On Regaining our Lost Humanity
Never has there been a moment when the future of humanity has been on such a knife edge of destruction in the face of imminent nuclear and ecological threats. Scientists’ warnings on fossil fuels’ existential danger are 40 years old and are eloquently and repeatedly echoed today by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. Scientists’ similar longstanding warnings of nuclear disaster are more urgent than ever as fighting continues around Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
On both those issues, as on today’s realities of mass immiseration and mass migration, most Western leaders ignore Global South calls for urgent action, not least on initiatives such as China’s 10-point proposal towards a negotiated settlement to end the horrors of Russia’s war on Ukraine. https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/rules-based-order/. Countries like India, Indonesia and Latin America have not followed the US sanctions on Russia, and are critical of US tension-building over Taiwan. China’s brokering of an Iran/Saudi Arabia rapprochement offers hope of an ending of the grotesque suffering in Yemen’s almost unseen war.
SHAPE, which has its roots in the Global South, is part of the class war and resistance worldwide to build hope for the different reality we believe all our societies, our children and grandchildren must have.
That hope is in the movements of revolt by civil society underway in countries that the West never hears enough about, especially in Asia and Latin America, though much is written there. In Western Europe and the United States too there is popular activism and vibrant intellectual challenge to governments and mainstream media from a host of voices, for instance, Democracy Now, Alternet, Truthout, Mondoweiss, Open Democracy, the Intercept. Never have there been published more new books from such voices, many from the Global South. The battle is being engaged against an unprecedented mass brainwashing by a debased uber-rich celebrity culture and the toxic distortions and fake news of social media.
Western leaders, with some fine exceptions, have lost humanity and normalised extraordinary cruelty, and illegality, including torture, in maintaining the fruits of greed and power. This stands out in the Western treatment of refugees, many misleadingly termed migrants, and in the UK “illegal immigrants”, to bypass the international legal obligation towards refugees. We are all only too familiar with scenes of everyday cruelty around the US/Mexico border, squalid camps, refugees hunted or dying of thirst in the desert, children being separated from their parents.
In Europe the barriers went up everywhere, except in Angela Merkel’s Germany, in 2015 when desperate Syrians streamed in tens of thousands away from Russian bombing, fighting, prisons and torture at the hands of the Assad regime and ISIS. The Mediterranean has ever since been a graveyard, with a handful of heroic NGOs in boats saving hundreds of lives of Syrians, Lebanese, Yemenis, Afghans, Eritreans, Somalis and many others, while unknown thousands perish.
The beautiful titled memorial of Algerian artist Rachid Koraishi’s Garden of Africa in Zarsis in Tunisia, where he bought a plot of land and made a cemetery, is one man’s poignant commemoration of the nameless bodies washed ashore here. “As a human being, I am incapable of ignoring the fact that these were once living human beings: father, mothers and even children. https://www.newarab.com/features/algerian-artist-sanctifies-sacrifice-lost-refugees
Meanwhile in Britain, shameful new policies are devised to fly arriving refugees to Rwanda, a culturally and politically unsuitable central African destination, to have their asylum applications processed, others will be herded in boat prisons for months or years. Child refugees, unprotected in random hotels, go missing as gangs seize them for grim underground purposes. Lawyers and activists doggedly fight on for them against the government in the UK. Here, as in many European countries, a relentlessly hostile and racist narrative against refugees fills the media.
Along with humanity, we have lost too the meaning of democracy - from the Greek words demos and kratos (people and power). In use today it is hollow.
If democracy had prevailing power, the massive worldwide popular mobilisation in 2003 would have halted the illegal Bush/Blair invasion of Iraq and the catastrophic destruction of Iraq’s society and civilisation, still ruined today.
While the world watched, democratic protest was recently stamped out by soldiers and police from Hong Kong and Myanmar to Egypt and Tunisia.
In the West, democracy is under no less lethal threat from the power of corporations, most notably, the arms, fossil fuels, and pharmaceutical industries. In the US in 2010 in the unprecedented Citizens United case the US Supreme Court gave corporations the right to make political donations. President Obama rightly forecast that the decision would “open the floodgates for special interests … to spend without limit in our elections.” Reckless irresponsibility and political corruption became a new norm across the world. https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022. Some recent shameful exposures of blatant corruption in both Houses of Parliament have shamed the UK’s political/business nexus.
But it is in Palestine that the West faces an increasing clash of morality with today’s unacceptable norms. The US’s long complicity with Israel’s progressive seizure of Palestinian (and Syrian) land, its apartheid laws and policies, egregious trampling of international law, ignoring of United Nations Resolutions, use of collective punishment, blockade of Gaza, imprisoning of children, targeting of unarmed civilians with weapons that maim for life, and much more, has been documented extensively. https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-israel-weaponises-water-gaza-strip
This is the world that has been created on our watch and that we must – as a matter of urgency – struggle to transform.
Photo credit: Shakeb Tawheed