When atrocities become a recurrent feature of contemporary life they can stretch our capacity for empathy close to its limit. As France counts the dead and wounded from yet another terror attack, it is a daunting task to consider even a fraction of the suffering of the victims’ families, much less to gauge the potential political fallout from such appalling violence. Even so, it is important to remember that the carnage in Nice is the latest in a sequence of horrors. We have barely had time to absorb each one before another displaces it from the headlines. Within the last few weeks these mass killings include the shooting of 48 people at a nightclub in Orlando, the bombings of 41 others at the airport in Istanbul; 22 diners at a cafe in Bangladesh, and more than 250 Iraqis in a bombing in central Baghdad. If these appalling figures are not depressing enough, there is also the UN statement, just yesterday, that at least 300 people have been killed in South Sudan this week, and more than 40,000 have been forced to flee from their homes since the beginning of the month.
With such a constant stream of horror and grief, it is hard not to be overwhelmed and perhaps just as hard to resist a reflexive response to acts of terror. The people who orchestrate such nihilistic violence depend on our maximum outrage in order to achieve their political goals. If anything the rash of recent attacks indicates a level of frustration at the tactic’s recent failure to produce its usual results. For several attacks have provoked bewilderment rather than mere anger, and the relative sophistication of the responses of the targeted communities has disappointed the intellectual authors of these crimes.
A few days ago, Michel Kilo, a Syrian dissident who had fled to Paris after being imprisoned for years by the Syrian government, told a New York Times reporter that there was a worrying absence of empathy for non-white, non-Christian and non-Western victims of terrorism. Kilo, who is Christian, observed that the goal of “this crazy violence” was to play up divisions within Europe and “make Sunnis feel that no matter what happens, they don’t have any other option.” He added: “If we lose all humanity, if you allow the slaughter of a nation for five and a half years, after all the leaders of the international community declared the right of these people to revolt against their government, then expect Islamic State — and many other Islamic States in other forms and shapes.”
In a thoughtful essay written in January 2015, in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo killings, the author Teju Cole notes that “Moments of grief neither rob us of our complexity nor absolve us of the responsibility of making distinctions.” Cole argued that “the suggestion that violence by self-proclaimed Jihadists is the only threat to liberty in Western societies ignores other, often more immediate and intimate, dangers.” Cole added that while the US, UK and France pursue their statecraft, not always with ethically defensible goals, they tend do so with a shared “expectation of proper respect for Western secular religion.” In fact governments often use simplistic narratives about foreign terrorism to cloak their own anti-democratic mischief – to divert attention from mass surveillance programmes, or to distract the public from a chill on the work of lawyers and journalists who question the “secular religion” and its agenda. Cole added “When [these governments] commit torture or war crimes, no matter how illegal or depraved, there is little expectation of a full accounting or of the prosecution of the parties responsible.”
Without, in any way, diminishing the value of the lives lost in Paris, Cole cautioned against the neglect of “unmournable bodies” – those victims who suffer beyond the focus of the Western gaze. “We may not be able to attend to each outrage in every corner of the world,” he wrote, “but we should at least pause to consider how it is that mainstream opinion so quickly decides that certain violent deaths are more meaningful, and more worthy of commemoration, than others.” This broader compassion for all the victims of terror is by no means a quibble over the abomination that has just occurred in Nice. On the contrary, it suggests that the struggle against violent extremism is one that transcends national, cultural and religious divisions and ought to take its stand on our common humanity.
