Human in cages

THE SOUND OF MIGRANT CHILDREN SEPARATED FROM PARENTS

Human in cages

x Daniel Barnabé: The disaster is that we are internalizing that the crime of class, of poverty, of foreigners, is a necessary evil

In the year 2006, Children of Men was released, a film by Alfonso Cuarón based on the novel by the writer P.D. James. From the development of the argument, he drew a dystopian hypothesis: the human species was unable to reproduce. We were barely given clues about the trigger for our extinction, but the consequences of the catastrophe. Without a horizon, society had collapsed and only proud Britain remained as a beacon of civilization, yes, in its worst form.

The action, located in the mid-twenties of the present century, showed us a fascist country through the eyes of any official, played by Clive Owen, who has just been involved in a subversive plot by his activist past. Perhaps the worst of the collapse that appears on the screen are not the realistic war scenes of the end of the story - with a masterly sequence plane - but the society shown at the beginning of the plot where two kinds of people are guessed, which still retain the British citizenship and those that don't.

While a part of the country seems to continue with its daily evolution, ducking its head like moles with a dismemorial complex, there are scenes in which human floods are confined in cages, industrially driven to a kind of refugee camp on the southern English coast . Some buy their breakfast in a hypercontaminated London, others await an uncertain destination trying to communicate with an impertérrito guard nailed to the ground next to his assault rifle. Shake some papers, a safe pass without validity through bars, as a symbol of those useless ways that try to make us respectable.

When I saw the movie, twelve years ago, it touched me in a special way. Surely because the protagonist was an age similar to the one I will have in the proposed time horizon. It was strange, at that time, to see the protests against the war in Iraq, the busy beginning of the century, as a remote past. Stranger to imagine that the prosperous society of the end of history could be awaited by such a grim future. Even so, during all this time, I have recommended the film with a disturbing pretext: if you want to know how our future is going to be, check it out.

What I didn't think, what we didn't think, is that our present would reach that threshold so quickly. It is shocking that reality confirms the worst fictions.

When Sons of Men was filmed, its conflict engine was the presidency of George Bush Jr., the architect in dynamiting an international law that, even with its limits, had served to avoid some war escalations. That lie of weapons of mass destruction, presented to the UN by Colin Powell in three sad power points, was not only the excuse for armed intervention in Iraq, but the point of bankruptcy to dynamite the post-war diplomatic consensus and introduce a certain privatization element in the invasions. The idea was not new, but the return of the British East India Company.

Today I find a video on social networks of those that have to be played twice to assimilate what has been seen. A pavilion, little more than a sports center of provinces, houses human beings in cages. An armed man leads a group of journalists with the intention of demonstrating zero tolerance - an expression of ridiculous architecture - that his government holds for illegal immigration. The images have been recorded in Texas, United States. And if they have had a special echo, it has been due to an administrative detail: the forced separation of minors from their families. The bureaucracy as asepsis before the most human.

We, inhabitants of the Europe of progress, have neither Mexico nor the megalomania of the wall, but we do have the Mediterranean and Africa to the south. The summer, which was previously the season of low tensions, has presented in recent years as the ideal opportunity for groups of people to try to jump the sea to reach a land they consider auspicious. The result is drifting ships, hundreds of drowned, a sinister game between mafias and rescuers where the pieces are human that on one side seem to overflow and on the other side bother.

From time to time a photo appears, a report that removes consciences. The problem is that the pathos of the majority of citizens dissolve between disability and daily fatigue. Meanwhile, the far right, which has ceased to be the meat of historical documentary to become a condiment for parliamentary news, makes its August advertising talking about invasions, crusades and limited resources. They are no longer a picturesque anecdote, they govern countries throughout Europe.

Some citizens, orphans of voice and context, buy the speech. Hating mutual funds and central banks is emotionally complicated. Visualizing the fundamentalist Moor or the African savage is much easier. We can talk about post truth now and charge against the angry white men. The truth is that the last forty years of neoliberalism have engendered this premeditably: when you have no class identity but your life is still governed by the weather of the salaried, you throw yourself into the arms of those who remember you, who puts you face, of who gives you a paper, however petty, miserable and grotesque it may be.

Meanwhile, a tiparraco that seems out of the desserts of a meal of real estate developers and pimps, says he will censor the gypsies. His name is Salvini, he is the Italian Interior Minister. He manages a budget, has authority, has a body of thousands of armed and uniformed men who comply with his orders.

For now, we humans can continue with our reproductive cycle, otherwise the cinematographic fiction of the beginning has been overshadowed by our present.

The liberal press, some with a certain humanitarian decency, another completely forgetting their Christian values, plays the mistake, electoral short-termism or at most the analysis of bad decisions. It seems true that there are votes, sympathies and desperate exits that are lethal to human rights. It seems obvious that there is a cohort of upstarts that are revolutionizing their countries against the EU, not from the popular but from the sectarian. This does not imply that reducing the disease to the symptoms is a successful analysis, at the most appropriate for those who have sins to hide. This is not the result of a series of catastrophic misfortunes, of an adverse play with the dice. This is what happens when the policy is reduced to the role of bedel in the global casino.

Immigrants, refugees, for losing have lost even identity. In a world where we suffer from agoraphobia by abandoning our precious individualism, but at the same time we are distressed by pretending to be different, superior to the neighbor, people who cross the sea are nothing more than an ambiguous and diffuse label. Behind the shrewd and the blanket, behind the pleading and fearful eyes, behind the hands that stretch to grab a lifeguard, there are people as complex as you and me.

Perhaps there is a Syrian nurse, an atheist, who in 2006 laughed with a telecomedy. Maybe a Sudanese who vibrated with a Champions League final. Maybe a future Nigerian mother who wants a future for her children. What if. Maybe there is some fundamentalist, some criminal, some murderer. Evil flees from misery and war as much as normality and good.

The problem, what is usually forgotten, is that these people do not cross Africa, on a trip full of dangers of a couple of years, for pleasure. What is obvious is that the destruction of the Syrian and Libyan states has been a time bomb for our precious territorial integrity. What you don't want to see is that nobody leaves behind their land, their family, their culture, their past, if they don't have very powerful reasons, often of life or death. Maybe you don't like immigrants, possibly they don't like having to become one either.

The disaster, discounting deaths, broken families, exploitation in the promised land, is that we are internalizing that the crime of class, of poverty, of foreigners, is a necessary evil. We will also end up in cages, shaking papers before unknown soldiers, being a number more than an indifferent statistic

Full text at: https://www.lahaine.org/cG9B