COLUMN: Refugee horrors are not new, and not easily solved

It could have been called “On the Beach at Bodrum.” The photo showed a uniformed Turkish police officer carrying the lifeless body of a 3-year-old Syrian boy who drowned attempting to reach Greece with his refugee family.

The image touched the hearts of millions of people who saw it, and led to calls for Europe to do even more to accept the tides of homeless Syrians and others fleeing the war-torn Mideast.

It is certainly understandable that good-meaning people want to help those who are in need, but good-meaning people should also understand the lessons of history.

In 1925, Ernest Hemingway wrote a vignette about the Greco-Turkish War called “On the Quai at Smyrna.” It too told a heartbreaking story of refugees being left for dead while fleeing from Turkey, and illustrated the callousness of man and the immensity of human suffering.

As the Turks were pushing the Greeks out of their country in 1922 following three years of fighting, they burned the port city of Smyrna and killed as many as 100,000 Armenian and Greek Christians. Hemingway’s short story depicts the scene in brutal detail as refugees huddled on a pier awaiting evacuation or death.

“The worst... were the women with dead babies. You couldn’t get the women to give up their dead babies. They’d have babies dead for six days. Wouldn’t give them up. Nothing you could do about it. Had to take them away finally.”

This was one of the last episodes of the Armenian Genocide, when the Turks slaughtered as many as 1.5 million people from 1915 to 1923. The picture painted by Hemingway is the verbal equivalent of that photograph of a Syrian refugee child dead on a beach near Bodrum. It tears at your heart. You wish you could have saved that child.

But the fact of the matter is that the one drowned Syrian child, Aylan Kurdi, could not be saved alone; Europe is being asked to save all of Syria, all of Libya, all of Iraq, even all of Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of impoverished and desperate refugees are now crossing into Europe and demanding homes, jobs, food, medical treatment. They come from Serbia and cross into Hungary, then Austria, on their way to Germany, which has said they are welcome, or Britain, France and Sweden, which are less enthusiastic about accepting the migrants, but don’t know how to say no.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban, on the front lines in Hungary, has said that the migrant crisis threatens to mean the end of Europe as a European culture. Nearly all of the refugees are Muslims and are following the same path across Europe that the Ottoman Empire took from the 13th to the 17th centuries when they were stopped at the gates of Vienna. Today’s incursion of refugees looks like it will skip across Austria without stopping and will inundate Germany. That’s great for the refugees, but the question, of course, is what will Germany look like in 10 years?

We have got two separate problems, both of which are related, but can’t be solved at the same time. One is the human problem of how do we alleviate the suffering of the refugees? The other is the national problem of how do we maintain the identity and self-determination of the European states?

If you take the approach of solving the human problem without acknowledging the national problem, you will create an unending spiral of misery that will last for centuries. The human problem needs to be solved at the root — in the Middle East — where the Muslim culture needs to take responsibility for its own people. Western countries will generously supply aid as we always have, but it will be up to the countries of the Middle East to stop their own wars and value their own lives.

 Turning Europe into the Middle East by mass migrations will merely import the problems of the Middle East into Europe. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, there is no geographic solution. Picking up and moving to escape the consequences of your alcoholic behavior does not solve anything. You will be just as alcoholic and just as reckless wherever you go.

Likewise importing millions of refugees from dysfunctional countries will simply import their dysfunctional cultures into their new homes. Moreover, it will create religious and ethnic tensions that will make the Bosnian War seem like child’s play. If the quality of life in Europe deteriorates dangerously because of the importation of millions of refugees and migrants, you can expect a pendulum swing that will attempt to push back against those migrants. It could — almost certainly would — get bloody. Alliances, nationalities and religion led to the First World War, as well as the second, and could certainly lead to a third.

Do not be confused by the fact that the migrants are crossing the border without guns. To those whose way of life is being challenged it will inevitably be seen as an invasion. Hitler used an army to invade France, but if he had just told a million German farmers and craftspeople and their families to walk across the border, do you think it would have been any more acceptable to France?

As Donald Trump said recently, “We either have a border, or we don’t have a country.” The same goes for the European Union.

Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake. If you don’t like his opinion, stop by the office and he will gladly refund your two cents. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com