More than 1000 refugees welcomed in Dortmund,Septemebr 6. Demotix/Felix Huesmann. All rights reserved.Perhaps it is only the most racist, right-wing groups who would refuse
to share the pictures of Aylan Kurdi or not get moved by it to support the
refugees' bid to enter Europe.

However, here is one immediate contrast. Radical Kurdish sites declare
that they will not be sharing the pictures of Aylan Kurdi. One story is titled,
'Why I
refuse to share Aylan Kurdi's picture'. Another
says: "If
wars continue in the ‘Middle East,’ if exploitation, repression, torture,
coercion continue – what will a few European countries accepting refugees’
change? Something maybe, but not much."

And
then it goes on to describe the dead child not as a victim, whom Europe should
have allowed free entry, but as "a boy who might have grown up to be a
hero" in the Kurdish struggle.

In
this narrative, Aylan Kurdi is not an example of a refugee who lost his life
because of Europe's inhumanity. No. Instead he is someone who could have been a
hero in the struggle, and we must ask: what prompted Aylan Kurdi's family to
leave the struggle and march towards Europe?

What is being challenged is the pro-immigration stance which works
with the figure of the refugee fleeing into the laps of western powers, rather
than digging in and putting up resistance to imperialist powers in countries
like Syria or in Kobane.

The refugee is reduced to a recipient of 'human rights' or rather humanitarian relief – these human rights
are basically what Alain Badiou would call 'animal rights', of food, shelter
and rest. That the refugees in their present dire conditions need precisely
these rights is true – and that must be ensured.

But these rights whenever they are fulfilled, as with Germany willing to
accept a good number of refugees, work by bracketing out the social and
political determinations of the refugees. Even Aylan Kurdi's picture works to
freeze the frame, the discourse to one of pure deprivation and suffering in a
way which invisibilises the refugees as political actors. But we must
differentiate between the actions of the refugees – which by putting pressure
on Europe can amount to a political action – and the pro-immigrant discourse
which is trying to put them in their place.

Compassion for refugees has won over fear in Europe today, pro-refugee
activists tell us. Fear pushes us to know the social and political
determinations of refugees from a right-wing perspective ('are they potential
ISIS militants?'). But compassion works by blinding us to it. The point is to
ask for these determinations from a left-wing progressive perspective.

The pro-immigrant left in Europe refuses to do this. They think that
doing this would be to indulge in Islamophobia – hence let us always look at
the refugees as pure victims of colonialism, rather than have a political
understanding of their agency! This infantilises the refugees. This is what the
picture of Aylan Kurdi has come to signify for Kurdish groups – this European tolerance
of refugees is so dependent on desocialising and depoliticising them.

In not seeing a political struggle, Europe's compassionate souls see
only a badland of warring factions in the refugees' country of origin. Their
narrative works with a clear binary: the safe and civilised west versus the
badlands of non-european countries. These badlands are just an undifferentiated
mass, with 'ordinary people' living there with oil underneath the soil, often
getting bombed by European powers. Such is the way the refugee-love
infantilises many non-european countries. Refugee-love has created its own
object of love, the pure humanitarian victim. The European fights the battle
against his/her government's anti-immigration stance; the refugee is just a
recipient or beneficiary of this struggle. That the refugee is coming from the
midst of a political struggle is rendered invisible.

Compassion is a self-referential loop here and the satisfaction of
providing relief to the hungry and the homeless refugees closes in on itself.
The compassion of the more left-leaning might be laced with a broad notion that
the intervention of European powers is responsible for this plight. But beyond
this, the existence of a resistance
as in Kobane or of strengthening the
resistance is too distant to what Slavoj Zizek has called the pro-immigrant beautiful
souls of Europe.

And yet the pressure on Europe to deliver even just humanitarian relief,
provide for the refugees must be welcomed.

Social desertification of the third world

This discourse shares strong affinities with
structural processes of what I call the social desertification of third world – a process which is not visible to the 'philanthropic
landlords' of Europe
hosting refugees. Small towns in India with major migration abroad, are full of
macho local elites driving their SUVs as though they are flexing their bicep
muscles. These are areas of the fast moving consumer goods marked by crass
commercialisation. A social and cultural
barrenness, degeneration and lumpenisation of these societies is part of the
process which produces and gifts the west its 'refugee'.

Indeed, apart from a country like India which is an ally of the US in
Afghanistan, the ultimate lumpen here is Saudi Arabia. Reports
say that Saudi Arabia has 100,000 air conditioned
tents that can house over 3 million people sitting empty, but has taken in
precisely zero migrants. It does take in migrants, but not as refugees with
legal status but as workers, so 'modern slaves'. But you cannot oppose what it
actually does for refugees in Europe, which is building
'one mosque for every 100 refugees who arrived last weekend', since that again will be Islamophobic!

In the larger logic of global capitalism, could we say that 'refugee
flow' towards Europe is good for imperialism and not so good for
anti-imperialist struggle? In particular, the old and the new landlords define
power relations in the context of a decreasingly able male population and a
general degeneration/commercialisation/lumpenisation of social relations. The dead refugee at the gates of fortress
Europe is also a symbol of this.

Gaining them entry into Europe might only reinforce Europe's moral
hegemony over the rest of the world and allow it to deploy its pro-refugee good
will and social capital to create the basis for the next armed intervention in,
say. Syria. Already the Guardian has declared as much: ‘The EU has to get behind the US agenda, support
and even assist with an invasion of Syria, maybe also implement other as yet
unspecified legislation to bring us in line with the US – or be swamped by the
‘fearful dispossessed’.

The desocialised refugee might integrate into society and become normal,
middle class citizens. They might contribute to 'multicultural diversity' in
places like East London or Kreuzberg in Berlin. But multicultural diversity is
also a trope for certain kinds of gentrification. Diversity and postcolonial hybridity is now pretty much an
amenity which the upper middle class wants almost as 'a right' and which real
estate conglomerates can use as a selling point.

Let Europe be racist, imperialist or what have you. Let Europe not admit
a single refugee and build the tallest fence around itself. I consider that
Europe has no obligation towards me, as this obligation puts me in a position
of dependence on Europe. But this only means that I will give Europe no chance
to prove its moral character and this is what allows me to prepare for a real
struggle against it. That is why the word from Kobane is to recognise the
struggle unfolding against imperialism in Syria and elsewhere.

A long time ago, Marx anticipated that the struggle of the European
proletariat could develop a linkage with the struggle in the colonies, that
they should reinforce each other. But Europe's refugee-love today is used
precisely to invisibilise this linkage, as though the refugee scrounging at
Europe's borders for 'animal rights' is the only reality, as though compassion
and not a political engagement is the only active attitude possible towards the
struggle in non-european societies.

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