Social media networks were flooded yesterday with outpourings of emotion after Brussels was struck by multiple terrorist attacks, killing 31 people and injuring over 200. Citizens and Western politicians united to express their grief for the victims and their outrage against terrorism, conjuring up cartoons that went viral in widespread shows of solidarity on the internet. These cartoons resembled the reactions to the Paris attacks in 2015, which claimed the lives of 130. The reactions also resembled that after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, which claimed the lived of 12, to which people showed their solidarity online by adorning their profile pictures with a translucent tricolour and sharing pictures with the catch-phrase “Je Suis Charlie.”
But why is this reaction unique to cataclysms of terror in the West, when even a standard expression of sympathy is hard to come by when such attacks occur in the Middle-East, Turkey, or even eastern Europe?
Turkey was struck by multiple terrorist attacks last week, in which ISIS and Kurdish militia groups claimed responsibility for separate attacks in Ankara and Istanbul. Dozens were killed, hundreds wounded, and little reaction was noticed. Putting those attacks in contrast to the Brussels attack in figures, Google News search provides over 11 million results for “Brussels attack,” while the Ankara car bombing generates fewer than 400,000 results, showing a notable difference in news worthiness of the two incidents.
All throughout the Middle-East, terrorist attacks are frequently carried out, resulting in devastation and death far outweighing the magnitude of the Brussels of Paris attacks. However, media reports of the incidents conjure little public emotion. The style of reporting is starkly different for deaths in the West and the rest of the world. For the former, very personalized accounts are given, describing in immense detail the personal experiences of some individuals who experienced the attack or lost loved ones. The description of the devastation of the attack is detailed extensively and vividly paints a harrowing image for the readers. For the latter, we are often bluntly told in a story lasting a matter of seconds that a bomb exploded here or there, and this figure is how many died (notably, quite often “died” is used rather than “killed”). This practice fails to invoke an emotional response. It is impersonal and the consistency of supplying death toll figures desensitizes the audience to what is going on.
Another explanation may rest with Western cities and countries, such as London in Britain or Paris in France, being iconic symbols of Western civilization that are often used in popular culture to convey this. Symbols synonymous with London and Paris are widely used in film, music, on clothing, in art, and a great mythology is built around Paris and London being a pseudo-Utopia of the Western world. This accounts for why youths (and sometimes adults) are infatuated with visiting the cities, and why refugees give voice to pursuing a dream life in these cities, only to find out their dream was built on a myth of exorbitant wealth and opportunity that scarcely exists for the indigenous population. Perhaps a few hundred years ago, Istanbul would have been seen in the same light. Beirut was once called ‘the Paris of the East’ before it became a third-world war site in the 2006 Lebanon-Israeli war. Baghdad was a prosperous cultural gem, now laid to waste. Damascus was striking in beauty, but no more.
Samuel Huntington, in his world-famous work The Clash of Civilizations, theorizes our differentiated reactions of sympathy for who we consider to be like ourselves, i.e. Westerners, and others, i.e. anybody else, are due to our religious differences. He proposes the Christian world, the Islamic world and the Orthodox world to be consistently competing for a dominant global position, and if they are not directly “clashing” now, they will be. To some, this adequately explains the lasting tensions between the Russian-dominated Orthodox world and the America-dominated Christian world, and of course the latter’s with the Islamic world, in which a leader is still due to rise (Huntington proposes scenarios for Turkey and Iran in competition for this role). On analysis, however, religion is more often invoked as reasons for a struggle against the Islamic world rather than against Eastern Europe and never in support of Western military action around the world. Other arguments which I believe hold more credence fall onto political reasoning.
Noam Chomsky’s famous academic work, Manufacturing Consent, illustrates in great detail the political motives for the mass media to portray one group of people as “worthy victims” and another as “unworthy victims.” For the former, news stories are produced that resemble reporting on Brussels and Paris, in which highly detailed images are provided and very personalized accounts are told, thus fostering a broader sympathy among the general population. For the latter, their victimization is largely dehumanized, impersonal and made to seem insignificant. The political reasons for this vary from case to case, but examples in Chomsky’s case studies include American massacres of innocent civilians in South East Asia, namely Vietnam, Laos, East Timor and their support for brutal and murderous totalitarian regimes in South East Asia and South America that carried out genocides. The plight of America’s victims was dehumanzed so as to limit public outrage for American military adventures. A modern example can be seen in Ukraine, where actions of pro-Russian rebels are treated as atrocities and attacks carried out by the pro-American regime are considered legitimate, regardless of civilian casualties or the use of internationally illegal anti-personnel weapons. In the cases of Brussels and Paris, the war effort against Islamic Fundamentalism forces mainstream media outlets to adhere to the status quo and not to question the motives of the attackers, but rather portray it as mindless carriage and to greatly personalize the plight of the victims so as to widen the emotional gap we feel for “us” and “them.” Cases highlighted in Chomsky’s work have shown a journalist’s job can quickly end if they fail to sufficiently adhere to the official government line. Although, occasionally a damning report does get out, but the reporters or companies responsible often face fierce backlash from the government or political organisations that were incriminated. The detention of Glenn Grennwald’s partner David Miranda by British police under American instruction illustrates efforts to suppress unfavourable but legitimate news.
The boundaries of our sympathy results from a variety of reasons. For some, Islamophobia is a part of their identity and can be fostered by the current style of media reporting on Muslim attackers and Western victims around the world, but the reason for the reports may yet be political rather than Islamophobic. The same applies to the consistent demonization of Russia in the media, which is a legacy of Cold War propaganda practices. For instance, we constantly hear about Russian oligarchies, but we seldom (if ever) hear about how the IMF gave rise to them during the 1990s when they devastated the Russian economy. Furthermore, it runs contrary to human nature to have everyone treat everyone else the same. It has never been the case that a society could consider itself and all other societies equal. Our differences stem from a network of roots which subconsciously lead us to treat others different from ourselves differently. Some differences have greater meaning than others. For some, it may be skin colour, others, it may be wealth, spoken language, style of clothing, religion, hair colour, gender. It ranges from significant to minor details. Ideally, a tolerant, Western society in Europe should be able to resonate with the plight of other victims of terror around the world in the same way that we do for our own, but our behaviour stems from a much deeper ingrained concept of identity, stemming from our national, religious and racial history, which invariably is found somewhere on the pages of history to have been in conflict with other nations, religions and races. As Belgium reels from the horrific terrorist attack, we should show our solidarity in any way we can. Universal tolerance and sympathy will remain the elusive Holy Grail to human development for the time being, but we will learn.
