Only one thing can help against the absurdity of the world: resistance

by time news

Thrown into an absurd world, we are used to lowering our standards. In a country where the entrepreneurial party FDP and the Greens want to save the climate together, one can basically only avoid the river valleys. But sometimes the general denial of reality becomes unbearable. In the absurdity of everyday political life, to which one has gotten used to, an abysmal irrationality suddenly shines forth, to which there is only one answer: resistance.

When the captain of the “Lifeline” was on trial in 2018 for rescuing refugees from drowning, an acquaintance of mine wrote on Facebook: “Charging someone for saving people from drowning is like becoming someone prosecute for saving people from drowning. ”That ironic comment seems like an echo from a bygone humanistic age. Because when the former mayor of the southern Italian village of Riace, Mimmo Lucano, was sentenced to 13 years in prison last week, hardly anyone noticed the absurdity of it all.

Lucano’s offense: He had opened the almost deserted village of Riace for a few hundred of the 500,000 homeless migrants in Italy. In doing so, he not only succeeded in saving the houses from decay and in making Riace a metropolis in Calabria, which has been deserted by the monopoly of agriculture. Above all, he broke the vicious circle of European migration policy: only those who have a residential address receive papers – and thus escape the cycle of illegality and exploitation.

But to save people from the hands of the Mafia and to give them back a minimum of dignity: This is, as the judgment shows, an offense in Europe. Because European agriculture and industry need slave labor without rights to flood global markets with cheap products. An estimated three million illegal migrants currently live in the EU and are exploited as harvest, meat or care workers. How normalized these unbearable numbers are is shown by the role that the refugee question played in the German election campaign: none at all.

The future of the continent lies in the hands of a political enterprise that discusses the grin of Armin Laschet or the résumé of Annalena Baerbock, while thousands drown and millions are humiliated. The EU’s criminal deal with Frontex, the inhuman resolutions in the Bundestag against the admission of refugees and all attempts to regularize people already living in Germany show a pattern: that Merkel’s historical “We can do it” should never be repeated.

What to do? We have no choice but to place justice over prevailing law and humanity over absurd politics. Global civil rights, which, as is well known, Hannah Arendt dreamed of, will come. Until then, we have to remember the oldest European virtue: hospitality as demonstrated to us by Mimmo Lucano in Riace.

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