Let Aylan Kurdi's picture not become Europe's civilising mission 2.0

A dead Syrian boy washed up on Turkish shore has unnerved the top few tiers of the many-tiered world. Aylan Kurdi's plump doll-like three-year-old body, only lifeless, and now buried, has been captured in an image that has once again proved the Stalinist maxim, a million deaths are but a statistic, but a single death a course-altering tragedy.

That image, which launched a thousand hashtags and forced open the tightly shut gates of European countries, is already being likened to the 1989 image of the tank man in Tiananmen Square, or the 1984 image by Raghu Rai of the unknown baby with hollowed eyes, buried under the debris left by Bhopal Gas disaster.

In our mediated world, where images matter most and become events in themselves, usurping entire pasts and redirecting or foreshadowing futures, the photo of dead Aylan Kurdi lying face down has been marked forever not only as the definitive icon of the Syrian, indeed West Asian, refugee crisis, but also a pictorial taunt, an assault so sharp on the idea of Euro-American civilisation that a so-called "rethink" has already begun.    

Ruminations on the ethics of the "visual shock" that was Aylan Kurdi's picture have flooded the news and opinion portals all over the world, with decision to publish and forefront it rocking global mediasphere. Almost every justification carried by editors around the world highlighted one point: It was important to humanise the refugee crisis, to put a face to it. Why graphic images of mutilation and death don't move us anymore, while a picture of a boy-like-our-own, drowned at sea, push us to "reorient", if only marginally, our tough policy talks on asylum seekers and global migration - is a question some asked but couldn't adequately answer. In a 24x7 televisual universe, where images jostle for our very, very short-lived attention span, bloodshed and gore are no longer arresting: they're the staple, the matrix of our sensory operations. Hence, the bloodless coup that is Aylan Kurdi's picture, that nevertheless is a subtly luminous depiction of the enormous human and environmental cost of relentless and bloody turf wars going on in West Asia in general, and Syria in particular, achieves what continual war photography, or ISIS beheading videos, could not.  

Promises from German chancellor Angela Merkel or shout-outs from European Union president Jean-Claude Juncker, urging their own governments and fellow nations to open the proverbial gates feel like a "take heart scene" from a Hollywood disaster film such as Roland Emmerich's 2012. Hundreds of op-eds on the "idea of Europe", replay of worldwide antipathy towards a particular race/religion, "reminiscent of the 1930s/'40s anti-Semitism", "what failed Aylan Kurdi", and many more fascinating soul-searching issues have been published. If there's a churn in the heart of Europe, if the centrifuge of politics and emotions has thrust a mirror before the continent's incontinent face, it has been effected by a mere picture. Not corpses or body count, but a picture.

And that's exactly the bitter irony of the situation. Our drawing rooms, television screens, computer monitors and smartphones have been inundated by Aylan Kurdi's lifeless, lifelike photograph, (which however, quietly leaves out his dead brother and mother who too drowned in the Mediterranean), pricking the bubble of our smug appreciation of political tragicomedies around the world. But, it has also, and cleverly so, spun the West Asian humanitarian catastrophe into a matter of Europe's, and likewise, West's, conscience.

It is the "white man's burden" all over again. Christian Europe, armed with conscience and guilt, now must embark on what it does best: civilising missions through centuries. Yet Christian Europe, true to its mythical form, is cavorting in the imagined contamination, especially the formerly Soviet East European nations, which dread the prospect of being "flooded by Muslim terrorists and ISIS supporters" in case they let refugees in.

How and why a refugee crisis, brought about by territorial supremacist wars waged by proxy by the biggest global stakeholders and regional dominants, becomes a matter of Euro-American largeness of heart - and a dead Syrian child washed up on Turkish beaches becomes a mascot for European emotional renaissance - is something everyone must ask urgently.

"Open the gates" becomes an outcry-turned-order when emotional tornadoes perform cosmetic surgeries on realpolitick, or politics as usual, pragmatism. UK's Prime Minister David Cameron or Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban demonstrates this pragmatic side of politics, European or West Asian. We are expected to believe that Germany's Merkel and EU's Juncker represent the more passionate, more humanised version of politics, given Germany's precarious history of having propelled two world wars and scarred forever by the Third Reich-engineered Holocaust. But it was Merkel and Juncker who remained demonically tightfisted during the unfolding Greek financial meltdown, forcing former PM Alexis Tsipras to ultimately accept a hideously unfavourable fiscal package. Even then, the idea of Europe was called upon to reinvent itself; but no leader or nation, angelic Germany included, was up to sign on for truly egalitarian banking reform.       

If Syrians are the new Greeks, did the latter too need an Aylan Kurdi - the image, not the boy, of course - to drive home the delicate matter? Or was it that what Europe is utterly incapable of doing is a self-civilising mission, an introspection turning inwards and not merely appropriating and Orientalising every shred of political capital not entirely inside its diminished dominion?

As Slovoj Zizek says in a brilliant piece in the London Review of Books: "Refugees are the price we pay for a globalised economy in which commodities - but not people - are permitted to circulate freely." Migration is the truth of the present and the future, the only order that will dictate flow and flux of people, languages, ethnicities and religions into a mishmash of multicultural worlds. Refusal to accept this basic idea is what precipitates the current quagmire. Hence, if Aylan Kurdi's picture has blown apart the fabric of our cosmopolitan numbness, has foregrounded what we take for granted as the unseemly but necessary backdrop to a globalised existence, then what it mustn't do is hijack the reasons behind the crisis itself. Or let Europe take credit even as it self-shames itself into "accepting refugees". Questions of asylum must form basic framework of foreign policy in every country, and petro-dollar rich emirates, who haven't budged a bit despite the hue and cry in Europe over little Aylan's picture, must be pressured into behaving better.

The tragedy that is Aylan Kurdi's picture is not about Europe's self-perception or an isolated war in a peculiarly conflict-ridden corner of the world. It is about the inability to face our own selves in the cracked mirror of globalisation. As Manu Joseph had mentioned a recent column, the discrimination between "good homelessness" (of economic/artistic/white émigrés) and "bad homelessness" (of refugees, black and brown migrants) is at the root of our half-baked globalisation. There will be fewer Aylan Kurdis if that is understood.