More hokum from the great Ai Weiwei

There can be few sentient beings in the plugged-in world unacquainted with the heart-wrenching photo of Aylan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose lifeless body was photographed on a Greek beach some months ago.



It's a photo that resonated on many levels. It shamed many into donating to charities that have been assisting in the resettlement of refugees. Here in Canada it triggered an outcry over the foot-dragging by the Harperites in bringing refugees to this country.

But for Ai Weiwei, the picture was an inspiration.



Yes, in case you were not familiar with the refugee crisis before, now that the great Ai Weiwei has taken up the cause you have no excuse for your ignorance...

More tastless self-aggrandizing hokum from Ai Weiwei.

Canada: half a million temporary foreign workers but no room for refugees

Big Steve and his side-kick Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander have seriously misread the Canadian street viz the European refugee crisis.

Seems most Canadians just want to help hurting refugees, especially those who find themselves in the headlines now, thanks to the tragic death of three year old Aylan Kurdi.

The Syrians.

Thanks to the photo of Aylan that went viral, Syrian refugees are the cause du jour.

Mr. Harper addressed the issue by re-announcing talking points that he has announced several times before; that Canada will accept up to 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next three years.

In the three years since he first made that promise, the number of Syrians who have actually arrived here has been negligible. In fact, government spokespersons get downright huffy when that question is posed.

It might be 2,000.

It might be 2.

We don't know because the Harper gang won't tell us.

This niggardliness with providing sanctuary to refugees is the worst performance by Canada since the refusal to accept Jews during WWll, documented in Irving Abella's book None is too many.

Since then, every Canadian government, Liberal and Conservative, has atoned for that by offering compassion and generosity to the world's huddled masses.

Hungarians arrived here in their tens of thousands after the 1956 uprising.

The "boat people" of Viet Nam also came in by the tens of thousands in the seventies.

Clearly Canada can accommodate and successfully integrate tens of thousands of refugees in a relatively short time.

The think tank here at Falling Downs has a draft plan pencilled up; we send home half a million temporary foreign workers at the end of their contracts, and replace them with refugee immigrants who are going to make a commitment to Canada.

Not just from Syria, but from Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and Eritrea and Somalia.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

Will one picture of a dead toddler be a game-changer?

Not in Canada.

The Farm Manager actually asked me that question.

Will one picture of a dead toddler be a game-changer?

It's a question that has Media Studies 101 written all over it...

We've certainly tamped down on the "sociology" here during the Harper years. You know, the sociology that suggests that when you kill somebody's parents and grandparents, their children and grandchildren make it their life's work to kill you and your grandchildren and grandparents in return...

Yup, a lot of those backward folks in the Middle East buy into that kind of shit.

Which is something the morons in Ottawa should have given some thought to before they embarked on their "let's bomb ISIS" mission.

But, in for a penny, in for a pound, as the saying goes...

Globalization and mass migration

There's nothing new about refugees. My own parents count themselves among the 15 million ethnic Germans who fled Eastern Europe towards the end of the WWll.

We are constantly reminded by our media that the current wave of migrants/refugees represent the largest population movement since those dark days.

Why? And why now?

Why? Once people are sufficiently desperate, they will risk everything in an attempt to improve their lot and that of their children. Over the past generation we in the virtuous West have done our very utmost to destroy the quality of life in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria.  We have largely succeeded.

While the citizens of those countries have had their quality of life destroyed, technology has simultaneously allowed them to view daily a vastly overblown cornucopia of Western propaganda that relentlessly trumpets the fact that here in the Nations of Virtue the streets are indeed paved with gold. When you've already lost everything but your life, why not risk that in a desperate attempt to make it to The Promised Land?

Hundreds of thousands are seeing the logic in that.

For the Africans the back-story is only slightly different. For the most part they haven't been recently dispossessed by our subterfuges about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction or that despicable ruse of empire, the fatuous "responsibility to protect" doctrine, or R2P.

Instead, they've been dispossessed by the last several hundred years of colonialism, including the neo-colonialism of the supposed "post-colonial" era. They too, thanks to the ubiquity of modern technology, are inundated with Hollywoodesque representations of life in the West. As long as they see heaven in the West and we keep making their worlds hell, those refugee-migrants will keep on coming.