Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr K
Sad, but the migrants off that drowned off the coast of the Canary Islands on Wednesday , will have had a worse death. Sod all coverage of that, as they weren't billionaires. Just desperate poor people.
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Yeah, I’ve seen that trope all over Twitter the past 48 hours - actually referring to the Greek incident, rather than the Canary Islands one. Either way the problems with it are several.
First, the events didn’t happen at the same time, and when the migrant tragedy occurred actually it did lead the news, in the UK at least, for at least a couple of days. Hardly anything leads national news bulletins longer than that unless there are continuing revelations. So the claim is disingenuous.
Second, the authorities involved are not the same. We can’t know what the US or Canadian coastguard or naval services would have done had they had jurisdiction in the Med, nor what the Greeks would have done in the North Atlantic. You’re trying to compare apples with pears.
Third, much of the moral outrage on social media has dealt in juvenile caricatures in which everyone on the ship in the med is automatically of noble character and has died tragically while the rich people on the sub are somehow corrupt and deserving of their fate. These sentiments ultimately help nobody because policy-makers can simply discount them as the fringe lunacy of the usual suspects.
Beginning such observations with a perfunctory ‘sad, but…’ does not absolve you from what ought to be a basic human duty to treat all loss of life as a tragedy, if not for the sake of those lost then for the sake of those left behind to grieve. There has been rather too much moralising that, when you scratch beneath the surface, actually looks a lot like the cynical exploitation of one human tragedy to advance a political campaign concerned with another human tragedy.