In October 2013, hundreds of would-be illegal immigrants were drowned when their boat sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa.
Tragically they were not the first to drown on such journeys, something that had been referred to by Pope Francis during the course of a visit to the island some months before.
The choice of Lampedusa for his first official trip outside Rome was highly symbolic for the pontiff, who said news reports of the deaths of desperate people trying to reach a better life that had been like “a thorn in the heart”.
The pope said a great deal more than that, quite a bit of it, as so often with this pontiff, either highly manipulative or very poorly judged (the former, I would guess: Francis is a shrewd man and no stranger to the demagogic arts). As I noted at the time, “Theodore Dalrymple” (Anthony Daniels) took a look at some of those comments. Here’s an extract, but read the whole thing:
In his homily, the Pope decried what he called ‘the globalization of indifference’ to the suffering of which the tragedy of the drowned was a manifestation and a consequence. Our culture of comfort, he said, has made us indifferent to the sufferings of others; we have forgotten how to cry on their behalf. He made reference to the play of Lope de Vega in which a tyrant is killed by the inhabitants of a town called Fuente Ovejuna, no one owning up to the killing and everyone saying that it was Fuente Ovejuna that killed him. The West, said the Pope, was like Fuente Ovejuna, for when asked who was to blame for the deaths of these migrants, it answered, ‘Everyone and no one!’ He continued, ‘Today also this question emerges: who is responsible for the blood of these brothers and sisters? No one! We each reply: it was not I, I wasn’t here, it was someone else.’
The Pope also called for ‘those who take the socio-economic decisions in anonymity that open the way to tragedies such as these to come out of hiding.’
With all due respect, I think this is very loose thinking indeed of a kind that the last Pope would not have permitted himself. The analogy between the two situations, the murder of the tyrant in Fuente Ovejuna and the death by drowning of thousands of migrants, is weak to the point of non-existence. After all, someone in Fuente Ovejuna did kill the tyrant; no one in the west drowned the migrants. Is the Pope then saying that Europe’s refusal to allow in all who want to come is the moral equivalent of actually wielding the knife?
By elevating feeling over thought, by making compassion the measure of all things, the Pope was able to evade the complexities of the situation, in effect indulging in one of the characteristic vices of our time, moral exhibitionism, which is the espousal of generous sentiment without the pain of having to think of the costs to other people of the implied (but unstated) morally-appropriate policy…..
In a recent article for The Spectator, Nicholas Farrell updates the broader story:
Foolishly, last October Italy’s left-wing government became the first European Union country to decriminalise illegal immigration [In fact, it began moves in that direction: the law was not formally amended for another few months] and deploy its navy at huge expense to save ‘illegal’ migrants crossing the narrow Sicilian channel in open boats from North Africa (Libya mainly) in order to bring them to Italy and thus the European Union — where most remain. Few get sent back: sent back where, exactly?
The decision to open the floodgates came in a moment of national moral panic after 366 people drowned in a single boat which caught fire and sank a stone’s throw from an idyllic beach on the island of Lampedusa, an exclusive resort favoured by the right-on rich. The dead included a mother who had given birth during the voyage and was still attached to her newborn child when divers found their bodies trapped inside the sunken vessel.
The policy change, driven by a perverted mix of human decency and political correctness, was pure folly: it has acted as a green light to wannabe boat people everywhere, whose numbers soar as the chaos in Africa and the Middle East escalates. The result is an exodus of biblical proportions out of Africa into Italy. So far this year, more than 100,000 boat people have arrived in Italy — two thirds of them brought ashore by the Italian navy. That is more than double the number who arrived in 2011, the previous record year. It is estimated that the total by the end of 2014 will surpass 200,000. So far this year Italy has deported only 10,000.
How many, I wonder, will Vatican City take?
Farrell:
Italy’s boat people used to originate mostly from sub-Saharan Africa; but — thanks to ‘Mare nostrum’, as the new policy is called — they now also come from the Horn of Africa, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Iraq. The word is out: to get to Europe, get to Italy (via Libya)….
Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean, thousands die crossing from North Africa to Italy in flimsy, unseaworthy vessels. A ticket, they say, costs between €1,000 and €2,000. The boat people do not just die by drowning. Those with cheaper tickets, confined to the locked hold of the boats, often die from carbon monoxide poisoning from the engine. Others die from stabbings and beatings as a result of the frequent fights that break out on deck.
According to the UN High Commission for Refugees, 1,600 boat people have died since June — 25 a day, roughly — crossing from North Africa to Italy. That figure is undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg….