World television showed the -– glacial -- images of a shipwreck in the Antarctic Ocean on November 23.

It was the Explorer, one of the hundreds of tourist ships that, taking advantage of the southern hemisphere’s summer, take the rich to visit Antarctica, the Malvinas, the Channels of Tierra del Fuego, and other wonders of the world.
“It is exactly like the tragedy of the Titanic,” the Argentine TV reporter said without a twitch.
In the sinking of the Titanic, nearly 1,500 people died. In the case of the Explorer, nobody died.
On the Titanic, there were 2,227 passengers divided into three classes. On the Explorer there were 100, of one single class.
The first class passengers of the Titanic had paid 4,350 dollars each for the voyage from Southampton to New York. Those of the Explorer had paid 11,600 euros per person to visit Antarctica.
In the Titanic -- as was well demonstrated by later investigations -- the gap between the different social classes was translated into the dead and survivors list. Among the first class, 38% died; among the second, 69%; and among the third, 75%. In the Explorer there was no social gap. All the passengers were rich, and the rest of those on board were the ship’s crew.
Our television journalist (a perfect scoundrel, there was only applause for him) said the shipwreck of the Explorer had been exactly like that of the Titanic.
Only one thing about them, really, made them look alike. In the first one, a boat coming from Southampton hit an ice mountain. In the second one, a boat coming from Ushuaia hit two ice mountains…
Another headline took over worldwide television screens the same week. It was Cyclone Sidr, which moved through Bangladesh leaving a heap of at least 3,000 people dead and a similar number missing.
Cyclone Sidr was important at the beginning of the week, when the acknowledged body count was under 300.
Soon it grew in conjectures and possibilities (some even spoke of 10,000 dead, buried in the water) and later it decreased until practically disappearing (only on TV screens, needless to say).
On November 23, the victim-less sinking of the Explorer replaced the cyclone of Bangladesh on front pages and TV screens.
That is to say, when the body count of dead and disappeared of that poor Asian country was approaching 6000, the media stopped talking about it.
There were only newsflashes -- sporadic -- on the international “aid on its way” (said with the customary euphemism).
Life -- as Wilde said -- imitates art. And for that reason the company which owns the Explorer is called Gap Adventures.
And for that reason the Explorer, like so many other ships -- refugees from the law in some tax haven -- has a “Liberian flag”.
So much is being said about the gap between the rich and the poor in the world that a company decided to name itself “Gap Adventures”, perhaps even making fun of the situation that millions of people live on less than a dollar a day (in Asia, Africa and Latin America) while other people can spend nearly 12,000 euros just to spend 19 days on a cruise.
Gap Adventures has a counterpart, shamefaced and unmentioned: Gap Misadventures.
Liberia is an African republic that exists like the tragic grin of slavery and oppression.
It was founded on lands acquired by the United States of the Monroe era, with the aim of finding the African-Americans a place in their “homeland”, so that they would stop bothering the New World white population.
When these (cultured) African-American colonists arrived at that “promised land” Liberia was, they reproduced the model of exploitation and exclusion they had learnt in the U.S. Only that there, they -- the North Americans -- happened to be the “masters” this time around.
Between civil wars and dictatorships (some of them instigated by the CIA), Liberia hardly made it to the 21st century. Today it survives on its “flexible” regimes and its attributes of “tax haven”.
That is why the Explorer, which has just sunk in Antarctica, had a Liberian flag. Now, the litigations of the shipwrecked and the insurance agencies will have to be processed in… Liberia.
This capricious link (created by reality, not us) between the Explorer cruise, Cyclone Sidr, Antarctica, Asia, Africa, and America invites us to think about a global Titanic.
We all sail the same sea and suffer the same global warming. For that reason, the ice mountains are coming down before their time in the Antarctic polar cap. And for that reason, rains overflow the rivers of the Ganges delta, flooding the low areas of Bangladesh.
In this cruise, a few travel first class. And if the ship, by any circumstance, happens to sink, the passengers are promptly rescued with all the aid services available (in the case of the Explorer, the Chilean Navy, the Argentine Prefecture, and a Norwegian ship intervened, among others).
The great majority of the passengers --metaphorically speaking -- are third class. When the flood comes, they are afraid of leaving their houses, since that is all they have (that is what happened in New Orleans not long ago). That is why they die. Those who die by the millions.
And nobody looks after them.
If we made a list of human losses in the global shipwreck that took place that week, we would be able to see that it reflects -- just like the balance of the Titanic -- all the banality, cruelty and absolute lack of humanity of capitalism.
This is how it is, dear reader. The victims of global warming will be, fundamentally, the poor. The dead from this new type of sinking that takes place simultaneously in Bangladesh and Antarctica, Liberia and New York, are the world’s poor. The salt of the Earth. Those who are considered “surplus”, as Thomas Malthus used to say, without euphemisms or disguise.
Finally, that colleague from the news was right: it was a perfect Titanic.