John Cohen s Broken Men An Ethnographic Expose Of...

In December of 2016 The New York Times published Roger Cohen’s ‘Broken Men in Paradise,’ an ethnographic exposà © of Australia’s offshore immigration detention system. â€Å"The world’s refugee crisis,† writes Cohen, â€Å"with its 65 million people on the move, more than at any time since 1945, knows no more sustained, sinister or surreal exercise in cruelty than the South Pacific quasi-prisons Australia has established for its trickle of the migrant flood.† Cohen’s Op-Ed 1 centers on interviews with detained refugees in the Manus Regional Processing Center, a facility on a remote tropical island in Northern Papua New Guinea and the holding ground for roughly 900 adult men seeking resettlement in Australia. Since its publication, the article’s comments section has exploded with vitriol; the scathing responses are seemingly endless, and read like careful composites of the most prevalent anti-immigration buzzwords: illegals, queue jumpers, economic migrants, leeches, welfare tourists and Jihadists. But Cohen, too, has a lexicon for the men of Manus Island. He calls them banished, political pawns, invisible and the walking dead. He analyzes Australia’s discursive obsession with the term boat people and the Orwellian contortions inherent in the phrase Offshore Processing Center. Most notably, Cohen calls his interviewees by their names. 1 Cohen, Roger. Broken Men In Paradise. 1 He introduces Benham Satah, a Kurdish refugee who has not been referred to by his given name for