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So the EU has renewed the general refugee status of Ukrainians in Europe. Obviously this is reasonable on humanitarian grounds, war is terrible and if we can shelter people safely away from it it is the decent thing to do. (Just try not to apply similar standards to Gaza, a conflict which has a far higher casualty rate among the civilian population.)
However, there is a new provision:
Personally I am a bit of two minds about the Ukraine war. On the one hand, I am all for my taxes paying for Ukrainian weapons for as long as Ukraine cares to fight Russia. Punishing a defector against the rule based international order while also weakening the main NATO adversary seems an excellent investment.
On the other hand, Ukraine seems like the kind of meat-grinder conflict like WW1 where the best option is not to fight it, and the second best option is to stop fighting sooner rather than condemning another few hundred thousands to death in a likely futile attempt to change the strategic picture. In WW1, among millions of volunteers butchering each other in the trenches, the wisest were probably the few who decided that they did not give a fuck about any dead archduke and would try to reach a neutral country rather than being compelled to murder and get murdered by the crazies who had taken over their countries.
My understanding is that Ukraine (unlike the German basic law) does not recognize conscious objectors to military service. Yet we only extend the right to refuse military service to the Ukrainian men who had already fled from the draft, but not the ones coming now.
Most of the risk of death is actually to military personnel. Numbers are contested, but it seems that being in the armed forces probably increases one's risk of death by more than 10x compared to civilians. If anyone has a claim that they are in physical danger from the war, it is military-age men.
I am also wondering what the long term plan of the EU is. In two years, will Merz and vdL tell the Ukrainian boys who fled to Germany at age 12 that they are now old enough to die for their country and ship them back?
I strongly suspect that most people with "FREE PALESTINE" in their Instagram bios don't want to let Palestinian refugees into Europe (or anywhere outside of Gaza), because that would constitute "ethnic cleansing".
I do not think that this is a common objection.
Providing a better alternative to anyone living in shitty conditions is generally not considered ethnic cleansing, especially not on part of the party providing the alternative (unless it is also responsible for creating the shitty conditions).
"We can't take you, because then we would be complicit in ethnic cleansing" is a reasoning on par with "I can't unlock your shackles, because then you might resist and I would be responsible for a violent rape". I do not recall seeing either in the wild.
From AP News, Why Egypt and other Arab countries are unwilling to take in Palestinian refugees from Gaza:
Obviously I don't believe these people. The reason Egypt doesn't want to accept refugees from Gaza is the same reason they built a massive wall along the border which extends several feet below ground level: they know that if Gazans come into Egypt, they will cause trouble. But the stated position of the Egyptian government is that accepting Gazan refugees into Egypt is tantamount to the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and plenty of Western people seem to accept this reasoning at face value.
See also this article in The Journal (kind of like the Irish equivalent of the Guardian):
Palestinians in Gaza: do they have a right to seek asylum elsewhere?:
This was just a cursory Google on my phone, and it wasn't difficult to find three completely separate sources making the same basic argument: that allowing Palestinian civilians to flee Gaza amounts to ethnically cleansing it, and that it is only just to sacrifice said civilians on the altar of an independent Palestinian state, even if they would prefer not to be so sacrificed.
Eh. The fundamental argument that if you respond to "Country X occupies the land and immiserates the people" by taking in all the people and giving them a better life, you make country X's job very easy and hasten the opportunity for them to do it to you next, is sound enough, both for X=Israel and X=Russia. The fundamental difference here is that the Eurocrat lobby assert their mandate over anyone who would stand against them, within or without their dominion, by claiming moral superiority as the defenders of universal individual human rights, and to my best knowledge Egypt does no such thing. By doing this, but then still turning around and making their military convenience trump those same notions they just declared universal (e.g. when browbeating the internal opposition that takes issue with their importing of Muslim refugees), they are guilty of hypocrisy. In my eyes, official hypocrisy, being a meta-level crime against the very concept of principles, is a worse crime than any object-level violation of principles can be.
(Those who build moral frameworks to protect hypocrisy, like the concept of "whataboutism", get close to being yet another level of abstraction up, thus deserving their own deeper circle of hell.)
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