The death of seven astronauts is a catastrophe, an event to be pored over and grieved. But the death of thousands of Afghans, and the future deaths of possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, is barely noticed in the West, and is hardly considered a catastrophe.

The deaths of seven astronauts, which must have been terrifying and violent, or the deaths of 3,000 people on Sept. 11, cruel, brutal, and horrible — that hits home, for those people are more like us than the dark skin people are, who dress in strange ways, and speak a language we can’t understand, and live in a country headed by a man who, we’re told, is evil, and wishes us harm.

These people are not Americans, not Canadians, not Westerners, not Christians, not Jews, which may be why their deaths are barely noticed, and are called “regrettable” rather than “intolerable” or “criminal.”

And so it is that everywhere we look — in newspapers, on television — the death of seven astronauts count for infinitely more than the impending deaths of seven thousand, or seven hundred thousand, who may be human, but who, in the universe of concentric circles which define how close any other person is to ourselves, occupy the farthest rings, the Plutos in our own personal solar systems.

“We” are Winners?

Flipping through TV channels I stumbled across an interview with a man, an American, who had written a defense of US foreign policy. “They say we’re stupid, we’re short-sighted, we’re bumblers,” he complained, bitter about the way Washington is regarded outside of America and 10 Downing Street. “Well, if we’re so stupid, so short-sighted, so bumbling, why is it that we keep winning?” This summed up the two defining characteristics of American foreign policy. First, the idea that America’s relation with other countries is a collective enterprise in which all Americans participate (“we” keep winning) rather than one planned by a tiny minority for the benefit of the same tiny minority. And two, the idea that foreign policy is a game (of conquest and control) whose object is to win.

And so there are gradations of human beings, gradations of suffering that matter. Gradations of catastrophe, too, that can thrust the deaths of seven to the fore, and sweep the impending deaths of hundreds of thousands to the shadows. That, to those who plan wars, and gull others to go along or acquiesce, is well and good.

“Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some simple person on a farm or in a city want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his home in one piece? But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.”

These comments, from Gustave Gilbert’s Nuremberg Diary, are based on a conversation Gilbert had with Goering while the latter was on trial at Nuremberg. (Goering adds): “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. War for him was an abstraction, and more than that, a foreign abstraction, not blood, not viscera strewn across a kitchen floor, not kids screaming in terror, not the charred remains of children littering a street, not brains blown out.”

All of these horrors he knew happened in war, but he preferred not to think about them, and he didn’t really have to think about them, because the wars his government was so ready to inflict upon others and that he was so ready to support as his patriotic duty were not wars that would leave his 10- year-old son a paraplegic, would not leave his aged mother crushed under the beam of a bombed-out building, and would not leave him whimpering in terror, huddled in some dank corner of his basement, in the dark, as bombs exploded outside, the noise deafening. Those fates would be visited upon other people, not him, not his neighbors, not his friends, not his family. He could afford to be cavalier about civilian casualties.

He would never have to see the bits of crushed bone, the smashed skulls, and the entrails oozing from bellies. We don’t need to see that, say Washington’s grandees and America’s network executives. All we need to see, all we need to remember, are 3,000 killed on Sept. 11; think about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction; think about his resolve to harm Americans. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked... It works the same way in any country.

Americans won’t see the immense suffering their government will inflict on others, as they haven’t seen the immense suffering it has already inflicted. That’s bad politics, and it’s bad for war, it’s bad for oil, it’s bad for profits.

Arab News Opinion 19 February 2003