There are a few questionable assumptions that go along with premise of this video, but I do like the overall idea presented.
The parochial attitude of North Americans is quite disturbing, and unjustified. We have unparalleled access to information and news from across the globe and by this feature alone we should be attuned to the plight of others and the injustice in the world. Yet, most of us are not. As long as shit happens ‘over there’ whether it be across an ocean, or the local river the daily pattern of our lives does not change.
Only when our routines are disrupted and our comfort zones threatened do we awake from our slumber. In our defence, there really isn’t another way to go about one’s life as the amount of horror in the world is a completely paralyzing notion and can only be examined at arms length if one wishes to remain sane.
But.
I think the balance between our safe cocoons and concern for the situations others needs to be reordered. The slow-fast human catastrophe that is Syria highlights exactly what I’m talking about.
“A chemical attack in Douma, the last rebel-held stronghold near Syria’s capital, Damascus, has killed at least 70 people and affected hundreds, rescue workers have told Al Jazeera.
The White Helmets, a group of rescuers operating in opposition-held areas in Syria, said on Saturday that most of the fatalities were women and children.
“Seventy people suffocated to death and hundreds are still suffocating,” Raed al-Saleh, head of the White Helmets, told Al Jazeera, adding that the death toll was expected to rise as many people were in critical condition.
Al-Saleh said that chlorine gas and an unidentified but stronger gas were dropped on Douma.”
We sit complicit while the Assad regime gasses its own people in their efforts to ‘stabilize’ their country.
“We are currently dealing with more than 1,000 cases of people struggling to breathe after the chlorine barrel bomb was dropped on the city. The number of dead will probably rise even further.”
The Douma Media Centre, a pro-opposition group, posted images on social media of people being treated by medics, and of what appeared to be dead bodies, including many women and children.
Rescue workers also posted videos of people appearing to show symptoms consistent with a gas attack. Some appeared to have white foam around their mouths and noses.
Symptoms of a chlorine attack include coughing, dyspnea, intensive irritation of the mucous membrane and difficulty in breathing.”
Being a civilian is Syria isn’t such a welcoming proposition. Chemical warfare is an agreed upon ‘no-go’ for most of the nations of the world. There is a treaty and everything.
“The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is an arms control treaty that outlaws the production, stockpiling, and use of chemical weapons and their precursors. The full name of the treaty is the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction and it is administered by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), an intergovernmental organization based in The Hague, The Netherlands. The treaty entered into force in 1997.”
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This image released early Sunday, April 8, 2018 by the Syrian Civil Defence White Helmets, shows a rescue worker carrying a child following an alleged chemical weapons attack in the rebel-held town of Douma, near Damascus, Syria. White Helmets via AP
Yet this happens. And most of NA placidly accepts this. Maybe some tsk-tisking and/or a lament on how horrible the gassing of civilians is. But then, most of us just scroll onward past this tragedy that has been disconnected from our consciousness.
What is missing, at least in part, is the feeling of responsibility (not to mention the empathy of what it must be like trying to survive during a civil war) of our part in their ordeal.
“Joseph Massad on Al Jazeera said the term was “part of a US strategy of controlling [the movement’s] aims and goals” and directing it towards western-style liberal democracy.[17] When Arab Spring protests in some countries were followed by electoral success for Islamist parties, some American pundits coined the terms “Islamist Spring”[20] and “Islamist Winter”.
Also this from The Atlantic:
“Egyptian military officials wagered, rightly, that they could get away with what became, according to Human Rights Watch, the worst mass killing in modern Egyptian history—as well as one of the worst single-day mass killings in recent decades anywhere in the world.
America’s relative silence was no accident. To offer a strong, coherent response to the killings would have required a strategy, which would have required more, not less, involvement. This, however, would have been at cross-purposes with the entire thrust of the administration’s policy. Obama was engaged in a concerted effort to reduce its footprint in the Middle East. The phrase “leading from behind” quickly became a pejorative for Obama’s foreign-policy doctrine, but it captured a very real shift in America’s posture. The foreign-policy analysts Nina Hachigian and David Shorr called it the “Responsibility Doctrine,” a strategy of “prodding other influential nations … to help shoulder the burdens of fostering a stable, peaceful world order.” In pursuing this strategy in the Middle East, the United States left a power vacuum—and a proxy struggle. During Morsi’s year-long tenure, Qatar became the single largest foreign donor to Egypt, at over $5 billion (with Turkey contributing another $2 billion). Just days after the military moved against Morsi, it was Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kuwait that pledged a massive $12 billion to the new military-appointed government.
The United States, along with the conservative Gulf monarchies and many others, also viewed Islamist parties with considerable suspicion.”
Being a world power, only when convenient, isn’t being a world power. Behaving only to protect the national interest places us squarely in the realm of realpolitik and the (a)moral compass associated with that mode of thinking. Syria lies on the border of two spheres of influence. The Russian empire and the American Empire. Arguably, Russia has greater influence, not least of all because of geographical proximity, on Syria and the maintenance of the current regime is in their national self interest. Thus the frisson between the American tacit support for the revolution (toward a US friendly regime) and the Russian support for the status quo and continuation within their own sphere of self-interest are the only realpolitik concerns on the table. The humanitarian disaster resulting from this friction between empires is but a footnote and not really mainstream news worthy – at least not past the ratings ‘bump’ procured for showing disconnected images of human suffering.
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A non-corporate real media would be all over the context of the situation portraying the real cost in human misery of what happens when spheres of influence collide and how little the ‘national interest’ cares about people dying ‘over there’. Yet with all our glitzy internet power and googleplexes of information at our fingertips has this sort of contextual analysis even been hinted at in North American mainstream media?
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Not really.
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Compare how the Associated Press and Al-Jazeera frame the article (also the sources on which this piece is based). A telling difference, the focus on the ‘facts’ versus the human angle that the Al-Jazeera piece. I think we need more of the second variety as we need to inspire empathy and the common human nature that binds us all together, so we can work toward a more peaceable future.
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(Unlikely as it may be.)
It’s nice to get a overview of what we have done and where we might be going, and of course the final heat death of the Universe. :)
Amazing how facts give no shits about gender identity.
Latest “science” from the anti-female forces…
Priorities set for the devout. Thy eggs shall be hidden, LORD!
Soooooooo nice to see actual feminist opinion in print. Congratulations to Hadley Freeman for boldly speaking against the current misogynistic assault on women. The trans-cult (see Patriarchy 2.0) has made sizable in-roads into feminism and at the core of its demands, centring the male experience in a female movement, has done grievous damage to the ability of feminists in their struggle to liberate themselves from the patriarchal scriptures of society.
Women are starting to realize the depth of the new threat to their emancipation, and are fighting back against the new misogyny as demonstrated by Hadley Freeman’s words:
“You would be wrong: nothing makes you look more liberal these days than shouting at women who express anxiety based on their experiences.
But then, as with experts, apparently we’ve all had enough of lived experience now. When a 19-year-old trans woman was elected a Labour woman’s officer last year, a Labour councillor explained that “lived experience as a woman” was not a pre-requisite to be a woman’s officer. Biology, too, has been deemed terribly passe. “Inclusive feminism,” Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood wrote when considering why self-identifying trans women should be allowed into women’s refuges, understands that “gender is a complex and deeply personal thing, and is about so much more than outdated ideas of biology.” On the day of this year’s Women’s March, trans model Munroe Bergdorf tweeted that to “center reproductive systems” at the demonstrations was “reductive and exclusionary”.
I’m trying to think of anything more patriarchal than telling women to stop fussing about vaginas at a Women’s March. A biopic about the Old Testament God starring Mike Pence? Because none of this is about making feminism inclusive; it’s about policing the way women talk about their lives. No one – male, female, trans or not – has the right to do this. Inclusivity means campaigning for the greater good of the group, not catering to each individual’s differences – can someone please tell Bergdorf that Irish women are still fighting to repeal the 8th? Female biology has been used by men to oppress women for millennia, and to tell women not to talk about it now is another form of oppression.
Intriguingly, some of the most passionate arguments I’ve had about this have not been with trans people, but with liberal men. I surely speak for all of us ladies when I say I love nothing more than when a man explains to me, at some length, what a woman now is. I only have 40 years’ experience but, as we all know, experience is old hat now. There is something, shall we say, revealing about the way these “woke bros” take such glee in calling women (older ones, especially) who talk about their rights and bodies “terfs” – trans-exclusionary radical feminists – and insist they shut up or risk ostracism.
Women have had to fight so hard for a place at the table, for the right to define themselves, for spaces where they feel safe. Any man who sneers at them now for worrying about the shifting paradigms, offering only meaningless platitudes or accusations of bigotry, is showing his male privilege.
There is understandable concern about being on the wrong side of history. But I’ll tell you what has never put anyone on the right side of history: shouting women down. Gender is a feeling and biology is a physical fact, and the reason women-only spaces exist is not to protect some special inner feminine essence, but because there are significant physical differences between male-born bodies and female-born ones, and the latter have long been at a disadvantage.”
Yep. All of the above. Double Plus Good! H
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…