Kompass-Newsletter No. 91 - 11+12/2020
"Racist idiot" voted out of office +++ 9 - 21.11.: Campaign "Deportation-free" against Lufthansa +++ 26.11.: Next Online event from Sea to City +++ (Charter)deportations at any cost +++ Alarm Phone Sahara on deportations from Algeria to Niger +++ Amnesty Campaign for El Hiblu 3 +++ Six years of Alarm Phone and recent AP reports on Aegean and Western Med +++ Article: The EU's Pact against migration +++ Migration Control Newsletter No.1 +++ Transnational Social Strike: new brochure for the last day of action
Dear friends!
He will have to leave the White House, the "racist idiot". This is how Toni Morrison appropriately described Trump and added in an interview in the Frankfurter Rundschau in 2018: "I will do everything I can to survive this historic lapse." Unfortunately Toni Morrison passed away in August 2019 and the US elections show: Trump may have lost, but despite (or by means of?) four years of notorious lies, egomania and continued racist and sexist smear campaigning, he won over 70 million votes. More than even in 2016. Anyone who hoped, along with Morrison, that Trump was just the latest upsurge of the sinking WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) in the USA was bitterly disappointed. Nationalist propaganda, division, machismo and racist populism always seem so damned deep and wide.
The deportation and exclusion policy in the EU and Germany follows the same repugnant thought patterns. The deportation of people in Frontex charter planes to Pakistan or Ethiopia in corona-lock-down mode is just as much evidence of a further brutalisation of the border regime as the quarantine in misery camps or the continuing push backs in the Mediterranean. Those responsible for organising this, and the politicians who initiate or at least cover up these inhumane and illegal practices, are far from having to reckon with public ostracism or concrete consequences. Even if - as was recently the case in the Aegean - mainstream media scandalise the injustice demonstrably and in detail.
That and how the fight against racism, deportations and the lethal borders can and must be continued on a daily basis is briefly illustrated by two current examples, each of which demonstrates remarkable continuity:
"There's something in the air - structural racism" is the title of one of three new posters with which the Berlin-Brandenburg Noborder Assembly continues its campaign against Lufthansa launched last year and calls for further "deportation-free" actions in November. The professional adbusting is very reminiscent of the deportation class campaign of kein mensch ist illegal in the early 2000s and will hopefully have similarly successful effects on the Corona-attacked airline.
The WatchTheMed Alarm Phone turned six years old in October - six years of being available around the clock and at the side of the people at sea! Five circles around Lampedusa are marked on the attached map. They show the positions of five boats that were accompanied by the shifts of the Hotline Project during the night of 3 November and supported by them until they landed or were rescued on the island off Sicily. Thousands have made it in recent weeks from Libya to Italy and from Morocco to the Canary Islands or across the Alboran Sea to the Spanish mainland. At the same time, hundreds of people have again died in these death zones produced by the EU.
The Compass Team
P.S.: This time we are saying goodbye to the current year earlier, but the next issue will be published in the first week of January 2021.