The phenomenon of verbal or virtual expressions of empathy of certain population in connection with the somewhat recent `shit in France` is interesting.
There is nothing wrong with empathy, on the contrary - but it is always reserved for groups that people consider close or at least have a serious delusion that they are close to them. And there is nothing wrong with that in itself, but it should be avoided if possible. The local masses of people can identify with a random population that died at a concert in Paris, because they sometimes go to concerts themselves, or with those who died in a cafe because they often go to cafes, or with those killed in front of a stadium because it is assumed that they go to matches of the local football team.
Because Jeanne and Michel who died at a concert are somehow similar, almost ours, with a slight shift in the parameters they could also have been Stanko and Biljana in Prilep. All of this seems recognizable, alien but ours, a common (or at least aspired to) social dynamic that is disrupted by bearded maniacs who come from hell. Some people may even perceive the situation as a personal insult, an attack on `their` values.
But the reality is bleak and harsh, the local crowd goes to concerts and matches less than the French crowd, purely for the sake of living standard, sit on bare cement in a half-destroyed stand or goes to the cinema with torn seats and a projector manufactured during Tito's time. Similar to a fan of a club from...Lebanon. And all of this is fine, the standard of living should not be a measure when expressing empathy.
The problem is that people want to perceive themselves as part of Western civilization. And the poor people do not realize that they are not. The West does not consider you as an integral part of itself and will never consider you. Ever since the Krajina War, you will always be the Border between the `bright` West and the `dark` East. The Western paradise does not consider the southeastern paradise `its`. Until yesterday, there was a visa ghetto for you. And today there is Schengen. It exists because of you. And they will not empathize with you under similar conditions. Just as they did not empathize much during Vukovar, Ovčara, Knin, Sarajevo or 2001. You will never find yourself on their front pages, no matter how many people die. Or possibly if so many victims die that it would be inconvenient for them not to put you on the front page. Like Srebrenica, let's say.
The terms Ausländer, Jugo, Eastman, Vogue, Balkan - are an integral part of everyday Western vocabulary. A little more than Sand-Niger but much less than Belgian. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't express sympathy for a tragedy in the West, on the contrary, we should. However, I will mention again, we shouldn't shy away...Empathy should be distributed to all innocent victims on the planet. Since if there is a gradation of the significance of the victims - then it is not empathy but only an expression of the stated desire to belong somewhere, to experience oneself as part of something, in this case Western culture. Or civilization, if that word is more dear to you.
With a child from Congo who dies at the age of 14, blacking out in a mine, no one intends to identify, empathize or even understand him because that child is foreign, unrecognizable, there are no patterns in the brain that would lead to empathy. Here, at the age of 14, a child goes to the eighth grade, likes a girl, plays games, throws a basketball, sleeps in a children's room a.k.a. all those things that a child from Congo doesn't have. Here, no one goes to a mine on 14 so there is nothing to empathize with.
Just like the myth about the Indians who supposedly could not see the Spanish ships when they approached some Mesoamerican coast, not because of myopia but because they did not have a pattern in their minds that such a thing as a ship could exist. Or death from a thermobaric bomb. Or from a grenade. In Syria. Everyday life. But the thermobaric bomb and its effect on people is an abstract, alien, unknowable thing - hence one cannot suffer from virtual/verbal empathy or concern about `some`...Sand-niggers there.
The fact that, in terms of civilization, the citizens of the Republic of Hunzistan are much closer to the Middle East than to the West is an unpleasant fact that needs to be covered up with some new mythology, with Nietzsche Macedon or Kirche Lazaroff.
Because you are sincerely looking forward to a bowl of fried food like you eat in Beirut, not a baguette. Because you are corrupt to the core and have semi-functional societies like theirs. Because your cities resemble landfills like theirs. Because your traffic culture is far more similar to that of Istanbul than to that of The Hague. Because...beer before cooperation. Because four recycling bins are as foreign and incomprehensible to you as a random character from Aleppo.
And because you are in the only European region that can generate war on the old continent. Naturally, you are not totally the same as the people from the Middle East, primarily because they have the destructive role of radical Islam, which is a conveyor belt for the production of idiots, a medieval atavism gone astray in our time. The Balkans are special, always on the border between East and West, not completely belonging to either of those two worlds. Although, if we are honest, much more similar to the Levant.
No comments:
Post a Comment