Foreign Affairs and the Lemming Instinct: A Rant

For the past months I've been feeling more and more uneasy about the balance of world politics. I don't know if it's a presentiment or if the world is just surviving as it always does, as contradictorily bad and good.

The sea change in the rhetoric about asylum seekers and migrants, who in my view are caricatured in the Berlin and national German news more and more as a threatening mass. (Quite ignoring the reality that, as two or more speakers at the UN General Assembly mentioned in September, there are more conflicts in the world today than there have ever been since World War II. — The more conflict, the more people fleeing conflict. It's not that people suddenly 'decide' that they want to be refugees. — And that countries around the world, even the poorest, have accepted millions of refugees too; it is not just the European Union and the United States.)

The weird inertia about evacuating people from Afghanistan who are endangered for being women or too 'pro-Western.' Afghanistan being kept in a worsening limbo as countries refuse to work with the "de facto" Taliban government. Apparently refusing because of the Taliban's bizarre policy about women's professional lives and education, which based on General Assembly speeches many other governments in the world seem to see with genuine bewilderment — a policy that also concerns me because it's a huge economic self-own.

The impulse in last week's Bavarian elections to vote extreme right primarily (55% of AfD voters identified this topic as important for them) based on 'concern' about accepting more refugees and migrants. — As if migrants were having the worst effect on quality of life, instead of global inflation due to the War in Ukraine, or climate change-related droughts and other natural disasters, for example. And thereby thrusting young and old, men and women, poor and (well, probably not rich) alike back into the arms of people who will torture, oppress, and kill them. Why not turn into a fascist state at once?

The wielding of eco-friendly home heating legislation in German political discourse as if it were a terrible civil rights oppression. Many countries around the world, affected more badly than Germany by global warming, wish they had as much public money to devote to reducing emissions as Germany does. But also the (in my view) counterintuitive impulse in countries like Germany to produce more and more climate-friendly cars and power plants and heating systems etc. etc. instead of focusing on reducing demand.

The continuing war in Ukraine. The impossibility of shipping its grain to countries who do want it (tons) as opposed to countries who don't want it (Poland, ...).

The downfall of Twitter and the megalomaniacal whims of Elon Musk.

The baffling support amongst American voters for the reelection of the US's 45th president, despite the sleaze that's radiating off of him like a mile-high nuclear fireball.

The peculiar support in business and politics for the United Arab Emirates and especially Saudi Arabia, despite the cloven hoof and horns that peer out whenever one considers the treatment of migrant workers, women, political opponents, people who lived in the path of 'eco-friendly' neo-cities before they were shot to death while protesting, Eritrean migrants crossing the border, and journalists.

And a lot of the unease I felt was already peaking even before Hamas tore down parts of the border wall in Israel and began massacring civilians.

Regardless of whether a cataclysm like a nuclear strike happens or not, justifying my foreboding, Martin Luther King Jr. Day did make me think that I should not whine about all the obstacles to civil rights and political rights today. If he could resist an establishment where policemen were genuinely out to crack his skull, like John Lewis, and much of the political elite that supposedly represented him probably even wanted him dead, and if he could still improve his country under those circumstances — why should I, as a woman who faces little-to-no oppression from my government, give up hope?

It's important to keep trying to live (if one has the privilege of trying it) in a way that shines a beam of light into the tempest.