Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Presumably you don’t follow events in Africa.
It’s understandable that most North Americans feel more outrage at slaughters inflicted on people who look like them captured on social media than the slaughters of Africans who have minimal presence on TikTok. But it’s remarkable how much more.
Tens of thousands of civilians have been slaughtered every year of our lives. Mass rapes by rampaging armies have been carried out every year of our lives. Horrors carried out in war zones with impunity every year of our lives. But years on end have gone by without any of these atrocities showing as much as a blip on the collective consciousness of Canadians.
In the last 10 years alone:
Yemeni Crisis
377,000 dead and counting
Public outrage in Canada 1/10
Tigray War
300,000 - 500,000 dead and counting
Public outrage in Canada 0/10
Ethnic cleansing in South Sudan
386,000 - 400,000 dead and counting
Public outrage in Canada 1/10 (mostly religious groups)
Syrian Civil War
500,000 to 600,000 dead and counting
Public outrage in Canada 2/10
Boko Haram insurgency
358,000 dead and counting
Public outrage in Canada 1/10
Ukraine War
20,000 - 30,000 dead and counting
Public outrage in Canada 10/10
Pointing out this disparity doesn’t mean excusing what’s happening in Ukraine. But it does raise troubling questions about how selective our attention is and what sorts of victims elicit our compassion and outrage which we more or less ignore.
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It shouldn't be a surprise that Canada, a country in NATO, has a lot more outrage about an invasion on an independent country on NATO's border by an enemy that has threatened nuclear war. I am sure countries in the African Union are a lot more concerned with the Tigray and Boko Haram than they are with Ukraine. People tend to pay more attention to conflicts that affect them more directly or that have larger regional or global implications. I also think you are under estimating how much outrage there was in Canada during the peak of the Syrian war. It dominated the news cycle for a while. For 8 years, there was a civil war going on in Ukraine and it was hardly on the news, yet during some of that time the Syrian conflict was all dominating the news and people were outraged.
There is also the fact that Canada has about 1.4 million people that identify as having Ukrainian heritage, which isn't an insignificant number and has some political weight. It's not that different than how when something happens in places like Lebanon or Haiti, the Canadian government pays a little more attention than they do in places like Yemen or Sudan. Those groups have some pull in Canada, despite those conflicts being relatively insignificant on a global scale.