Matter of response and responsibility

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian philosopher, literary critic and communication theorist, who had presciently predicted the coming of the World Wide Web, 30 years before it was invented, was the first to use the term “the global village”.

In his two seminal works, The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), he described how our world would progressively contract into a kind of vast neighbourhood connected by “electric technology” and the instantaneous movement of information from and to every corner around the planet, leading to an “extension of consciousness”.

He was less prescient, and overly facile, however, in his predictions when he assumed that human communities, sharing the same information and the same imagery about the same event at the same moment of immediacy in this “global village”, will in time acquire “syncretism”, a confluence in these communities’ hitherto disparate or contradictory moral beliefs.

The information superhighway may have raised our consciousness, true, but it sure has not turned us into a united commonwealth with a shared consensus on how to deal with crisis in this putative world of ours, now rendered ever so small by new technology.

The fact that the international community continues to twiddle its thumb while the mayhem in Syria continues attests to that fact. How much more of that mayhem would it take for these nations to take action? Surely you must agree that their response has been maddeningly distracted, dismally slow.

By now it is clear that the uprising in Syria has shown itself to be unique among the others that have characterised the “Arab Awakening” movement. There is something very Alice in Wonderland about the macabre situation there, but after 15 months of falling through the rabbit hole, we are discovering, unlike Alice, that things are not so much getting “curiouser and curiouser” as viler and viler.

Observers dispatched there by the UN Security Council to monitor a so-called “ceasefire” have had their job reduced to counting bodies. In Al Houla last week, in the wake of a rampage by government thugs known as shabiha (meaning ghosts or vampires), they counted 108, that included 34 women and 49 children. Some had had their eyes gouged, throats slit and bodies hideously disfigured.

Two days later, while the UN Security Council haggled over a resolution condemning the Al Houla massacre and as the world was left numb at the spectre, UN observers in Syria verified yet another massacre in the village of Sukar, outside the city of Al Zour, where 13 bodies were found, with their hands tied behind their backs and with signs that they had been shot at close range.

If the ethical values of the international community do not propel it to call for and then agree on a concerted effort to stop this unspeakable violence, then ethical values be damned.

In 2001, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty introduced the principle of Responsibility to Protect (R2P), later endorsed by the General Assembly. The endorsement was a response to the traumas of Rwanda, Bosnia and Somalia, as it was a shift in perception from non-interference to non-indifference.

Sovereignty was no longer a licence by a ruling regime to kill, nor an option for the international community to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to the suffering of human beings around the world. We are all, are we not, our brothers’ keepers? And we are all complicit, are we not, in that which leaves us indifferent?

Shortly before she was killed in Homs in late February, while the city was under relentless bombardment, the Sunday Times reporter, Marie Kolvin, told her editors: “No one here can understand how the international community can let this happen”.

To be sure, symbolic acts, like slap-on-the-wrist sanctions and theatrical expulsions of Syrian diplomats from countries in North America and across Europe were taken but to date, there is neither consensus among world powers on how to end the bloodshed nor any appetite to interfere — ‘Hey, don’t look at me, it ain’t my beef, I only work here’.

Of all the lessons about human beings’ indifference to the sufferings of others, the one offered by the German pastor, Martin Neimoler, who wrote about his own complicity in the escalating brutality of life in Nazi Germany, is best known.

“First, they came for the Communists”, he wrote, “but I was not a communist — so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat — so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew — so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me”.

The Arab world should not continue to depend on the ineffective Kofi Annan, and the US on the duplicitous Russian President Vladimir Putin, to spare them from the moral responsibility of taking bold action. It is in moral responsibility that our identity, culture and history are most truly challenged and guarded. A vital moral tradition, even in its polemics, is not a luxury in political life but a need.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.