The EU fears its credibility is at stake as it seeks to weigh growing concerns about the crushing of dissent in Tunisia while preserving a controversial migration deal with the north African country, according to a leaked document.
In the 60s and early 70s, Spain, Portugal, Greece were all authoritarian dictatorships. The western European countries effectively cut off links with them and applied pressure. When the people of each of them overthrew their dictatorships, EEC/EU membership was used as a stabilizing force, and as an aspirational milestone for full democratization.
The EU of the 2010s could have played such a stabilizing role in Mediterranean countries after the Arab Spring. Tunisia had a budding democracy. If the Europeans had taken it seriously and extended a hand for some kind of EU association/integration (like Iceland, Norway or Switzerland), it might have done for them exactly what it did for Spain, Portugal, Greece.
Instead, the Europeans decided to hyperfocus on the symptoms of immigration and embraced democratic dumping. So long as the dictator in Tunis, this homunculus called Kais, stops the migrants, he gets to do whatever he wants. Just so racist northern European hicks don’t vote far right. Well, guess what, they still vote far right and the migrants stilll keep coming.
Europeans just don’t seem to be able to wrap their little brains around the simple fact that they need to treat Africans as people who deserve to aspire to democracy and progress in their own countries too.
Good comment.
Man the Frontex referendum is Switzerland was the most cut in half I’ve ever felt.
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MBFC: Left-Center - Credibility: Medium - Factual Reporting: Mixed - United Kingdom
Wikipedia about this sourceImagine my disgust when I learned the USA, under Madame Secretary Killary, helped the brutal crushing of the Arab Spring (and it seems we helped start it, too, besides the normal covert stuff we do, but I can’t remember), which iirc, also began because a man had only one it two tomatoes to sell to provide another black day for his family, that were ruined by the overturning of a table, or something like that.
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PNAC lays out a plan to destabilize the middle east, and it worked. There was a video of Wesley Clark or someone and a bunch of emails leaked to WikiLeaks and their competitor, forget the name rn. Assange was a political prisoner, not a criminal one.
I shall reiterate:
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We used to have a website called the memory hole that helped preserve such documents but things happened. I had guests come in around 3a.m. so I’m not quite awake yet, and don’t remember the exact details rn. If I remember later, I’ll see if I can find documentation, but a lot of it was scrubbed, lost etc