An article in the Australian publication New Matilda gets to the real point about last night’s attacks in Paris \u2013 one that no one wants to talk about. What westerners feel right now is a powerful and very selective outrage that identifies with the suffering of people “like us”. We mourn the deaths in Paris while not even noticing those killed in Lebanon a day earlier\u00a0and almost certainly by the same fanatics that launched the attacks in France.<\/p>\n
Lots of westerners like to dismiss such observations\u00a0as “whataboutery”. It is natural, they say, to care more about people we know or\u00a0who are similar to us. That knee-jerk reaction\u00a0may be\u00a0comforting, but\u00a0it is precisely the problem.<\/p>\n
After all, what drives our\u00a0selective outrage if not\u00a0selective compassion?\u00a0But\u00a0our selective compassion is what got us into this mess in the first place. As Europeans we have always viewed ourselves as fully human, but seen those in the Middle East and much of the rest of the\u00a0world\u00a0as slightly less than human, and not quite as deserving of our sympathy. It is such feelings\u00a0that allowed\u00a0Europe to colonise, abuse and exploit brown people.<\/p>\n
The historic racism that we Europeans are all too ready now to acknowledge, and that we understand\u00a0fed western\u00a0colonialism, is not a thing of the past. It still\u00a0thrives\u00a0deep in our souls. Where once we felt the white man’s burden, we now feel his outrage. Both depend on the same arrogance, and the same ascription of lesser human qualities to those we see as different from us.<\/p>\n
We are\u00a0still trying to\u00a0civilise brown people. We still think\u00a0we have the right to change them, bend them to our will, improve them by force. We still want\u00a0to lecture them, condemn them, threaten them, overturn their elections, arm their oppressive leaders, plunder their resources.<\/p>\n
And after we have destroyed their societies, we expect to be able to shut\u00a0our borders to them as they make desperate journeys to find some peace, some safety away from the war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and elsewhere we either created directly or supported with our money and arms.<\/p>\n
Our racism has not changed. It is alive and creating new justifications for our selective compassion every day.<\/p>\n
What has changed is that technological advances have made weapons of death and destruction ever easier and cheaper to acquire. Those we once oppressed with impunity and far from our homes, out of sight, can now find us and give us a taste of our own medicine.<\/p>\n
If we want to stop the attacks, and avoid turning our own societies into the oppressive dictatorships we have supported\u00a0across\u00a0much of the rest of the globe, then we need to stop interfering, pillaging, manipulating and abusing. And we have to start by\u00a0refusing to allow ourselves to identify more with the victims\u00a0in Paris than those in Beirut. If we were really as civilised as we believe, we would understand that both are equally deserving of our compassion.<\/p>\n