by SHIRIN SHAFAIE
When violence and murder of human beings, innocent or not, is commoditized; when the ultimate form of barbaric voyeurism can be found in every corner of our planet where there is electricity and satellite coverage; when our governments start to contemplate extracting reimbursement from the same people they have been bombing the hell out of, this is when you know you are watching not just news but the news of a historic barbarism in the making, before your very own eyes, live, on the hour, every hour for as long as it sells.
Yes, we pretend to find public execution of people appalling and barbaric; we don’t hesitate to condemn such behavior in the strongest terms possible. Nevertheless, we seem to have an obsession with watching dying and dead people on TV. This is the bulk of what we buy as news and watch or read while eating. And the fact that most of us don’t even find it controversial should be highly controversial itself.
A few optimists still believe that:
If nothing is left, one must scream, because silence is the biggest crime against humanity. (Nadezhda Mandelstam)
The problematic here is not the silence, for that is a fact; what I find problematic is our presumption of the idea of humanity; it’s a utopian idea; it’s an illusion, a myth. For it is apparently not against our humanity to stay silent while witnessing human atrocities. Even if only a few of us actually benefit from all these killings and wars, that is still no good news for you and me; it doesn’t mean that we are not complicit. It takes one person to push the button, to operate a drone, or to drop a bomb, but it takes the whole humanity to remain silent, to change the channel.
It is not the US government alone, it is not just the NATO forces, it is not just the fascists of every era, it is each and every one of us with a working tongue, an ear and an eye, with smart phones in our pockets and with televisions left on — we are all complicit. We can’t say we didn’t know, we didn’t see, because it all happened almost live in front of our very own eyes, in the comfort of our living rooms, on our breakfast tables. They did it, we watched and we said nothing. We remained blind to the light that was shed on our own kind of blood. It didn’t happen to us, it is not real, it’s only on TV; it will disappear at the push of a button.
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