"I'm so sick of seeing the endless debate about "if you care about Paris you don't care about Beirut/Metrojet/now Nigeria" et cetera. The reality is this: Paris, like any American city, is in the first-world protected zone.
Ever since WWII the overall consensus strategy on the part of everyone in the ruling elite of the global North, from the most far-right capitalist to the most left-wing Politburo member, has been to export conflict from the North into all kinds of global peripheries. We EXPECT to see violence in Beirut because we put it there. Our security states protect us from the blowback of whatever neocolonialist policies we might care to pursue on those peripheries. So what if we fail at nation-building? We'll never have to "fight them over here," not really. (The attached map, although badly out of date, expresses some of this concept.)
So of course when there's a terrorist attack in a core northern city like Paris or New York we're shocked, bereaved, and upset. We've lived our whole lives in a bubble in which violence is always declining and foreign-policy issues are remote and academic. The faux-leftist argument that we should feel equally sad about people dying in Beirut is hollow and hypocritical because it substitutes moral righteousness for actually asking WHY it is that we feel so shocked.
If someone told you that 129 people were killed in car accidents in Paris the other day, you'd shrug your shoulders. In fact millions of people die every day and you don't give a shit. Everyone dies. But those concrete deaths represent a brief puncturing of the bubble of security that surrounds us and makes our lives as we know them possible. It accomplishes what the terrorists want us to believe: that this bubble is a sham, as much propaganda and hubris as reality.
The solution isn't pretending like you're oh so distraught when a bus full of Russians or Bangladeshis falls off a cliff. It's pursuing a politics in which Western elites--that's the people who govern us--have to take responsibility for the violence they displace onto other people. And that means acknowledging that the bubble they've created was created ON OUR BEHALF."
Greg Afigenov, Facebook, 17 November 2015
Comments