion! The crocodile tears have stopped dropping, the new trend is for speeches that have nothing to envy to the far right.
In France, as in other countries, some rely on “public opinion,” which according to surveys with questionable wording would approve the firmness of the leaders. Hollande, Valls, etc. like to pretend that public opinion is overcome by the fear of attacks, a state in part maintained by the martial declarations of our leaders and the state of emergency that is becoming permanent; as if all those cops in the streets could prevent the attacks! But this is not the time to think and the cop hiding within every Minister takes advantage of it…
Shameful measures are therefore taken. To justify the police omnipresence, they pass another three months extension to a “state of emergency” poised to become permanent. These emergency laws are ineffective against terrorism, but not against our freedoms. And, in the background, employers and government are taking advantage of the climate thus created to multiply attacks on workers in general, layoff or condemn activists who fight, in any case try to intimidate and cover the voices of those who are protesting… But they haven’t won yet.
A response to build
Fortunately, last Saturday, all those who were protesting against emergency laws marched in the streets of 70 cities across the country.
And we will need a response from the working class, our only hope to set the record straight with our leaders and force them to show a minimum of humanity that they only express, if at all, when they fear us.
