{"id":32531,"date":"2015-08-27T04:00:07","date_gmt":"2015-08-27T08:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32531"},"modified":"2018-01-11T16:47:55","modified_gmt":"2018-01-11T21:47:55","slug":"the-plight-of-the-calais-migrants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/08\/27\/the-plight-of-the-calais-migrants\/","title":{"rendered":"The plight of the Calais migrants"},"content":{"rendered":"

At sp!ked<\/em>, Brendan O’Neill<\/a> talks about the situation in Calais between the migrants who want to enter the UK and the government that very much wants them to stay on the other side of the Channel:<\/p>\n

What\u2019s worse: treating people like animals or referring to them in animal-like language? Most normal people would say the former. Actions speak louder than words, after all. To treat someone as less than human — by denying them their rights, caging them, beating them — has a direct detrimental impact on their individual autonomy and everyday lives. In contrast, comparing someone to an animal, through your choice of words, is just unpleasant; it doesn\u2019t physically hold that individual back. Sticks and stones can seriously impede our ability to live freely; words can only make us feel bad (if we let them).<\/p>\n

Yet in the morally inverted world of political correctness, where speaking in the clipped morals of the new clerisy is the key and hollow duty of every citizen, words are more important than behaviour. You\u2019re judged on how you express yourself, not on what you believe, or what you do. Take Swarmgate, the media fury over British PM David Cameron\u2019s use of the word \u2018swarm\u2019 to refer to those few thousand migrants in Calais who long to come to Britain. When Cameron was talking about sending soldiers and barbed wire and dogs to keep these aspirant Brits out of Britain, the self-styled guardians of public decency — the Twitterati, liberal editorialists, Labourites — said little, except perhaps that he should do it more quickly. Yet as soon as he referred to the migrants as a \u2018swarm of people\u2019, these Good People became pained: they banged their fists on tables, spilt their tea, went on the telly.<\/p>\n

Ladies and gentlemen, behold the inhumanity of political correctness, which bats not one eyelid when 5,000 human beings are reduced to the level of animals, yet which becomes wide-eyed with anger when their animal-like status is mentioned in polite society. \u2018Treat them like shit, just don\u2019t use shitty language while you do it\u2019 — that\u2019s the glorious motto of the PC.<\/p>\n

Right now, nothing better captures PC\u2019s Kafkaesque levels of dishonesty and censorious linguistic trickery than Swarmgate. This controversy has exposed that many influential people now mistake politeness for morality, linguistic temperance for decency. So it was that Harriet Harman, acting leader of the Labour Party, could go on TV and rail against Cameron for using that s-word and then in her very next breath call on him to do more to prevent these migrants from getting to Britain. \u2018He should remember he\u2019s talking about people and not insects\u2019, she said. Then, in mere seconds, without embarrassment, she talked about the \u2018nightmare\u2019 of having all these noisy migrants at the English Channel and said Cameron should put pressure on the French to assess \u2018these people\u2019 to see which ones \u2018should be deported\u2019. Sent back to where they came from, which in some cases is Afghanistan and Iraq: nations Harman\u2019s party helped to destroy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At sp!ked, Brendan O’Neill talks about the situation in Calais between the migrants who want to enter the UK and the government that very much wants them to stay on the other side of the Channel: What\u2019s worse: treating people like animals or referring to them in animal-like language? Most normal people would say the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,62,1117,28,53],"tags":[389,480,554,238,351],"class_list":["post-32531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-europe","category-france","category-media","category-politics","tag-davidcameron","tag-hypocrisy","tag-immigration","tag-offensensitivity","tag-politicalcorrectness"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8sH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32531"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32533,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32531\/revisions\/32533"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}