Terrorism: Psycho-political observations on shock and indifference
Dr Marco Chiesa

'Murder at a distance removes the need for elaborate defensive mechanisms'
(Chomsky, 2001)



The September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington were a crime against humanity, which sent waves of shock and horror due to their scale and the means by which they were executed. The reactions to the events have been amply shown in the media, and grief and horror of unprecedented force was displayed throughout most of the world. In this contribution I would like to discuss a contrasting phenomenon, namely indifference shown by political elites, media and general population to similar tragedies that occur to our fellow human being.

During the Gulf war part of the nearly 100,000 tons of bombs that rained over Iraq (the equivalent of five Hiroshima bombs) targeted water purification plants, irrigation systems and sewage treatment plants as well as electrical and other Iraqi civilian infrastructure, which were systematically destroyed. The combined effect of war and prolonged iron fist sanctions had disastrous effects on the civilian population of that Country. The spread of typhoid and other contaminated-water-borne diseases, coupled with the denial of food aids and medicines, has led to one of the biggest death tolls of civilians in any one Country in recent history. According to the recent Unicef report (1999) 500,000 preventable under-fives deaths occurred in the period 1991-1998. Those children died of treatable diseases and malnutrition. The incidence of birth malformations and children's cancers has increased by 3 and 4 times respectively as a likely consequence of the depleted uranium used in bombs, which found its way into the food chain (Fisk, 2000). More recent figures show that 4,000 children still die every month as a consequence of the continuing effects of economic sanctions, primarily a US/UK affair. Denis Halliday, one of the three respected UN diplomats in charge of humanitarian coordination for Iraq who have resigned in protest against sanctions, has called these sanctions “genocidal”.

The reaction to these appalling crimes was (and is) very different from those witnessed after the September 11 crimes, when an almost total universal condemnation was coupled with feelings of shock and devastation. By contrast the level of shock and anxiety in the West has been very low relative to the magnitude of the human tragedy involved in Iraq. Horror, grief, anger and despair have not been universal. While most of the media treated the known humanitarian catastrophe in a low-key fashion and let it drop rather quickly, the reaction of the political elites was to minimise or deny the extent of the tragedy. The latter found its most eloquent expression in Madeleine Albright's statement on national television that “the price [of 500.000 Iraqi children's death] is worth it”. When John Pilger invited Robin Cook, the then Foreign Secretary, to participate in one of the very few programmes dedicated to the suffering of the Iraqi people, he declined on grounds that it would not be desirable to be shown alongside dying children. A ten-year catastrophe of genocidal proportion has fallen into oblivion. No three minutes silence has ever been recorded in any institutions for the children of Iraq, or indeed no psychoanalytic contribution was sought or conference organised on understanding the psychological and social roots of the human disaster brought upon the Iraqi people. Now we are faced with the horrifying prospect of a renewed full-scale war against Iraq as part of the so-called ‘war on terrorism’, which will inflict further mortal blows to the Iraqi population.

A second dramatic example of this selective indifference, and there are several to choose from, is the destruction by US bombs in August 1998 of the major pharmaceutical factory in Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world. The Al-Shifa factory produced 50% of the affordable medicinal requirements and 90% of anti-malarial and TB drugs in the entire country, as well as most of the veterinary drugs. It is estimated that thousands of people (although the precise total toll is unknown), of which a high proportion were children, died of treatable diseases as a consequence. This crime elicited no detectable response, and it is fair to assume that it did not enter into many people’s consciousness. The total toll of preventable deaths can only be an approximate estimate (carried out by the German Embassy in Khartoum and by a non-governmental organization based in Cairo) because Washington vetoed a formal UN inquiry into the affair. This is in great contrast with the huge effort put into assessing the extent of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo after the Balkan war. Incidentally, the US has always had a cavalier attitude towards UN initiatives, the most recent of which is its lack of endorsement of the International Criminal Court. This may be understandable in the light of a previous sentence passed in June 1986 by the International Court of Justice (the World Court) that condemned the US for ‘unlawful use of force’ in the terrorist war against Nicaragua, which killed some 30,000 people and left a country in ruins, and asked the US to pay substantial damages to Managua. The US dismissed the World Court deliberation and proceeded to escalate the war by increasing military aid to the Contras terrorist forces.

I would like to offer some theoretical explanations for the possible reasons behind such contrasting personal and societal reactions to terrible criminal acts that have led to thousands of innocent victims and left behind a horrifying trail of destruction and suffering. Why such universal reactions of outrage and condemnation in one case are matched by so muted responses or outright indifference in others? Why such a discrepancy?

When indifference is the main reaction to a catastrophe occurring to people who do not share our culture and race, and who do not belong to our political sphere of influence, I suggest that the differences felt between them and us are magnified to a point where these people become so alien that they tend to disappear altogether as human entities from our consciousness. They stop existing as human beings with whom we share a great deal of common ground. As a consequence our capacity to empathise with their sufferings and take in the nature of the crimes committed against them becomes partially obliterated. We can feel the full force of the impact of the many barbarically murdered on September 11, but the 5,000 estimated civilian casualties of recent aerial bombardments in Afghanistan hardly touch us. In this country we may become preoccupied by the possibility of biological warfare, but there may be little or no concern for some who have died such as the thousands who have died of starvation in refugee camps in Pakistan or in distant villages in Afghanistan: just a mention or a statistic to sacrifice on the altar of our war aims. The splitting and other schizoid operations at work in these circumstances lead to insulation and crimes that would elicit horror if they were committed against us or people similar to us, become mere footnotes to be quickly disposed when they are perpetrated by us or by people similar to us. Segal (1997) convincingly shows that inability and unwillingness to face guilt and responsibility for crimes is a central factor that mobilises manic mechanisms, a corollary of which is the “dehumanisation of the enemy…, making the enemy either a monster or an object beneath contempt”. I suggest that obliteration of the notion and perception of people’s suffering is at the root of indifference.

Over-identification with, and idealisation of, our prevalent culture and our political elite may be another important factor in the denial and indifference to the crimes we commit. If by definition, and without need of qualification, we are the 'civilised society' engaged in a war against 'evil' and possess ‘a strong sense of right and wrong’ (a fundamentalist position), then we cannot believe that we are in fact capable of committing crimes against humanity, an exclusive prerogative of the enemy of the day.

Mainstream media undoubtedly has an important role in influencing and sustaining psychological operations. Media and political elites are well aware of the power of images. Nobody will ever forget the shocking images of the airplanes guided into the twin towers and the resulting carnage, shown repeatedly, day after day, on our screens. By contrast how many images of dying children or grieving mothers in Iraq or in Sudan have been shown in the last ten years?

In the same way high-tech killings by automated modern warfare are presented in an aseptic and sanitised fashion. Media coverage reinforces denial and insulation that allows us to black out the notion that at the end of the 'high precision, laser guided' bombing there are human being in flesh and bones.

It is of great relief that many courageous people do not fall prey to such syndrome of indifference, even when a heavy personal price is paid, like the parents of Greg Rodriguez, a young man who died in the World Trade Centre carnage. They said: "We read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go...not in our son's name." For these bereaved parents murder at a distance does not elicit defences, but is regarded as a crime.

References

Chomsky, N. (2001). Foreword, Vietnam Inc., P. J. Griffiths. London: Phaidon Press.
Fisk, N. (2000). The hidden war. In A. Arnove (Ed.), Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War. London: Pluto Press.
Segal, H. (1997). From Hiroshima to the Gulf war and after: socio-political expressions of ambivalence. In J. Steiner (Ed.), Psychoanalysis, Literature and war (pp. 157-168). London: Routledge.
Unicef (1999). Results of the 1999 Iraq Child and Maternity Mortality Surveys : Unicef.