Richard Fernandez doesn’t quite grasp the new post-Parisian reality.
The dream of a “borderless Europe” has taken a body blow. Now all courses run ill. The momentum of the migrant tide is already too great to simultaneously pacify public opinion and avert a human tragedy. A million people are on the road, strung out all over the place. Reuters reports that migrants are now making their way through the Arctic route, coming in through Norway via Russia clad in pitifully thin coats. “Ali left Syria to avoid the army draft and paid $2,500 all-inclusive for the trip to the border, which included flying to the Russian Arctic port of Murmansk via Moscow and Beirut. Like others reaching Norway, he cycled the final stretch, as Russian authorities do not allow travelers to proceed on foot.”
Ali may not be as welcome any more. You can’t let them freeze and Paris can’t let them in. Like Syria itself, there are no easy choices left to the Europeans. EU efforts to bribe African countries into repatriating their citizens were met by a blank refusal.
The European Union has been forced to drop controversial plans to deport failed asylum seekers who do not have passports after African countries blocked the move.
European leaders offered more than £1billion aid in a bid to persuade their African counterparts to take back tens of thousands of illegal migrants.
But a migration summit in Valletta, Malta, descended into farce after the Africans rejected the EU plan to expel those who do not qualify for asylum using special papers.
The dilemma the West now faces is that it cannot survive on the basis of the platform which its elites have carefully constructed since WW2. They are being beaten to death with their own lofty statements. They must either continue to uphold the vision of open borders, multiculturalism, declining birthrates, unilateral disarmament and a growing state sector at all costs — in other words continue on the road to suicide — or retreat. As recent events at American campuses have shown, when faced with the choice of saving the Left and saving the actual world, the odds are that “the world” goes over the side first.
If the elites will not save the world, then the world must be saved from the feckless elites.
UPDATE: Paris Attacker Was Syrian “Refugee” Who Arrived in Greece Last Month