Poisonous Rhetoric within the Migrant Crisis

Today the Guardian published an opinion piece titled “Stop calling the Calais refugee camp the ‘Jungle’” by Joseph Harker. This refugee camp in Calais has been in the news recently because last Monday French authorities started the demolishing of parts of the camp that with evict 1,000 migrants and refugees that will need to be relocated. Most media outlets have taken to calling the camp the “Jungle”, the term some residents started using back in 2002 when it first opened because of the terrible living conditions it provides. The phrase “Calais Jungle” has its own Wikipedia page and has become the most common way of referencing the camp.

Harker argues that using this term is pejorative and racist because we are now equating these Middle Eastern refugees with animalistic qualities. He writes, “What kind of people live in a jungle? Are they civilised? Are they respectable? Do they share our values?” These migrants and refugees are fleeing poverty and violence to try and start better lives but the rhetoric and imagery used to describe them is often undeservingly derogatory.

This Eurocentric tendency to dehumanise anything “other” is nothing new. Orientalism of the East and barbarisation of Africa were the norm for much of Europe’s history. In the UK’s recent history racist language was used to describe individuals during the 2011 riots where one policeman said “It’s like being in Planet of the Apes” in reference to all the BME rioters in London, according to the Daily Mail.

Animalistic rhetoric is damaging because to demonizes certain minorities and races. Historically the idea of the “savage” has been applied to Africa. Chinua Achebe, author of “Things Fall Apart”, exposes how this form of racism through language is still relevant and widely overlooked by criticising one of the most famous British novels Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”, Professor Achebe points out that this divisive language is used because “q­­­­­uite simply it is the desire -- one might indeed say the need -- in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe”. Africa, in Conrad’s vision, becomes the opposite of civilised Europe and African people become “beasts”.

In one passage Conrad writes, “They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you, was just the thought of their humanity -- like yours -- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly.” Achebe condemns that most discussion of the book ignores Conrad’s blatant racism because the rhetoric “is such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely unremarked.”

The Eurocentric view of Africa parallels the current European views of the migrant crisis. The way these refugees live and are treated in Europe is shocking. It took a photo of a drowned little boy, Aylan Kurdi, to humanise the millions of people who were labelled as threats to Europe and terrorists. But the outrage at the current humanitarian crisis the refugees are experiencing was short-lived, as the rhetoric has returned to viewing these poor people as uncivilised and suspicious.

While Greece crumbles under the weight of taking in most of the refugees coming in from Turkey, Europe still does not know what to do. German chancellor Angela Merkel has proposed a strategy for an EU solution to the refugee crisis and the EU meets with Turkey today in Brussels for an emergency summit on the crisis.

Austria’s foreign minister, Sebastian Kurz, told the Observer “in Greece refugees are being waved through to the heart of Europe. That is simply unacceptable in the long run. The European Union cannot act like a human trafficker.” This statement ignores how most migrants in Greece are trapped, unable to go anywhere, overwhelming the already weak economy in the country. By dehumanizing these migrants Europe is allowing them to suffer and burdening the countries who are accepting the largest numbers.

The UK and the rest of Europe is failing these people and this is allowing for xenophobia and racism to increase everywhere, continuing the legacy of creating boundaries against everything that is “other”.

As Chinua Achebe concluded his lecture, although Conrad and his personal racism may be dead, “unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still.”

Original story: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/stop-calling-calais-refugee-camp-jungle-migrants-dehumanising-scare-stories

Mary Schlichte