The atrocities of the Fortress of EUrope
Something I posted on my FB wall, scattered thoughts from august 21st. Now here.
**for all of us who were or are refugees: for the fiction of sovereignty
The EU has entered into the stage of ultimate decadence and moral perversion. Far from intending to moralize, I would much more prefer to say a word or two on the current discourse of the so called migrant crisis in Europe.
The first thing that one is struck by is the fact that millions of people coming to Europe are called migrants, even though in this case this is not the proper term. In general, the idea of migrant is someone who chooses to move country, i.e. migrate in order to enjoy a better standard of living, rather than a casualty of the world reserve army of labor which expands and contracts according to the anarchy of capitalist production, including the production of war.
These people are refugees seeking protection and shelter, people who have fled their homes not because they wanted to, but because there is war raging there, currently worst conflict on this planet. These people have left their past and are fleeing into the uncertain future (to paraphrase Hannah Arendt).
The very fact that the EU and Western media in general represent these people as migrants tells us something about the nature of this very „crisis“. As is well known, the EUrope has had its share in creating and sustaining this conflict, it has participated in the imperialist interventions with the USA under the umbrella of the NATO alliance.
Refugees represented as migrants is just the ultimate invention of the capitalist machinery that lurks behind the EU's values and its purported human rights discourse. The commodification of the human rights (discourse) has opened the space for the unseen political and ideological manipulation that we are witnessing today on a mass scale. Those who call for the defense of human rights are at the same time those who have committed the worst crimes and atrocities, all under the guise of the defence of human rights.
The fact that these people are called migrants is, to follow Marx's thesis from his Jewish Question, just another way to naturalize dominant economic and social relations. For who are migrants? In the language of the right-wing, migrants are people who came to take „our“ jobs away, the object of hatred, the Other, in the language of the disunited and impotent „official“ Left, migrants are the surplus they do not know what to do with. Migrants or more precisely, refugees are our shame! They are kept in camps, subject to sequestration, separated from their families, deliberately demarcated from the natives through instruments like food vouchers, techniques of surveillance different from those applied to natives, subjected to physical and psychological violence- in the interest of course not of any absolute prevention of entry, but precisely in the interest of immigration which would produce a racially stratified and divided workforce.
