One thing that struck me about the readings was the tendency for dictatorships to document their brutality. Kingsley, for instance, notes that a photographer codenamed Caesar (now known to us as Fareed al-Madhhan) was tasked by the government to take photos of victims in detention centers. This suggests a bureaucratic, even clinical approach to keeping track of brutality. Mrie, on the other hand, writes that government soldiers leaked videos of torture to “instill fear by showing us what awaits us inside detention centers if we dare to challenge the government.” Given this view, it seems that the documentation can be attributed to a feeling of being above the law — torture, and similar exercises of power, are trophies for the regime.
I also noticed in the readings the complex familial ties that factor into decisions about leaving and/or staying, and even whether to protest. Again, Mrie is a quite obvious example of this, wrestling with the decision to speak up or stay with her family, and then eventually grappling with guilt and anger over the news of her mother’s death. The Washington Post article explains that even for well-settled Syrian doctors in Germany, they’re torn between a desire to return to a potentially unstable home and a desire to stay — one of the interviewees, Rania Kadib Alban, points out that Syria is her home, but her children call Germany home. This, of course, hasn’t stopped politicians from being eager to stop incoming refugees and force current refugees who aren’t as integrated into the society out of Germany — it strikes me, as The New Arab piece writes, an “indecently hasty” policy proposal that would affect possibly hundreds of thousands of people. The recent victory by the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt will no doubt change the calculus for Syrians and other refugees, and I’d be curious to see how this story develops over time.
A topic I’d like to learn more about is what Kingsley mentioned as “an organized system of mass resettlement,” a hypothetical solution that Kingsley says would have alleviated pressure on Europe’s infrastructure while also allowing humane treatment of refugees. I’d be curious to know more about the behind-the-scenes debates that politicians and policymakers had over how to address the influx of refugees, and I wonder what feasible (in hindsight) policy proposals might have been shot down due to political unpopularity. And, if the EU’s treatment of migrants and refugees should be considered generally a failure, what countries and policies can be held up as successes?
Finally, on the journalistic level, I thought the variety of approaches was quite fascinating. There were the pieces that leaned to “hard news” and analysis, like the Slate and The New Arab pieces, but I found myself most interested in the pieces of reportage that told stories through characters, especially Gopal’s book, which reminded me very much of the kinds of pieces The New Yorker publishes — character and quote driven, but with the journalist’s own observations playing an important driving force.
