Alfred Dawes | Hypocrisy of human sympathies

“Twenty-three Ukrainian refugees killed during border crossing”.

That’s not true, but it got your attention though. Had the title been “Twenty-three African refugees killed” it would have been easier to scroll on or turn the page. You’re not racist, well at least not by this experiment, but you are programmed to feel less empathy towards some people. It is no secret that the international response to the Ukraine war is very different from what is usually seen when darker countries become conflict zones.

I cannot even check my account balance in the app for a local bank without a banner advising me as to how I can help Ukraine. The initial coverage by the media of the refugee crisis was blatantly discriminatory, with some reporters describing the horrors of this war occurring in a “civilised” country, and with refugees who are professionals and who look like they could live next door. Never have I seen this level of sympathy-driven reporting of conflicts in the Middle East and Africa. Even the Rwandan genocide was framed as a shock and awe at the level of violence rather than the actual human suffering. It was not only that a senseless war had started. It was a war where white people were the innocents, not Iraqis, Libyans, Nicaraguans, Sudanese, Congolese or Burmese.

As you read this, there are currently 27 live conflicts around the world. Yemen has been locked in a bloody civil war over the last six years. Two hundred and forty thousand people have so far perished, the majority dying not from bombs and bullets, but starvation, disease and other consequences of the war. Thousands of brown babies and children have died in the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. Yet there is nothing in the media beyond tallies of the death toll.

The worst refugee crisis in the world was not met with ordinary citizens greeting asylum seekers with warm blankets, strollers and even rooms in their homes. The nearly seven million Syrians fleeing their homes were met with closed borders and hostility, and worst. One European country which now boasts of how many Ukrainian refugees they accepted refused to even take in their quota of refugees fleeing the Middle East and Africa. Yet their current virtue signalling is greeted with praises.

AFRICA’S WORLD WAR

Congo, known for its massive mineral wealth and Leopold of Belgium’s heart of darkness, has seen a massive conflict, known as Africa’s World War, rage since 1994. Over three million souls have perished in that conflict that has drawn in troops from Rwanda, Uganda, Angola, Zimbabwe and Sudan. With no hopes for a non-military solution to the conflict, many more will die in the years to come while the world ignores their plight.

As I stood silently in the killing fields of Cambodia and stared at the piles of skulls of the victims of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, I asked myself, why was this allowed? When I saw the tree where they swung babies by their legs to bash their skulls against the trunk, my eyes welled up, because I know these were the children of a lesser god. The outpouring of charity we see today never came for the Cambodians, two million of whom were slaughtered in the genocide.

On June 24, during repeated attempts by sub-Saharan migrants and asylum seekers to scale a border fence between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla, at least 23 people were killed. Although official reports blamed the cause of the deaths on the stampede, videos circulating on social media show dozens of men flung across the ground with security officers standing over and even prodding them. Some reports put the death toll as high as 37.

Nothing much was heard of this incident in the traditional Western-oriented media. After all, these are only poor African refugees trying to get into Europe. We don’t even count how many of them drown, even when it is significant enough to make the news. They are not professionals or people who could live next to us.

The hypocrisy of “I stand with Ukraine” movement is not lost on the majority of well-thinking persons. However, the need to stand when everyone is standing, and kneel when everyone is kneeling, feeds it. Virtue signalling is the latest pandemic and it is the reason we now have celebrities screaming their cis-gender pronouns, or lauding/condemning the overturn of Roe v Wade by the US Supreme Court.

It is now human nature in 2022 to flit between trending causes to show how much we care and how good of a person we are. We do not care that we are being told that some lives are more important than others or that we are being manipulated into promoting causes that have ulterior motives for their originators. Don’t take my word for it, google how well the Black Lives Matter folks are living on the monies raised by the outpouring of support for George Floyd et al.

It is not that we should become cynical and not care for those we are instructed to feel empathy. We should, however, begin to ask why is it that one group of humans deserve more love and support more than others. Is their pain and suffering greater, and who determines why I should add to the expected outpouring of support by plastering it in the forefront of my conscience. Maybe if enough of us ask these uncomfortable questions, ooh-oo child things will get brighter…

- Dr Alfred Dawes is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons, CEO of Windsor Wellness Centre. Follow him on Twitter @dr_aldawes. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and adawes@ilapmedical.com.