The worst moral indictment on those who claim to be the unparalleled bastions of “democracy, good governance, liberal values, human rights and individual liberties” in our contemporary epoch of imperial and capitalist domination is the wholesale, flagrant, and utter disregard of the humanity of Global South peoples as gleaned from the worsening migrant crisis.
In despairingly fleeing the dreadful lived material conditions at home where dehumanizing poverty is the order of the day, African migrants soon face the cold and harsh reality of the non-existence of the proverbial greener pastures.
The treacherous and precarious journey by water from African shores to European ones signifies how disposable and expendable the lives of Global South peoples are. And such journeys turn into futile exercises of building castles in the air. Africans are simply not regarded as human beings.
Equality remains a sheer fallacy; the myth upon which hegemonic oppression is premised on.
Because for downtrodden yet fervently optimistic African migrants (a torturous oxymoron), they are coldly greeted with the morbid viciousness of death when overloaded boats capsize; and, worse, the barbarity of European right-wing, racist, and xenophobic migrant policies where the so-called “illegal” migrants are locked up in squalid jails and other morally degraded internment facilities.
It makes the discerning eye super-livid when contemplating about the savage approaches of European countries towards the morally enraging migrant crisis—increasingly exacerbated by the catastrophic global failure of ruinous neoliberal/neocolonial capitalist policies.
In several instances, Africans are simply left to resign to their miserable fate: Death and an overwhelmingly concrete sense of monumental despair and alienation.
Where critical emergencies regrettably arise, with an uncanny and disturbing frequency, European officials delegate scant rescue efforts to salvage the sanctity of human lives. It is, in all honesty, exceptionally calamitous.
‘Let Them Die’ – How African Lives Are Disposable
Despite all the cries desperately clamouring for a decent, dignified existence, Europeans vaingloriously deem it fit and wise to shut their borders. To say this is the worst moral indictment in the epoch of humanity’s modern history is a gross understatement.
Let them die! This is the glaring and putrefactive mind-frame of racially-motivated and ultra-nationalist European right-wing and populist political elites.
Africans have to die. They are not fit to enter the luminous “garden” called Europe. We must die in our “jungle”.
One immediately—with crushing sorrow and highly-charged indignation —points to the recent devastating news of the overcrowded migrant boat that capsized in Greek waters. Stranded and desperate in the midst of vast and raging waters, Greek immigration authorities simply resorted to the fateful thinking “let them die!” as lives were decimated.
At least 78 people are known to be dead, and over 500 people were reported missing. The United Nations called for an investigation into Greece’s handling of the disaster.
And, as the news of that unfortunate disaster diffused with urgent alacrity across various global and regional media outlets, loads of money were poured towards the rescue efforts of the billionaires who perished in the Oceangate Titan submersible implosion.
It was an ill-fated ocean trip that grimly revealed the self-aggrandizing decadence of the billionaire class while millions of impoverished masses across the world die from the scourge called poverty.
A scourge that can be easily solved if there is ample and radical political will to address and resolve the Global North-Global South income and wealth disparities by using those billionaire funds.
Reuters reports that a migrant boat from Senegal carrying 200 people has gone missing off the Canary Islands. The disconcerting aspect of this malaise is that such tragic reports have become normalized.
It is remiss to overlook the critical material reality pressing us: That such billionaire wealth is solely extracted from the world’s poor who are relentlessly super-exploited and oppressed by the brutal policies of neocolonial domination.
The Root Causes of the Migrant Crisis
The global elite and their financialized private capital continue to conspire with Africa’s indigenous parasitic looting class—the bureaucratic petty bourgeois constituted by the political and economic ruling elite—in dehumanizing the lives of Africans.
Globalized neoliberal capitalism means that “foreign investors” continue to extract and plunder Africa’s resources for the enrichment of the oligarchical elite in the Global North.
In this, African leaders (who continue to view neoliberal capitalism as the prevailing wisdom and natural way of running political economies) get the crumbs of financialized global private capital; living lavishly in obscene opulence while the majority impoverished masses languish in perennial cycles of enervating poverty, hunger, abysmal health and education services, war and conflict, and diseases.
Burdened by the insurmountable weight of this crushing poverty, impoverished Africans are left with no other option but to look towards the north.
Yet, borders are tightly shut. The dejection. As Africans continue losing lives due to the worsening migrant crisis, the supremely important point that comes to the fore is this: The same wealth that European elites are denying African migrants access to was stolen from Africa.
That wealth is ill-gotten and illicit. That wealth was greased and oiled by the sweat and blood of African peoples due to colonial and neocolonial domination.
Conclusion – Disingenuous Narratives Must Be Countered
Europeans need to look in the mirror; and realize that their cruelly intransigent approach to the migrant crisis is antithetical to the values of democracy, liberty, good governance, and human rights which they brazenly and vociferously preach.
The writing is on the wall—neoliberal structural adjustment programs undemocratically imposed on Global South peoples, and naively embraced by Africa’s elite, are the direct cause of African deaths at home, in the waters, and in European jails. Discarding such imperial policies will be the first step towards holistic liberation.