A TIDAL WAVE OF DESPERATE HUMANITY
(…seeking refuge from criminal tyranny and indiscriminate barbarous violence)

There’s only one way to describe what’s happening to Europe today…it’s being swamped by a tidal wave of desperate humanity seeking refuge from criminal tyranny and indiscriminate barbarous violence…but it doesn’t know how to really cope with it for several reasons.

Beyond basic humanitarian considerations, such as Germany’s and Austria’s more or less welcoming moves to allow them in, the EU’s apparent collective paralysis on how to properly deal with the situation is because it faces a wrenching dilemma. That is, how to accommodate and assimilate such an overwhelming mass of humanity, all at one time, having a completely different set of cultural values from itself? Even for those members, such as Germany and Austria, which seem to have a higher capacity and infrastructure than the others to absorb and support such an alien inflow, it is too overwhelming to contemplate, thus their reluctance to make more than the bare minimum of humanitarian moves to deal with it.

Such mass population displacements and migrations are always disruptive and, regrettably, also often result in violence, as we’ve seen in the news, mainly sparked by ethnic, racial, and religious factors which just aggravate the situation. And despite the homogenizing veneer of “globalization” what we’re seeing in this instance is how two broad regional cultural matrices are clashing instead of interacting positively with each other.

Simply put, the EU as a whole is a vast “Christianized” cultural matrix, with all of norms and values that derive from that, and regardless of the many variants of it among its components, that prevails throughout the region. Conversely, as a whole, from the Atlantic shores of Morocco to the near reaches of the Indus, and up into the Kirgiz, Uzbek, and Kazak parts of Eurasia, it’s a vast “Islamic” cultural matrix, with all of the norms and values that derive from that, and regardless of the many variants of it among its components, that prevails throughout that region.

That’s the reality of the divide involved in this situation. Unfortunately it is not being honestly and openly acknowledged by anyone, which explains the difficulty of finding a mutually acceptable resolution for such a horrific humanitarian crisis. What’s worse is the way some would-be EU demagogues use the situation to promote their xenophobic agendas, while trafficking jackals on the other side exploit it to profit from the misery of it all. It is not a very flattering picture of our human character.

But to put it into its proper context, this is the result of the collective misguided policy of the entire international community not to intervene early on in Syria’s civil conflict, by not providing some sort of a “safe haven” within Syria, for those of its people who were attempting to free themselves from a brutally tyrannical regime. Thus, without it they remained fragmented, unable to consolidate and organize themselves into a viable entity, with a resulting vacuum in which the rabid ISIS virus was able to spawn and erupt, adding the pressure of another tyranny even worse than the one they rose up against.

This is the genesis of the situation we have today. With no other options for survival in their homeland these are now voting…with their feet. How it will all end, or what will be the impacts to result from it we cannot say. But one thing we can be sure of…neither Europe nor any part of the Middle East will ever be the same again.

CENTURION