TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER

EARLIER THIS WEEK I WAS SURPRISED one morning, as I munched on my granola with dried pomegranate, to see that what I imagined on television to be Syrian refugees queuing in desperately cold and drizzly conditions to enter yet another railway station in Austria or Hungary en route to "freedom" in Germany were in fact fans of Star Wars, the Disney company's children's entertainment franchise, who were prepared to undergo such hardship in order to be among the first to purchase plastic toys depicting aspects of its latest moving picture film release.

INDEED, IN MANY WAYS, THE REAL news about what is being called a "migrant" or "refugee" crisis mirrors scenarios from science fiction productions of recent times. One of the most popular pieces of serial television amusement now on American TV involves the drama facing a group of seemingly "normal" people who are more or less incarcerated within their several dwellings due to the dangers presented to them by hordes of starving individuals wandering aimlessly yet menacingly about and preventing the protagonists from going about their daily affairs.

SUCCESSFUL HORROR FICTION derives its impact from a capacity to strike a chord in the hearts and minds of its recipients. Never have I been more frightened by hearing a banging hatch in the attic in a film more than when I watched one alone in my house with a banging door in the attic above me. 

AT THE MOMENT EUROPE AND AMERICA is afraid of, as usual, the outsider, or, as philosophers like to put it, the "Other". At the moment the "Other" is banging on the latch on the door in the attic and we are developing a form of paranoia instead of sitting comfortably pretending that the crisis in Europe is just about to go away.

THIS REMINDS ME OF THE PARANOID WAY of seeing the wider world in nineteen fifties and sixties humorous fiction, often involving some forms of parody. In many of these science-fictional scenarios aliens, often pointing what were at the time called "ray guns", would emerge somewhere on the planet and, in sometimes broken English, demand "take me to your leader".

I DETECT A FULFILLING OF THE PROPHETIC elements occasionally present in Science Fiction with the current situation of the aliens arriving on the borders of the European Union. These people, rather than being content to remain in Malta or Cyprus, or even Greece or Italy, are demanding to be taken to our leader in Germany, someone they know will take care of them correctly. 

UNFORTUNATELY, THE DUBLIN REGULATION (Regulation No. 604/2013; sometimes the Dublin III Regulation; previously the Dublin II Regulation and Dublin Convention) is a European Union law that determines that the responsible Member State for treating asylum seekers or other distressed peoples will be the state through which the asylum seeker first entered the EU. Thus these good people are not allowed to travel to Germany.

YET FORTUNATELY, DESPITE one of the so-called "golden rules" of the European Union stating "No treaty change can be made without the agreement of all the member states", our leader Merkel has unilaterally decided to suspend the above-quoted regulation. Thus in my view, and in the line of the United States Constitution, the European Constitution could also have an amendment: "All rules apply unless Germany decides otherwise."

COMING NEXT: TAKE ME TO YOUR LIDL