[Mb-civic] They Just Never Meant Very Much To Us

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http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-07/30edwards.cfm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Cogitation: They Just Never Meant Very Much To Us July 30, 2005
By Dave Edwards

Samples From An Ocean Of Suffering

In 1992 a group of neuroscientists travelled to India to research the
effects of meditation. In the mountains above Dharamsala, the scientists
spent time with a young monk who had been meditating intensively for six
years. Richard Davidson, a psychobiologist from the University of
Wisconsin, had done pioneering work correlating minute shifts in facial
expression with emotions. He explained to the monk that he would be shown
a video of Tibetan demonstrators being beaten by Chinese security forces.
His face would simultaneously be videoed to record any reactions. Writer
Alan Wallace described the result:

"As the monk watched the video, we didn't detect any change of expression
in his face at all, no grimace, no shudder, no expression of sadness."
(Wallace, Buddhism With An Attitude, Snow Lion Publications, 2001, p.176)

The monk was asked to describe his experience while watching the video. He
replied:

"I didn't see anything that I didn't already know goes on all the time,
not only in Tibet but throughout the world. I am aware of this
constantly."

It was not that the monk failed to experience compassion while watching
these brutal scenes, Wallace explains: "He was aware that he was simply
being shown a video - patterns of light - representing events that took
place long ago. But this suffering was simply one episode in the overall
suffering of samsara [existence], of which he was constantly aware. Hence,
while looking out over the ocean of suffering, he didn't feel anything
extraordinary when he was shown a picture of a glass of water". (Email to
author, July 15, 2005)

This account came to mind when I saw the response to the July 7 terrorist
atrocities in London. In the video experiment, the monk's mind was so
steeped in compassion that his expression did not change at all even when
he saw images of his own people being brutalised. So what does it tell us
that so many British people were so deeply shaken by the suffering of
their fellow citizens?

After all, have we not been reading and watching endless accounts and
footage of near-identical horrors in Iraq and Palestine on mainstream and
internet-based media over the last few years? The suffering of the Iraqi
people, for example, is almost beyond belief. When the West again blitzed
Baghdad in March 2003, this followed years of war and sanctions that had
shattered the country's infrastructure. The population again being bombed
had already had to endure the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of
children from malnutrition, water-borne diseases and other horrors caused
by US-UK sanctions. This truly was suffering heaped on suffering.

Howard Zinn made the point after the September 11 attacks:

"One of the things that occurred to me, after I had gotten over my initial
reaction of shock and horror at what had been done, was that other scenes
of horror have taken place in other parts of the world and they just never
meant very much to us." (Zinn, Terror And War, Open Media Book, 2002,
p.90)

One Second Per Death

I don't believe this comparative indifference is hard-wired into human
nature. The truth is that we are trained to value the lives of our
countrymen more highly by a socio-political system that has much to gain
from a restricted, patriotic version of compassion, and much to lose from
an excess of popular concern for suffering inflicted on 'foreigners' by
our governments and corporations.

It was a very real disaster for American elites when ordinary Americans
became outraged by the catastrophe inflicted by US power on the people of
Vietnam. This concern seriously obstructed US realpolitik, stirring
previously slumbering democratic forces and threatening elite control of
society (see Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People's
History). Famously, the champion boxer Muhammad Ali refused to fight in
Vietnam, saying:

"No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn
another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave
masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such
evils must come to an end." (Ali, 1966. Quoted, Howard Zinn and Anthony
Arnove, Voices of a People's History, Seven Stories, 2004, p.431)

At time of writing, the death toll from the London bombings stands at 56
dead. In the early evening of March 28, 2003, the media reported the
killing of 55 Iraqi civilians (the final toll was 62) by an American
missile in the al-Shula district of Baghdad. Hours later, David Sells of
the BBC's Newsnight programme devoted 45 seconds to the atrocity 16
minutes into the programme - less than one second per death.

These 45 seconds presented the slaughter as an Anglo-American public
relations problem, and a predictable one at that: "It is a war, after
all", Sells observed blandly over footage of Iraqi women wailing in grief,
adding: "But the coalition aim is to unseat Saddam Hussein by winning
hearts and minds."

Imagine if Sells had commented on the London bombings that people +had+
died, "It is a terrorist campaign, after all", but the bombers' aim was
"to win hearts and minds".

I asked George Entwistle, then Newsnight editor, how he justified just 45
seconds of coverage. He replied: "As a current affairs programme we lead
on a news story where we think we can add analytical value; i.e., can we
take it on? We didn't feel we could add anything." (Interview with the
author, March 31, 2003)

Something of "analytical value" would certainly have been found if the
victims had been British or American. We can make all the excuses we like,
but the fact is that tragedies of this kind just don't mean as much to us.

Last week, the Independent noted that an October 2004 report in The Lancet
had estimated Iraqi civilian deaths at nearly 100,000, but that the
methodology "was subsequently criticised". (Terry Kirby and Elizabeth
Davies, 'Iraq conflict claims 34 civilians lives each day as "anarchy"
beckons,' The Independent, July 20, 2005)

But the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, which conducted
the survey, is one of the world's most prestigious research organisations.
And The Lancet is one of the world's leading science journals. I asked
Terry Kirby, co-author of the Independent article, which criticisms he had
in mind. Kirby replied: "So far as I am aware, the Lancet's report was
criticised by the Foreign Office." (Email to the author, July 22, 2005)

You couldn't make it up!

On the same day, an Independent leader added that the Lancet findings had
been reached "by extrapolating from a small sample... While never
completely discredited, those figures were widely doubted." (Leader, 'The
true measure of the US and British failure,' The Independent, July 20,
2005)

Lead author Gilbert Burnham from the Johns Hopkins School told me the
sample size was entirely standard:

"Our data have been back and forth between many reviewers at the Lancet
and here in the school (chair of Biostatistics Dept), so we have the
scientific strength to say what we have said with great certainty. I doubt
any Lancet paper has gotten as much close inspection in recent years as
this one has!" (Dr. Gilbert Burnham, email to the author, October 30,
2004)

By contrast, an independent website, Iraq Body Count, last week published
a report estimating that nearly 25,000 Iraqi civilians have died since the
invasion and occupation began. The report was not conducted by a leading
research body, it was not peer reviewed, and yet it was broadly accepted
and granted headline status by the BBC, ITV News, the Guardian and many
other media. Even senior government figures were happy to mention the
website's results.

This is a perfect example of how the establishment tends to see only what
it wants to see. That would be fine, except that the public is therefore
unable to understand or address the real problems our governments have
created. That means more suffering for everyone.

Repeated endlessly, and contrasted with mass coverage of Western victims
of terror, such entrenched bias inevitably trains us to value Western
lives above non-Western lives. Like the air we breathe, this parochial
compassion comes to seem normal and natural to the extent that we barely
even notice when our armies are killing Third World people in vast
numbers. Noam Chomsky is a rare voice willing to discuss this reality:

"If they do something to us, the world is coming to an end. But if we do
it to them, it's so normal, why should we even talk about it?" (Chomsky,
Power and Terror, Seven Stories Press, 2003, p.20)

We Cry! We Live!

I've sometimes had discussions with people on the subject of altruism,
love and compassion where someone has indicated, say, their wife and
children, and declared: "I'd sacrifice my life to protect them."

Alan Wallace invites us to consider whether this kind of commitment is
necessarily rooted in compassion and altruism, or whether it might involve
an extension of selfishness. Are we in fact defending what we see as part
of "me" and "mine", extensions of ourselves?

The media praise public outpourings of compassion and grief for the
victims of London, New York and Madrid as signs of a nation's humanity.
And surely they are. But how much of this concern is also rooted in a
sense that we - our people, our security, our way of life - are under
attack? How much is our reaction actually an expression of self-concern?

It is vital that we aspire to broaden and equalise our compassion for
suffering. Not because it's "nice", not because we should "teach the world
to sing". It is vital because otherwise there is a real danger that, in
caring deeply for real and important 'us', and ignoring irrelevant 'them',
we become utterly blind to the misery we are causing, and entirely
ruthless in crushing those who cause us harm.

Even as the media were asking how on earth human beings could kill
innocent commuters in London, Christopher Hitchens wrote in the Daily
Mirror: "We shall track down those responsible. States that shelter them
will know no peace." (Hitchens, '07/07: War on Britain,' The Mirror, July
8, 2005)

In the New York Times last week, leading columnist Thomas Friedman 
wrote:

"We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears. The
State Department produces an annual human rights report. Henceforth, it
should also produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report, which would focus on
those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against
others. I would compile it in a nondiscriminatory way." (Friedman, 'Giving
the hatemongers no place to hide,' New York Times, July 22, 2005)

And yet this is the same Thomas Friedman who had himself written at the
height of the NATO bombing of Serbia in April 1999:

"Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs
certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you
ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by
pulverising you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can 
do
1389 too." (Friedman, 'Stop the music,' New York Times, April 23, 1999)

Many people believe there is a deep divide between ethics and politics.
But a patriotic version of compassion is often the most potent weapon of
realpolitik. It is used to persuade us to ignore our own crimes and to
turn against "evildoers", official enemies often selected on the basis of
carefully hidden agendas.

Compassion can also, however, be the most potent tool of liberation,
breaking the links of greed, hatred and ignorance from which our political
chains are formed. Power needs compassion to be partial, patriotic, rooted
in self-concern. Humanity needs compassion to be universal, unconditional
and equal.

The basis for this equalised concern is straight forward enough: everyone
is identical in yearning from the depths of their hearts for an end to
suffering and for lasting happiness. Recognising that this is so - that
others truly are just like us in this respect - provides a basis for
universal compassion. Or are we seriously to believe that suffering is
somehow deeper and more important 'here' than 'there'? Suffering is simply
suffering.

Every time our media present Third World people as anonymous crowds, as
inconsequential extras in grand Western dramas, we might remind ourselves
of the deeply humane words spoken by the cousin of a Palestinian man shot
dead by the Israeli army in Nablus refugee camp. The man spoke of his
shock at the events of September 11, but continued:

"I know what they feel. But I want them to know what I feel. I think many
of them don't want to know about us, don't want to know what we feel. They
think we are from another country, or from another star. We also, like
them, we cry! We live! We feel sad! We feel happy! And we have minds,
also! I want them to use their minds and to understand what happened
here." (Through Muslim Eyes, Channel 4, September 6, 2002)

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