Tag: Poland

Donald Tusk is a ray of hope exposing Europe’s far-right slumber

Posted on by Migrant Tales

As Finland plans to open two of its eight border crossing points Thursday, Interior Minister Mari Rantanen was busy on A-studio spreading her usual bravado and get-tough-on-migrant soundbites earmarked principally for the Perussuomalaiset (PS)* party’s supporters.

Rantanen has a funny habit of smiling after a difficult comment. According to her, some 900 asylum seekers were a threat to national security and therefore Finland had to close the border with Russia.

It’s pretty clear that after breaking its campaign, like promising lower fuel prices at the pumps and food prices, coupled with massive cutbacks in social welfare spending, the PS is in deep trouble with its supporters.

After the European Council’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatovic, rebuked Rantanen for the closure of the border, Poland’s new Prime Minister Donald Tusk gave a strong speech at the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, that gave hope against the toxic tide of anti-immigration rhetoric, which runs also high in Finland. as well.

“The criticism [by EU Commissioner Miatovic] doesn’t have any bearing on our decision [to open up two border crossings] since the government has been guided by national security, which has been the main factor for closing the [Finnish-Russian] border,” said Rantanen.

Interior Minister Mari Rantanen (left) and Prime Minister Donald Tusk are two very different politicians. Sources: Yle and Wikipedia

In many respects, Tusk’s speech was not only directed at the outgoing ruling party, Law and Justice (PiS), but against xenophobic politicians like Rantanen and other ones in other European countries.

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Movies like Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” are needed more than ever today

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Thanks to Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” we can now get a terrific glimpse of the suffering of asylum seekers who were used as political pawns by Belarus and Poland. Since it would have been impossible to film the movie in Belarus or Poland, Holland created a movie with actors to debict these people’s suffering.

Writes the Guardian: “Green Border, a feature film by the celebrated director Agnieszka Holland, won the special jury prize in Venice last month. It tells the story of a Syrian family trying to get to Europe via the Belarus-Poland border in 2021, and the brutal treatment they receive at the hands of Polish border guards.”

The movie also exposes the hypocrisy and racism of Europe towards such people.

“The end of the film makes the explicit comparison between the two refugee crises,” the daily continued, “and the different receptions granted to Ukrainians and to the much smaller number of darker-skinned refugees from Africa and the Middle East received at the border.”

In Finland, Perussuomalaiset* Interior Minister Mari Rantanen announced a tightening of asylum procedures in Finland by speeding up the process to four weeks. The asylum seeker will wait for the decision at the border.

Continue reading “Movies like Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” are needed more than ever today”

The EU’s double standards on the treatment of refugees are out of step with its alleged values

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There is mounting evidence about how Polish and Ukrainian border guards openly discriminate against non-Ukrainians and minorities like the Roma fleeing war as well as attacks by Polish nationalists. The commissioner for home affairs and migration, Ylva Johansson, has only words of praise.

“We can expect a lot of EU unity and EU solidarity towards Ukrainian if the situation deteriorates significantly,” Johansson was quoted as saying last month in Euronews.

The commissioner does not mention last November’s inhumane treatment of asylum seekers on the Belarus border or the discrimination that Africans and people of color are facing at the border.

While such hypocrisy is visible for everyone to see if they wish, it shows not only how racist Europe is but how little it has done to combat this social ill.

In light of the discriminatory and racist treatment by Polish and other EU border guards of non-EU citizens, I was surprised by a tweet from the Polish ministry of foreign affairs denying and slamming it as “fake news.”

Source: Twitter

I wonder what the Polish chancellery has to say about an African Union and other statements that claim that racist and discriminatory treatment at the border isn’t fake news?

Continue reading “The EU’s double standards on the treatment of refugees are out of step with its alleged values”

Ukrainians battle against the Russians but do little with the Poles to fight racism

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Shameful and racist treatment. Ukrainian train conductors push back on Africans fleeing the war while Polish border officials don’t permit Africans to enter Poland, reports The Guardian. 

Just like when Poland fenced out Middle East asylum seekers in November from entering the country, which even led to the death of children from hyperthemia, Africans are facing the same obstacles at the border. 

Keeping out asylum seekers was done with the full complicity of the EU.

Can you teach an old dog new tricks?

Racism is a driving source of injustice in the EU swept under the rug with double standards and hypocrisy.

Such acts and treatment of Africans and other people of color force Ukraine and the EU to lose their grip on their high moral ground they wish to have.

Source: YouTube

Far-right groups and anti-immigration extremists in Finland and Europe flirt with fascism

Posted on by Migrant Tales

By Enrique Tessieri

When far-right groups and anti-immigration extremists flirt with fascism nothing good can ever come out of it. Even if it sounds incredible, we have in Finland our own holocaust deniers and those who claim the Nuremberg Trials were  a farce.    

Has Perussuomalaiset MP Jussi Halla-aho, Olli Immonen, Juho Eerola and his aide Ulla Pyysalo as well as Kotka councilman Freddy Van Wonterghem ever seen war? I don’t mean playing a Playstation 3 war game or seeing a war movie, but suffering and witnessing the real thing?

When politicians make statements denying or playing down the Holocaust, state that the the Nuremberg Trials [see Natsi-Saksasta] were “a farce,” or openly admit they like Benito Mussolini and fascism, they are breathing life back to a beast that can terrorize Europe again.

Even if the fascism they like is different from the one we saw in the 1930s, it is the same ogre but in twenty-first century garb. The scapegoats and enemies may have changed, for example Muslims today and Jews before, but it is the same beast.

Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz commandant during 1940-43,  justified the death of an estimated 2.5 million with the following quote:  “I had my personal orders from [Heinrich] Himmler [to exterminate Jews]…Not justified [to exterminate so many people] – but Himmler told me that if the Jews were not exterminated at that time, then the German people would be exterminated for all time by the Jews.”

But there is a far bigger question that Auschwitz doesn’t answer right away: Does that type of systematic mass murder that took place there reveal the dark side of the Nazis or something worrying about us?  Do we all have the potential as a group to become mass murderers?

If we look at the former Soviet Union under Stalin, the systematic genocide committed against Amerindians by white Europeans, the terror that reigned under the Pol Pot regime of Kampuchea, China under Mao Tse Tsung, the slave trade and European colonization of Africa  as well as many other cases, they prove beyond any doubt that we are capable of  barbaric deeds.

It makes no sense to spread hatred and attack and victimize other human beings and groups. If you disagree you need to reread your history again, and again, and again.

The author at the gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp where it reads Arbei Macht Frei, “Work Makes (One) Free.” 

 Some 400,000 Hungarian Jews were exterminated in spring 1944 at Birkenau, or Auschwitz 2.

 The shoes of the victims that ended up in Auschwitz’ gas chambers.  

tygodnik.onet.pl: Psychopaci s? w?ród nas

Posted on by Migrant Tales

Comment: This must be the first Polish-language opinion-piece entry on Migrant Tales by Poland’s leading theologian, father Adam Boniecki. In light of the Norway mass killings, he too asks what is the responsibility of those that claim not to support violence but do so in their writings.

Even if Breivik carries all the signs of a psychopath, Boniecki asks how does the political climate and debate in the media stimulate the psychopath’s behavior? Boniecki answers this question by stating that the killer prescribed the “wisdom” of those that wrote on these hate websites like on the Gates of Vienna. “Words are not innocent,” he writes. “Through words in human history a lot of good and terrible things have emerged.”

One matter about racism and hatred is that it has an unpredictable mind of its own. It can even attack those that are dazzled by its power and gave it its freedom by letting the ogre out of the cage.

___________

Ks. Adam Boniecki
Ku oburzeniu dobrych chrze?cijan policja poinformowa?a, ?e Breivik jest „chrze?cija?skim fundamentalist?”. Trzeba si? pogodzi? i z tym, ?e „chrze?cija?ski fundamentalizm” istnieje, ?e jest równie, a mo?e bardziej gro?ny ani?eli fundamentalizmy laickie.
Thank you Jussi Jalonen for the heads up.