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Big-Hearted or Small-Minded? Americans' Selective Sense of Compassion

6 February 2010

By Dave Lindorff

About that outpouring of heartfelt sympathy and aid for the poor people of Haiti following their earthquake.

Where is the same outpouring of sympathy and aid for the poor people of Afghanistan or Iraq? We are to be sure at war there, but, at the same time, supposedly we're fighting in those countries because we want to help their people, right?

And have you seen the photos of the city of Fallujah, after the US Marines were through with the place and trashed it in late 2004?

The whirlwind: US Marines march into Fallujah
Fallujah, a city of 300,000 before the US Marine assault in November, 2004, was bombed, shelled, and eventually bulldozed until much of the city was simply levelled by US forces. There was never an accurate tally of the number of civilians killed, with estimates ranging from thousands to tens of thousands. Hospitals were bombed, ambulances were shelled and destroyed, fleeing civilians were mowed down as they tried to swim to safety across the river, white phosphorus weapons were illegally used against Iraqi fighters, inevitably also killing and maiming civilians too, and captured Iraqi fighters were executed by Marines. Worse yet, US forces strewed toxic weapons, including massive numbers of depleted uranium shells, all over the city, which is now, according to British reports, experiencing a huge rise in birth defects and infant mortality.

More broadly, it is estimated by credible medical experts that over 800,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed or died directly because of the US invasion of Iraq--a number greater than the dictator Saddam Hussein, whose overthrow was the purported justification for the invasion, killed during his decades in power. Another 1.5 million have been seriously injured. The infrastructure of the country remains largely destroyed seven years after the invasion. And as many as four million Iraqis are refugees, many of them living in camps in Syria and Jordan.

And then, have you seen the photos of the US-caused devastation in Afghanistan, where the war is really only just starting to ramp up?

In Afghanistan, already nearly 10,000 Afghani civilians have been killed and another 15,000 seriously injured since the US invaded in 2001.

Both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are disasters that defy the imagination, but you don’t see Americans lining up to help. Instead, we organize campaigns to send cookies, phone cards and children’s letters to our “heroes” over there--the very ones who are the proximate cause of all the slaughter and the devastation.

Somehow, Americans’ hearts can go out to the victims of a natural disaster, and we’ll rush to our cell phones to make donations to charities that we think will provide aid and succor to the survivors. But when the disaster is of our own making, when the death and misery are the result of weapons financed by our own taxes, and the killing is being done not by politically indifferent heavy winds, torrential rains or shifting tectonic plates, but by men and women in uniform who are sometimes our own neighbors or relatives, who are acting on the orders of politicians we elected to office, we aren’t so quick to provide assistance.

In fact, we really don’t even want to know about what is being done to those people in our names.

It’s bad enough that the aid spigot to places like Haiti or the coastal regions around the Indian Ocean struck by the 2004 tsunami off Indonesia gets turned off, almost as soon as the news teams go home and the grim pictures on our TV’s are replaced by celebrity scandals, but those spigots never even get turned on when it is places like Iraq or Afghanistan, where America is the earthquake.

It really should be the other way around, shouldn’t it?

Then again, it would be better still if we took a good, hard look at the monstrous horrors that our military inflicts on innocent peoples around the globe, and decided to act to make sure that such things are no longer done.

Much money is spent on research into how to predict the paths of hurricanes, and into how to predict earthquakes or to warn of approaching tsunamis. But we already know how to prevent the catastrophes caused by the Pentagon: just de-fund it.

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