What About That Other Maritime Disaster?

1,619 words

I am going to be a little more charitable towards the Titan submarine tragedy than my esteemed colleagues Jim Goad, Gunnar Alfredsson, and Thomas Steuben. All three look at the anti-white virtue-signaling, the incessant cost-cutting, and the reckless disregard for safety practiced by now-deceased OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush and conclude that perhaps this little disaster does not quite warrant the copious teardrops being shed over it like the water that crushed the submersible near the wreck of the Titanic wreckage on June 18, instantly killing its five occupants — including Rush himself.

They’re not wrong, of course. My schadenfreude did surge when learning about Rush’s fashionably perverse comments about his own race and sex, such as when he talked about his disdain for hiring “50-year-old white guys.” There is also a lot of irony and meaning imbuing the whole fiasco — which, of course, gives writers like me something to write about. Rush can be seen as the Icarus of the sea. An Aesopian moral could be fashioned about the price one pays for alienating one’s own people. The very name of the submersible symbolizes of the hubris of Man — as did, ironically, the name of the doomed vessel it was intended to visit. (I know, I know, “irony is not coincidence”, but still . . .) As a result of all this deeper meaning, it is difficult not to view the Titan disaster as a sort of cosmic comeuppance — at least for the late Stockton Rush.

I had never heard of the man before all this, and so I don’t know about whatever redeeming qualities he might have possessed. But I also refuse to let go of my sadness and sense of tragedy. This was a needless loss of innocent human life, including that of a teenager. Yes, these were wealthy men going on a high-risk adventure in what amounted to a $250,000 bath toy. But does that mean we should do the Mashed Potato over their watery graves? What harm did they do other to themselves on their way to becoming a permanent footnote to Titanic lore?

As I was dithering emotionally over this news item, I read of another maritime tragedy, which instantly cemented my perspective on the Titan. I had been counting all the ways the allegorical Stockton Rush did and did not deserve his demise. But after hearing of this other incident, I saw Stockton Rush as a tragic hero of Faustian proportions, worthy of song — or at least a 30-page black-and-white graphic novel. Hey, he may have been a race traitor, but he was our race traitor, buddy!

The other story I am referring to is that of a fishing trawler overloaded with up to 750 “refugees” from Pakistan, Egypt, Syria, and Palestine that sank off the coast of Greece. In comparison to that, the doomed Titan was the epitome of Promethean glory.

This migrant liner capsized on June 14 over one of the Mediterranean Sea’s deepest points. According to the latest reports as of this writing, 82 of its passengers are confirmed dead, 104 were rescued, and the rest are still missing and presumed dead, despite the efforts of the Greek coast guard, navy, and air force to locate and rescue survivors. It is estimated that 50 to 100 of the passengers were children — and according to the reports, none of the people rescued were wearing life jackets.

Much criticism has been leveled at the Greek authorities for not acting quickly enough to avert the disaster or to save the passengers, but the Greeks did try to establish contact with the stricken vessel and save it:

Greek and United Nations authorities were first alerted about the boat, which was heading for Italy, on June 13. They then surveyed the area and repeatedly tried to call and contact the ship, but all requests for help were declined as passengers repeatedly expressed that they wanted to continue their journey.

Later in the day on June 13, a merchant ship supplied the fishing boat with food and supplies. However, later attempts to try and supply help were declined by passengers. A coast guard patrol boat moved alongside the ship before it ultimately capsized in the early hours of June 14.

None other than former US President Barack Obama weighed in on the events while in Greece a few days later. As would be expected, he complained about how the comparatively miniscule Titan, the fate of which was still in doubt at the time, was hogging all the news coverage while this much greater human tragedy was being more or less ignored:

‘There is a potential tragedy unfolding with the submarine that is getting minute-to-minute coverage all around the world,’ [Obama] said. ‘This is understandable because we all want and pray that these folks are rescued. But, the fact that this has got so much more attention than the fact that 700 people sank is an untenable situation.’

The International Organisation for Migration called it one of ‘the worst sea tragedies in the last decade’.

Obama also brought up the parallels in an interview with CNN earlier on Thursday. When talking about how democracies can’t thrive with high levels of inequality, he used the sub tragedy as an example.

‘In some ways, it’s indicative of the degree to which people’s life chances have grown so disparate.’

Obama’s comments illustrate the stark difference between Left and Right these days, and also how far the Left has fallen. Well over a century has passed since the advent of progressivism, when the Left pursued reasonable goals such as establishing two-day weekends, abolishing child labor, and ensuring safer working environments. Today, prominent Lefties such as Obama are empathizing with unassimilable illegal immigrants as they invade Europe in order to get on public welfare and ultimately replace its indigenous populations. By the same token, over 50 years have passed since we put a man on the Moon, and while the Titan was at best a degraded manifestation of the same intrepid spirit, it still retained some of that noble sentiment.

You can buy Spencer J. Quinn’s young adult novel The No College Club here.

“Why pay a quarter of a million dollars to take this cheap contraption 12,000 feet underwater, where it can be crushed in nanoseconds by 400 atmospheres of pressure, to see the Titanic, which we have already seen countless times on film and in photographs? Because it’s there, man! Because it’s there!”

It is indeed easy to lampoon, but a purer form of that same spirit also burned in men such as Ernest Shackleton and Edmund Hillary, who are impossible to lampoon. They took tremendous personal risks to accomplish great things and expand Man’s access to his world. It was partly arrogance, but partly daring as well. Such feats transfix millions because they demonstrate that there is something more to life than fulfilling one’s selfish desires. Surely not everyone is cut out for risking his life for a cause or an ideal, but the fact that some of us are is a source of inspiration. This is why the Titan story gets more airtime than Obama’s precious barbarian barge. Those people were acting entirely out of self-interest, even as their self-interest threatened the interests of the very Europeans whose lands they were invading. What’s inspiring about that?

It is certainly a shame that even one of those passengers had to die. But they were planning to enter Europe illegally, and bring with them the criminal pathologies of North Africa and the Middle East, to say nothing of all the violence and repression of Islam. They did not belong, and they did not care. They were willing participants in the Great Replacement — a cross between Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints and Derek Turner’s Sea Changes, if you will. Once there are a certain number of these people in Europe, it will ultimately force a devastating civil war, the eradication of whites as a distinct racial group, or Europe’s total submission to Islam. And all three outcomes are intolerable.

With the European migrant population now lighter by 650 people, perhaps whichever one of these outcomes God decides to test us with will be postponed by a month or two. Maybe the European whites of the future will use that extra time to help stem the tide. Who knows?

The best solution would have been for the vagrant vessel to turn around and take all those people safely back to where they came from. In lieu of that, the actual outcome turned out to be preferable to the ship docking in Italy with all its passengers on board. Is that coldhearted of me? Or was it more coldhearted for that ship’s captain not to issue life jackets to his huddled urchins? Or perhaps the urchins themselves were being quite coldhearted by planning to occupy a land that doesn’t belong to them in a form of squatters’ rights?

Whatever else might be said about him, you can’t accuse Stockton Rush of that. At the very least, we should give the man credit for going down with his own ship. There is a great deal of honor in that. He may have had his flaws as a captain and businessman — and he certainly deserves posthumous censure for his hidebound opinions on white men — but at least he believed enough in his product to walk it like he talked it. The same cannot be said of that fishing trawler captain, who made sure to save his own skin after presiding over the drowning deaths of a staggering 85% of his clientele.

Although it may not turn out to be such a good thing for him after all. The Daily Mail reported that “[n]ine survivors have been arrested on suspicion of people smuggling — including the ship’s captain . . .”

Talk about irony. Maybe that’s another reason why the story was underreported in the media, rather than Barack Obama’s oh-so-tiresome blather about “inequality.”

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