Von der Leyen’s EU group plans Rwanda-style asylum schemes
www.theguardian.com
Centre-right European People’s party says it wants to create deportation deals with non-EU countries to head off rise of far right

The European People’s party (EPP), an umbrella group of centre-right and conservative parties, has said in the final draft of its manifesto ahead of elections to the European parliament in May that it wants a series of deal with non-EU countries with a view to deporting irregular migrants for asylum processing in “safe” third countries.

“Yet another unsavoury EPP chunk of red meat, meant to attract the far-right vote. It will not work. All the EPP strategy has achieved over the past years, is making the far right bigger. So if they know it doesn’t work, why do they stubbornly repeat the same tactics each time?” said Sophie in ‘t Veld, a Dutch MEP, and the lead representative for the liberal Renew group on the parliament committee for civil liberties, justice and home affairs.

  • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.deEnglish
    0·
    8 months ago

    Every step in the direction of the fascists will be followed by the demand for another step. But with the first step the political window has shifted, so the next step suddenly seems discussable when before it was just considered to bei heinous, barbaric and strongly rejected. This is how fascism rises. Not in a landslide, but step by step by step. I don’t expect some uneducated dissapointed young men from an underdeveloped region to get this. But the politicians know what they do and they make the same mistakes like a hundred years ago. But this time it is deliberate.

    Mass deportations to third countries, particularly in Africa, is a plan straight out of the Nazi book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_Plan

    The Madagascar Plan was a plan proposed by the Nazi German government to forcibly relocate the Jewish population of Europe to the island of Madagascar. Franz Rademacher, head of the Jewish Department of the German Foreign Office, proposed the idea in June 1940, shortly before the Fall of France. The proposal called for the handing over of control of Madagascar, then a French colony, to Germany as part of the eventual peace terms.

    The idea of re-settling Polish Jews to Madagascar was investigated by the Polish government in 1937,[1][2] but the task force sent to evaluate the island’s potential determined that only 5,000 to 7,000 families could be accommodated, or even as few as 500 families by some estimates.[a] As the efforts by the Nazis to encourage the emigration of the Jewish population of Germany before World War II were only partially successful, the idea of deporting Jews to Madagascar was revived by the Nazi government in 1940.

    Rademacher recommended on 3 June 1940 that Madagascar should be made available as a destination for the Jews of Europe. With Adolf Hitler’s approval, Adolf Eichmann released a memorandum on 15 August 1940 calling for the resettlement of a million Jews per year for four years, with the island being governed as a police state under the SS. They assumed that many Jews would succumb to its harsh conditions should the plan be implemented.[5] The plan was not viable when proposed due to the British naval blockade. It was postponed after the Nazis lost the Battle of Britain in September 1940, and it was permanently shelved in 1942 with the commencement of the Final Solution, the policy of systematic genocide of Jews, towards which it had functioned as an important psychological step.[6]

    • gapbetweenus@feddit.deEnglish
      0·
      8 months ago

      Don’t you think that equating EPP to Nazis is rather disingenuous? Motivations and ideologies matter and EPP is not the same as NSDAP by quite a big margin. For example Germans far right had a meeting talking about a plan to remove all “non-biogermans” from Germany - that indeed was almost the same as the Madagaskar plan.

        • gapbetweenus@feddit.deEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Before mass slaughtering the Jews in concentration camps, the Nazis also proposed to deport all the Jews to some african country, for instance Madagascar.

          That is the plan of the fascists.

          It’s not that hard to read the comment I was referring to as equating EPP with fascist.

      • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.deEnglish
        0·
        8 months ago

        I’m not equating the EPP to Nazis. I say that they are willing to cooperate with Fascists, coopt fascist ideas and through this give rise to fascism. It is the same thing that the conservatives did in the 1920s and 1930s. The patterns are the same, the talking points are the same. The delusions about being able to control the fascists are the same.

        That does not mean that they themselves are fascists. But they are willing to play that game, where everybody except the fascists are losing in the long run. And they do so for short term gains, that will be meaningless, just like the conservatives in 1930s Germany quickly found out.

        • gapbetweenus@feddit.deEnglish
          0·
          8 months ago

          Before mass slaughtering the Jews in concentration camps, the Nazis also proposed to deport all the Jews to some african country

          You might understand that I interpreted that as equating to Nazis.

          Otherwise, I would agree that conservatives a running an appeasement strategy with far right voters - but it’s not like the left has found any strategy to combat the rise of the right. In realty no-one (mainstream) want’s to touch the underlying structural problems with a pole (global inequality and general exhaustion from capitalism), I would guess because there is not really a solution in the current system.