|
U.S. Should Ship Statue of Liberty Back
to France
By Eric Zuesse
February 05, 2017
"Information
Clearing House"
- "SCF"
-
Today’s America is a mockery of it. Lady
Liberty weeps now. So, let’s ship her back from whence
she came, and maybe Europeans will like the symbolism of
it. After all: we got it from Europe, just like we got
the immigrants from there.
Donald Trump might not be able to get
Mexicans to pay for his wall that the U.S. is building
to keep Mexicans out, but would Europeans pay to receive
back this symbolic statue, which France gave to an
America that deserved it, but that no longer does?
This monument for compassion, and against
bigotry, is now merely a metaphorical sore thumb here,
but maybe France would be happy to receive her back, and
perhaps millions of Europeans will proudly pay to see
her, touch her, and stand at her base, to welcome her
back to Europe, which ironically consists of the same
countries from which almost all of America’s
immigrants used to come, before France had gifted the
U.S. with Lady Liberty, back on 28 October 1886.
America’s Department of Homeland
Security reports that,
for the latest available data-year, 2015, the U.S.
granted asylum to 69,920 people. By law since 2012, an
annual limit had been established for refugees into the
U.S.: 70,000.
During that same year in Europe, there
were 1,322,825
applicants for asylum, and 69% of them were granted
asylum.
Eurostat’s asylum statistics display
vastly bigger figures than America’s, for the vast
majority of the vastly smaller countries of Europe, as
Eurostat described:
For first instance decisions, some 75% of
all positive decisions in the EU-28 in 2015 resulted in
grants of refugee status, while for final decisions the
share was somewhat lower, at 69%. …
The highest share of positive first
instance asylum decisions in 2015 was recorded in
Bulgaria (91%), followed by Malta, Denmark and the
Netherlands. Conversely, Latvia, Hungary and Poland
recorded first instance rejection rates above 80%. …
The highest shares of final rejections
were recorded in Estonia, Lithuania and Portugal where
all final decisions were negative…
The number of first time asylum
applicants in Germany increased from 173 thousand in
2014 to 442 thousand in 2015… Hungary, Sweden and
Austria also reported very large increases (all in
excess of 50 thousand more first time asylum applicants)
between 2014 and 2015. In
relative terms, the largest increases in the number of
first time applicants were recorded in Finland (over
nine times as high), Hungary (over four times) and
Austria (over three times), while Belgium, Spain,
Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland and Sweden all reported
that their number of first time asylum applicants more
than doubled. By contrast, Romania, Croatia, Lithuania,
Slovenia and Latvia reported fewer first time asylum
applicants in 2015 than in 2014.
Germany’s share of the EU-28 total rose
from 31% in 2014, to 35% in 2015, while other EU Member
States that recorded a notable increase in their share
of the EU-28 total included Hungary (up 6.6 percentage
points to 13.9%), Austria (up 2.2 percentage points to
6.8%), and Finland (up 1.9 percentage points to 2.6%).
Conversely, France and Italy’s shares of the EU-28 total
each fell nearly 5 percentage points between 2014 and
2015, to 5.6% and 6.6% respectively. …
Syrians accounted for the largest number
of applicants in 12 of the 28 EU Member States,
including 159 thousand applicants in Germany (the
highest number of applicants from a single country to
one of the EU Member States in 2015), 64 thousand
applicants in Hungary and 51 thousand in Sweden. Some
46 thousand Afghan applicants were recorded in Hungary,
41 thousand in Sweden and 31 thousand in Germany.
A further 54 thousand Albanians, 33 thousand
Kosovans and 30 thousand Iraqis also applied for asylum
in Germany; no other EU Member State received
30 thousand or more asylum applicants in 2015 of a
single citizenship. …
In 2015, there were 593 thousand first
instance decisions in all EU Member States. By
far the largest number of decisions was taken in
Germany, … constituting more than 40% of the total first
instance decisions in the EU-28 in 2015. In addition,
there were 183 thousand final decisions, with again the
far largest share (51%) in Germany.
The much larger country, United States,
under its new President Donald Trump, is promising to
cut sharply the number of annually admitted refugees,
downward from its present meager 70,000.
On a per-capita basis, Europe is taking
in seven times as many refugees as the U.S. does. Both
America and Europe are widely expected to reduce, not to
increase, the acceptance of refugees.
So: Does the Statue of Liberty still
represent America — or does it instead represent only an
America that once was, but no longer is?
When considering this question, one might
also consider what precisely caused the refugees to become refugees.
Syria was the largest source of 2015’s refugees into
Europe. What have they been fleeing from? According
to Western-sponsored polls of Syrians throughout that
country, they have been fleeing mainly from U.S. bombs
and bombers, which were supporting Al-Qaeda-backed
jihadist groups that have been trying to take over their
country. Of course, as was being reported in the Western
press, they were fleeing mainly from Syrian government
and its allied bombs and bombers that have been trying
to kill ‘moderate rebels’ against that government.
Those were figures from 2015, when the
U.S. was bombing throughout the year in Syria (where it
was, in fact, an invader), and when Russia (which was no
invader, but instead was invited in by Syria’s
government, to help it prevent an overthrow by that
U.S.-Saudi alliance) started bombing there only late, on
September 30th of 2015. Mainly, Syrians were fleeing
both from jihadists who were trying to take over their
country, and from American bombs that were supporting
those Saudi-financed jihadists. (And, overwhelmingly,
the residents there were fleeing from what Obama
euphemistically called ‘rebel controlled areas’, to the
areas that were still under the Syrian government’s
control.)
The second and third largest sources of
refugees into Europe during that year were Iraq and
Afghanistan, two countries
that America started bombing in 2001 in retaliation for the
Saudi royal family’s 9/11 attacks inside America.
The new Trump Administration is retaliating against
refugees from seven countries, on account of the 9/11,
and also other, jihadist attacks, which likewise weren’t
perpetrated by people from any of these seven: Syria,
Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. In
fact, at the very moment of that U.S. announcement about
those seven countries, the Saud family were not only
supporting both Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, but were
dropping American-made bombs onto Shiites in Yemen. And
Trump was terminating refugees both from Syria and from
Yemen, thus cutting off any escape to the U.S. for those
victims of U.S.
aggression against those two countries that the
Saud family and the U.S. aristocracy want to conquer.
Will Europe take these refugees in?
U.S. aggression combines now with a
tightening closed-door policy, and neither reality fits
the Western myth. So, might Lady Liberty be crying also
because of Western lying? She has become alien to this
country as a misfit here, as being both a refuge and a
model for the world. She no longer belongs in this
country, in spirit. She might as well be officially
included on President Trump’s banned list, a resident
alien that’s being returned to sender. Maybe if Trump
sends her back to France, he’ll try to negotiate with
France’s leaders, some sort of price that they will be
billed — not, of course for creating the statue (since
it was created by the French), but, like he plans to get
Mexicans to pay for building his wall to keep them out.
How far will Trump go in his ‘politically
incorrect’ new form of ‘Americanism’?
Investigative historian
Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of
They’re Not Even Close: The
Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,
and of
CHRIST’S
VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House. |
