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Robert Habeck claims that the situation in the camps on the Aegean Islands "defies description". She doesn't. For example, Catholic theology knows the so-called limbus: the Latin word for "hem" or "edge" describes a limbo reserved for the souls of children who died unbaptized. The road to heaven is blocked for them. It is a place where despair is deliberate.
Anyone who was there as an eyewitness, like me in autumn 2018, knows: Moria in Lesbos, for example, could certainly be described as a mixture of a prison camp and a dump. The Greek UNHCR estimates that 85 percent of people on the islands are entitled to asylum, but are still stuck. You can't go forward, you can't go backwards.
Even adults who are condemned to an existence - one may not call it life - in this "gated community" of violence and lawlessness will sooner or later go mad. Back then, employees of NGOs told me about the great risk of suicide: they would have to hide detergents from the young people, who would try to poison themselves with them.
Now the leader of the Greens has made a pre-Christmas proposal for kindness. In order to alleviate the worst of the hardship, according to Habeck, Germany had to free "about 4000" unaccompanied minors from the limbus as part of an emergency aid program and lead them to heavenly Germany. "Let the children come to me and do not defend them" (Luke 18/16).
According to Habeck, it is a "requirement of humanity". Now humanity commands a lot, and Habeck promptly interpreted his fellow human beings as a dirty "PR campaign". We Germans could not eliminate the misery of the whole world. Help yes, but on site. No "false incentives" for further migration. And so on.
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Incidentally, a kind of sending children to Germany on a smaller scale recently called for Lower Saxony's Interior Minister Boris Pistorius (SPD). There was no comparable outcry as currently at Habeck. Just a narrow-lipped cancellation from the Federal Ministry of the Interior.
As always everything seems to fail because everyone can never agree on where the refugees should be distributed. As long as there is no European solution, there will be no German solution. And as long as there is no German solution, there will be no Lower Saxony solution. So exactly happens: nothing.
The cynical punch line
The media opinion tennis, this time as a back and forth between alleged virtue and alleged reason, takes the place of politics again, understood as the art of the possible. Instead of practical measures, there are fresh outrage offers in the form of a "debate", which is only used to round off the respective political camps - while winter in the Aegean camps is undisturbed under fluttering plastic tarpaulins.
If nothing happens, it is because nothing can happen. This is the cynical punch line of current mirror fencing to take the minimal gesture, maybe a little pressure off the cauldron. The real scandal is the boiler itself, constructed and put up and heated by: Europe.
The horror on its "hem" is wanted, it should radiate into the world. The message is clear: "As you enter, let all hope pass." Here the otherwise self-proclaimed West, who is otherwise so in love with his values, shows his deterrent face.
And when you look at it up close, it really defies description.
