The Ocean Gate submersible Titan killed five people in an illfated expedition to the wreck of the Titanic Photo: EFE/Ocean Gate
Summary of the report
- Titan submersible tragedy: Five people, including wealthy executives, died when they ran out of oxygen at 12,000 feet in the Atlantic Ocean.
- Internet Reaction: Several users, mostly communists, mocked the tragedy, celebrating the deaths of wealthy people, thus testifying to a discourse of dehumanization.
- Historical context: The dehumanization of the rich is a tradition in farleft discourses, invoked to justify violence and oppression based on a Marxist view of society.
Somewhere 3800 meters deep in the Atlantic Ocean, on the edge of the remains of the Titanic ship, five people trapped for days in a small submersible, the Titan, pondered what to do in the last hours of their lives as their oxygen supplies were slowly running out . It is estimated that it sold out on Wednesday (21). Parts of the submersible were found this Thursday, confirming the death.
According to social media, the situation is funny for many as the victims of the disaster were rich. The group, which jokes and pokes fun at, is at least partially confused with what last month’s judicial censorship of comedian Léo Lins welcomed for allegedly insensitive jokes.
The victims are 61yearold engineer Stockton Rush, pilot of the vehicle and CEO of OceanGate, which offered tours of the wreck of the famous ship that sank in 1912; Hamish Harding, 58 years old, British adventurer, holder of several flight and diving records, who has already been to the South Pole with one of the astronauts who walked on the moon; Shahzada Dawood, 48, a BritishPakistani businessman in the textile, construction and fertilizer industries, and her 19yearold son Suleman Dawood; and PaulHenri Nargeolet, 77, a former French Navy diver known as “Mr. Titanic” for the knowledge he gained about the ship he was part of the first expedition to the wreck in 1987.
OceanGate charged US$250,000 (R$1.2 million) for each passenger. The commercial service opened in 2021. But Stockton Rush’s interest wasn’t just financial: His wife Wendy is the greatgreatgreatgreatgranddaughter of Isidor and Ida Straus, a couple who died in the Titanic sinking.
The Titan departed for the expedition on Sunday (18th) at around 9am Brazilian time. An hour and 45 minutes later, communications with her surface escort vessel, the Polar Prince, were lost. Unlike a submarine, a submarine relies on communication with its mother ship. Without contact, the vehicle was unaware of its own position and did not emerge at the agreed 4pm time.
When the Polar Prince reported the disappearance to Canadian and American authorities, ten hours had passed since the disappearance. Oxygen autonomy was a maximum of 96 hours as of Monday. On Tuesday, the Canadian team registered knocking noises every 30 minutes near the missing person’s spot. Since the search began, however, experts have warned that the chances of a successful rescue are slim. If successful, the rescue would set a depth record. The fatalities were confirmed hours after the wreck was discovered.
twist of tragedy
Laura Sabino, a communist YouTuber with 240,000 Twitter followers, celebrated the tragedy on Tuesday: “I giggle every time I think about four multimillionaires who lost their money, lost in the middle of the ocean are.” The post got 21,000 likes. When users responded, showing that she herself reported losing an aunt to Covid19 in 2020, which also leads to death from asphyxiation, Sabino laughed and questioned the intelligence of the comparison.
Gustavo Pedro, national leader of the youth wing of the Brazilian Communist Party (UJC, PCB), residing in Rio de Janeiro, posted a meme of a shark promising to eat “three bourgeois in a can” and commented “Eat the rich” ( “eat the rich”). the rich”), a term commonly used by American socialists.
On the same social network, “minus 5” became one of the most used expressions by users this Thursday, with more than 15,000 occurrences. Among the results are comments like “minus 5 millionaires in the world”, “minus 5 potential Elon Musk in the world”, “minus 5 billionaires in the world… unfortunately one dies, one heir is born”.
Musician and presenter João Gordo posted a drawing of the submersible on Instagram with the caption “How many ‘mini submarines’ does it take to wipe out all the billionaires in the world?” and added a comment: “Great investment.”
However, it is not true that all were billionaires. This only applies to Hamish Harding and Shahzada Dawood. Stockton Rush, the pilot, is worth an estimated $12 million, making it the lowest of the bunch.
“More Dead Billionaires”: Social media meme promoting the worst.
Tradition of dehumanizing the rich, proven motivation of envy
“Bourgeois” and “capitalist” were the terms Karl Marx chose to describe the supposedly dominant class of societies based on a free market economy. But they also became dehumanizing insults among revolutionaries. At least it contained an accusation derived from Marx’s erroneous conclusion: those who had much could only steal from those who had little.
The idea was then demystified by “revisionist” socialists like Eduard Bernstein, who in an 1899 book suggested that, contrary to what Marx claimed, “capitalism” improved the lives of workers—a sign of a harmonious relationship between them Work instead of just exploration. Bernstein preferred to achieve socialism through reform rather than violent revolution. Marx condemned the reformists and explicitly opted for violence in the Communist Manifesto, which he coauthored with Friedrich Engels, the wealthy heir who supported him with pocket money in London.
As in other historical cases, dehumanization takes the form of demonization, stereotyping, the use of groups as scapegoats for the mistakes of the accusers themselves, and propaganda.
In 1849 Engels published an article in Marx’s journal Neue Rheinische Zeitung in which he stereotyped entire peoples: “The next world war will result in not only reactionary classes and dynasties but entire reactionary peoples disappearing from the face of the earth.” And that too is progress,” wrote the communist.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, leader Vladimir Lenin followed in the footsteps of Marx and Engels. Since the society of the victims of the revolution was not very industrialized, the stereotypes were “kulaks”, peasants who felt a little more comfortable than most. In a letter to party comrades in August 1918, Lenin publicly hanged “100 wellknown kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers.” In the same letter, anticipating the actions of his political heir Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, already in the first year of the revolution, Lenin ordered: “Take away all their grain.”
Stalin, hunting the kulaks, committed the Holodomor against the Ukrainian people, a genocide recognized by the Brazilian Senate last year that claimed an estimated 12 million victims between 1932 and 1933. The instrument of death was an artificial famine, for which grain confiscation was one of the main ones methods.
Cambodia’s communist dictator, Pol Pot, went further and persecuted not just the rich but anyone with any sign of intellectuality, even if it was just for wearing glasses. Communist dictator Mao Zedong stigmatized everything related to ancient Chinese traditions—ancient ideas, ancient customs, ancient habits, and ancient culture—in the Cultural Revolution of 1966, leaving millions dead in his wake. In Cuba, those considered “counterrevolutionaries,” “reactionaries,” and members of the bourgeois class were executed, imprisoned, or sent to forced labor camps along with homosexuals. In North Korea, the world’s most closed regime to date, the communist regime created a sort of state religion worshiping the Kim Lineage and claimed countless victims among the socalled bourgeois.
The Nazi parallels are no coincidence. The Nazis inspired their concentration camps in the Soviet gulags, as the Nazi Rudolf Hess, who served the longest tenure as director of the Auschwitz death camp, recounts in his autobiography. Höss reports that the Nazis had known about the extermination program in forced labor camps for enemies of the Soviet dictatorship since 1939.
Such as People’s Gazette Academic studies have shown that the ideology of those who seek to use state power to effect “redistribution” is primarily motivated by malicious envy, the kind of envy that seeks to punish the rich rather than empower the poor . Moreover, recent studies of leftwing authoritarianism show that antihierarchical violence is one of the most distinctive features of this attitude.
To update: Shortly after the publication of this report, the hypothesis that the submersible imploded due to the wrong materials chosen by Rush, which could not withstand the high pressure of the water column, proved more plausible. The information comes from the US Coast Guard. There was a warning that the vehicle was unsuitable, but the company ignored it. The US military would have discovered the implosion days ago. The five would therefore have died faster than assumed in the report.
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