From La Riposte.
Enormous material and financial resources were deployed to save the five occupants of the submersible Titan. Canada deployed a Lockheed CP-140 Aurora with a powerful underwater search and surveillance capability. A Royal Air Force C-17 transport aircraft and a Royal Navy submarine were on site. Canada and the United States deployed C-130 aircraft.
In addition to submarine hunting aircraft, the use of sonar buoys (capable of monitoring underwater activity up to a depth of nearly 4,000 metres) and remotely operated search robots accompanied a significant number of ships, including the Deep Energy, a seabed oil and gas pipeline installation vessel, and the Atlantic Merlin, equipped with an underwater robot, or the John Cabot, capable of constructing detailed imagery of the seabed.
No precise figures have been put forward, but the overall cost of this vast operation must certainly be in the hundreds of millions of euros.
Everything was done to generate maximum emotion around the fate of the passengers of the Titan. A procession of maritime experts, explorers, engineers, journalists, politicians and commentators of all kinds paraded on media platforms around the world. The interior of the submersible was described in detail.
Contrast between massive mobilisation and indifference
The whole world needed to know who these people were in mortal danger. We interviewed their relatives. Could we even imagine the tragic situation in which they found themselves, or the anguish of their loved ones? Thus, a unanimous moral position was forged: as long as there was any hope of finding these five people alive, the rescue operation had to continue, whatever the cost.
There is a contrast between this impressive mobilization and the treatment of the sinking, a few days earlier, of a trawler in very poor condition in which about 700 people, including, according to many accounts, a hundred children, died off the coast of Europe.
Repeatedly warned of the existence of this massively overloaded boat that could sink, Frontex and the Greek coastguard did nothing to prevent the disaster. Calls for help were picked up by the Alarm Phone device, which immediately alerted the Greek coastguard, which considered that the trawler did not need to be rescued.
A BBC investigation clearly showed that the boat remained virtually motionless for at least three hours before sinking.
Like some of the passengers on the Titan, it is believed that the majority of the trawler’s passengers were from Pakistan. But they weren’t billionaires. There was no international mobilization or rescue effort for these unfortunate people. They were simply left to their fate, condemned to death by the cruelty and indifference of European governments, for whom the men, women and children who risk their lives to come to Europe are worthless.
From the website of the French Marxist journal, La Riposte. The original can be found here.
[Picture top from CNN]
