Should the US help Save These People? - Italy, Migrants, and Libya - some things to consider

[pampango]

8. Certainly. As with all refugees, they are fleeing war, oppression and starvation. We care.

Just because we are farther away does not mean that we cannot do our part to help.

There's a great oped in The Guardian today that deals with this crisis.

Our political class ... has been pulled so far right ... it will not tell the complicated truth about the consequences of conflict, about a globalised economy, about our interconnected world, a world that we cannot simply step off, or stop."

The far right’s fantasy of pulling up the drawbridge to stop this great flow of desperate humanity in transit is just that: a fantasy.

Many drown anonymously. Their stories on the whole do not interest us, as they are too complex. Too many countries are involved, too much conflict, too many journeys push them out to sea. ... We feel we have no responsibility to them, still less understanding of who they are. They are simply “other”. The discourse of the BNP, the EDL, and now Ukip – which, whatever it says, attracts out-and-out racists – has contaminated public life.

How did we end up in this moral vacuum where we lose any sense of connection to other human beings? It’s fairly easy: people who aren’t human beings don’t need any rights, or any sympathy, so we dehumanise them via language both political and personal. We talk of them as disease, contagion, a virus. They are not us. They cannot become us.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/20/immigration-language-of-genocide-british-politics