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Published on the Doomstead Diner on November 1, 2015
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As each day and week goes by and the wave after wave of refugees keeps on streaming toward the Promised Lands of Germany & Sweden, it is becoming ever more clear that the Clowns in Brussels have no plan for handling this, and there likely is no plan that can, at least not one that meets the Humanitarian Ideals of the modern Westerner.
Why not? Because the planet is in an extreme case of Overshoot with respect to the population of Homo Saps, and so that population has to shrink. It is far too late even if it was ever possible to resolve the problem of overshoot through Family Planning, Birth Control and so forth, which are also conceits of modernity. The fact the Chinese 1 Child Policy failed so miserably is testimony to the futility of trying to keep the population reigned in via this method.
If you can't keep the population in check by decreasing the Birth Rate, the only other way is on the other side of the Life Equation, by an increase in the Death Rate. So it is inevitable that the Death Rate is going to increase, the only questions are: How will it increase, Where will it occur and Who will be the first to go to the Great Beyond?
In Europe, the origination point for what we call modernity today, there is a conflict between the Humanitarian Ideal of providing shelter and succor for the masses already displaced by climate change and war, and the fact they already themselves are in a situation of overshoot, although not as bad as the folks fleeing MENA nations. Their economies are all tanking on their own, with massive youth unemployment and political instability all over the continent.
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A few northern European countries like Germany and Sweden still seem flush enough to be able to afford taking in a few 10s of thousands of refugees, but those are not the kind of numbers we are talking about here. We're talking 100s of thousands already on the move, and this number is likely to soar into the millions as time goes by here, at least if they don't die before they can get on the move. Saudi Arabia by itself has 30M people, and probably cannot support more than 1M of them, if that.
The proximal cause for this mass migration doesn't appear to be starvation, it appears to be ongoing warfare and poverty. That poverty though is the result of decreasing amounts of exportable Oil, and factions are fighting over who gets what is left of this shrinking pie. The most powerful faction gets not most of it but ALL of it, and the weaker factions have no access to money to buy food, even if there still is some being shipped in there. They can't even scratch out a living as poor subsistence farmers anymore, because years of drought and soil depletion have left many towns inhabited since Biblical times now uninhabited. At first they moved into the larger cities, but of course there was no better opportunities there, and so they now are on the move to try to make it to Germany before they die where they are.
The migration route is long and dangerous on its own, even in good weather. The boats making the water crossings are flimsy and overloaded as the Human Traffickers try to make as much money as they can off the misery. On the overland portions of the journey, they have numerous borders to cross on the way to Germany or Sweden. The countries in the Balkans in their path like Serbia, Croatia, Slovakia, Hungary etc don't want them there and can't afford to feed and house them while they make the transit either, so the ones that are still making it through are sleeping "in the rough", often out of doors without even a tent of their own. These are not Backpackers with full gear for a hike out in the wilderness. If you look at the masses of people walking to the border crossings, many just have the clothes on their backs, not even a suitcase.
Now, in warm weather, this is somewhat doable, although you still have to be pretty hardy for it. If you ever slept on hard ground without even a sleeping pad you know what I mean. However, once winter sets in or even late fall as you move north and also travel through mountainous areas (like the Balkans), night time temps can fall below freezing quite often. You can't last long in this type of weather without real good winter gear. Being an Alaskan now, I have winter gear out the wazoo and can dress for success for winter temps down to 40 Below if necessary, but these folks don't even have good winter jackets or gloves. You don't need such things down in MENA, and I doubt there is anywhere they could buy them even if they have the money. It would have to be ordered online, and I'm not sure FedEx is delivering in Syria and Afghanistan when it Absolutely, Positively has to get there Overnight before you make your Bugout for Sweden. LOL.
So, if these migrants currently on the road numbering in the 100s of thousands distributed all along the route are not to begin FREEZING TO DEATH, they are going to need absolute MINIMUM tents provided and sleeping bags. Who is going to put up these Tent Cities, where along the routes, how will Sanitation be provided, where will the Food and Water come from, who will pay for all of this? Frankly, even with a decent tent and sleeping bag, if the days are cold as well while you are standing in lines waiting to cross borders, hypothermia can set in there also without decent winter gear on, and I doubt they will all be provided with Parkas, Balaclavas, Mittens, Ski Pants, long underwear, polypropylene socks, insulated boots etc.
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Bottom line, barring some complete MIRACLE, there are going to be a lot of DEAD PEOPLE on the Balkan Refugee Highway this year, although the amount of information that actually gets dispersed by the MSM is probably going to be quite small. Pics of Frozen to Death Infants will not play well for TPTB on a competence level, although why anyone might think they are competent anymore is hard to fathom anyhow. The Drowned to Death Infants already have them in trouble.
It's not just on the Refugee Highway you have a problem either, you have nearly as big a problem with the early arrivals who actually made it THROUGH to Germany and Sweden, because while they have set up some Refugee Tent Cities, in a Swedish Winter, a Tent is not going to be enough here. It's already not enough, these encampments have been burning down, partially because you have locals unhappy about the arrival of these folks setting fire to them, but also just because the folks living in them start their own fires for cooking and to keep warm. If you are going to house 10s if not 100s of 1000s of refugees, you're going to need to do a lot better than a few tents. You will need a BIGGER BOAT.
Who is going to pay for this? Food, Sanitation, HEAT FUEL for tents in the winter in Sweden? That by itself will take more than a few cannisters of Propane.
They obviously at this point don't even have TIME to put up any better housing than Army Tents, you're talking only a couple of weeks more before pretty much full on Winter Weather hits in the northern latitudes. Of course it will be a good deal colder in Jan-Feb, and then if you are still stuck in the Mountains, colder still. So at this point, a high Death Toll amongst the refugees seems just about unavoidable.
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Long term, the situation is no better. How do you afford to put up something better than Tent Cities even if you work all through next spring and summer to do it? Where will you build these housing developments, and how will mostly destitute refugees pay the rent? Even if they HAD some money when they left Syria, by the time they finished the journey with the bribes and rip-offs along the way, they have pretty much shot their wad at that point.
So the alternative here is to try to STEM THE TIDE, and somehow STOP or at least slow down this Tsunami of Refugees before it revs up again next year when the weather improves in the Spring. How do you pull off that stunt?
One idea is to hand over a few $Billion$ to Turks and Croatians for THEM to set up Refugee Camps! Except, even if you pay them to do this, first off most of the money will go into some Oligarch's Swiss Bank Account, and second the current local population doesn't much fancy having a bunch of destitute people living in tents nearby. So conflicts develop, at which point it starts costing Da Goobermint more money than they are getting pitched at them to handle the problem. This is one problem you CAN'T handle just by throwing a lot of money at it.
This is not a new problem in Europe, it happened before, though not to this scale or at such speed because the global population was not so large back in the 1800s when the Ruskies began their Pogroms, driving the Jewish Population out of Mother Russia.
The term "pogrom" in the meaning of large-scale, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting, saw its first use in the 19th century, in reference to the anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire. Pogroms began occurring after the Russian Empire, which previously had very few Jews, acquired territories with large Jewish populations during 1791-1835. These territories were designated "the Pale of Settlement" by the Russian government, within which Jews were reluctantly permitted to live, and it was within them that the pogroms largely took place. Most Jews were forbidden from moving to other parts of the Empire, unless they converted to Orthodox Christianity.
For those Jews not killed on the spot there in those Pogroms, they had to engage in a Mass Migration, which was chronicled first on stage and then on film in "A Fiddler on the Roof".
It is estimated that some 2M Jews migrated out of Mother Russia in the late 1800s to early 1900s. A few made it as far as Britain and the FSoA, but many more settled on the Migration Route, in Poland and in Germany. They congregated in impoverished neighborhoods, like the Warsaw Ghetto.
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We all know what happened after that of course. When the Great Depression hit, the impoverished Jews were scapegoated as the cause of all the problems. This time, when Uncle Adolf and the Nazis came to power, his solution was not to drive the Jews out of the country. He had the FINAL SOLUTION to the problem.
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This time around, it's not impoverished Jews being forced to migrate and ending up as impoverished Ghetto residents in Europe, it is impoverished Muslims ending up as Refugee Camp residents, for the time being anyhow. But as the numbers swell and more arrive, the capacity to keep absorbing the influx begins to vanish. For all but a few of the "richer" Northern European countries like Germany and Sweden, the capacity has already vanished. Greece has 50% Youth Unemployment and is an economic basket case even without the 1000s of Syrians arriving each day on the shores of Kos and Lesbos.
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The Clowns in Brussels want to assign the various members of the EU some target number of refugees to accept, to total up to something like 120K. They can't even agree on this, and that number is a drop in the bucket. There are ALREADY more on the move than that, and the number is only likely to get larger here as time goes by.
Is anybody setting up official Hitler-style Death Camps yet? Not as far as we know, but the Refugee Camps that are being set up are already Unofficial Death Camps. The living conditions are atrocious, they are overcrowded and disease will spread/is spreading inside them. In all likelihood the food supply reaching many of these encampents is probably pretty thin, and as winter sets in, the ability to heat the tents is also likely circumscribed by lack of fuel. You don't NEED Zyclon-B produced by IG Farben here to do the Extermination Job this time, Mother Nature will do the job just fine. What you will need are some Caterpillar Backhoes and Daiwoo Front End Loaders, because you are going to need to dig some mighty big mass graves. You are going to have DEAD PEOPLE by the truckload here to dispose of.
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Essentially what you have here is a World of Death Camps. Not in one spot like Germany back in the 1940s, but spread all over the world on the Migration routes between MENA and Europe, SE Asia and Australia and South America and North America. There are millions on the move already here in all these locations, and more on the way.
Is there any way to stop this migration? No, not really, not until it becomes more dangerous to undertake the journey than to stay where you are. Currently, dangerous as such a journey is, it is more dangerous to stay in the war zones and drought ravaged neighborhoods than to roll the dice in a Refugee Camp. Maybe you'll be one of the lucky ones to make it through to the Promised Land. At least until the Promised Land itself is in similar condition, at which point those places turn into similar war zones as the one you are trying to leave.
Europe will be under continuing and escalating Refugee Migration problems for so long as Europe appears to be a better and safer place to live than the place you are trying to exit stage left from. The efforts to stem the tide will mostly fail, and then there will be escalating local violence. This will occur on the southern border of the FSoA also, and in Oz as well. Electrified Fences and more Patrol Boats may slow this a bit for a while, but eventually the defenses fail, as they did for the Roman Empire, as Ugo Bardi has chronicled in numerous articles.
There is a Human Tsunami building here, and this is Not the End. It is not even the Beginning of the End. It is just the End of the Beginning. Thank you, Winston Churchill.