Greece's 'Migrant Crisis' Continues, Media's Selective Empathy Too
ABC News reports eighteen migrants died, with only two rescued, after an inflatable boat sank south of Crete. A grim, recurring headline framing desperate souls as a 'crisis' for Europe, rather than a direct consequence of Western foreign policy and economic exploitation. Missing from this narrative, as always, is the fact that these 'migrants' are often fleeing destabilized regions, conflicts
fueled by Western arms sales, or economic collapse exacerbated by global capitalism—contexts mainstream outlets consistently downplay. Instead of probing who benefits from these endless cycles of displacement, we get detached reports on body counts. (Conveniently, the defense contractors selling weapons to conflict zones and the corporations profiting from resource extraction rarely appear in
these 'migrant crisis' stories.) One might wonder: how many more bodies must wash ashore before we look beyond the 'migrant' individual and confront the geopolitics of despair?