Boat People as Destructive Rhetoric

May 9, 2011
Gary Lilienthal

Shipwreck Occurring in the Collective Unconscious - Wikimedia Commons

That shrinking world outside the porthole was chaos embedded in the white froth of the sea. Imran solidified in his own terror.

That shrinking world outside the porthole was chaos, embedded in the white froth of the sea. Imran solidified in his own terror, as the captain abandoned ship and the ship threw itself towards the rocks.

The Australian Collective Unconscious

Because of reaction to people smuggler rhetoric and upsetting stories of family deaths on the high seas, the Australian collective unconscious remains frozen in movie-fiction horror at the evils of the old dictation test of the White Australia policy. However, this induced horror can be debunked.

People smuggling is a form of rhetoric requiring the application of no specific art or manipulation. In his The Art of Rhetoric, Aristotle advanced five kinds of these non-artistic proofs:

Laws
Witnesses
Contracts
Tortures
Oaths

Each of these proofs is persuasive on its own. For example, people might form an empathetic bond with a person who swears an oath, or feel horror at reports of torture.

People coming to Australia by boat on the high seas conform to the international law of the sea and to their contracts of carriage with the ship’s captain. Neither of these non-artistic proofs appears unreasonable until officials allege that the ship’s captain is somehow torturing his passengers, by for example making the boat sink, taking them on a terrible journey on which they are unlikely to survive, or taking them on a passage for which they should not have been accepted. Now it has become persuasive, and people react to it in horror.

All that remains is to rhetorically rename the captain and the ship’s agent as people smugglers and it magically infers disdain for the captain and his agents. This takes place without any detailed explanation of what the law really is. The rules could be literally anything for the uncritical television viewer, such as for example an administrative queue. Consequently, people smugglers and queue jumpers arouse voter horror, because they are undesirables forcing their passengers on the adverse elements to invade Australia.

The Apparition of a Lacuna in the Law

To illustrate, coalition immigration actor Scott Morrison obliged by inferring the absence of law in his 21 March 2011 announcement: “The bypassing of Christmas Island raises potential questions over the legal status of the boat’s passengers as off shore entry persons and their access to on shore processing pathways, including the Refugee Review Tribunal for appeals. These questions can only be really tested in court.”

Further examination of the horrific ship’s captain will allow people to base this fictional torture on gripping aspects of ancient mythology, such as that of the ancient ferryman. This is possible following the C. G. Jung dictum in his The Archetypes that these ancient myths continue to act as archetypes in the public psyche, controlling collective perceptions and reactions.

The Myth of the Ferry Driver

The mythical ferry driver was a character in the literature of many ancient legends. He conducted terrible water voyages and seemingly operated by a code of conduct, which could not be breached – an unwritten law. The myth of the ferry driver arises first in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh and then later in amended form in Dante’s Divine Comedy of the early modern age. The latter version was based on Greek mythology, sung more recently than that of the Gilgamesh Epic.

In the Epic of Gilgamesh, wisely written about 5000 years ago by ancient Sumerian priests, the ferry driver was a cooperative official. In fact, this ferry driver acted as the servant of Noah some time after the great patriarch had survived the biblical flood. He was a residue of the flood, now helping people cross the great ocean to reach the immortal Noah.

This ferryman showed Gilgamesh how to prepare for the trials of the waters of death. They succeed happily and without mishap in reaching the far side of the great ocean. However, the ferry driver role was altered greatly in Dante’s version. Dante interwove a new version of the ferry driver into his Inferno, based in the more recent Greek mythology.

In Canto II of Book One of the Inferno, after passing through the vestibule to Hell, Dante and Virgil reached the ferry that would take them across the river to Hell. The ferry was driven by mythical Charon, who did not want to let Dante aboard, because he was a still-living being and there was an unwritten law prohibiting the carriage of living beings to Hell.

Virgil forced Charon to accept Dante’s passage by explaining to him that Dante’s journey was on a divine path. Charon was the mythical ferryman of Hades who carried souls of the newly deceased across the rivers Styx and Acheron, rivers that divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. By tradition, Charon was paid for the passage by placing a coin in the mouth of a dead person. Some say that those who could not pay the fee, or those whose bodies were left unburied, were tortured by having to wander the shores for one hundred years.

Outcome of the Rhetoric Admixed with the Myths

A certain immigration restriction inheres in these legends. It was as if those on the other side had an inherent right to live in the neighbourhood of their choice, and that would be disturbed by any arrivals.

Since rhetoric constructs people smuggling based on mythological archetypes inferring undesirable invaders, observers feel they need deliberate no further. They assume that innocent people arriving from foreign shores is indistinguishable from an offence by a people smuggler. Imran’s attempt at innocent arrival thus becomes criminal, even although he perished at sea.

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