The temporal distribution of deaths notably reveals that the number of victims rose after 2001, and more so from 2003, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thus, before the wrenching increase due to the wars in Syria and the wider Middle East, there was a ‘normal’ rate of more than a thousand deaths a year among those trying to reach Europe. There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty. [...]