There is an incredible depth and breadth of vitriol being published against migrants and asylum seekers right now, and a torrent of images on screen of mass human suffering. We are becoming desensitised and “used” to apocalyptic “Hollywood” movie images of people being torn apart, tortured and/or left to rot. Hence my weekly Comment in the daily Plymouth Herald (16.7.24) condemning any and all attempts to devalue even one human life.

We must not stop talking about it. Day after day we see horror on our screens. Everything from the apparent attempted assassination of a past-President to the blanket bombing of refugee camps.

We watch dramatic, high definition, cinematically enhanced moving pictures of bombs exploding into mushroom clouds and sound waves, collapsing buildings. 

There are close-ups of human carcasses with dissembled body parts, their relatives’ faces offered in close-up, blooded and wide-eyed, some screaming and others offering traumatised stares. The images can be paused, rewound, captured, recreated, saved and shared. Like a Hollywood movie.

In essence, we are being daily desensitised to the suffering of humanity.

Last week’s NATO conference in Washington heard world leaders ramping-up military plans for more war, more expenditure on war, and thereby, more images of death and destruction on TV. More frightening still was the latest language, intimated on stage and spoken more precisely on the fringes. The concept and identification of “surplus humans”. The term itself has been spoken in the Israeli Cabinet recently by a self-proclaimed fascist and racist war minister, referring directly to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Let’s think on that. Surplus humans. Surplus to what, to whom and by what criteria? When politicians demand to “send them back”, the presumption is they’re surplus to requirements. When walls are built to keep “them” out, permissions given to shoot to kill, they’re “surplus”. Militarised camps are built to warehouse and store hundreds of thousands at a time, of these surplus peoples. 

A couple of hundred years ago, in 1798, Thomas Malthus published a book still referenced by the more bigoted of politicians, and poorly paraphrased to suggest “overpopulation creates poverty and misery”. Malthusianism is back in fashion. Let the forces of war and climate reduce populations “naturally”, to give the smaller human race space to live. Malthus’s arguments were thoroughly disproved on the basis that as more people exist, so more resources can be produced to alleviate poverty. Today, it is largely only the elitists who still adhere to his tracts, although, in the face of climate collapse, a range of liberal minds are now starting to repeat his nonsense, amongst them the near-god of the environment, David Attenborough. 

To disprove this nonsense, is to recognise that humans have modified less than 15% of the global land surface, and settled to create homes on 10%. In the UK, 9% of the land is built-upon. There is space.   

A better example still: there more food produced in the world today than there are mouths to feed. The much-overstated argument that the current human population would require 2.5 Earth’s worth of resources in order for everyone to live to the standards of USA and Europe is full of holes – firstly, Capitalism’s overproduction of Stuff, including industrial food, is not a desirable nor sustainable way forward for humanity, and secondly Capitalisms exploitation and destruction of natural resources is not a stated goal of the vast majority of humanity. 

The issue, is resource (wealth) distribution. One-third of all food produced in the world is wasted. The reason is intentional – if the transport of the food to the people who need it is not profitable (often termed “economically viable”), and if the hungry people cannot pay the market price (including the surplus value known as profit), then they must exist in a condition of malnutrition and slowly starve – in their millions.

With a complete negation of any reason or rationality it is argued that the surplus food is a natural part of the System, it is the surplus mouths that are the problem. Capitalist society values only those who work to produce surplus for those who accumulate and hoard wealth. Those who do not or cannot are deemed a drain on society, an impediment to growth, surplus to requirements. 

Obviously it is not people who are the problem. After all, we’re all people. As a matter of fact, the System that commodifies and puts a price on every aspect of life is the problem. 

Were we to live in a system based upon human need not profit, resources could be prioritised to ensure every human has the basics of life ensured: nutrition, shelter, health care, education and community – love. And there is more than enough to go round.

Instead, adherents of the system of Capitalism are knowingly destroying the planet, descending into war, genocide and barbarism. And these acts don’t go away simply by turning off our TV. They continue to come towards us and engulf us. 

We are witnessing the rapidly developing situation towards one billion climate refugees by 2035, forced to leave their homelands due to extremes of weather impossible to live under. Crop failures, permanent drought, or fires or floods that destroy arable land create both war for the diminishing resources and mass migration for survival. 

These conditions, now recognised by the warrior class of NATO and every imperial power, are likely to be answered by rapid the development of more vast refugees camps, the people guarded and impoverished, incarcerating the millions forced to stay and die where they were born, surplus to requirements of the global system of Capitalism whilst the world leaders spend more than $2trillion each year on armaments.

To believe there are surplus humans is to have lost all humanity. If a society says some lives don’t matter, then one day that life is likely to be yours. Not watching the latest news will only bring this ever closer to our doors. The real news is that we’d best change the System, fast.