Immigration Outrage is a Festival of Hypocrisy
The public can get extremely outraged in a heartbeat. It only takes a coordinated press campaign and some touching pictures. It appears that showing images of children consequently works. It did with Nayirah in Iraq, with Ghouta’s Sarin, with Alan Kurdi in Bodrum with Omran Daqneesh in Aleppo (but not with the unnamed girl right of him) and it does again with “children in cages” now. It didn’t with Abdullah Issa though. Nor with kids massacred in Yemen which is continuously being bombed with our approval; we just #dontlookaway, don’t we? [all together: “Yes, We Do!”]
We are led to be selective in our hate. Right and left’s forces suddenly are summoned over and against each-other. They blame one-another over the topic at hand while all media write the same headlines as if controlled by an invisible conductor. The hypocrites. Both of them and you are if you are blaming Trump solely because of these cages.
The immigration, “zero tolerance” problem is not a new one. It’s been going on for a decade if not longer. Mostly leftist or centralist forces – as some, laughably, would like to refer to Obama’s reign – are genuinely mad. In a way they are right of course. We should not live in a world where kids get separated from their parents while fleeing. We live in a globalized world for all these in charge so why fight the same observance when humans are involved and want to relocate on this planet?
The trouble with all that is that we are selectively outraged. We are led to be and we all keep our heads looking away until mainstream media zooms in. When, under Obama, the very same deportations happened nobody cared. When, under Obama, the very same wall was built, nobody cared. When, under Obama, pipelines were carving through holy land, nobody cared either. When, under Obama as well as Bush and Trump, we’d blow sovereign nations to bits, nobody cared. Although the populace does when Palestine is involved. The latter’s the eternal hot topic most of the leftist Western public rallies against to pat themselves on the back stating “I do care. I follow the Israel-Palestine issue closely.” That merely is a decoy if you ask me, because we really do only care when mainstream hones in to it.
The whole Trump migration outrage is plain perverse while we shed crocodile tears addressing it. At exactly the same moment that outrage was at its height the European leaders convened in Brussels to discuss the EU immigration policies. A policy which has opened up EU borders to predominantly young male immigrants cued to the release of the Alan Kurdi picture back in September 2015. Tens of thousands of immigrants were suddenly spotted by mainstream in Macedonia; a mere week later in Budapest – already deep into Europe. Images of immigrant-flooded train stations in Hungary’s capital were quickly etched on our retinas. Coincidence had it that I was in Budapest two weeks before on my way to Romania and I did not see a single refugee there. I heard about the problem on my way back home. Immediately I wondered how tens of thousands of people could have walked hundreds of kilometers into Europe and have only been “spotted” [“picked up”] by mainstream after almost a month’s worth of daily 12 hour long hikes.
The EU’s immigration policy sure does contain extremely questionable events which we are rightfully outraged about. There’s thousands of people drowning in the Mediterranean for example and a large part of the public takes to the street and screams and shouts against it. But I wonder: would it not be far better and more effective to shout against the vectors at the source of migration? After all, it were the Atlanticists bombing Libya to smithereens even after Qaddafi’s warning that “migration floodgates” would open up should he be taken out of the equation? We didn’t care.
The EU’s new immigration policy is touted as a “triumph“. Although the text is considered a tiny bit vague it does proclaim the EU will build “disembarkation platforms” on North-African coasts and “controlled centers” in Europe itself. Do you need to have an IQ bordering the genius to understand that these are mere euphemistic words for “detention centers”? You don’t, do you? But yet again – there hardly was any outrage, nor even jest, nor a mockery or even a drawn parallel to what we were outraged for when Trump himself was connected to the very same “facilities” at exactly the same moment.
If Western anti-War activists continue to bang on about Trump not being welcome or merely address the Palestine question in concert we’ll not get anywhere. When they do rehearse Saddam, Qaddafi, Assad, Yong-Un, Putin and Trump being the vile evils mainstream makes them to be we’ll get nowhere. When they allow protests against foreign military intervention to be drowned in a personal message against a single individual we’ll get nowhere. It’s long overdue that they start addressing the source vectors themselves leading to migration, namely foreign intervention, an absurd focus on militarization and an unwillingness to talk to foreign leaders the Western world does not seem to (want to) understand, we’ll get nowhere.
Indeed. If we recite, iterate, recapitulate and rehearse merely the attention points mainstream leads us to in order for us to become outraged, I can not help but deduct that the immigration outrage indeed is a festival of hypocrisy.
Hypocrites will bring us nowhere.
