In her novel Herod’s children, written 1948 the Austrian author Ilse Aichinger, a Jewish victim of Nazi regime, wrote: “The Darkness ran into the ports of Europe". But have we ever chased it away or do the same buffaloes run the same darkness, only dressed in gown of the dead and meek? The citizens of Europe rejoice many freedoms of mobility and education. Yet the purpose of this mobility and education has failed its noble cause if we do not learn to recognize and spot the signs of history repeating it self. The real lesson of WW2 is not memorizing numbers of victims, names of the oppressors and numbers of years but understanding how millions of ordinary German citizens were convinced to participate in these acts. Millions of people from countries such as Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, are attempting to escape the warfare and terrorism that make living impossible. As they seek Asylum in the alleged peace of Europe I ask myself in what kind of Europe I wish to live?
Witnessing terrifying brutality of state organs towards migrants, my focus is clearly set on the present migrant crisis. Often I hear neighbors, colleagues or politician speaking of endangered National Security. Those people claim the culture of Europe, settled on christian values, is being compromised by the flood of Asylum seekers, that bring with them, their dangerous otherness. Those who see a threat in migrants often identify with a image of a ethnically homogeneous European society. Difference is not perceived as an enrichment, but as a threat that eradicates the healthy existing patterns of a Nation. The threat of the migrant crisis is also perceived as an economical threat. Because of the desperate situation of the Asylum seekers, when they seek work in more developed countries, they are willing to work for lower wages. The domestic population is frightened that this will lower the price of their own labor.
On the other hand many research has been done in this field, that gained little or no attention in the public media. To reefer to all of these papers, in a proper way, is a job for a much longer narrative, so I will simplify the matter. As fear is pumped with the crisis, concrete studies show that the migrants are not a part of the problem but a part of the solution. Asylum seekers, or even economical migrants, don't come to live from welfare, they come to work and to find a normal everyday life. They have the same basic human needs as every European, as every human. They yearn for peace, security and a warm home. Mostly these are young highly motivated people. They work, they pay taxes, they pay for accommodation. The economically more developed countries, to which they wish to escape and find sanctuary, have a low nativity rate, but also a low mortality rate. Oversimplifying the matter, we could claim they fill the demographic gap and the GNI. The real threat in Europe is not the crisis, but the toxic discourse. As Deleuza/Gautier said in their famous work Schizophrenia and Capitalism: "Distinctions must be made: the repressing representation which performs the repression; the repressed representative, on which the repression actually comes to bear; the displaced represented, which gives a falsified apparent image that is meant to trap desire." The repressing representation is the State, the repressed representative are the migrants and the displaced represented are the ideas of migrants as threat (terrorists, job thieves, otherness). This is accomplished through empty referents like: "National security". "National security" does not exist by itself, it is a empty bubble filed with collective paranoid imagination. No human is born illegal, humans make other humans illegal.
To conclude, on the example of the migrant crisis I elaborate the Europe I wish to live in. The Europe I wish to live in, is a multiethnic and colorblind (deuteranopian) Europe. It is a place where diversety has a proper framework to create beuty, where different styles, religions, opinions meet and collaborate. It is place where difference is seen as a enrichment instead of a reason for animosity. A place where everybody is welcome and where we stopped fighting against each other and began fighting for each other. Because that is what it means to be human and that is what makes us whole.
