Asylum Seekers - moral relativism revisited

The sangat camp has closed, and refugees are heading to England. The radio gives this wooly affirmation that these refugees are coming on ‘economic’ visas. The press does likewise. No one really tries to understand why 1200 Iraqi Kurds and Afghans were sat in a camp in France desperate for asylum. ‘Refugee’ often has this subliminal streotype - dependant, desperate, and, reading the trash-press like the Daily Mail/Telegraph, calculating to leech money from the government. These stereotypes are reinforced by the same papers that ‘simply’ assert that Saddam is ‘evil’ and that he must be tackled. The same papers that blindly supported the ‘simple’ war in Afghanistan against the ‘evil’ Taliban. If ‘they’ are really ‘evil’, by implication of theduality of such speak, it means that ‘we’ are somehow ‘just’, and therefore by taking the moral high-ground ‘we’ should at least be consistent.
It is utterly repugnant therefore that ‘we’ can criticise and restrict the flow of asylum seekers while blatantly claiming a ‘simple’ moral superiority over thoses asylum seekers ‘oppressors’. How can one strike at such ‘criminals’ while at the same time failing to support their ‘victims’. The countries with such clear excesses of economic wealth (and easily spouted moralilty) have a clear self-imposed responsibility to provide support for all thoses who are ‘victims’. More critically, they have an absolute duty when it was their misguided intervention in the first place that exaggerated the power of such oppressors (through for example, direct support of Saddam Hussain and the Taliban).

Posted by Ian at December 5, 2002 09:37 AM | TrackBack §