The Duck and the Chicken

The Europe of today is not reaping more than it has sown.

Although they don’t admit it (mainly the countries that participated in the bloody stupidity), the Europe of today, which has never before been besieged by so many foreigners, at least since the fall of Rome and the Barbarian invasions, is not reaping more than it sowed when it supported American interventionist policies in the Middle East and North Africa.

If it hadn’t helped to invade, destroy and vilify countries like Iraq, Libya and Syria; if it hadn’t equipped terrorists with weapons and vehicles by using its spy agencies, which in turn gave rise to the Islamic State so that these terrorists would fight Gadhafi and Bashar Assad; if it hadn’t helped to create the enormous allure of the Arab Spring, promising peace, liberty and prosperity, to which it afterwards only contributed hunger, destruction and war, rape, disease, in the desert sands, among the rocks of the mountains, in the depths and dark tomb of the Mediterranean, Europe would not now be immersed in the largest humanitarian crisis of this century, comparable only in recent history to the great human migrations that took place at the end of World War II.

Cheerful and sweet, the United States, which bears most of the responsibility for the situation, is even considering receiving a portion –and this surely must be at the Europeans’ insistence—of the hundreds of thousands of refugees that the U.S. created with its disastrous and stupid doctrine of the “war on terror;” the doctrine which paradoxically replaced stable governments with terrorists, and which was inaugurated by the “junior” Bush after the controversial attack on the twin towers.

Once the immigrants are distributed in ghettos or at least some of them are integrated into the countries that take them in as part of a long and painful process that will likely take decades, Europe will no longer be the same.

In the meantime, the immigrants will continue to arrive at Europe’s borders, disembarking on its beaches, invading its trains, climbing its mountains. Every week, thousands of people, who are digging holes and facing blasts of water, video recordings and tear gas, who have no more luggage than their blood and their future in the form of the bodies of their children, will collect their ration of hope and fate, their part of spring, of a privileged continent, which has, satiated itself by exploiting the greatest number of different regions in the world.

It’s too early to say what the consequences of this great exodus will be. Personally, we welcome the mix of all people, an injection of new blood into a conservative continent which is dying and aged demographically.

However, it is difficult to believe that a homogeneous and compassionate, cosmopolitan and prosperous Europe will emerge out of all of this in the future when new immigrants are arriving at a time in which the extreme right and fascism are on the rise, with neo-Nazis fencing off and setting fire to shelters with mothers and children, barking Hitleristic cries.

If, instead of following American imperialist policies in now devastated countries such as Libya and Syria, or in disguised dictatorships like Egypt, Europe had applied what it spent on weapons in North Africa and in places like Afghanistan to investments in factories in those same countries or on lines of credit that could have generated employment for the Africans before they needed to attempt desperate Mediterranean crossings, and had placed their chips on peace not war, the old continent would not be beset with the problems it is now facing. The sea that bathes the south would not be clogged with cadavers, and the Islamic State would not exist.

This ought to serve as a lesson for the European Union which insists on continuing to be a backup force for the U.S. in war and diplomacy via NATO, so that the same mistakes that were made in the south are not repeated in the east, particularly the provocation of a conflict with Russia as a result of the situation in Ukraine, which could cause a new massive exodus on a second migratory front, one that would multiply the problems, chaos and challenges with which Europe is now dealing.

Europe’s misfortunes, the humanitarian chaos that is taking root in its cities at places like Keleti Station in Budapest and at the entrance of the Eurotunnel in France, demonstrate that history does not tolerate mistakes, principally when these are based on prejudice and arrogance, and instead quickly sends the bill to those who made them.

A chicken that follows a duck will end up drowning.

This is what Brussels and the EU need to learn in regard to Washington and the United States.