Migrants, refugees and terrorists - and the short memory of everyone involved

During the height of the migrant/refugee crisis in 2015 many -admittedly right-wing- media outlets and politicians asked the question about how many terrorists are entering Europe with the unchecked flow of people.

Remember the rat cartoon? That is sooo Nazi! (Except it isn't, but don't let a deliberate misinterpretation stand in the way of a good controversy.)

Remember when Hungary tried to enforce the Schengen rules as a border country, and got a shit-ton of flak for that? Just remember the name "Keleti Railway station".

For this they were called Nazis. Yes, I know we don't like Fox News and the Daily Mail; however the whole point of being a rational and liberal person is to actually use, you know, reason instead of labels. Unlike those stupid right wingers who are just putting everything you say into the category of "tree hugging pinko commie", and hence ignore it. No, liberals never would do that.
Ever.

Except they did. Or many of the people who pride themselves as liberals did so. Which is a shame; a shame we would like to quickly forget. They ridiculed, they accused, and they used red herrings so that the actual issue -how many terrorists enter Europe unchecked- was never asked. In fact if you search 2015 articles, you will be reassured, how unlikely it is for terrorists to go through all that suffering just to walk into Europe; after all they can fly, right? (A BBC article talks about Schengen issues pretty eloquently, although appears to avoid some tough questions involving events a couple of months prior...)

After the wave of attacks, of course, the narrative changed; now we can read about how these pesky terrorists used the crowd to mask their presence (just like the rat cartoon suggested), how they abused Europe's naivety to enter and do their shenanigans; but no one in the Guardian, Independent, New York Times, etc. stopped and said: you know, guys? We were wrong. No; what you get is a report on terrorists using the Balkan route to enter Europe, and then an attack on the one politician who dared to mention that it is a very real danger. The terrorist in question came through the Keleti Railway station into the EU I would like to stress. He was helped by well-meaning people (or, being somewhat cynical, people who sought to get political capital out of the situation), who then marched to the Austrian border to demonstrate how evil it is to enforce the law. In other words: terrorist (well, several, as we know) did what those Nazis were warning us they would. Now what? Do we apologise? Or do we keep going on with the offensive?


In fact, they still seem to be very much attacking the one guy who was right in this case. Don't get me wrong; Orban is no saint. He needs to go; this post is not about him. It's just in this one case he was right, and he was right when it mattered- during the height of the crisis, and not in hindsight. Since then his 2015 suggestions of refugee camps outside of Europe (oh, are they hellish? YOU NAZIS!), the protection of borders (I wonder how you do that without fences to force people use the border checkpoints?) -even by the Guardian, and so on have been adopted quickly by the people who called him (and the whole nation of Hungary) a Nazi; and refugees are now called migrants. (It's interesting that even the Guardian changed its tone, and nobody seems to care.)


Yet nobody had the guts to say: you know what? We fucked up. These other guys were right. They just pretend the past did not happen, and by the magic of the media, indeed it has been erased from the history books. And we're not talking about an ancient kingdom's past, or if the Black Prince was indeed such a blood-thirsty tyrant. We're talking about changing what happened two years ago. We're talking about decisions made that cost lives. Could have been some of these events avoided? Who knows? But that does not absolve people who made them, who called others trying to argue for a different approach Nazis, and then now pretend the whole thing did not happen.

It is truly Orwell's worst nightmare coming to life.