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.
Systematically being the key word. There is no way to claim that what keeps happening to boats carrying migrants is accidental. It’s a policy decision. So awful.
Genuinely surprised by some of the comments here. This is worth discussing and I’m glad the writer of this article drew attention to it.
Today, you could drown an entire cruiseship of Romani and most of Europe would cheer.
Here in Australia, honestly, it’s disappointing that we’re still treating refugees as criminals and turning them back. Who cares if people visit the country. It shouldn’t be too much work to identify them
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.
The so-called “refugee problem” would not exist if countries with means would actually deal with the root causes of people fleeing countries without means. In the US it’s much the same with Mexico and other countries south of us.
Their countries are going to shit because of the accumulated circumstances of centuries of colonialist exploitation, and people there are forced to take their lives into their own hands and try to go somewhere else, because staying isn’t an option for them anymore.
Refugees are just a symptom. We need to address the illness itself, or it will never go away.
Sadly, the symptoms make for an easy political wedge issues to score cheap points, and so it remains beneficial for certain politicians to continue ignoring the illness.
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.
Lemmy is officially not ready to take over reddit until I see people discussing the cardi b, blink 182 loving stepson angle to this story being discussed.
Be the change you want to see in the world
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. ↩︎
It’s not illegal to seek asylum.
What law did the migrants break?
Does the Coast Guard do a thorough investigation of anyone that is in need of their services and establish everyone is innocent of any potential crime before rescuing people
Is it really a crime to be human based on geo location and net worth? To me it doesn’t make any sense.
People aren’t illegal.
So you should just be left to die if you get shot while committing a crime?
The submarine venture may have been legal on paper but they definitely committed some crimes, at very least negligence. $250K ticket price is a giant red flag and if it’s allowed at all it should increase their liability, with the talk of the ignored concerns it sounds like an outright grift.
How can a human be illegal? And which law governs the Titanic sub’s operation?
Regardless people deserve to be rescued if possible.
It’s simple human psychology. We get all excited about a child that fell into a well but when it’s 10 children or 100 we just care less and less even if the group includes the one kid we started with. I guess it’s kinda sad but also not at all surprising
I read somewhere that this an evolutionary trait that developed back from when we hung out in small groups. Empathy was only useful as a species when we could act upon said small group. Increase the group size and we find no additional benefit on having empathy for the unknown extended group.
It kinda makes sense. Read on the news 300,000 dead! . Or 250,000 dead! There is no difference on the empathic response although one has 50,000 more dead people. Read 1 kid is suffering and your heart tears to pieces.
We are a weird species for sure.
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.
Capitalist media only cares about sexy tragedies and expensive dangers. Focusing on 500 poors gasping their last breaths far from view only serves to remind viewers of how unfair things are on a basic level - and that threatens power.
The thing is, I’ve never seen such an overwhelmingly bored response from the general public to a Sexy Tragedy like this before. The only person in my life who expressed any iota of distress over the Titan is my dear mother, but she cried when we dropped off our old TV at Goodwill, so.
People are, I think, getting a little bit harder to trick with the song-and-dance of the hyper-rich dying in outstanding ways.
“When the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways… This is one of the ways when the poor are too poor. When the rich are too rich there is a way, and if I am not mistaken, that way will come soon.” - Pearl S. Buck
