Gordon Barlow

I think their sympathies might well not lie with the country that tortured and killed their grandparents. It's difficult to judge how many generations it takes people to forgive one's parents' or grandparents' oppressors and their successors. My mother (died 1999) never forgave "the Japanese" for the atrocities they committed on Australian PoWs - even those Japanese of later generations. I know Jews who have never yet forgiven "the Germans", these 70-odd years later. (Some English and Poles, even.) There are bound to be a whole lot of Algerians - and their children and grandchildren of whatever nationality - who haven't yet forgiven "the French" for the atrocities they committed during their occupation of Algeria.

Ho hum... that's life, I'm afraid.

Pulaski

Lots of Middle Easterners seem to still hold a grudge against "the Crusaders" from around 600-900 years ago. Plenty of Brits haven't forgotten the Norman conquest of 950 years ago. I am not aware of any grudge being held against the Romans/ Italians for conquering and oppressing the British 1,600-2,000 years ago, so empirically it appears to take around 1,000 to 1,500 years for the descendants of an oppressed people to "get over it".

Blackladder

Here's another bit of maths for you. I read in Gävle Dagbladet yesterday that the local council are preparing a reception centre (under canvas!) for some of the masses of migrants arriving in Sweden every day. The cost? 167,000 (yes) Swedish Crowns PER PLACE. That is somewhere near 14 or 15 thousand quid per individual - and even then the total number of migrants that this reception centre can take is only 3,000. The pockets of the long-suffering Swedish taxpayers must be nearing empty by now!

Pythagoras

Interesting.

I watched an SVT news programme (a few weeks ago now) concerning the rising costs, to kommuns (municipal councils), due to the immigration surge. Only a few kommuns were reported to have raised taxes next year. The TV presenter asked one Kommun leader why they were not doing it..?

I understood the answer to be - not that they didn't need to, it was more '..we haven't found the right way to explain why we might need to'

The cost of immigration is being masked as much as possible by reasons like 'we must have more teachers, schools, healthcare staff, etc - in short, itemizing each piece of expenditure and even blaming the previous Government for not investing enough.

If government, both local and national, went to the public and were honest about the real cost in taxes for mass-immigration policies I can guess what the public's response would be

Gordon Barlow

Travelling in Turkey fifty years ago, we two Australians found ourselves rather popular, especially in the Gallipoli region. The fact that our forefathers had invaded Turkey was not held against us; on the contrary, we were welcomed because the Turks' forefathers had beaten the invaders back!

I guess some of the educated classes may have held a grudge against the European invaders of long ago, but the few we encountered didn't mention it. The lower classes - among whom we mixed - didn't even know about it, to the best of our knowledge. The Arabs - of all classes - bitterly resented the European (Jewish) invaders of Palestine in the 1940s, though. To my shock (I was an unsophisticated youth), I was told that they regarded Winston Churchill as a war criminal for supporting that invasion. I wonder if they still do.