Governments can bomb faceless troops of enemy conscripts with impunity, but are questioned closely about bombing photographable individuals. Numbers numb; identity humanizes.
How so very true. Rogue, for-hire mercenaries aside, the use of assassins as instruments of official (though very clandestine) state influence has been a practice for millennia. It's really no surprise that at the most convenient times, various power-wielding officials, whether military, intelligence or political, have somehow expired.
Yet every time this has happened over the course of modern world history, there's always an outpouring of emotion. Support, grief, blame, anger, disbelief -- it doesn't matter. For one person to publicly die one way or another is to put a human face on this indigestible concept of death. Humans, naturally, are afraid of death and dying. Death with a capital D represents the unknown, the other side, the hereafter.
But for a mass of people to publicly die one way or another simply doesn't evoke the same emotion. Numbers do indeed numb, while identity humanizes.
(It's important to note at this point the caveat to my statement: Numbers numb, as long as they're not on home turf. New York, September 2001: thousands died and we all banded together, but only because it happened here on our own soil. I haven't seen the same support in the US for the victims of the 2004 Madrid bombings or of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. Over two centuries of virtually untouched geographic isolation will do that to a nation.)
So in the context of this understanding, what would happen if, say, two countries in Central Asia engaged in full-scale conventional warfare tomorrow? With thousands of troops from international coalition forces fighting and dying on both sides, would all of humankind be driven to feel the same emotions we felt when, say, Gandhi was assassinated? Or Dr King? or JFK? My guess is that we would not. Witness the involvement of the international community in Afghanistan and Iraq for the past seven years. July 2009 was the bloodiest month for US-led international forces in Afghanistan, with at least 46 casualties reported so far.
Forty-six! That's forty-five more than just one famous persona being eliminated!
Yet because we don't know who these 46 were, because they were not popular figures, because they were not household names (nor will they ever attain this status posthumously), we simply cannot self-evoke the same type or level of emotion.
Or is it because the war is taking place in a part of the world that -- let's face it -- we the people don't really care about?
So now let's shift focus and broaden our scope. If 46 or 200 or even 10,000 soldiers are killed in the course of a conventional war, how would we react to just one nuclear explosion in Kabul? Let's say a nuclear device went off there tomorrow and decimated the capital of Afghanistan (with, according to USAID, a population of 3,450,000). For one nuclear weapon to wipe Kabul off the map is not unrealistic, and the number of people immediately affected by the blast represents approximately 0.05% of the world population (6,768,167,712 as of July 2009, according to the US Census Bureau).
Without taking into account long-term medical-related casualties as a result of fall-out, debris or surface temperature cooling (International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, or IPPNW, has done a wonderful job detailing these long-term effects), and considering just these immediate casualties as a result of the blast impact, how does the thought of so many people dying so quickly make you feel?
More than the use of a nuclear weapons, there is nothing as horrifying as the existence of a nuclear weapon. Its presence begets its threat. There is no other instrument of war as indiscriminate as a nuclear weapon. It is a device used for slaughter, and nothing else.
The only way, however, that nuclear weapons truly will be abolished -- completely and verifiably eliminated -- is if we the people begin to take notice of the utter destruction and havoc just one device can wreak on a region and, indeed, the world. We must stop thinking in terms of numbers and reconnect with our sense of shared humanity.
3 comments:
Congrats on the new blog, Riz! I'll be sure to add it to my Google Reader.
If you have not already, I encourage you to set-up Google Analytics to track information about your visitors (volume, #returning, referrals). Be sure to add a block for your own IP address otherwise or you will skew your data with tons of hits from you checking the site.
I really enjoyed reading this entry. You touch upon a very dark aspect of human psychology - our ability to inflict profound harm upon the "other" in the name of abstractions. I'm wondering whether you think communication technologies that connect individuals from all around the world (e.g., twitter and Iran) will have an effect on our historical sense of isolation.
Hi Nate -- thanks so much for the advice! Done!
Mimi -- I do think, especially in the context of Iran's elections and ensuing protests, that media channels like Twitter have helped people around the world better understand and empathize with the spectrum of sentiments in Tehran and elsewhere in the Islamic Republic. Perhaps, through enhanced dialogue, we can understand that in many ways, the message behind the Iranian protests represents what we all share in our common humanity: liberty, the freedom to choose our leaders, and an unbridled ambition to succeed and make our world a better place.
Twitter is still relatively new, so its true impact has yet to be determined. On a side note, I remember Wikipedia being updated almost in perfect real time to report on the Mumbai attacks in November of last year. I hope that Twitter as a communication medium will have the same impact on our interconnectedness as blogs and Wikipedia have had.
Post a Comment