More refugees drown – babies and children amongst the dead, Nazi fascism is reborn

It is with a heavy heart that we read of the deaths of more desperate refugees this morning – their overcrowded boat capsized off the coast of a Greek island in high winds.

At least 34 people are dead – 15 of them babies and children.

At time of writing the report was buried well out of sight on The Guardian website. Early online commenters on the news didn’t miss the opportunity to swiftly pump out the usual hateful tropes about open borders and bombing Syria without a flicker of concern for the dead. I’m not surprised – they expressed no concern because they had none.

Let us be under no illusions about what is happening here. All of those deaths were preventable.

I said in this article following the death of Aylan Kurdi that:

Right now other children are on their way with desperate families to other boats waiting in the Mediterranean and if we don’t act now more will die.

and here we are.

This is not a tragedy – it is policy. Europe as a collective had the resources to save those lives but decided they were expendable  – their desperate plight was politically inconvenient and it was easier to let them drown than have the basic decency and moral courage to save them.

Nazi Fascism is reborn in Europe – doing nothing to save those people when we knew, we knew they would be on that boat can be called nothing else.

Of course all manner of self serving justifications and obfuscations will be deployed by politicians, the media and casual fascists to reinforce the moral case for our continued indifference – such arguments will be familiar to anyone studying the history of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

The language is always the same, human beings are assigned a label by which their humanity can be downgraded, in this case ‘migrants’, then this downgraded species is classed as a nuisance, a pestilence, a swarm, a tide –  to be exterminated or simply left to die.

The blame for these deaths will be neatly shared out amongst all manner of people, smugglers, terrorists, the EU, Greece, politicians and of course the refugees themselves. This is all bullshit, its purpose is to comfort US, to protect our consciences from the stark chill of our moral choices.

For those of us who warmly assume that we would have spoken out against the horrors of Nazi Germany I say this, your moment is here – now.

You think not? Well ponder this.

Right now, more people, children, and babies are en route to more boats of death in the Mediterranean – will we speak out to prevent this or decide they are not really human or worth saving? Will we blame someone else and look the other way?

The time for hand wringing, internet chatter and media hysteria is over. We either act to save these refugees or we let them drown.

The blood of tens thousands is on the hands of Europe already.

How many more must die before we wake up to what we have become?