What do you care?

Robert Fisk, the Middle East correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, was in Toronto tonight. He gave a passionate speech centered on the Western newsmedia’s complicity and complacency in misrepresenting the war on Iraq. His mixture of humour and horror leaves a strong impression on the listener. He manages to bring to life fairly abstract subjects such as the old and new crimes of the Western powers in the Middle East finally revisiting them in the form of terrorism, now and in the future. He should definitely not be missed if the opportunity to hear him presents itself.

His historical analysis is highly engaging. Possibly because of his great passion and humanity, though, and the fact that he has witnessed so much death and suffering, he seems to look in the human heart for a solution to the problems he identifies. I found him rather Dickensian in believing that if only enough people were made to care about the suffering of strangers, war would turn to peace. He seems to think the problem is that most people in the West just don’t care about people in other countries. I find this point of view inadequate. No-one really cares about the situation of people in other countries. In the same way that Americans, for example, don’t care about the suffering of Iraqis, Iraqis don’t care about the suffering of Americans... Heck, most of the time people don’t care about the suffering of their next-door neighbour, not to speak of the suffering of strangers on the other side of the world, except perhaps when a natural disaster strikes.

So I don’t think the problem is a dearth of caring. People need something they can personally connect and relate to before they can care. The case of natural disasters is a case in point. People who on a day to day basis have no comprehension, and hence no sympathy, for the daily suffering of a Latin American shanty-town dweller or a victim of military action, suddenly open up their purses, albeit briefly, when a natural disaster strikes. I think they can imagine, at least at the back of their mind, the same thing happening to them and how they would feel if it did happen to them. Normally, people justify the suffering of others to themselves, which allows them to disregard it. You know the usual line: people suffer because they are lazy, have been brought up badly, and so on. I think such people can be made to care if they see the absolute irrationality and futility of what is going on, that is, by taking all justifications away from them.

It is useless to try to raise anti-war sentiment in the US by appealing to people’s compassion. People, at best, have compassion for their own group. It is, therefore, much more useful to help them see the irrationality and futility of the suffering of members of their own group. For instance, by pointing out to them that although the war on Iraq is going nowhere, more and more American soldiers are getting killed by the enemies that they themselves have created, and that the Iraqi Resistance is growing stronger. One indication of this is the number of American soldiers that are getting killed by the action of so-called “improvised explosive devices” or IEDs, that is, “home-made” bombs, a resistance movement’s weapon of choice. The number has been steadily climbing since the beginning of the war.


The November 2005 figure is preliminary, and covers only the first 21 days of that month. At the current rate, the final November figure will probably exceed 50.

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Unity, progress, and purpose
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