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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Like said below, a huge amount of Russians were accepted. At least here, the eventual reason to close the door mostly had to do with the fears there would be infiltrators sent alongside the rest.

I feel like we need a number here. How many?

a huge amount of Russians were accepted.

ahem. ahem. What means 'huge'? Ever since COVID times, EU does everything to let less Russians in, not more. And they mostly let those Russians the least likely to go to war (e.g. rich).

Okay, I shouldn't have used the word 'huge', but the point was the comment about how EU states did not "accept men fleeing the draft from Russia", which was not correct.

I remember the time when Finnish (or Estonian or Latvian...I can't remember) authorities specifically stated at the time of the Russian partial mobilization that they will not give Russian refugee men asylum. Their foreign minister (as far as I can remember) declared that "coming to Europe is a privilege, not a right". Of course, being relatively old, I remembered the rhetoric of this exact same cabal at the time of the 2015 refugee crisis. I understood that only a pathologically evil cabal can be this shameless and brazen. It's mind-boggling, really.

Finland is a different situation from European countries generally. Russia is actively taking refugees from the middle east and elsewhere and shipping them to the Finnish border where they are provided with bicycles and told to cross. This is a deliberate attack on Finland. Their decision to close their borders to Russian asylum seekers is a response to this abuse of that system by a hostile Russian government.

Russia is actively taking refugees from the middle east and elsewhere and shipping them to the Finnish border where they are provided with bicycles and told to cross.

How is that, in effect, different from what Serbian, Macedonian and Turkish authorities were doing in 2015?

The EU states have tightened their general asylum policies since 2015 precisely because of that crisis. They were already doing pushbacks in Greece in 2020 as a response to asylum seeker entry wave at that time, it was big news before the Covid hit.