The Useful Dead
The seas are full of ghosts. Ghosts of men, women and children who made a journey that will never end. We can feel their gaze upon us. We can feel their fingers pointing.
But we don’t hear their voices. The Prime Minister is right. We can never hear their voices, because voices are for the living.
That’s what makes the dead so useful: they grant us the freedom to be their voices, to bend over their prone forms and breathe our own words into their stilled throats. The dead have given us the gift of their own silence, that we may fill with whatever we fancy.
It’s the easiest thing in the world, to appoint yourself the voice of the dead. Nothing is simpler than making up your mind “what they would have wanted” and proceeding to carry out the wishes you just conjured into existence. It’s terribly, horribly easy, to paint your own desires onto the blank canvas that a death leaves. So easy we do it without even thinking, and congratulate ourselves on the trick.
The more dead there are, the more voices that have been silenced, the more opportunities to fill the silence. Twelve hundred dead speak very loudly, when you make sure they’re speaking in unison.
So you can assure a nation that those 1200 voices — those 1200 ghosts watching us from the sea — would, if only they could, have pleaded with us to save them from their fate, by any means necessary. By the means you promise us ARE necessary.
You can assure a nation that 1200 who died rolling the dice in search of a better life would regret that gamble, that they’d rather have lived out their lives in hopelessness than ended them in desperation.
You can assure a nation that 1200 dead are on your side. And those 1200 voices can easily drown out the few feeble ones on the other side, the voices of the living begging for some hope. Those 1200 voices have the numbers, so hope must be extinguished, because you can assure us that hope is the enemy of life, and you have 1200 witnesses to back you up.
The most reliable, and helpful, witnesses of all.
How can you argue with the dead? How can you dispute with the accusing stares across the sea? And how can you think to contradict the voices — who are you to presume to know what the dead are saying? Who are you to complain that someone else has put words in their mouths, only to do the same yourself?
I don’t know what 1200 dead are thinking. Maybe they’re applauding strong border protection. Maybe they’re wishing they had been horrified enough by the consequences of their trip to have called it off and accepted their lot in life.
Or maybe they’re thinking it was still worth it. Maybe they’re thinking they’d do it all again, for a chance at a life millions take for granted as their birthright, but they’ve been denied by chance and circumstance and the savagery of powerful men.
Maybe they’re thinking, to risk your life for a glimpse of something better is not something to be condemned. To risk your family’s life in order to give them a life worth living: maybe they’re thinking that was their right, and nobody will take that right away, even if death does.
Maybe they’re thinking that hope is all some people have: to seek to deny it to them is cruel; to destroy lives to terrify them into abandoning it unspeakable.
Or maybe they’re not. We’ll never know — ghosts don’t talk.
All we can know is how useful the dead are, and how easy it is to use them.
