Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
You’re talking about about geopolitics. I’m talking about the media and public opinion.
As a former journalist, I understand that empathy is a remarkably capricious and fluid thing. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are killed in war every year. Some elicit tremendous outpourings of outrage and compassion among middle-class westerners sitting at their breakfast tables. Most are completely ignored.
It’s not simple geopolitical alliances that govern which deaths we care about and which we don’t. Where we culturally situate who is being killed and who is doing the killing plays a big part. If the deaths can be fit into an emotionally satisfying narrative, the media’s job is all the easier.
We’ve proven again and again that we don’t particularly care about non-European people in the developing world killing one another. It takes a horror the scope of Rwanda for those deaths to even appear on our radar. But introduce a Western/European/Colonial role to the story, and the engines of public outrage rev up. Because that fits a political narrative that has real juice.
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I don't think that really explains it. As far as I know, there weren't any real protests in North America about the killing going on in the former Yugoslavia in the '90s. Those were Europeans getting killed, but there wasn't any kind of large movement to protest it, because what's the point? NATO conducting air strikes probably generated more protest action than the war itself.
Which is basically how it always plays out. People care when their country may get involved or when their country has some sort of influence on the outcome. People didn't protest the Iraq War but not the Yemen Civil War because they have a particular affinity for Iraqis that they don't have for Yemenis. It's because the US and other western nations were directly involved (and not in some abstract sense like selling the Saudis weapons that eventually get used in the Yemen conflict).
So as it applies to this conflict, yes, Westerners are obviously going to pay more attention and have more of a reaction to a conflict where the US President and Secretary of State are flying over to it to confer with one side's leadership, where the US sends aircraft carriers into the region as a means of supporting the conflict, and where there's a potential risk of the conflict spreading, than they are about a civil war that Western nations aren't even really involved in. I don't see what's remotely surprising about that. It's the same reason people care more about Ukraine than they do other random conflict; it's right on NATO's borders, so obviously it's going to get far more attention. That doesn't mean it's right, or that people shouldn't give those other conflicts much more attention, or that we shouldn't all consider the types of evils that our governments sometimes tacitly support around the world.
And to be honest, I think the opposite effect is happening too. In a few weeks, Israel has already killed about as many civilians as Russia has in almost 2 years, and dropped as many bombs in a week as the US did in Afghanistan in a year, but people shrug, treat it as the cost of doing business, and hand wave away potentially starving millions of people.