A man without a country to go home to, when he left it was too busy being blown apart. A man who became stuck between two borders, from a country that let him move on to the next checkpoint where he failed to pass. A man who border patrol just watched exit their country five minutes ago is now a man border patrol is telling that he cannot re-enter. If there ever was a way to understand how statelessness feels, this is a good way to visualize it. Complete failure of the idea of government and furthermore, a complete denial of basic human rights. A man with nowhere to call home should not be confined to the buffer space between your doorway and the neighbors doorway at the end of the hallway. This type of situation should be illegal in international law and at the very least, spark action from the European Union, regardless of Turkey's status. In this situation it doesn't matter that both Turkey and Greece have taken on *million migrants since 2015. It doesn't matter that neither is willing to take back one migrant while both point a finger at each other to deflect blame. All that matters here is the lack of human rights. Treating a human being like a rodent in a shoe box is not a good look on Europe.

Statelessness

The natural reaction as a civilian in a country providing a steady diet of Russian bombing because your government ceased to exist when the Caliphate took over is - RUN. Evacuating is not only recommended but expected. Human nature is survival, no matter how depressed we think we get, if we ever had to flee to live we all would. If the government gets to flee office and abandon its responsibilities to protect its law abiding citizens, then we should allow each and every person seeking asylum to flee to somewhere safe. After all, that's usually what members of the failed government will do and its a pattern proven time and time again throughout history.

What is statelessness? In the case of Syrians it could be said that statelessness is the abandonment of the Syrian government, its descent into anarchy and an active war zone, which ended the Syrian nationality with lack of an operating Syrian state government. Syria had problems that led to statelessness through its laws before the war started. If you were a woman having a child and the father is unknown or is stateless himself; the child cannot be passed your (former) Syrian nationality. That means the baby would be born stateless. The baby wouldn't be able to travel or gain the rights of citizens within the former Syrian state. Sadly this probably happened hundreds of times over in each of the countries that don't allow the mother to pass on her citizenship to a child, even with that child being born on "state" soil within its territorial borders. Some countries require that a surname be given at birth like Turkey since becoming a republic. The terrible thing about statelessness is that it doesn't just present one problem that needs to be fixed, it seems to create many problems stemming from the root problem of being stateless without a way to fix it.

When Hitler Made The Habsburgs Stateless

In the tumultuous first half of the 20th century, World War I resulted in the end of the Habsburg Monarchy with the overthrow of the Austro-Hungary Empire. The Emperor Charles I of Austria was sent into exile by the new parliament of the German-Austrian Republic in 1919. The Holy Roman Empire effectively ended in 1806, but since the Habsburg's continued into an Austrian Empire and Austro-Hungarian Empire until losing World War I, this was the true end of almost 700 years of Habsburg rule in Europe. As a result of Charles I's exile, the end of the monarchy was all a young Adolf Hitler needed to realize his nationalist dreams that began in his youth:

Like many Austrian Germans, Hitler began to develop German nationalist ideas from a young age. He expressed loyalty only to Germany, despising the declining Habsburg Monarchy and its rule over an ethnically variegated empire. Hitler and his friends used the greeting "Heil", and sang the "Deutschlandlied" instead of the Austrian Imperial anthem.

Hitler didn't want to assimilate as a child and what did he know about anything as a boy? Answer: About as much as he knew as a man. Hitler was a deeply depraved individual but he may not have ever been able to even be a murderer had he not rose to power veiled in German nationalism and finger pointing the blame on someone else. The fact that our leaders still do the same things today is more of a testament to history repeating itself than the coming of a Fourth Reich. People get distracted and forget. Younger people never realized these little nuances of how Hitler rose to power so they don't see the harm in pointing blame at others or entire ethnic groups by slamming their country in trade talks in the modern day. But this blame game hiding behind nationalist movements is just further proof that they don't work.

Hitler had just served illegally in the Bavarian Army during World War I, which he shouldn't have been allowed entry into because he was an Austrian citizen, only reported 10 years after allowing Hitler to start his German military career:

In August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Hitler was living in Munich and voluntarily enlisted in the Bavarian Army. According to a 1924 report by the Bavarian authorities, allowing Hitler to serve was almost certainly an administrative error, since as an Austrian citizen, he should have been returned to Austria.

Charles I died in exile at a young age in 1922 and just 3 years later Adolf Hitler would publish the first German copies of Mein Kampf. The death of Charles I led to Otto von Habsburg assuming all the titles of Emperor Charles I at age 9 on the Portuguese island of Madeira. The aftermath of World War I created entirely new borders and created the disruption and chaos necessary for Hitler to capitalize on the unorganized post-Habsburg continent.

Almost twenty years since his fathers abrupt death the exiled Habsburg claimant to the Austrian throne, Otto von Habsburg, his widowed mother the Empress Dowager Zita, and the Habsburg clan were still on the mind of a much more powerful Hitler:

For his own safety, Otto left the European continent for the United States and lived from 1940 to 1944 in Washington, D.C. In 1941, Hitler personally revoked the citizenship of Otto, his mother and his siblings, and the imperial-royal family found themselves stateless.

Habsburg monarchs were Roman Catholics. The last Emperor Charles I has been officially beatified in the Roman Catholic Church and is on his way to sainthood. It was the nationalism and anti-monarchy sentiment that Hitler used to weed his way into power and become the Chancellor and Fuhrer of Nazi Germany. In revoking the Habsburg's citizenship, he made the exiled family stateless, proving that his nationalist movement was just another movement of exclusion and ultimately what we all found out in the end: extermination. The mass exterminations of 1941 were in response to Hitler's failed plan to move Jews to Madagascar. The lunacy of this time period was something never before seen during Habsburg rule of Europe. The stability of the Habsburgs would've prevented all of this. The Pope was backed into Vatican City by 1929 as another step towards disrupting the powers that kept the entire continent stable for almost 1000 years to that point.

The revoking of the Habsburg's citizenship and their exit visa from Portugal to the United States coincided with the beginning of mass exterminations of Jews under Nazi German rule with Hitler also the commander-in-chief. In making the Habsburg's stateless, it is amazing that Hitler was able to allude Bavarian administrators of the army from identifying him as an Austrian citizen when he had joined Bavaria in World War I. Had he been sent home to Austria instead, he may have never rose to power. The snake like way Hitler came to power as the monarchy he grew up hating crumbled into exile leaves a suspicious imbalance in documentation that was entirely advantageous to Hitler.

Having a Habsburg Monarchy as the strong head of state as well as a strong Roman Catholic faith would've been far better than a republic disguised by a nationalist movement that ultimately ended up in a dictatorship. As the monarchies fell, so did the religious element tied with it from the days of papal influence and Holy Roman Emperor's sovereign and religious reign. Many free states existed under the emperor, not much different than a federal government with a president existing over a union of states. There were even Free Imperial knights granted certain sovereign rights after being elevated from serfdom in the feudal Medieval Ages and passed down through generations to have authority where states were unable to form in the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire. This was an interesting way to keep order of law in areas that no one could establish a duchy or state that was subordinate to the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Emperor gave the knights imperial immediacy and was their direct overlord. The overlord allowed a looser grip on the knights than a vassal state. It was a good way to have a nomadic element to the idea of an Empire as a federal type layer over a union of states, independent of each other, maybe, but all under one common Emperor and empire.

The fall of the Kingdom of France after the American Revolution was another example of how things that begin as a republic turn into a military driven dictatorship which also appoints and self-crowns its leader king. Napoleon's victories over the Holy Roman Empire that the Habsburg's dissolved by 1806 left these Free Imperial knights as neither free nor imperial. The knighthood's corps was dissolved the same year as the Holy Roman Empire, which was not entirely legal. The Emperor could abdicate but didn't have the authority to release all obligations to the Empire and dissolute the empire entirely. Many states didn't agree with this act but the Habsburg rulers moved on to the Austrian Empire, which they created to keep Napoleon from taking over their imperial empire. The Dual Monarchy that followed the Austrian Empire in 1867 was finally dissolved with the exile of Charles I in 1919 by German-Austria parliament in the aftermath of World War I. The absence of dynastic monarchs after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1921 ultimately allowed the rise of Hitler. The Habsburg family worked with allied powers during the war establishing Austrian regiments for the allies based in the United States. They also evacuated over 15,000 Jews by the time they left Europe in 1941 for the United States. If they hadn't been put into exile, Hitler never would've had the authority to destroy a continent. Due to the United Kingdom's early ineffective efforts to curtail Hitler, it could be said that the most powerful sovereign on Earth at this time over Royal status was the Emperor of Japan, who gave Royal and divine power by rule to the wrong side.

Statelessness, Royal Surnames, Children of Exile

The son of Otto von Habsburg was born in 1961 while Otto was de facto stateless. Furthermore, Otto's eldest son was baptized with his titular name: Archduke Karl of Austria. Since 1966, after renouncing his claim to the Austrian throne, Otto and his family were allowed back into Austria. Otto never lived there and Karl doesn't use his titles, going by Karl von Habsburg, which is not what birth/baptism records most likely show in Germany or the Roman Catholic Church.
That creates another issue where the conflict could cause problems of statelessness for Karl or the entire house of Habsburg-Lorraine since royal families do not use a surname in everyday life. Royals are an exception from the norm and when they use surnames its almost as if they purposely don't confine to the expected "use the name of the House" that "x" royal is a part of.

Royals just don't have surnames like North Americans do. They also have a choice to use any number of house names or titles so as to establish almost a new family in the world of non-royal record keeping. That would present a problem for anyone looking to lead a private life and could lead to a self-imposed stateless scenario that needs to be fixed or have an exception made for one last royal favor.

A big issue for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will be what name they decide to use legally as they step back from senior member status in the British Royal Family. When in school, both Prince Harry and William used the surname "Wales" from their father's title "Prince of Wales" (which is different than the family House name "Windsor"). In Canada and the United States a surname is a necessity living as a non-royal. As a Royal is exiled and becomes stateless perhaps the idea of a Royal without titles is also a way to say a royal is stateless. The main point is that whether you're the exiled poor, royals, or even self-exiled royal; your paperwork may not be adequate enough to establish citizenship without a government stepping in and granting asylum or special attention to your case. This process has repeated itself over and over again leading to a result where the current estimates peg the existence of 12,000,000 stateless people worldwide.

Being Accountable for Statelessness

Imagine a conversation:

Man walks through Turkey and moves on to border check to get into Greece.

Greece (admittedly) is willing to go to violent measures to keep migrants from entering the country.

Man is turned away, shockingly, and walks back to Turkey's border only to find now Turkey will not let him re-enter.

Man gets stuck in a 150 foot space between Turkey and Greece with both countries saying its the other's fault.

Finger pointing at their neighbor essentially.

This helps no one and doesn't work in the long run. Hitler is an extreme example of how something doesn't need to be very extreme when it comes to finger pointing and nationalism to breed hate against an entire ethnicity within a country of people who perceive them self to be the superior citizens. Americans like to say "we're full" when it comes to Mexican immigration because our frustrations of the economy were directed at immigrants instead of the government. Then our blame of Mexicans for our perceived lack of personal wealth and success was galvanized by our current President to win an election in 2016. That same kind of finger pointing will always find someone to blame. We may never have another Hitler come from it, but we certainly aren't creating a proactive population to get out of the cycle to the point where we could actually progress forward from the lunacy of finger pointing nationalists.

See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/us/politics/coronavirus-trump-obama.html

(Aren't you tired of this cycle?)

Fixing Statelessness As Human Rights Movement

A positive campaign to fix statelessness would be a plausible way to undo the damage of the past regimes that led to so many people becoming displaced without a place to go home to. If we made it a movement of basic human rights that civilians exiting a lawless and war torn country be afforded unlimited access to safe countries for temporary refuge we should make it into a system that everyone signs into international law (by treaty). Statelessness only still exists because our government allows it to perpetrate. It could have to do with the hiding of certain family records by purposely making them incorrect or not entirely true. That's my own suspicion and opinion and I have no fact to support it other than it seems like something we could correct from an administrative standpoint, if we so chose to.

Calvinist Teachings About Spiritual Death & Salvation

I have a Reformist (Calvinist) view to describe what kind of society exists around me as an American in 2020. In our TV-infused, iPhone glued, society we have lost our spirituality and in a sense, our spiritual death has been occurring at least since Steve Jobs pulled that first iPhone out of his pocket in 2007. We are so saturated with our lifestyle that we begin to feel loathsome of it and the only solution, "we" think, is more materialism, more financial success to do more things with our lives. Calvinists believe:

Calvinists maintain that God selected certain individuals before the world began and then draws them to faith in His >Son, Jesus Christ. They believe that when Jesus said, "No man can come unto Me except the Father which hath sent Me >draw him" (John 6:44), Jesus was saying that men had to be drawn to Him by God before they would believe and that ?>He only draws those to Him whom He had chosen.

A simple way to say it is: if you're not looking for God, you won't find Jesus' teachings compelling enough to even think twice about the message. If your heart doesn't desire God, you won't find Jesus. If you don't find Jesus, you don't get saved. That's just Christian teaching, but in a spiritual sense, it can be applied to any sort of human crisis. If you don't seek spiritual salvation, you won't be able to hear the call when crises like them come to fruition. Again, look at the man in the picture. If you do not feel for the helplessness of his situation then you aren't someone God will be able to reach. Calvinists go a step further and say some of us, whom Calvin called the elect, are predestined to be open to God's grace through Christ's salvation, and that connection will lead us to solving problems the majority of people are not going to take up to try and solve.

The problem begins with the rot at the top. If this is all some cruel exercise we're being put through to evoke some honest spiritual leaders and compassion from Western, millennial types - then fine. Good way to see who rises to the occasion. In fact, the last time that type of enlightenment and deep thinking occurred in the country I live and breath in was before it was a recognized nation-state. It was the American Enlightenment that fueled the American Revolution. It's about time for another type of reflection on our core beliefs. If we have lost ourselves in this society it was by design. It really weeds out those that persevere through the hard times only to still strive to be a better human. Personally, even taking the time to share my thoughts here is a way of acting. Maybe its not enough for some of you to simply draw attention to a humanist line of thought. If you feel that way, ask yourself what you can do to help me accomplish more in fixing the way people think of such human crises. What applies to Turkey and Greece applies to you and me as well. When we work together, we accomplish more. If someone is willing to accomplish something humanitarian in nature, it only makes sense more involvement of other willing humans would strengthen the effort!

This country is getting to close to its population suffering a massive spiritual death. Just like it's not up to Greece or Turkey, it's not up to Democrats or Republicans in the legislature, or even an Obama or Trump polarizing executive branch to solve these very human issues presenting themselves at the doorways into our Western world. Americans like to complain about how Middle Eastern and Eastern cultures don't accept our belief system or religions only to deny any responsibility when we deny these people a chance to be accepted into our Western doorways and be a part of our belief systems. Sadly, there's so much fear on Western television and other media these days that were more likely to want to keep people out without even questioning why it is we feel so decisively that way. Without spiritual motivation, we do not get to the point where we see past what is said on television and on to the enlightened solution. We get reclusive and edgy without even knowing why. I've pulled myself out of this very situation. I don't know when it started, or what one even triggered my inquisitive quest for why? All I know is I'm glad to have reached that point because the bond with God is strong. The realness of every situation is realized. I can ignore the childishness of our leaders because there are answers out there if you're willing to dig them up. What do I gain from all of that soul searching and fact finding? Something nobody can quantify and only I can feel - spiritual connection to both God and man. Feeling that way is something I can use to help people not many others feel like helping. It isn't their fault, their spiritual death happened as a result of the actions imposed silently or cleverly upon them by their "leaders" of Western culture. With people reacting to our leaders each and every word, we risk the consequences of that one person who takes it too far because they have been suffering the loss of their spirit. If a person cannot feel humanity in the most rational of situations (I'm just asking you to feel something other than "not my problem" or hatred for the man in the photo btw) - we cannot be saved. We cannot find salvation from sin to feel good enough about who we are and tune into the real problems we are facing as humans when a flawed world exists all around us. If Western culture wants to be accepted, then Western culture needs to expand its influence by allowing eastern populations into our back door when the bombs start dropping. We can do as the Roman's did quite effectively and make people assimilate into our society so our own citizens don't suffer the consequences of someone revolting against our society from within our walls. Believe it or not, it can be done. Gallo-Romans of Gaul (now France) and Roman Africans come to mind when I need an example of cultures that successfully assimilated into the Roman Empire as Romans but also brought their own unique qualities that had a positive influence that exists long after the Roman Empire's fall to this day. Basically, proof of assimilation plus other contributions from outside of one's (i.e. Roman) culture made the empire better and brought more reason into the empire for it to continue. Without the Roman African's we wouldn't have had a Saint Augustine. Without Saint Augustine we wouldn't have had Christian reformation - which without philosophical, secular, acceptance into Christian thinking and theology - we would've never separated Church and State, nor successfully integrated Church into State and vice versa. From Caesar's road back from Gaul to Trajan's expanse of the Western Roman Empire at its greatest in AD 117, Roman's had a track record for allowing people from the outside into their empire, into their walls, and into their culture. When people struggle to assimilate, we should give them a helping hand. When people refuse to assimilate, we can give them a boot outside the walls. But it takes a very naive person to believe we are doing all we can to help people assimilate, just as it takes a very unwilling person to not follow through on what they say they want (Western cultural acceptance in the East) when the easiest solution is the willingness to show people from the East that are begging to get into our doors what we're all about. To realize what we're all about is simple. Americans are still the descendants of World War 2 veterans. Americans are still living within the framework of their enlightened founders (and one could say its time for an update on that framework?). We can realize that we can't keep doing the same thing forever without there being circumstance where the system does fail to work. Whether its an economic crash within American walls, a law that doesn't make sense, a tax system that hurts people and does not provide enough public service to be effective to help people. There's imperfections all over our society. The solution is right in front of us. When things get stale, its time to seek new answers. When push comes to shove, we shove tyranny right back. Unfortunately we may not even have the psychological capacity to accept the way we feel is corrupted (i.e. think deeply and within so as to acknowledge we are spiritually lost). A lot of people hate taking on what they perceive as shame. One shouldn't feel shame in correcting their beliefs or feel "dumb" for becoming aware of a destructive path they've been on (spiritual death). One should be grateful they have all of the darkest days behind them. We have but one fault to accept and that is that we are flawed and will always be flawed. Perfectionists and asocial individuals are incapable of seeing the value in what I'm saying. It's all the more reason to take on the burden of the challenge. How you can start is by really feeling for the man in the photo. Imagine being alone and stuck without two entire nations, foreign nations, that will not take you in - while you have no home to go back to. We have to feel something. We have to put the pressure on our governments to do better as well. It's the chaos of the times and the finger pointing to where we're simply outnumbered in our battle. Take a reformation point of view on it and think perseverance of the saints...

If you can muster strength by past example, who better to model than saints? We need to move past all of the things a saint wouldn't care about when faced with such chaos. The saints aren't persevering because of politics. The saints did not strive to be understood for financial gain while they temporarily inhabited the Earth. Saints took up the challenge of awakening a community of believers to assist in their fight for humanity and its issues. This is a human issue.

I couldn't be more motivated to help.

Random (Maybe Not) Artwork and Documents

Some Portuguese Art from the High Renaissance by Raphael of Pope Julius II in the name of Julius Caesar

Some of his favorite Holy Roman Emperor Habsburg-Aziz by a guy named Albrecht Durer

A Treaty Windsor That Helped Me Put Together Something Only An Italian Banker's Son Would Understand

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Windsor_(1386)

I wouldn't mind being part of the "Illustrious Generation" regeneration, having realized just how deep God's absolute sovereignty goes in history, but at the same time not knowing the full extent of his divinity. I'm humbler, I'm closer to God than I have ever been.

That's something my faith has confidence in and why we need to see some revelations play out that people who don't actively seek God's grace but need God's grace truly, desperately deserve right now. I don't mind sharing it - His love is immense.