People who wanted to find new lives. Instead they lie like cocooned caterpillars, desperately hoping to wake up to a different world. Others sit on the rubbish-strewn pavement, hunched in blankets. They too are rubbish, or so it would seem, according to widespread attitudes that have in recent weeks seen calls for children to undergo dental inspections to determine their age. 

…Give me words to make this picture real. …But this is an age of unparalleled harshness. Pictures of suffering pass us by. We narrow our eyes and close our souls. 

…There’s no bed to go to and no destination in sight. A camp that provided some kind of desperate community is being demolished. The people here are falling into a gap in the modern world. They look like they are bound for a homeless future. These are the people we have decided we have no space for, no interest in and no compassion towards. This is the result – people mingling with discarded plastic bottles in the streets of abandonment. For human beings don’t disappear, unless you actually kill them. They stand around, slump in blankets, lie wrapped up and trying to dream of somewhere better. Here they are – the unwanted.

…If history has taught us one thing it is that fear of the other is always irrational. There is no case in history when a wave of hatred was justified or grounded in fact. Yet such waves of fear and loathing can be so forceful and widespread that they appear completely sane to those affected, and are hard to resist. 

There was no rational basis for the antisemitism that made Rothko’s family flee Russia. Labour MPs who think the left needs to accept the current anti-migrant mood are utterly wrong because such moods can and do thrive independently of fact. Here’s the question: should liberals and socialists in the 1930s have recognised there were legitimate reasons for popular antisemitism?

So look, and weep. Not for them. For us.

Here lie the unwanted of Calais – an indictment of us, not them | Jonathan Jones | Opinion | The Guardian

Jeezus…