Fortress Europe

by Santiago Alba Rico, (from www.rebelion.org)
Based on an original article called “Invitation to the Bomb”.

The beatings and insults to the sub-Saharans in Melilla are something more radical and more terrible than racism; they are the manifestation of a belligerent and potentially homicidal anti-humanism

We should have saved some naiveté for this occasion. In the last few years we have been offered such a repertoire of horrors that we have developed a constipated conscience. Spain shivered with the demolition of the Twin Towers and its 3000 deaths; shivered with the bombs at Atocha station and the 200 deaths of simple commuters; it even shivered with the missiles over Baghdad and the tortures at Abu-Gharaib. It has shivered with the scenes of New Orleans overrun by water and abandoned by its government.

Much more impressive than all of this, is the zoological treatment given to the Africans at Melilla’s iron curtain. The shooting, deportation and incarceration of thousands of people who were asking for help, the so called “migratory policy” (as Hitler called “demographic policy” the transfer to Auschwitz of the European Jews) impugns with facts, before the eyes of the world, the genuineness, viability and justice of the current political and economic order. At the same time, the reaction of our politicians, our media and our public opinion impugns our right to wealth, our right to democratic institutions and, mainly, our present and future right to consider ourselves the “good ones”.

After all, the pain of 9/11 and that of 5/11 can be blamed on “evil terrorists”; and the pain of the children in Baghdad can be blamed on “evil imperialists.” But in the case of Melilla, there is no doubt: there the system itself has been photographed. We have captured forever the image of an “Order” that has to shoot at those who ask for help, to treat those that are hungry like animals and that cannot allow itself the least bit of hospitality.

That the Africans request help from the same ones that rob them shows their desperation; that those who steal receive them with bullets and sticks demonstrates the irrevocable ignominy of capitalism.

We can make distant wars, impose structural adjustment programs, sign in an office a commercial agreement and destroy ten countries without apparently violating any commandments. But if some hungry and thirsty men call at our door, then there’s no other alternative left to us than to smash their heads, to shoot at them and to abandon them in the desert.

Whether we are believers in God or not, this is a sin and such a shameful, dirty, abject, worthless sin that it is not strange that we make such a big effort to hide it, to forget it or to justify it. The Spanish army has been sent to murder a beggar that extended his hand, as the Neo-Nazi bands do to those that sleep among cardboard boxes and Spain applauds or remains silent.

The barrier that cuts the world in two without thresholds or transitions is also a screen on which are projected, two undisguisable contradictions that it are easier to forget as if they were somewhere else.

The first one has to do with the direction and possibility itself of individual displacement in an unequal economic space in which the nation states, formally homogeneous, have an unequal capacity to impose their sovereignty. International Treaties and local constitutions, in accordance with the principles of the UN, recognise and demand respect for the individual right of citizens to leave their countries. But those same treaties and constitutions, in accordance with the principles of the UN, leave in the hands of the States the right of entry.

But this contradiction also determines, and is the condition of, a double displacement in space, in opposing directions (ascending and descending) that coincides with these politically active characters that we call tourist and immigrant. Millions of western tourists enter freely every year, as abstract holders of a superior power, in Egypt, Bali, Morocco, Tunisia, while millions of Latin American and African immigrants are rejected, as pure abandoned individuals, in the borders of the USA and Europe.

The second contradiction of the Barrier is a continuation of the first one and has to do with the well-known paradox of human rights. Against the universal principles of the French Revolution, the reactionary Joseph de Maistre reminded us that in the world there weren’t any people who could be called human beings but only Spaniards, Frenchmen, Englishmen and even Persians (if Montesquieu’s testimony was to be accepted).

This accurate mocking unveiled, a century and a half later, the absurd and tragic consequences of seeking to defend human rights in an unequal economic space formally governed by the nation-state. Hannah Arendt has already brought our attention to the fact that, once lacking homeland, family and money, once reduced to their pure human condition, the stateless persons and refugees of the Second World War were off limits to any rights.

Mere individuals, the men that jump the barrier of Melilla and destroy their passports so that they are not returned to their less-sovereign nations, deprived therefore of all tutelage, without resources and without nationality, they become men, just men, and they don’t have anything more than their naked human condition with which to resist. And in fact, since that moment and for that reason they have stopped being subjects with rights. Their destiny is the desert. The reactionary Joseph de Maistre was right and what makes him right is capitalist neo-liberalism itself, which carries on proclaiming the sacred and universal nature of human rights.

The beatings and insults to the sub-Saharans in Melilla are something more radical and more terrible than racism; they are the manifestation of a belligerent and potentially homicidal anti-humanism. The worst thing that one can say about anybody is that he is only a man; the worst thing that one can do to somebody is to treat him as if he were only a man. There is nothing more dangerous in this world than to be just a man. Or maybe yes, maybe it’s worse to be... Senegalese.