The Russians: Who else?
- Bernd Liske
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
CC-BY 2.0, Marco Verch, Flüchtlinge auf einer Wanderung in unwegsamem Gelände
Historical revisionism: The motion by the CDU/CSU
At first, I thought it was fake: Shortly before midnight—Better Man had brought me to tears—I stumbled across a post on X that claimed to publish the wording of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group's motion for secure borders and an end to illegal migration, which is to be presented to the Bundestag this week. After some searching, I found confirmation: it wasn't fake. I was also able to access the text at BILD.
On Sunday, I set out to find articles dealing with the motion. I wanted to know if anyone else had been alarmed by what had caught my attention. I searched in vain. In addition to the question of feasibility under European law, there was friction over the move to distance themselves from the AfD, as it seemed necessary to capture what Friedrich Merz had expressed with such fervor last Thursday:
I don't care who follows this path politically. I'm just saying that I'm not going any other way. And anyone who wants to follow me must adhere to these five points. Compromise on these five issues is no longer possible.
Nowhere did I find any discussion of this paragraph:
The migration crisis stems largely from the Syrian civil war, which Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has fueled and prolonged for years. To this day, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin continues to exploit migration as a hybrid weapon by sending hundreds of people across the Belarusian border to Europe every week. More than a million Ukrainians have fled to Germany as a result of Russia's war of aggression, which violates international law.
It is astonishing how much fake news can be packed into such a short paragraph, thereby falsifying history. Let us first take a look at the Syrian civil war, to which I dedicated an article in DEUTSCHE WIRTSCHAFTSNACHRICHTEN back in 2015: Syria: The West must now resolve the crisis it has caused. In no other country in the Middle East did members of different religions live together as peacefully as in Syria for centuries and even during the decades of the Assad clan's rule. Under Bashar al-Assad, Syria became an economically developing country that was opening up to the West. However, the color revolutions of the Arab Spring destroyed everything in Syria as well. Part of this was due to sanctions imposed by the European Union. An article in the VOLKSSTIMME newspaper on January 14, 2021, entitled "The 'Arab Spring' and the CIA" states:
The outcome of the uprisings is sobering. In many cases, the living conditions of ordinary people have deteriorated even further. The real triggers of the "Arab Spring" remain controversial to this day. Libya and Syria stand out in particular, where foreign powers intervened militarily from the outset. ...
Without massive outside interference, this war would never have triggered the largest refugee movement since World War II and the partition of the Indian subcontinent. At least ten million Syrians are fleeing, around one million have found refuge in Europe, most of them in Germany," wrote Middle East expert Michael Lüders in his 2017 book "Die den Sturm ernten – Wie der Westen Syrien ins Chaos stürzte" (Those Who Reap the Storm – How the West Plunged Syria into Chaos). The book is now considered a standard work on the history and background of the Syrian war.
Anyone interested in the history of the civil war cannot ignore Timber Sycamore: However, instead of the German Wikipedia article with 10 references, it is advisable to read the English version, which has 41 references and is more comprehensive overall. Wikipedia is generally an interesting topic in itself—as is the way it treats us Germans: we would only get confused if we knew everything and some things.
Timber Sycamore was a CIA operation to build, train, finance, and arm the Syrian opposition. The program, approved by Barack Obama, was intended to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Hafiz al-Assad. It was only when Russia intervened in the conflict at the request of the Syrian president to restore Syria's sovereignty – at least in parts – that the tide turned. Russia's entry into the conflict certainly correlates with the increase in the flow of refugees from Syria, but to make this the yardstick of responsibility would be to give general action – naturally only that of the West and in particular the US – carte blanche to shape the world according to its own will, ignoring the sovereignty of nations and branding anyone who rebels against it a terrorist or rogue state. The importance of this consideration is evident from the increasingly serious efforts of the US, Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal to take over the region and the intention to resettle the Palestinians in the surrounding states in order to dominate the region via a Greater Israel. I recommend reading a post I wrote last year.
But, as already indicated, the paragraph in the CDU/CSU parliamentary group's motion has even more to offer. Can anyone—without my help—savour the sentence "The migration crisis stems largely from the Syrian civil war" and come to a realization? In saying this—and leaving it in the text—I do not wish to exaggerate my own importance, but rather to take the opportunity to encourage people to take a more critical look at what they are presented with on a daily basis. We are now dealing with such a volume of fakes and demagoguery that it is increasingly creating a reality that we can no longer imagine otherwise, and if someone comes along and points out that there is another – the real – reality, it is they who are accused of fakes and other things. The reality that has been created is particularly problematic because of the potential consequences: war, death, destruction. That is why it is important to pay attention to such statements: "Respect" for everyone and everything should be the guiding principle. Debate and truth are the only means to this end; without them, all others fail.
The key word in this sentence is "significant." Between 2015 and 2017, 481,798 refugees came from Syria. "Significant" would mean – as a German citizen, one cannot avoid encountering one or the other from time to time – that there would then be an insignificant number of citizens of other nations who found their way to Germany: Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis, and so on. But the statistics – we Germans are tidy, after all – tell a different story: during the same period, 178,076 Afghans, 152,146 Iraqis, and 632,857 refugees from other nations arrived. Syrians thus accounted for 33.3% of the total number of refugees.
Given these figures, can we say that the migration crisis was "primarily" caused by the civil war in Syria – especially when we consider that the other primary refugee flows can be attributed to similar causes? Oh, I just noticed something else: I forgot about the Ukrainians – although they are not refugees in the sense of the asylum law and do not have to go through the asylum procedure. However, there is no getting around the fact that over 1.2 million people is a significant number, which is contributing to the strain on the German social welfare system, local authorities, and the education system. If we take this figure into account – and disregard figures for other refugees between 2018 and today – the proportion of refugees from Syria falls to 18%. For further details, and in particular the costs, please refer to my article last week on the attack in Aschaffenburg.
Blaming Russia for the migration crisis is pretty far-fetched, and even if the Russian president were actually to personally bring a few hundred refugees to the Polish border every week (it doesn't say that. Well, are there hundreds?), this extremely modest number would be a rather ridiculous "hybrid weapon." On the issue of who is actually using the flow of refugees as a weapon, I refer you to my post from last week. Similarly, not blaming Russia for the Afghans shows that the CDU/CSU parliamentary group is capable of thinking in terms of epochs. The same applies to the Iraqis: there was no poison gas in the country, nor were there any Russians acting on Putin's behalf who brought death and destruction to the country and the region in the form of ISIS, thus triggering the refugee movement from there.
Can you really sell anything to Germans these days? Looking at the polls, you have to assume so: at most, the attempt to link Russian responsibility for the German migration crisis with the slogan "We can do it" in order to subtly raise the question of whether Angela Merkel is an agent of Putin might be a bit too much. Otherwise, Germans swallow a whole lot of undigested information every day, and Russophobia is the primary contribution to their daily diet.
I have once again conveyed to the esteemed reader of my texts the experience of always looking, when clarifying the reasons for a multitude of problems, whether the zero hour from which one investigates the causes can be pushed back and whether further influences can be discovered there. A tip: this also applies to the "Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, which violates international law," which I do not wish to discuss in detail here.
I have already included the moral of my little reflection in various places in the text this time, so I will leave it at that. The remaining parts of the motion are already being debated, and it will be interesting to see how the political decision-making process shakes out. My suggestion above to get back into the habit of thinking (and reflecting) for oneself certainly applies here as well.
