Masha Gessen - The Hitchens Prize (2018)

Masha Gessen delivers a powerful acceptance speech at The Hitchens Prize ceremony in 2018, arguing for journalism's unique responsibilities in covering immigration.
For text of the speech, visit our media partner The Atlantic: www.theatlanti...

[@lukasthomas8056]

Although the two comments here are rather selfdisqualifying and apparently not even read or cared about I'd like to give my 5 cents on the topic of immigration to the unexisting audience. I ended up here because I read the article "In the shadow of the Holocaust" by Masha Gessen in The New Yorker which I liked, not because it revealed stunning new interpretation but rather what to the phenomenological common sense thinker is obvious since a long time but hardly anyone is allowed to say. Here, in her acceptance speech, she delivers humanistic and empathetic reasonability which should be the basics of civilization. However, she, as so many others and I dare to say nearly all political figures and thinkers, forgets one crucial aspect, the most crucial of all perhaps, which in the beshadowed Germany of the above mentioned article has even found the opposite ideology (Merkel: "keine Obergrenze"), which is the limit in capacity of meaningful absorption of refugees in one single country or should I say, one cultural context. It should be clear to anyone that the African continent has a growing population of approximately 1.4 billion and the South American continent of over 400 million. All these people would like to migrate north. But the capacity of Germany and the U.S.A. is not sufficient to integrate these numbers. Not only are they clearly lacking space and funds but also the social and cultural resources and tolerance for meaningful aid. In Europe and in Germany especially, the numbers are already higher than what society can handle. In my city, the roman foundation Cologne, over 50% of the population has a migration background. That means that Cologne is not Cologne anymore. And the migrants who get here are not jewish journalists from Russia but muslims with no education whatsoever if not polygamy and suppression of women's rights and, connecting to the above article, surprise, surprise, real antisemitism. This tragical circumstance should lead to a Realpolitik, which clearly is empathetic with refugees, but also recognizes what it can carry.

[@davidpelzer2404]

Blah blah blah, bla blah blahhhhhhhhhhhh.