Seleucus wrote: ↑Sun May 21, 2017 4:41 amI think it is important to propagate the idea that refugees want to return home.
I don't mind "propagating" it, if it turns out to be true. But I would suggest it would be unwise to imagine it if it's not true.
As I said before, I think IF it's true at all, it tends to be true of only first-generation refugees. It's certainly unlikely to be true of second and third generation people, who have never seen their alleged "homeland," and is likely untrue of economic migrants, which make up the majority of immigration today. By definition, they've not been forced out, but have decided to leave when they did not have to. Why therefore should they suddenly prefer to return?
The Jews are an amazing example.
The Jews are pretty much a historically-unique example. I wouldn't look for that pattern to become general.
Another good example is the return of slaves from the Americas to Liberia after abolition.
Is that why there are so many African-Americans in America?
I think the averages are against your thought there.
Internment camp systems have been extremely successful in achieving nation building. South Africa, Malaysia, and Kenya for example. I'm not saying it isn't a brutal method, but it is arguably less costly of life than than the current policy which seeks to avoid involvement with the population.
I think a less brutal alternative is desirable. The current policy is useless, I agree...but so is forcible "re-education" of people. That's always a human rights disaster.
One of the important lessons we should take away from the Obama period is that after the Arab Spring, overthrowing dictatorships didn't result in popular support for freedom and democracy, the majority supported Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists. The default position of the psychology of the masses was Islamist, some active intervention is required to change that inertia.
I would suggest it needs to be undermined not by force but by persuasion, and not eclipsed by force but by the winsomeness of alternatives. After all, Islam is not a very bright system of belief. The Koran is not a plausible document, even by the most generous reckoning. Mohammed was not an admirable moral example. And Allah "the merciful" is a cold, indifferent and distant account of god. There is much in Islam that leaves the soul hungry and sad.
Fill the empty soul. That's the way you transform a person.
Boko Haram
Very nasty people, those. Angry and hostile to everything Western.
At some point, you have to ask why Islam produces so many moral disasters. It's not like it
generally makes good people, but
occasionally becomes used for nefarious purposes. Islam seems
routinely to create anger, violence, repression, sexism, terrorism, and so forth. As I say, look around the world for a single country that is made happy, just and prosperous by Islam. There isn't a single case. At some point, shouldn't we ask Islam to show its "superiority" in
just one little case?
And if it can't, we really have to ask, why would we persist in encouraging it at all?
Already we see mosques with women doing the call to prayer, for example a case in Denmark. Overall I agree that hundreds of millions of Muslims in the 21st Century are likely not going to reform and the civilization will largely continue with the inertia of thousands of yeas behind it.
The solution is to give them something better. You would say "education," I suppose; and I think that's an admirable idea. But I think they also need some better metaphysical and existential answers too. Give them those, and I think we'll see real change.
The problem is this: the secular soul is so empty it ultimately has nothing to offer them. It has no (non-arbitrary and non-trivial) rationale for hope, morality, identity, meaning, direction or governance. We in the West offer Islamists Nikes, Coca-cola and BMW's in exchange for giving up the centrepiece of their cultural, spiritual and existential hopes. Some take that deal: but a lot won't. And maybe it's not so hard to understand why.