Three seemingly unrelated stories in The Guardian in early September tell us where we stand as a species and planet as we approach the one-quarter mark of the 21st century.
The first details how the “Unrelenting heat … across parts of Brazil” is “amplify(ing) the risk of wildfires that have been raging” throughout the country, even as climate change is contributing to “anomalously high rainfall totals” across parts of Africa, leading to flooding and generally unlivable conditions.
The second story focuses on what elites like to call the migrant or immigration crisis. About a dozen migrants from Eritrea — in Africa — died as they attempted to cross the Channel after their boat capsized. It is among the deadliest of such incidents to take place, even as the French and British governments further militarize their borders, and the the number of people “fleeing war and torture” in Africa and the Mediterranean and crossing the Channel to the United Kingdom has been increasing.
In Germany, far-right parties are ascendent, winning local and state elections.
“In the eastern state of Thuringia,” the paper reports, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) emerged as the most voted-for party on Sunday with nearly 33% of the vote and in neighbouring Saxony it came second with almost 31%.”
Our news culture tends to silo these stories. There is climate change and the havoc it wreaks, especially in the less developed countries of the world. There is immigration and the increasingly militarized response to borders here and in Europe.
And there is the politics, which are distorted by these trends but often covered as if they occur in a vacuum.
But the “hardline rhetoric … on full view in the lead-up to the (German) election” mirrors what we are seeing here and in many Western nations. In Thuringia, The Guardian reported, posters and placards “called for ‘summer, sun and remigration,’ the latter an allusion to mass deportation plans allegedly discussed by some AfD politicians along with other far-right figures at a meeting last year.”
Donald J. Trump, former president and current Republican hopeful, has centered his own plan in his campaign. “You have to do what you have to do to stop crime and to stop what’s taking place at the border,” he has said, repeating the dual lie that we are experiencing a massive crime wave and that the criminals are asylum seekers or “illegal aliens.” (Crime has ticked up but remains far lower than it was in the 1990s, and studies have shown that immigrants — here legally or not —- commit less crime than U.S. citizens.)
Numerous publications have sought to debunk the immigration narrative by underscoring how difficult — if not outright impossible — it would be to accomplish. But actual deportation is not the point. The rhetoric is.
And the rhetoric — really, collections of lies — feeds on the artificial distinctions erected between these issues. People flee their homelands because their homes have become unlivable — because of changing climate, failing economies, war and dictatorship, and gangs and drugs. Every immigrant who I have interviewed in my years as a journalist has told a similar story. The details may be different — their home country, whether it was gang violence, police corruption, or the erasure by environmental catastrophe (or pending catastrophe) of their homes that caused them to flee. Few said they wanted to uproot their lives, separate from their families, their cultures, but they did. They had little choice.
The same goes for the population we describe as “homeless” — a group who are more appropriately seen as internally displaced or internal refugees, people who because of their economic circumstances or mental health are viewed by our profit-obsessed culture as lacking worth. They are invisible, except when they are not and they police are called in and the dance we do at the border is recreated o the streets of our most prosperous cities.
The vote in Germany may shock, but it’s not all that different than the anti-homeless backlash that took place in San Francisco. It’s just less polite.
Climate change and its effects. Resource wars (whether waged by nation-states or gangs). Mass human flight and internal displacement. These are not isolated. They are woven from the same cloth: Capitalism. We must accept this reality if we are to address it.
Hank Kalet is a poet, essayist and journalist in New Jersey. He teaches journalism at Rutgers University. Email: hankkalet@gmail.com; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites; X (Twitter), @newspoet41; Substance, hankkalet.substack.com.
From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2024
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