A young Syrian boy cries as his father carries him past Hungarian police
after being caught in a surge of migrants attempting to board a train
bound for Munich, Germany at the Keleti railway station on September 9
in Budapest, Hungary. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
The refugees won’t all make it to Norway. Nor does the Norway they seek exist.
bySlavoj Žižek In her classic study On Death and Dying, Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross proposed the famous scheme of the five stages of how we
react upon learning that we have a terminal illness: denial (one simply refuses to accept the fact: “This can’t be happening, not to me.”); anger (which explodes when we can no longer deny the fact: “How can this happen to me?”); bargaining (the hope we can somehow postpone or diminish the fact: “Just let me live to see my children graduate.”); depression (libidinal disinvestment: “I’m going to die, so why bother with anything?”); acceptance
(“I can’t fight it, I may as well prepare for it.”). Later, Kübler-Ross
applied these stages to any form of catastrophic personal loss
(joblessness, death of a loved one, divorce, drug addiction), and also emphasized that they do not necessarily come in the same order, nor are all five stages experienced by all patients.
Is the reaction of the public opinion and authorities in Western
Europe to the flow of refugees from Africa and Middle East also not a
similar combination of disparate reactions? There was denial, now
diminishing: “It’s not so serious, let’s just ignore it.” There is
anger: “Refugees are a threat to our way of life, hiding among them
Muslim fundamentalists, they should be stopped at any price!” There is
bargaining: “OK, let’s establish quotas and support refugee camps in
their own countries!” There is depression: “We are lost, Europe is
turning into Europa-stan!” What is lacking is acceptance, which, in this
case, would have meant a consistent all-European plan of how to deal
with the refugees.
So what to do with hundreds of thousands of desperate people who wait
in the north of Africa, escaping from war and hunger, trying to cross
the sea and find refuge in Europe?
There are two main answers. Left liberals express their outrage at
how Europe is allowing thousands to drown in Mediterranean. Their plea
is that Europe should show solidarity by opening its doors widely.
Anti-immigrant populists claim we should protect our way of life and let
the Africans solve their own problems.
Which solution is better? To paraphrase Stalin, they are both worse.
Those who advocate open borders are the greater hypocrites: Secretly,
they know very well this will never happen, since it would trigger an
instant populist revolt in Europe. They play the Beautiful Soul which
feels superior to the corrupted world while secretly participating in
it.
The anti-immigrant populist also know very well that, left to
themselves, Africans will not succeed in changing their societies. Why
not? Because we, North Americans and Western Europeans, are preventing
them. It was the European intervention in Libya which threw the country
in chaos. It was the U.S. attack on Iraq which created the conditions
for the rise of ISIS. The ongoing civil war in the Central African
Republic is not just an explosion of ethnic hatred; France and China are
fighting for the control of oil resources through their proxies.
But the clearest case of our guilt is today’s Congo, which is again
emerging as the African “heart of darkness.” Back in 2001, a UN
investigation into the illegal exploitation of natural resources in
Congo found that its internal conflicts are mainly about access to,
control of, and trade in five key mineral resources: coltan, diamonds,
copper, cobalt and gold. Beneath the façade of ethnic warfare, we thus
discern the workings of global capitalism. Congo no longer exists as a
united state; it is a multiplicity of territories ruled by local
warlords controlling their patch of land with an army which, as a rule,
includes drugged children. Each of these warlords has business links to a
foreign company or corporation exploiting the mining wealth in the
region. The irony is that many of these minerals are used in high-tech
products such as laptops and cell phones.
Remove the foreign high-tech companies from the equation and the
whole narrative of ethnic warfare fueled by old passions falls apart.
This is where we should begin if we really want to help the Africans and
stop the flow of refugees. The first thing is to recall that most of
refugees come from the “failed states”—where public authority is more or
less inoperative, at least in large regions—Syria, Lebanon, Iraq,
Libya, Somalia, Congo, etc. This disintegration of state power is not a
local phenomenon but a result of international economy and politics—in
some cases, like Libya and Iraq, a direct outcome of Western
intervention. It is clear that the rise of these “failed states” is not
just an unintended misfortune but also one of the ways the great powers
exert their economic colonialism. One should also note that the seeds of
the Middle East’s “failed states” are to be sought in the arbitrary
borders drawn after World War I by UK and France and thereby creating a
series of “artificial” states. By way of uniting Sunnis in Syria and
Iraq, ISIS is ultimately bringing together what was torn apart by the
colonial masters……
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