Zygmunt Bauman: The Refugee Crisis Is The Humanity Crisis

Pablo Picasso: Cat Eating A Bird, 1939
(source: NY Times)
no copyright infringement intended

Zygmunt Bauman (his latest book, “Strangers at Our Door” is published with Polity Press): Those people who are forced to flee intolerable conditions are not considered to be “bearers of rights,” even those supposedly considered inalienable to humanity. Forced to depend for their survival on the people on whose doors they knock, refugees are in a way thrown outside the realm of “humanity,” as far as it is meant to confer the rights they aren’t afforded. There is currently a pronounced tendency —- among the settled populations as well as the politicians they elect to state offices — to transfer the “issue of refugees” from the area of universal human rights into that of internal security. Being tough on foreigners in the name of safety from potential terrorists is evidently generating more political currency than appealing for benevolence and compassion for people in distress.

Read in Bauman's position in today's NY Times

(Zoon Politikon)

(Zygmunt Bauman)