Will This Be Jason Kenney's MS St. Louis?

According to the Canada Border Services Agency, Hungarians — the bulk of whom are said to be Roma — are the top users of the Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration Pilot Program which kicked off in the Greater Toronto Area on June 29.

 

 

But Roma Community Centre executive director Gina Csanyi-Robah likened the program to a “bribe” and said many people are “misinformed” about it, as information doesn’t seem to be available in Hungarian.

 

 

I really, really hope I'm wrong about this.  I hope that somewhere, ten years down the road, somebody will poke me in the ribs and say "remember when you were fretting about ethnic persecution in Hungary turning into a repeat of genocide?  Boy, did you screw that up!"

 

 

"We need to roll back these hundreds of thousands of Roma outlaws. We must show zero tolerance towards Roma crime and parasitism," Jobbik chairman Gabor Vona told a rally of several hundred people in Heroes' Square in central Budapest.

 

 

The evidence, however, suggests otherwise.  Democracy in Hungary isn't what it once was.  The EU has made some critical noise, but there aren't any teeth behind the criticism.  As Hungarians grapple with the same economic same challenges being faced across Europe, there's an increased focus on placing the blame on minority groups like Jews and Sinti-Roma.  It all sounds familiar.  At Why Should I Care last night, Barbara Falk (a professor at DND) talked about how the Raoul Wallenberg monument had been desicrated with pig's blood.  During a recent trip to Budapest, she wondered if that was what Berlin felt like in 1933.  She's not the only one thinking that.

Here's another repeat of history; using all kinds of excuses about cutting costs and focusing on legitimate refugee claims, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney is finding ways to send Sinti-Roma in Canada back to Hungary.  His messaging on this file sounds eerily familiar to that of a predecessor of his, Frederick Charles Blair.  Blair is remembered by history not for filtering out fake refugees or for saving Canada money, but for shutting out Jews trying to flee the Holocaust. 

 

 

It's all well and good for Kenney to make positive noise about funding and support and doing what's best for Canada, now, but history will judge him on the consequences of his actions.  How is this program being communicated to all, but especially to Hungarian refugee claimants?  Are we living up to our end of the bargain?  What is Canada doing to closely monitor what's happening in politics and on the ground in Hungary?  Have we learned anything from past mistakes?

 

 

Again - I really hope I'm wrong.  I fear that I'm not.  It would be better for everyone if Jason Kenney comes to his senses and we never have to find out.

Profiling The Kadhrs: This Smacks of Eugenics

Welner also discounts much-cited comments by some U.S. guards at Guantanamo that the Toronto native is a “good kid” and “salvageable” – calling them “shallow in their prognostic significance.”

 “When one leaps to the conclusion about Omar Khadr’s future because he is friendly, one might recall that Osama bin Laden has always been described as gentle, likeable and charming,” New York-based Welner told Postmedia News.

“Lest we forget,” Welner said, “Omar Khadr’s university-trained father, for whom Omar translated, was ‘good’ enough that others would give him their money for his orphanage – yet he was raising money for al Qaida, and (was) a high-ranking member” of the terror group.

Dr. Michael Welner is a forensic psychiatrist, one of many looking for ways to quantify evil.  He has been called to offer testimony on the likes of Luka Rocco and, of course, Omar Kadhr.  This, to be, is more than dubious science, as evil is a linguistic catch-all and not a scientific concept; it's a little too familiar.

Even more disturbing are the connections Welner is making between Kadhr, his father and Osama bin Laden; it doesn't matter what they say, it doesn't matter how they act, they are fundamentally evil and that evil can't be overcome.

If we believe that as a concept, what's the conclusion to be drawn?  That some people, groups of people, perhaps even whole tribes are not suitable for social living.  What do you do when you have people that you don't want around?  You run them out of town.  Or, failing that, you contain them.  When you create a distinct divide between yourself and a perceived other, you permit yourself to stop seeing them as human and remove responsibility on your part to treat them as human.

We're seeing what that looks like in Syria.  We've seen it before - in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, in Nazi Germany.  Simple solutions with finality are never the answers they seem to be on paper.  There's a reason for that - life isn't simple.  Answers aren't simple.  We might prefer them to be, we might even delude ourselves that they are, but simplicity exists in our minds only.

There are psychotic people in the world - people, human beings - who do not have the neuro-psychological capacity for empathy.  They aren't evil, they're limited, just as someone born with any deficit is.  While these folk can be dangerous to society and must be contained, they aren't monsters, any more than a shark is.  Beyond this, the brain is a very plastic organ; with the right training, accommodations and environment, most neurological conditions can be managed.  It's just takes conscious effort on the part of everyone.

This issue isn't about Omar Kadhr - he's a symptom, not a disease, one person that none of us has ever spoken to.  This is about what we are willing to accept as fact on the belief of so-called experts.  We cannot allow for philosophies - for that's all they are - like Werner's to stand unchallenged.  We've seen before what happens when prejudice is justified by science.  It's not a path we want to walk again.

UPDATE - Now, Francois Legault is adding his own piece to the eugenics file, saying Quebec kids should be more like Asian kids.  What's really being asked is, what motivates behaviour?

Children Always Come First

By February 2012, Syrian forces had killed 500 children, according to Navi Pillay, the UN human rights chief. "They've gone for the children -- for whatever purposes -- in large numbers," Pillay told the UN Human Rights Council, as she appealed once again for the UN Security Council to refer Assad to the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.

Young children were particularly targeted by the Nazis to be murdered during the Holocaust. They posed a unique threat because if they lived, they would grow up to parent a new generation of Jews. Many children suffocated in the crowded cattle cars on the way to the camps. Those who survived were immediately taken to the gas chambers.

People shouldn't be surprised that children are always first targets.  In a survival-of-the-fittest game, it's never about competing and building strength, it's always about eliminating competition.

This is as true in politics or business hierarchies as it is in natural selection.

People look at the murderers of history and say "animal."  Of course they're animals - all human beings are animals; we're great apes, not much different than chimpanzees.  We're mammals, just as are lions. 

But we're also more than that - we are the most social and the only recognized sentient species on earth.  Every social organization shows us that diversity, specialization, collaboration and mutual support make us stronger.  The whole is more than the sum of our parts, when we're conscious of this.

Which is why progressive societies educate their young, provide healthcare for their young, ensure their children have all the tools they need to succeed as strong, independent individuals in a strong, collaborative social environment. 

If you want to go fast, go alone - see how long you last.

If you want go far - move together.

The Apex Predator: Chronicle, Capitalism and Genocide

“Soon, many Afrikaners were calling themselves Doppers, after the little metal caps with which they snuffed out candles.  They called themselves Doppers because they were deliberately and consciously extinguishing the light of the Enlightenment, so that they could do what they had to do in darkness.”

  - Rian Malan, My Traitor’s Heart

If you haven’t seen the found-footage, superhero flick Chronicle, you should.  Apart from telling a great, chilling story with achingly real characters, Chronicle presents a thought-provoking example of how confabulation (consciously or unconsciously creating fictional narratives to alleviate cognitive dissonance) allows us to justify the unjustifiable.

The video clip linked to the picture above says it all.  The villain in the film comes to see himself as an Apex Predator – at the top of the human food chain, a lion amongst men.  His power gives him the absolute right to crush lesser mortals, like a child stepping on an ant.  Which he does, leading to horrifying results.  Sadly, he is part of a cycle; the wrongs he commits are instigated by wrongs he suffered himself.  In the end, there were no winners. 

Part of the brilliance of the film is the way in which this character develops into a monster; he can’t intentionally inflict harm on people until he ceases to see himself as one of them.  It’s this piece that has something to tell us about the decline of capitalism and why our world is becoming an increasingly polarized place.  It's less an indictment of a given system than it is a comment on the human condition.

Lions, you see, aren’t individual actors – they’re a species.  While lions might hunt gazelles with impunity, there are social consequences when lions compete with each other.  When individuals or groups of people try to see themselves as resting at the top of the food chain, they consciously or unconsciously establish a false divide between themselves and everyone else.  While distinctions of “other” justify actions or indifference that would be unconscionable directed at “one of our own,” these divisions are completely false – and they have consequences. 

In fact, if history tells us anything, it’s that sooner or later, you reap what you sow.  It’s a lesson we seem to be doomed to repeat.