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5 (15 October 2002) Article 7 ' We are the Other'From latest issue of Inter Pares Bulletin (September 2002, Vol 24 No 4) When faced with the terrible crimes against humanity that we have seen over this past year, we ask ourselves, how is this possible? How can people do these things to their fellow human beings? And how can people accept and justify these crimes? These are natural questions in the face of acts of violence beyond imagining. But they are not new questions. They are questions that have been asked countless times in the violent decades and century just past, and over millennia. The historical inhumanity of humans to humans is a central paradox of humanity itself. At the same time, the answer to this grim question is not a mystery. The answer has existed from the first time the question was asked, and is evident before our eyes in the events we witness. These crimes against humanity are possible because those who do these things have stripped, in their imagination, all vestiges of humanity from those they brutalize. It is the creation of "the Other" that justifies cruelty and terror — whether the pervasive terrorism of the powerful, or the much-less-frequent terrorism of the weak. When the victim has been re-imagined as less than human, then isolation, exploitation, repression and even obliteration can be seen as a necessity, rather than a crime. But the generalized qualities of the Other are always figments imagined in the self-consciousness of the victimizer and projected onto the Other to justify repression. The demonization of the Other is a primary function of propaganda and the cruel ideologies — religious and secular — that propaganda serves. This fixation on the Other is central to the crisis of humanity in the present phase of "globalization" and the militarization of politics that it has intensified across the globe. It is central to the terrible violence that destroys people and peoples en masse and obliterates their places and communities. It is central to the economic violence that lays waste entire cultures, communities and commons, without compassion nor recompense. It is central to the cruel logic of capitalist competition that sets countless people adrift — the majority of them women and children — without community or gainful work, then restricts their movement so that they cannot seek elsewhere what has been destroyed at home. Their one remaining "asset", their labour, is itself constrained and stolen. Poverty has been criminalized, migration to seek a better life outlawed. For millions on the planet, to follow their dream has become a capital crime.The result is predictable and dangerous. When people are perceived as less-than-us, their circumstances matter less than ours. When people are seen as less-than-us, their lives matter less than ours. When people are considered less-than-us, their deaths matter less than our deaths, and the manner of their dying is obscured by bigotry and our own imagined fears. What is clear is that this notion of difference is perverse and deceitful. It must be challenged.What human society offers is not so much difference, as diversity. Humanity is not made up of fundamentally different civilizations, but rather diversity within civilization. There is more diversity within any single "civilization" or living culture than there is among them all. The way forward is to embrace the Other in ourselves, and to see ourselves always in the Other, so that we are defined not by what separates human beings but by what joins us. This is an ethos that exists and is growing in the world, creating movements of common cause, locally and globally. In our work we see everywhere the core human values of care and generosity and mutuality present and promoted and defended by an diverse range of citizens and activists. The latest issue of Inter Pares' Bulletin (September 2002, Vol 24 No 4) offers examples of people working together to defend and protect the rights and lives of those besieged, and to challenge the marginalisation of people on the basis of origin, gender, religion or class. |
