THE REFUGEE CRISIS: FROM TERRIBLE TO WORSE.

The unfolding gigantic refugee crisis in Europe seems to be going from terrible to worse, underscoring the profound political, economic, and social crisis in Europe, threatening to tear to shreds the fabric of Western Civilization with its historically developed system of values and even well-established legal procedures.

There is no way the present crisis can be reasonably resolved to anybody’s satisfaction for as long as it remains what it is: an irreconcilable clash of the extremes, for as long as its specific underlying causes have not been thoroughly examined and addressed.

Paraphrasing an old wisdom, this is a clash of heart versus head. Those who are against admitting the refugees seem to have no heart. Those who are ready to welcome all of them with open arms seem to have no head. The heart side has received a powerful boost from the appeal of Pope Franciscus to Christian humanistic sensibilities, a commendable emotional reaction to human tragedy.

The head side appeals to reason, to the sobering-up of the day after. To the inevitable political, economic, socio-cultural, and national security consequences in our age of global terrorism and resultant state-sponsored paranoia, in which the side effects of the medicine administered to societies may not be much better than the disease itself.

How can we bring together heart and head to a constructive dialogue, in which the mutual disdain and disparagement would not scuttle any mutually acceptable solution? Both sides are correct in their approach to the reality of the current crisis. What makes them incompatible are the numbers.

Stalin once famously said: One human death is a tragedy. A million dead is just a statistic. He has been severely condemned for saying this by his critics, but Stalin’s critics in this case are hypocrites. There is no better formulation than his, to put the current refugee problem into proper perspective. I see a dead child washed ashore on a Turkish beach, and my heart breaks with grief. I instantly want to open my house and my wallet to help prevent another such tragedy. The next instant I am not so eager about my house and my shrinking wallet, but now I want my government to do the helping. After all, I am paying them enough in taxes to do the right thing!

But mind you, we are talking about actual human tragedies. How many of them can our senses register and process before our emotional empathy gets numb? When we reach an exceptionally large number, isn’t it true that our response will become different? Isn’t a million human tragedies just a statistic, where our emotion finally steps back, and reason grabs the center stage?

A million refugees? What about ten million? Come on, where does it stop?

And then, suddenly, in the shadow of the heartless statistics, even one child’s death does not hurt anymore. Goodbye, human values, goodbye, our bleeding heart! From now on, let commonsense do the talking!..

Farewell, compassionate Europe, “and if forever, then forever fare thee well.” The time has come for new leaders to march their nations toward a new clash of civilizations, where one extreme must conquer the other, in order to survive, because they are so utterly incompatible…

But let us approach the current crisis from another angle. A million refugees, or maybe even two, coming to Europe? But why not a billion or two, or even more? How many unfortunate victims of the world, and they do count in billions, would not desperately want to leave their failed and failing countries and come in search of better lives in Europe, in America, in Canada or in other fortunate areas of the world, where they can escape misery and outright human tragedy? How many more little children’s corpses have in fact been washed out on a beach somewhere where we do not care about them, because we do not see their pictures, and, frankly, we do not want to care? Billions of victims somewhere too far away to matter? But that is just it: a statistic!

Indeed, Stalin was right. He was so right that I emphasized this quote in my erstwhile book Stalin and Other Family, written in 1999, and in my entry Tragedy and Statistics, posted on this blog on February 7^th, 2011, A billion or a million, or even a hundred thousand, --- these are just numbers. And to go even further, even one human tragedy is just a statistic, as long as it is reasonably far away from us, as long as it does not disturb our general sense of quiet complacency. Out of sight, out of mind!

But what if all those billions did start descending upon rich Western nations, like the current refugees are? Come to think of it, why are some refugees luckier than others? Who empowers their exodus and their arrival in Europe, and why? This “why” is a very important question, because having an answer to it, we may start understanding what is going on, why some refugees are coming in, whereas others, even in direr straits are precluded from coming. Where does the money come from to pay, quite handsomely at that, for the precarious journey? Why do some people have this money, while others don’t? Is the tragedy of Syria so much greater than the tragedies of Iraq, Libya, and of many other countries torn by civil war?..

With the unspeakable tragedy of the current refugee crisis in full swing, it may appear too cruel to raise all these “heartless” questions. But I also keep wondering why all these Syrian refugees are fleeing to Europe from a country where, under President Assad, before this terrible war had started, they had admittedly led fairly prosperous lives, had received very decent education, had access to medical help and numerous other amenities, and lived in peace with their neighbors…

Why did the war start, in the first place? Not the official version, quite blurry at that, but the real deal!

Perhaps, asking this question first may be the right start in addressing the current refugee crisis and, I am sorry to say, more of them to come, in the not so distant future.