White is right
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“War is a stern teacher,” wrote the Greek historian Thucydides. And indeed, the Russian invasion of Ukraine – the latest tribal conflict to break out in sub-Scandinavian Europe, has taught us many lessons in just its few days.
We have learned that armed resistance to a foreign invader/ occupier / colonizer is not only justified but righteous and laudable. Stories of ordinary Ukrainians rallying behind their country and cause flood the airwaves. Stories of men and women, some just teenagers, from all walks of life stridently vowing to oppose those who would destroy them by any means necessary and calling for weapons to help them fight their war.
We have also learned that to support such a resistance is the correct response. Online appeals and crowdsourcing of funds for weapons for the Ukrainian armed forces and civilian resistance flood the Internet. Western media outlets like Sky News breathlessly report on ‘resistance camps’ in transmissions that actually teach viewers how to make the most effective Molotov cocktails.
We know now that it is the duty of those who believe in the righteousness of the Ukrainian cause to travel to that besieged land to take up arms, as many have done and are still doing. We know that this too, is right and just.
Collective guilt and collective punishment are also now acceptable, as seen in the strident calls to punish the Russian people as a whole for the actions of their latter-day czar.
Boycotts, disinvestments and sanctions are good too, we are told, and are in fact appropriate and correct responses to aggression and warmongering. To remain neutral is to side with the aggressor, as has been repeatedly whitesplained to us.
Indeed, we now know that depending on where and on whom they are used, weapons can either be barbaric, or instruments of democratic liberation rained down on uncivilized populations for their own good.
Oh, and another thing we’ve learned is that such a thing as international law not only exists but will actually be implemented on transgressors. The International Criminal Court can in fact be made to spin the wheels of justice in record time.
The same media that interrogates rock-throwing Palestinians about their support for ‘violence’ is praising and teaching that very violence.
Zarrar Khuhro
But terms and conditions do apply, and in just the opening days of the war the enlightened West, through its media, pundits and leaders, has reminded us once again that our worth as human beings is not judged by the fact that we exist, breathe, bleed and love. It is certainly not judged by the content of our character. It is judged instead by the color of our skin, our eyes, our hair. It is judged by the names we call the God we worship. It is judged by where in this bleeding globe we live and, when you combine all these criteria, you find that we, the relatively uncivilized, non-white, non-blonde and non-blue-eyed underclasses occupy the very lowest rung of the global caste system. Our resistance is illegitimate, our causes are evil, our fighters are terrorists and our activism and boycotts are anti-semitic, anti-freedom, anti-democracy.
From correspondents choking back tears as they talk about the horrors unleashed on ‘white, Christian Europeans’ to ‘carefully’ chosen comments by reporters about how such things are unthinkable in ‘relatively civilized’ parts of the world, to analysts saying that while thermobaric bombs were used in Afghanistan, their use in Europe would be ‘stomach-churning’, so many examples now abound that to list them would take an article on its own.
At the heart of this is not ignorance; these are people who are familiar with the history of conflicts in the last few decades. They know that worse war crimes have been carried out by the West, and the US in particular, in Iraq and Afghanistan with utter impunity and the certainty of not being dragged before the Hague. They know that the same countries that fund Israel’s occupation are now sanctioning Russia. The same sporting institutions and universities that ban and penalize support for the BDS movement or rallies in support of Palestine are now boycotting Russian athletes and organizing offical vigils for Ukraine.
The same media that interrogates rock-throwing Palestinians about their support for ‘violence’ is praising and teaching that very violence.
No, it isn’t lack of knowledge that leads Forbes to label Ukraine as “the first social media war,” ignoring Syria and many other examples.
It isn’t brain damage that leads Condoleezza Rice to blithely state that invading a sovereign country is a war crime.
Nor is it a lapse for former US ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul to declare that there are no more ‘innocent’ or ‘neutral’ Russians anymore, without realizing that if Russians bear the burden of their leader’s actions, a stronger case could be made for punishing the American people for the wars waged by their country. After all, Americans do elect those very leaders while the Russians clearly do not. It’s also interesting to note that McFaul’s logic mirrors that of Osama Bin Laden, who certainly believed that the American people were legitimate targets for their complicity in their government’s policies. They know all this.
For these flagbearers of freedom, war is only bad when it is waged on people who look like them.
The rest of us, systematically demonized and dehumanized for decades, are at best invisible and at worse somehow deserving of being bombed and butchered.
The arc of the universe may not bend toward justice, but it does certainly bend toward irony; recently a video of a young, blond and fair skinned girl standing up to a heavily armed soldier went viral with hashtags in support of Ukraine and praises for this ‘lioness.’
Soon, it became clear that this girl was in fact Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian who stood up to Israeli soldiers attempting to arrest her mother when she was only 12 years old. Since then, she has been jailed and harassed, but has remained defiant. With that revelation, the support vanished like drizzle in the desert.
We are repeatedly told that the world is at an inflection point, teetering on the brink between democracy and autocracy. We are told that we must adhere to the ‘rules-based order’ that the West exemplifies to ensure stability. But what we have once again been shown is that those rules only apply to those who are on the whitelist. The rest of us are, and will always be, disposable.
- Zarrar Khuhro is a Pakistani journalist who has worked extensively in both the print and electronic media industry. He is currently hosting a talk show on Dawn News. Twitter: @ZarrarKhuhro
