Quote:
Originally Posted by Chewy
The slow dehumanisation of refugees is very much like what happened back then, I don't think people are connecting directly to the holocaust itself, but more to the events in the preceeding years. It's sad that people have forgotten the image of the young refugee child, dead on a beach, and now have gone back to thinking of them as less than human.
|
That's because most people don't realize we've been here before.
Surely this country gave a warm welcome in the past to refugees - such as those escaping the Nazis? Not so. Anne Karpf finds unpleasant parallels, then and now, and discovers how it feels to be the target of such hostility.
There's a doleful little game that staff at the Refugee Council sometimes play. They show visitors press cuttings about refugees and asylum seekers from the 1900s, 1930s and today, and ask them to guess when they were published. Most people get it wrong. They assume that Jewish refugees were welcomed, at least in the 1930s, with a tolerance that has traditionally been seen as a beacon of Britishness. They're shocked to discover that rabid intolerance - among both press and government - has a strong British pedigree.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2002/j...publicservices