Here is a dispatch from the great theatre of European hypocrisy, filed from a bar in the Ardeatine quarter of Rome where the campari is as bitter as the truth. News reaches this correspondent that two individuals, likely scapegoats of prodigious idiocy, have been collared by the carabinieri following the incineration of a minivan carrying migrant farm workers. Seven souls, imported to pick our tomatoes and harvest our guilt, are now indistinguishable from the scorched earth of the Foggian countryside. The fire, a perverse baptism, has ignited a fresh row over the EU's border policy, a document so porous it might as well be written on cigarette paper and smoked by bureaucrats in Brussels.
Let us be frank. The minivan, a Fiat Ducato of certain vintage, was a mobile coffin on wheels. It did not spontaneously combust out of a sense of poetic justice. It burned because the men inside were deemed expendable. They were part of the invisible army that feeds Europe, a legion of ghost labourers who exist in the spaces between our legal frameworks and our moral scruples. The arrests are a poultice on a gangrenous wound. The EU will convene emergency summits, release statements wringing their hands in simulated anguish, and then return to the noble work of drafting regulations that allow this tragedy to metastasise.
This is the acid reflux of a system built on good intentions and bad implementation. The Schengen area, that grand experiment in borderless fraternity, has become a sieve through which desperate people pour, only to be funnelled into the black economy. The farm owners, the agribusiness magnates, the supply chains that deliver cheap produce to our tables: they are the unindicted co-conspirators. But they will not fry in a minivan. They will not be arrested. They will attend ribbon cuttings and receive EU agricultural subsidies while the smoke from this funeral pyre drifts across the Alps.
I recall, in a gin-soaked fug, a quote from a former Italian interior minister: 'We cannot be the refugee camp of Europe.' Quite right. We are not a camp. We are a crematorium, operated with the bureaucratic efficiency of a second-hand car dealership. The men who died today were not refugees. They were economic migrants, a term that has been weaponised to justify a thousand cruelties. They were, in the ghastly vernacular of our times, 'irregular.' As if their suffering was a breach of protocol.
Let us dwell on the mechanics. A minivan, overcrowded, likely with faulty wiring. A driver, perhaps a smuggler, perhaps a poor soul himself. They were transporting these workers from the fields to a makeshift dormitory. The fire caught swiftly. They had no chance. The screams, if any, were in a language the neighbours are trained not to hear. The authorities will investigate. They will find a patsy. They will promise reform. And next season, a new minivan will arrive, filled with new workers, their fates as precarious as the last.
This is not a breaking news story. This is a recurring nightmare. The EU border policy is not under scrutiny; it is a fetish object, admired for its complexity while its failures are ignored. We will see the usual panoply: the condemning tweets, the moments of silence, the op-eds from armchair humanitarians. All of it a dance around the central fact: we want the labour but not the labourers. We want the fruit but not the hands that pick it.
As I drain the last of this gin, I consider the geometry of absurdity. Seven men dead. Two men arrested. Millions of Euros to be spent on border fortification. Zero spend on the conditions that make such journeys necessary. The logic is circular. The tragedy, predictable. The satire, redundant. The fire was not a cause. It was a symptom. The cause is a Europe that builds walls around its conscience. And the only thing that burns is the poor.
