Ever since Russia invaded Ukraine last week, reporters and commentators have been saying all kinds of barbarity. In trying to justify their sudden empathy for the Ukrainians, they reveal how little they care about other peoples at war.
No need to read between the lines. It’s all said openly, without embarrassment. The British newspaper Telegraph, for example, wrote on the 26th that Ukrainians are “just like us” and that is why the Russian invasion is so shocking. After all, residents of Kiev watch Netflix and have accounts on the social network Instagram. It is unthinkable, for this reason, for your city to be bombed.
A correspondent for the US television network CBS expressed similar surprise, explaining that the Ukrainian capital is not a place like Iraq and Afghanistan. “This is a relatively civilized, relatively European city,” he said on air. “You wouldn’t expect that to happen here.”
Already on the British network BBC, a former member of the Ukrainian government explained that he was getting emotional because he saw “blond, blue-eyed Europeans being killed every day” by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s missiles and helicopters. “I understand and, of course, respect emotion,” the TV host replied.
Even on the English broadcast of Al Jazeera, a network based in Arabic Qatar, a commentator expressed outrage that Ukrainians have to take refuge in other countries, such as Poland. They are prosperous, middle-class people, not refugees from the Middle East, he said. And it got worse: “They look like any European family that could live next door.”
It’s not that the invasion of Ukraine shouldn’t be worrying. There is a clear risk that the war will involve other powers in the coming weeks. Russia, as everyone likes to remember, has a huge nuclear arsenal. The bombings and the deaths of civilians do have to bother us. But always, and not just sometimes.
All these comments account for the dehumanization of the so-called global south. The implicit, and sometimes even explicit, idea is that an Arab or African country is expected to be at war. It is also customary for its population to have to take refuge. As if that were its nature, under normal conditions of pressure and temperature. Your essence. The absurd, unthinkable, is when this happens to the developed world.
This all matters more than the nit-picking of social media. As the Palestinian thinker Edward Said explains in his classic 1978 book “Orientalism”, the way people refer to certain peoples has real consequences.
The dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims by European powers over the centuries is directly linked to the colonialist project that has caused so much damage in the world. The French occupation of Algeria, which lasted more than a hundred years, depended on building the image of the Algerians as an inferior, savage people who needed the help of the more advanced.
The essentialization and inferiorization of the “other” is what allows someone to write, without hesitation, that the bombing of Ukrainians is shocking because, like us, they watch Netflix series and post on Instagram.
It also allows a reporter to say that Ukraine is civilized, unlike Iraq — not to mention the irony that Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization in antiquity. Without going into the merits, too, that the “civilized” US invasions destroyed Iraq in 2003.
Only with all this empathy can people build this image of heroic citizens wielding weapons on the streets of Kiev. When it’s the Syrians fighting in Damascus, or the Yemenis stationed in Sanaa, they usually appear only playing the role of savages and terrorists.
It is this attitude, in short, that helps to understand why, all of a sudden, the whole world seems willing to receive and support refugees, as long as they are Ukrainians, Europeans and similar to us. Blond, blue eyes.
As for the Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans, Sudanese — not those. After all, being a refugee is their nature. There is nothing new, there is nothing outrageous. Let them come swimming, let them drown in the Mediterranean, let them cut themselves with barbed wire. It’s how things are, really.
