“April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks,” runs a diary entry by Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. “One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away […] audience shouting with laughter when he sank.” Orwell is so often reduced to cliche, but this quote has been stuck in my mind since footage was circulated online this week of a Greek coastguard boat apparently trying to capsize a migrant dinghy in the narrow strip of sea between Turkey and Greece’s Aegean islands.

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This is how media spectacle works in our age: we are invited not just to sit back and laugh or applaud but, with social media, to add our own emotional input. Footage such as this, and our reactions to it – whether it’s outrage at the callous treatment of vulnerable people, or xenophobic glee that “illegal” immigrants are being turned back – have helped foster a new sense of crisis along Europe’s borders this week, after Turkey announced on Friday that it would no longer prevent refugees on its territory from trying to cross into the European Union. Since then, the Greek authorities say they have prevented more than 32,000 people from entering the country without permission.

But we are being manipulated. The disregard for people’s safety exhibited by Greece’s border guards – not just in the Aegean, but at the Evros land border in the north – is only the most visible part of the problem. Just as important is the role played by Turkey, which let the dinghy set sail, filmed it, then released the footage to the world; and by European political leaders, who would rather we forget that the events are partly a result of their own policies, a failure that has smouldered away for five years since the crisis of 2015.

Turkey’s decision to “open” its European borders, aimed at pressuring Nato allies to support its recently expanded military intervention in the Syrian war, represents the collapse of the refugee deal it signed with the EU in March 2016. Despite Turkey’s admirable role in hosting 3.7 million displaced Syrians, this decision is a cynical stunt that uses the lives of refugees as a bargaining chip and seeks to destabilise neighbouring countries. Turkey’s action may come to be seen as the trigger for Europe’s security crackdown, but in truth the situation had already become untenable, largely because Europe has spent the past five years treating migrants as a nuisance to be swept under the carpet.

The EU never made good on a promise made in 2015 to relocate refugees en masse from Greece, leaving many trapped in appalling conditions on the Aegean islands. Local residents have become increasingly frustrated, in recent weeks clashing with riot police over the Greek government’s attempt to start building “closed” camps – ie detention centres – for asylum-seekers.

An anti-refugee backlash has been brewing in Greece for months, but it has been intensified by the new border crisis, turning it into a cause celebre for far-right activists around the world

Now, that anger is being turned towards migrants and the people who help them. Vigilante groups, some with suspected links to the far right, have become increasingly present on Lesbos, attacking migrants, humanitarian workers, volunteers and journalists. On Chios, in the early hours of Tuesday morning, a fire broke out at an NGO-run warehouse being used to store aid supplies. Vigilante groups have also been reported at Evros, while migrants yesterday told reporters from Channel 4 and Sky that they had been shot by live bullets from the Greek side of the border, with one person killed. Greece’s government dismissed these claims as “fake news”.

An anti-refugee backlash has been brewing in Greece for several months, but it has been intensified by the new border crisis, turning it into a cause celebre for far-right activists around the world. On social media, the hashtag #IStandWithGreece was flooded with racist claims that an Islamic invasion of Europe is under way. “This struggle is biblical in scale,” tweeted the far-right provocateur Katie Hopkins, addressing Greece. “You are on the pointy end of the spear.”

A day later, the president of the European commission, Ursula von der Leyen, echoed this when she thanked Greece, at a press conference, for being Europe’s “aspida”, the Greek word for shield. Von der Leyen has form here: in September, she launched her presidency by renaming the EU’s head of migration policy the “commissioner for protecting the European way of life”, a wording that was widely criticised, and later altered. Leading European politicians are at pains to reassure Greece, as well as the wider public that they will keep them secure. But in the rush to do so they are reinforcing a clash-of-civilisations framing that will only deepen the underlying problems in the long run.

Now, the rhetoric is translating into policy. European leaders have been quick to pledge their solidarity with Greece, but this translates into support for border control rather than resettling refugees among countries better equipped to accommodate them. Greece, meanwhile, has taken the drastic step of suspending asylum applications for one month, a move that was swiftly criticised by NGOs, including the UN’s refugee agency. A key principle of international refugee law is that people should have the right to claim asylum, and not be penalised for crossing borders in order to do so. Von der Leyen and her colleagues, however, have largely stayed silent on this – and on the reports of violence at the border. Indeed, the director of the EU’s border agency Frontex, Fabrice Leggeri, appeared to condone the use of live fire in an interview last week. “When migrants … try to violently cross the border, we have to prevent that,” he told the German newspaper Die Zeit.

The urgent challenge now is for European politicians to avoid stoking yet another panic about migration, and to establish a system for accommodating refugees that shares the work fairly between countries, and makes the protection of human life a priority. A petition supported by 115 different NGOs calls for the immediate evacuation of asylum-seekers from the Aegean. Britain, regardless of Brexit, has a role to play, too: it has the resources and capacity to resettle people, and the government has already softened its negotiating position on family reunions for child refugees after pressure from campaigners.

Beyond that, however, we need to start being honest about an underlying cause of this crisis: wealthy parts of the world have increasingly been trying to foist the task of accommodating refugees – in Europe’s case, not just from Syria, but from a series of other long-running conflicts, many of which have been fed by European troops and weapons – on to their poorer neighbours. But as Europe is once again being reminded, inconvenient people do not disappear simply because it might wish them to.

• Daniel Trilling is the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe