A massive operation is under way to find and save a stricken vessel and its passengers. As time passes, anxious families and friends wait with growing fear. The US coastguard, Canadian armed forces and commercial vessels are all hunting for the Titan submersible, which has gone missing with five aboard on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic in the north Atlantic. The UK’s Ministry of Defence is also monitoring the situation.
It is hard to think of a starker contrast with the response to a fishing boat which sank in the Mediterranean last week with an estimated 750 people, including children, packed onboard. Only about 100 survived, making this one of the deadliest disasters in the Mediterranean. Greece and the EU blame people smugglers, who overcrowd boats and abuse those aboard them. But both have profound questions to answer about their own role in such disasters. Activists say authorities were repeatedly warned of the danger this boat faced, hours before it went down, but failed to act.
I’m glad this article exists; this has been bothering me. Specifically, I’m bothered that, while aljazeera featured the stories about the boat of refugees as and after it was happening, I haven’t seen it crop up in U.S. news at all. One of the deadliest disasters in the Mediterranean, and… crickets.
Then a submersible with a handful of white rich lads gets lost and it’s all over the papers and all anyone can talk about.
To be fair, part of this is the fact that the submersible story has a lot of wild and novel details to it, plus the novel “oh god imagine being trapped in a submarine” fear factor, that make it great for getting attention and clicks, but nevertheless.
The other part of it is that people see “poor, brown refugees drowned at sea in the Mediterranean, once again” and feel completely disconnected from that and glaze over. The refugees don’t get the same automatic “what would that feel like if it were me” empathizing, and the situation doesn’t get the same scrutiny of rescue details and chances and what exactly went wrong that resulted in hundreds and hundreds of innocent people drowning at sea.
And they were in a BOAT. They knew where the boat was. The boat was reachable. They just let them die.
It’s true that we’re talking about different countries and different organizations, but this is a recurring pattern. Refugees are being systematically and repeatedly allowed to drown when they are very near to people who could help them. Other people get prioritized and rescued like they’re kings.
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One group is full of hundred-millionaires. The other group is full of destitute people fleeing their home countries due to horrific conditions.
Given that capitalism does put a price on people, that’s obviously the metric used to determine who to help.
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On the same vein it would be very easy to say that media, the Guardian included, almost never report on the (weekly or even daily this time of year) rescues that the Greek (and other) navy does successfully carry out. Nor, of course, are the effects of the migration wave ever discussed with appropriate nuance except a one liner under a picture of a local saying “Mr Spyros the baker said he feels for the migrants but he dislikes what’s happening to his neighborhood.”
They only find space on their front page when they can point a finger at some huge disaster with a tragic photo to illustrate and shock normal people.
Pelt me with stones if you must. I am Greek and live in Athens. The amount of people that have come here and are going around downtown and everywhere else with basically nothing to do in their lives and getting by with benefits if they’re lucky (and very often resort to crime as poor people will do anywhere) is unsustainable. If you read opinion polls there is now a very large majority of the population that think this. Even those who vote left have completely come around in the last years. So don’t be too hasty with your conclusions. This is not about lacking empathy or humanity. It’s just realizing the objective reality that has taken shape around you.
Greece has been blamed for this recent tragedy because the land borders are guarded, which presumably leads to people smugglers sending more people on ships to Italy. But what are we even supposed to do? Just let the country become an open air camp of no prospect poor people, while destroying our society in the process? How does this help anyone? Does anyone think Greece, the recently bankrupt economy, can magically provide for millions of destitute people? Or that if the EU for whatever reason decides all are welcome and thus implicitly invites literally millions, it will not result in widespread social unrest? We already see far right gaining almost everywhere. Here we had literal nazis in parliament and they are currently regrouping after being put in jail.
And there are other questions on this whole issue. Look at UN statistics and see that the majority of people arriving here are not fleeing from Syria. They’re from Pakistan and Afghanistan among other places. Why is the answer to those countries’ problems to settle their populations in Greece and Europe? Why is no other place on earth willing or expected to help them? How realistic is this as a solution when the number of people who would like to move to Europe (from Asia, Middle East and Africa) is larger than the population of Europe itself? Also, is Saudi Arabia for example only able to house Cristiano Ronaldo? They have resources and are closer geographically and culturally to a lot of these people.
This is just one person’s opinion (although very common) but uncontrolled migration can yield even worse results (nightmarish in fact) in the long run than what we’re seeing right now. And what we’re seeing right now is already terrible. I wish there was a more viable solution than the people stay at home and make those places better to live in, which is just unlikely.
Nah, I do agree it’s a much more common take than people realize. Another POV I’ve seen was on the other end of this spectrum, when Malaysia actually offered to open up their borders to refugees years ago and the refugees…refused lol. Apparently they prefer to get into South Korea instead. I’ve never seen a faster 180° change in opinions regarding refugees like that time.
Everything you’ve said pretty much exactly describes the homeless situation in Seattle, in that there are so many with great needs, but only so much one city can do. Meanwhile, the people living in Seattle and paying taxes are seeing their city deteriorating around them.
Shame on the US coast guard for failing to help in the Mediterranean.
this is an incredibly comical misinterpretation of what the article is saying, and i’m sure you realize that.
Absolutely.
I just find this sort of article kind of pointless. Response to a situation in one place was drastically different than a response in a completely different place involving completely different people and agencies with their own different priorities. I don’t think it’s all that illuminating in any global way, except it shows the priorities in one of those places aren’t great. A commentary on the same agency (or even country) responding differently to rich and poor would be more meaningful, but I think the US Coast Guard was pretty proactive when Cuban refugees were crossing in makeshift rafts (a commentary on the difference between US and Greece in those much more similar situations would be interesting, but wouldn’t hit the rich/poor or anti-immigrant angle).
That’s fair as far as it goes, but there are analogous behaviors on the US side of things as well. This is just another instance in which the US government has gone to incredible lengths to rescue tourists who got in over their heads (Wendover Productions touched on this in recent video about the National Park System, if you’re interested) at the same time that Border Patrol and local vigilantes have been recorded sabotaging water caches left as life-saving measures for migrants crossing arid parts of the southern border. That’s a pretty clear indication of which sorts of lives out society thinks matter, and just as in the Mediterranean it more or less comes down to “which ones look and talk like I do?” rather than “which ones are most deserving of the limited resources available to help them?”
I don’t think it’s all that illuminating in any global way, except it shows the priorities in one of those places aren’t great.
but that unto itself is kind of important, is it not? these are social tragedies which do not need to happen–but they’re basically allowed to happen by a mixture of social apathy, lack of scrutiny, and inhuman social and political incentives. you’re demonstrating why this is illuminating, and why we should talk about it: because the alternatives you describe can happen and are happening but don’t with certain groups, or from certain countries.
We are a global people. We could do more, and we actively don’t. We should all be ashamed and just because it makes you feel uncomfortable or helpless doesn’t mean you have to rationalize the shame of our species.
We need to face it if we’ll ever change it.
One’s legal and one’s illegal?
i fail to see why one being legal and one being illegal[1] should have any bearing on the response or treating the people with basic human dignity. committing a crime also does not make one worthy of death–and especially not when that crime is one without a victim like illegal immigration.
and i don’t think the latter should be illegal (certainly not meaningfully so), to be clear. i am morally opposed to the idea of hard borders. ↩︎
Fucking agree so hard.
It’s not illegal to seek asylum.
People aren’t illegal.
So you should just be left to die if you get shot while committing a crime?
It looks like its all over now that the coast guard have announced finding a debri field on the ocean floor
That mass drownings have become so common – more than 25,000 people have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014 – is shameful in itself.
Over 25,000 have drowned since only 2014?? Holy Christ.
it’s not surprising given how many people have immigrated or requested temporary/permanent asylum in Europe since 2014 (probably several million overall)
