Read This Before the Media Uses a Drowned
Refugee Boy to Start Another War
By Dan Sanchez
September 09, 2015
"Information
Clearing House" -
ANTIMEDIA 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.
Newsflash to the oblivious citizenry of the
power-projecting “free world”: this is what war looks like. This
times ten million. 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 drone in Pakistan, or
starved to death in Yemen all the time, and it is all on your
dime. 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.
Aylan drowned in the arms of his father, who had
been desperately trying to keep his head above water. The prelude to
the disaster probably looked something like this photo of another
Syrian refugee family.
It actually shows an arrival and not a departure.
Still, 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 the father must feel. Overwhelmed and near the end of
his rope. His daughter’s arms wrapped around his neck. His son’s
face buried in his chest. Both looking to him for protection and
provision he ultimately might not be able to give. It is no wonder
this visceral photograph has also gone viral.
Another newsflash: this is what war displacement
looks like, both in the sea and on dry land. What you see in his
face is the anguish felt right this very moment by the many millions
of mothers and fathers 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.
Um, no, 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.
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.
Far from preventing such tragedies as Aylan’s
drowning, intervening further would only produce many more.
You are troubled by that picture you saw on
Facebook. Good. It means your heart hasn’t been completely hardened
by nationalistic and xenophobic indoctrination. But don’t let it
make you susceptible to war party manipulation. And don’t just
“raise awareness” of it by liking and sharing the tragedy and then
forgetting about it in a month. To truly contribute to justice for
Aylan, work to set things right.
And the first step to setting things right is
understanding. Make it a project to learn 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. And once you’ve acquired
understanding for yourself, work to spread it to others.
An indispensable resource for this is
Antiwar.com. And a few good starting points are these essays of
my own:
Mass-Producing Huddled Masses
Refugees from the Footfall of the American
Colossus
Flytrap to Breeding Ground
How America’s wars produced a terrorist
infestation
Where Does ISIS Get Those Wonderful Toys?
From Uncle Sam, the Bruce Wayne of Jihad, and his
Cronies
Clean Break to Dirty Wars
Shattering the Middle East for Israel’s Northern
Front
Salafists Gaining Ground
Throughout the Middle East, thanks to US
intervention
The US Government’s Not-So-Secret Support for
al-Qaeda and ISIS
The Biggest State Sponsor of Terrorism of Them All
Copyright 2014 The Anti Media
