January 06, 2005
Silence in Fortress Europe
Three minutes' silence across Fortress Europe...
You know that, whenever politics is allegedly 'suspended', when 'differences' are put aside, you are face to face with ideology in its raw state. This is not because politicians use catastrophes as a smokescreen for forcing through unpopular measures on the blindside (the Jo Moore syndrome). No: it is because the ostensible 'suspension' of antagonisms is in and of itself a political act. The very presupposition that there could be a ground which is 'beyond politics' is bourgeois idealism in person.
Three minutes? Are we have to ten minutes, then, for the millions of a victims of the slave trade ('the holocaust, the one that's still going on' - Chuck D)?
No, because the ideological commitments underlying EU-2's 'respect' are not hard to discern. The silence is not, we are led to believe, a political gesture - but what does that mean? That the victims of the Tsunami were innocent victims unlike....
Well, the 'unlike' is the issue... Unlike whom?
Unlike those caught up in political struggles, presumably...
And why should we not 'respect' THEM? Well, obviously because in some sense their difficulties are their fault...
Which is why, obviously again, we can justify protecting the borders of Europe against this other type of dangerous flood.
Who do the privet-hedge Nazis think that 'asylum seekers' are, I wonder? Judging by the level of vituperation and disgust that asylum seekers produce behind those hedges, they couldn't possibly be the same poor, helpless victims of natural disasters that are now, so we are told, worthy of our charity, could they?
