There is a great deal in the media about the refugee crisis in Europe and Greece’s role as a buffer zone between Turkey and the rest of Europe. The majority of it centers on the EU’s attempts to prevent refugees entry and the banishment of refugees to Turkey – all of which I believe to be clearly true.
It’s far easier to destabilize a region (Syria & Iraq) and then ignore the fallout (an inevitable refugee crisis) rather than to actually deal with the aftermath. It’s even easier when your intention, or political motivation, is to smear the victims of the crisis with labels such as ‘terrorists’. Is it an exaggeration to use the following analogy: You blow up someone else’s house; then get irate at them when they seek shelter in yours? Greece seems to be at the center of the headlines on the refugee crisis. But why? Because they let them in?
I’ve been doing a bit of travelling around Europe since the beginning of the refugee crisis in Europe and Athens is the first city in which I’ve seen any serious ocular evidence of refugees. The most deplorable part of this is that Greece is one of the least equipped countries in Europe to deal with another crisis!
I see queues of migrants outside the soup kitchen near my hostel; they sit playing cards in the hotel lobby I’m sitting in as I write this and they walk the streets looking – considering their circumstances – content. I’m not advocating Greece as a utopia for the displaced – but they are here and seem well cared for. That is, at a time when Europe is intent on treating them as a virus, which it must eradicate from it’s boarders.
From my own observations it would seem that a country which has known hardship – albeit on a lesser scale – is far more open to empathy and humanity then the voracious powers of Western Europe. To rephrase a great man’s words, ‘I look to a day when people will not be judged by [the country they were born] but by the content of their character’ (Martin Luther King Jr.).
Scribblings and Broken Glass 