#FlagWaving In #WarTime

by Ryan O'Neill

everythingleft,co.uk 

 

How selective solidarity and sympathy aids a jingoistic foreign policy

On Sunday evening, the first news reports started to come through that France had conducted its largest bombing campaign to date against an ‘ISIS stronghold’ in Raqqa, Syria. The Guardian referred to Raqqa as an ‘IS bastion’, and that the decision to launch such ‘massive, retaliatory airstrikes’ was an act of “self-defence”, according to french foreign minister, Laurent Fabius. These airstrikes follow Friday’s terror attacks in Paris that left over 140 people dead.

Speaking on the first day of the G20 summit in Turkey, Laurent Fabius claimed that

“France has always said that because she has been threatened and attacked by Daesh(ISIS), it would be

normal that she would react in the framework of self-defence. That’s what we did today with the strikes on Raqqa..we can’t let Daesh act without reacting.”

Aside from drawing attention to the carefully selected language of war deliberately used by elements of the mainstream media, in events such as these, it is important to carefully consider the public perception and acknowledgement of these claims of self defence and the environment that gives them such qualification. 

Almost immediately, following the Paris attacks, hashtags to pray for Paris were everywhere on social media and Facebook gave users the opportunity to cover their profile pictures in the colours of the French flag. Without falling into the sickening diatribe and ideological battles of the nitpicking left, it is important to understand that despite France using the narrative of self defence to justify a violent, ongoing bombing campaign, the public have inevitably fallen lockstep into an alliance that although perceived as defensive or sympathetic by those who make such gestures, it can easily appear offensive to others. At the current time of writing, massive portions of social media from Facebook to Twitter are awash with the same flag that don the jets dropping bombs on a city of 200,000 people. A city that was once home to over a million Syrians but whose lives have been destroyed not only by ISIS but a war that foreign powers have been instigating from the beginning, including France.

The day before the events in Paris, 43 people were killed in an ISIS attack in Beirut and an ISIS suicide bomber killed 18 people in Baghdad. The reaction to these tragic events however contained very little of the sentiments of solidarity and sympathy reserved for the victims of the attacks in Paris. A predictable response to such selective grief has inevitably taken centre stage however and not only do we have French flags covering social media accounts but a new army of  keyboard warriors taking it upon themselves to lecture on victimhood and decide whether someone has the right to grieve depending on their past displays of grief to other tragic events. Various political groups or individuals are engaging in self righteous rhetorical questioning and declarations of one being less racist or more internationalist in scope has become more immediately important than the tragic deaths of innocent people, whether in Paris, Beirut, Baghdad, or indeed Raqqa. 

We must get past petty and divisive tribal ideological battles if we are to understand why certain parts of the general public react to these tragic events in such a different manner. If we seriously wish to present obstacles to the inevitably violent reactions to such events, whether dropping bombs on Syria or setting fire to a refugee camp in Calais, we must understand the environment in which these power relationships take place. The public perception to a specific event is shaped by a public discourse that links language, institutions and practices and only by deconstructing this relationship can we begin to understand the divisive structures that make such selective grief inevitable. For instance, just as Raqqa is described as an “ISIS stronghold”, Bourj el-Barajneh, the predominately Shia suburb of Beirut that ISIS attacked on Thursday was described in the press as a “Hezbollah stronghold.” Such language takes away the humanity of the innocent victims of the ISIS attack and gives the impression of the event as one which has taken place in an ongoing violent war between muslim groups, far away in the battlefield of the Arab world. The purpose of this is to sow the idea of difference, the idea of us and them, western values and muslim values, here and there, and if such a conflict spills over into our world, it has less to do with the violent foreign policy of our governments and more to do with the muslims who have come here, bringing “their” violence with them. 

So long as this divisive discourse is prevalent in our narrative, the issue of surveillance and more draconian practices through the security services becomes a much more pressing issue than the need to question the aggressive, murderous foreign policy of our governments. Following 9/11, although also much earlier to a lesser degree, “Muslimness” has been racialized through surveillance. Since all racisms are socially and politically constructed rather than resting on the reality of any biological “race,” cultural markers associated with Muslimness (forms of dress, languages, etc.) have become racial signifiers which indicate a people supposedly prone to violence and terrorism, justifying a whole range of surveillance and criminalization, from arbitrary arrests, indefinite detention, deportation, torture, solitary confinement, the use of secret evidence, and sentencing for crimes that “we” would not be jailed for, such as speech, donations to charitable organizations, and other such acts considered material support for terrorism. These racial underpinnings also help to sustain the foreign policy objectives of the US and Europe as the vast death toll in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Syria and elsewhere could not be sustained without the dehumanization of its Muslim victims. Racism at home goes hand in hand with empire abroad. 

Laurent Fabius was right when he said France could not let ISIS act without reacting as that is an inevitable feature of the divisive discourse we have created. So long as this divisive narrative keeps us in a constant state of war, a war that now has a tangible enemy, or at least a collective label to associate with terrorism, every action requires a reaction. Whilst maintaining the language of war, every politician is a war politician and every war politician must react to “acts of war, orchestrated from outside” as French president Francois Hollande described the attacks on Paris and repeated standoffs, along with making decision makers ever more jittery, will inevitably prepare European populations psychologically for war, whether real or not. As we can see throughout history however, each crisis creates ever more resentment from those who feel they have been the ones to back down or compromise along the way, or those who have been on the receiving end of new security measures in response to the ongoing elements of such a crisis. Both of these psychological responses play into the hands of radical elements which will inevitaly amplify such resentment and make it more difficult to back down or display caution when the next crisis takes place. In the first quarter of this year following the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, attacks on muslims in France increased by 500% and is already triple that number for this year. This reality has a causative effect on, amongst many other issues, the fact that hundreds of French muslims, as well as British and other European muslims are swelling the ranks of ISIS in Syria and the popularity of right wing parties in France and other countries within the EU is growing at an alarming rate. The divisions are ever widening and the battle lines are being drawn whether we choose to engage with them or not. 

The men, women and children that will be killed in their homes this week from french bombs in Syria are no more willing combatants in a war than those watching a rock concert in Paris on a Friday night, but as bombs rain on Syrian homes from French planes, as they did in Libya or Mali in recent years, draping ourselves in the flag of France, however ignorant or well intentioned, will inevitably make the divisions of this “war” ever clearer.

No matter how afraid we are or how sympathetic we feel towards tragic victims of violent atrocities, so long as we still prioritise our own privilege, unquestioning and complicit in the discursive formations that use racialised othering to justify the actions of our own governments in this war, real or not, we can only ever be considered within the category which Jean Paul Sartre aptly describes as “half victim, half accomplice. like everyone,” when such violence inevitably returns.