DEAD SOULS
1. The Wrong Kind of Victims
The last few days have witnessed possibly the worst atrocities committed in the town of
Let us now do an exercise Here is a newspaper cutting from a major broadsheet newspaper,
‘The Israeli regime has been accused of renewing its attack on
the Palistinian settlement, scene of the ongoing Palistinain Israili conflict's most gruesome single massacre, as
Israili forces unleashed sniper fire and artillery shells on civilians trying
to flee.’
Can you imagine what the Stop the War website would, rightly of course, make of such an attrocity? Now as it happens I have substituted Israel for Syria in this account, which comes from the Daily Telegraph’s report of the latest mass murder committed by the Syrian regime. The Stop the War coalition silence is a product of something that I will call, for the purposes of this short essay, soul rot. A disease that once it infects the individual conscience spreads like a cancer, first creating a truly grotesque myopia, finally leading to what can only be described as ‘soul death,’ a state in which rows of murdered children leave you cold because they are victims of the Syrian state and not the consequence of American drone attacks in Northern Pakistan.
This kind of diseased thinking has already spread to some who once held positions of respect on the left; as George Monbiet has found out:-
Thus
once respectable figures like Noam Chomsky and John Pilger are reduced to the
level of the conspiracy obsessed geek, glued as much to his obsession that all
real evil in the world emanates from the White House or 10 Downing street as he
is to his computer screen. No longer able to engage in articulating a case they
are reduced to the level of name calling; with consciences rotting with hate
for ‘the west’ they stoop to the same level as holocaust deniers.
There are a range of responses to human suffering ranging at the most extreme from sadistic pleasure through the normal human responses of compassion, solidarity, empathy, at the other extreme simple indifference. To those eaten away with soul rot the first response is 'how will this advance/hinder my cause?'
George Monbiet may think the struggle hopeless, though it is not as he seems to rather grandiosely imagine, just ‘his’ struggle but it is the struggle of all who seek to deal in truth, not lies, spin or propaganda; it is a struggle that has existed in its current form since at least the early days of the twentieth century,[1] as any serious reader of George Orwell could affirm, it is a struggle that must be continually fought in the face of bullying orthodoxies of whatever stripe.
On a day when we are absorbing the full horror of yet another atrocity committed by Assad’s and his Alawite militia thugs Stop the War cite Israel and the US as the greatest violators of human rights on the planet. As Christopher Hitchens used to say when the rot eats this deep condemnation becomes redundant, they condemn themselves out of their own mouths.[2]
2. The Importance of the Shudder
From 1997 until I left to travel in 2002 I was the senior clinician at The Drug and Alcohol Foundation in central
There are no easy explanations for the latter, cliché’s about ‘the banality of evil’ or the need of perpetrators to dehumanise their victims, whilst true, only take you so far. What I do believe is that perpetrators who commit grievous crimes have already done something grievous to their own humanity, have severed some part of themselves, slicing off areas of conscience and empathy that like severed limbs will never grow again. To be without empathy is truly to be only half human.[4] Whilst this does not place them in the same category as their victims it did inspire something in me akin to compassion.[5]
Dealing day after day with people who have had great pain inflicted upon them psychologically or physically or the capacity to inflict it, can take it toll and I believe took it’s toll on me[6] as the years passed.
It was also part of my role to supervise and mentor trainee counsellors, some of whom seemed to imagine that to experience shock or disgust was somehow unprofessional. Now of course nobody wants a counsellor who is so overcome by their own reactions that they prove useless as a source of insight and support. However a counsellor who ceases to experience horror or disgust when confronted by the trauma and horrific life experiences they encounter is not only useless they are positively dangerous.[7] Thus I spent time explaining to trainees the importance of never loosing an essential propensity to shudder; we should never become blasé in the face of extreme violence or suffering.[8]
3. Silence, Indifference, Collusion and Lies
This
takes me back to the issue of the response of some, who I presume would see
themselves as humanitarian and as being on the left, to the latest Syrian
atrocities. These responses range from silence, simply making no comment, this
often morphs into indifference, simply refusing to get agitated by events in
Syria in a way that they would, say, by events on the occupied West Bank or
Gaza strip, to colluding with Syrian Propaganda and engaging in outright lies. As
an example of collusion that shades into the outright lie I quote from someone
called Patrick Seale writing in the Guardian. This article has been lifted in
its entirety and placed on the Stop the War website:-
Major-General Robert Mood, the Norwegian head of
the UN observer mission, has been cautious in pointing the finger of blame for
Friday's Houla killings: "Whatever I learned on the ground in Syria
The key sentence here is of course the last one, with the weasel word ‘probably.’ The Major-General of course is accurately quoted, what else could he say with demolishing the whole UN mission? However the only other body to share this version of events is the Russian regime of Mr Vladimir Putin.
This is not by any means the worst example that I could find, however since it appeared in The Guardian it is likely to carry the veneer, to those on the liberal left, of some respectability.
I could of course have equally written the whole of this short essay as an analysis of the way in which the right wing media treats the plight of the Palestinians,[10] for soul rot is by no means confined to elements of ‘the political left.’ The same range of responses from silence to outright lies accompanies the murder by Israeli soldiers of Palestinian men, women and children. After every Israeli atrocity no sooner are bodies cold than the dissemblers and obfuscating propagandists of the political right set about slandering the victims.
The ‘journalism’ produced by this kind of soul rot, this failure to shudder, not only descends into the worst kind of propaganda but, as I say, colludes with the crime itself; by slandering the dead and maligning the victims they become accessories after the fact. Such sickness eats away at the humanity of those who engage in such disgusting lies and distortions, though I care little for them, our solidarity and care belong with the victims and it is in their name that anyone who believes in such essential human values as truth and justice must speak out
[1]
See for example the grotesque propaganda of the Second Balkan War.
[2]
Since I started writing this they have shifted their stance to align it with
the morally bankrupt Putin regime in Russia US
[3]
Often a combination of these factors, moreover in some cases that I worked with
victims went on to become perpetrators, the only unifying theme being the use
of drugs and/or alcohol to blot out searingley painful experiences.
[4]
I have encountered very little undiluted evil , and I can already hear the
sniggers of those on the left at my use of the word, though somehow no other
term will do, the closest I came was
when working with a truly psychopathic individual whose only desire was to be
released from prison so that he could wreak violent revenge on his
ex-girlfriend, her father, brother and
certainly any other males involved in her life. He wanted me to write a report
saying that he was now drug free, which was almost certainly true, and that as
his offences were committed under the influence of drugs he no longer
represented a danger to society, which was not true.
[5]
This again is not saying that they should not be locked away from society and
in some cases locked away for a very great length of time indeed.
[6]
I believe this latter category can inflict the greater toll.
[7]
I did once come across a practitioner who was working with offenders and who
boasted that nothing could shock him any longer, he had heard it all. In
consequence he entered freely into the world of the violent offenders he worked
with and in implicitly sharing their world view ended up effectively colluding
with them.
[8]
It is a debatable point as to whether elements in the entertainment
[9]
My emphasis. There is nothing new under the sun, a similar piece of
apologia could be dug out of the
archives of the Daily Mail during the Spanish Civil War, indeed it reminds me
some of the Axis reporting of Guernica, like the peasants of Guernica it seems
they blew themselves up and cut their own throats as a propaganda exercise to
put the Syrian regime in a bad light.
[10]
The latest line propagated by the Republican right in the US is that there is
no such thing as The Palestinians, merely ‘Jordanians’ who insist on living on
land that rightly belongs to the state of Israel!
