Ending western warmongering should take priority over every other societal concern, in the same way your husband being a serial killer would be a more urgent concern than his refusal to wash dishes.
The foremost imperative is for the West to halt its deadly campaigns. Placing an end to western warmongering should outrank all other social issues, much like discovering your spouse is a serial killer demands more immediate attention than his reluctance to do the dishes.
It reveals a profound dysfunction that political discourse centers more on domestic matters than on the fact that our governments are actively killing people overseas. This isn’t to diminish the significance of domestic issues, but rather to highlight that they do not carry the same horrifying urgency as the ongoing mass violence inflicted by imperial core powers.
Healthcare? Obviously significant. Immigrants’ rights? Critical. Social justice and equality? Essential. Yet imagine if you were living where bombs made in the West were ripping your community apart, only to see western social media focus on the paramount importance of LGBTQ topics or combating discrimination against neurodivergent individuals. Take a moment to genuinely empathize.
Once again, I am not dismissing those matters’ relevance. I am emphasizing that stopping mass murder ought to be an even more pressing priority. This shouldn’t be contentious.
In no other context do we struggle to recognize urgency this clearly. A mass shooting claiming twenty lives in your country commands more focus than other wrongs occurring that day. The killing of a seventy-year-old woman is more deeply felt by her community than if she had succumbed to lung cancer. You would instantly stop your debate on intersectional feminism if someone were being strangled nearby.
When violence affects those resembling us—living nearby, speaking our language—we immediately grasp that murder is an urgent crisis demanding our attention. But when our governments are implicated in killing people of different ethnicities, tongues, faiths, and customs, we compartmentalize and downplay the immediacy of the atrocity.
This reflects terribly on us as a society. We resemble the wife of a serial killer who ignores the buried bodies while focusing more on his gambling issues. We disconnect from an essential part of ourselves to psychologically detach from the empire’s brutal crimes in this manner.
Such denial harms those suffering—and ourselves as well. Denying the reality of Western military violence distorts our inner selves, twisting how we perceive and engage with life. It scars the lenses through which we view the world. How could it not?
All these conflicts and genocidal acts call us to reconnect with a sacred part of our humanity by responding with the seriousness they demand. Authentic living and embracing reality’s truth require this.
Original article: caitlinjohnstone.com.au
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