THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR - THE MANIPULATION OF GRIEF TO INCITE WAR

THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR

THE MANIPULATION OF GRIEF TO INCITE WAR

Stes de Necker

A baby boy turned to flotsam. Washed up on the shore, face down in the mud. 

His family, refugees from Syria’s civil war, had tried to reach Greece, but their over-crowded raft overturned in the Mediterranean Sea and he drowned along with his brother and mother.

The viral image of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s lifeless little body on a Turkish beach has shaken the conscience of the West and wrenched America’s attention to the refugee crisis now rocking Europe.

This is what war looks like, just million times worse. That which is mere “foreign policy” to you and your government is desperation and death to those on the receiving end of it.

Children just as innocent and precious as Aylan are being driven into the sea in Libya, incinerated by drones in Pakistan, or starved to death in Yemen all the time.

And every single instance creates a sight just as achingly forlorn and horrifically tragic as the one above, even if it isn’t photographed and seen by millions. Especially for anyone with young children, the picture is a punch in the gut.

It only takes a shred of empathy to instantly imagine how people seeing this must feel, but this is what war displacement looks like, both in the sea and on dry land.

Right at this very moment many millions of families are driven from their homes and sources of livelihood throughout the countries shattered by weapons from the West: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, Ukraine, and more.

It is a shame that the curiosity, empathy, and imagination of most are so stunted that they require such vivid imagery as this showing up in their news feeds to feel concern for the havoc wreaked by their governments’ policies.

And then they are stirred, not enough to actually learn a damn thing about it, but only enough to be manipulated into demanding— or at least countenancing — more of the very same kind of intervention that caused the tragedies in the first place.

Warmongers in government and the media are perversely but predictably trying to conscript Aylan’s corpse into their march to escalation. They are contending that Aylan died because the West has not intervened against Syria’s dictator Bashar al-Assad, and that it must do so now to spare other children the same fate.

Aylan’s family were Kurdish refugees from Kobani who had to flee that city when it was besieged, not by Assad, but by Assad’s enemy: ISIS!

And ISIS is running rampant in that part of Syria only because the US-led West and its regional allies have given them cover by supporting and arming the jihadist-dominated uprising against Assad.

The West has been intervening in Syria heavily since at least 2012.

Indeed, it is Western intervention that has exacerbated and prolonged the conflict, which has now claimed a quarter of a million lives.

But because much of the intervention has been covert and by proxy, it has received little media coverage and public attention.

So the “blowback” that results from it, including Aylan’s death, can be conveniently blamed on alleged “non-intervention” and used to justify more overt and direct intervention.

In this way, governments have long exploited public obliviousness and gullibility to get their wars.

Government's and the news media are masters in the art of manipulating our emotions. This is not the first time this has happened. The manipulation of grief for political purposes has a long history.

Consider the Vietnam War and the rhetoric around the violent brutality that transpired there. During the War, 60,000 American soldiers died in combat, while nearly two million Vietnamese civilians were killed. Westmoreland, Chief of Staff of the United States Army at the time proclaimed, "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does the Westerner. Life is plentiful, life is cheap in the Orient." We must consider this context and this leadership when reflecting on America's responsibility for unjust war tactics including the military command at the time to 'shoot anything that moves.'

Forty-two years later, at the funeral of the three slain Jewish teenagers, Netanyahu echoed Westmoreland, when he said, "A broad moral gulf separates us from our enemies. They sanctify death; we sanctify life. They sanctify cruelty, and we mercy and compassion."

The parallels are striking. The "us" versus "them" mentality -- the claim that our side glorifies life while their side glorifies death -- are used in both instances to justify military action.

The parallels do not end there.

In 1968, the American presidential candidate, Nixon pledged to bring an end to the war that was seeing increasing protests and expression of public disgust among the American electorate. Instead, when he came to power, Nixon, shifted the focus of attention from the mistreatment of the Vietnamese and tremendous loss of lives on both sides of the divide to the missing and imprisoned American soldiers who he promised to 'bring home' in spite of having no information or evidence that these missing soldiers could be found.

The literature professor Gail Holst-Warhaft from Cornell argued that the exploitation and perpetuation of the families' grief under the public's gaze, and the encouragement of false hope for their missing family members to come home was a conscious and precise manipulation of national loss in the service of continuing the war for several more years.

Moreover, if the hawks were to get their wish of seeing Assad finally overthrown and his forces dismantled, there would then be zero local resistance to ISIS, Syrian Al Qaeda, and the other jihadist groups completely overrunning Syria.

As bad as the refugee crisis is now, just imagine what it will be like as all of Syria’s many religious minorities desperately flee from these hyper-violent and hyper-sectarian Sunnis, armed to the teeth with Western weapons.

Until we recognize how our grief is being used to further agendas that our not our own, we will continue to see the despair, hopelessness, violence, and suffering of Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans, Afghanistanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Palestinians, Ukrainians and more. Many of these people are yearning for peace and quiet at a time we must still realise that enough lives have been lost.

Far from preventing such tragedies as Aylan’s drowning, further intervention would only produce many more.

We should all learn more about the role of foreign intervention in the Syrian Civil War that is creating so many of these refugees, and in the wars roiling the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia in general.

The first step to setting things right is understanding and once you’ve acquired understanding for yourself, then work to inform others.