Combatting indifference

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Fishnut
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Combatting indifference

Post by Fishnut » Wed Jan 26, 2022 8:46 pm

It's Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow (27 Jan). The Guardian have a thought-provoking piece including comments from the director of the Auschwitz Museum, Piotr Cywiński, in which he says that "the biggest task for remembrance today is to combat indifference".
“You can massacre tens of thousands of Rohingya, you can put 1.5 million Uyghurs in camps, in Yemen people are suffering because they do not have anything to eat, and we don’t feel concerned in our world,” he said.
People in Afghanistan are desperate, struggling to find food and sufficient shelter to withstand the winter, with the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) predicting that over half the population are "facing extreme levels of hunger" and nearly 9 million at risk of famine.

In Syria there are currently around 850 boys being used as human shields by Islamic State in fighting that has also forced over 45,000 people to flee from their homes, in the middle of winter.

Closer to home, we have 18% of the population in absolute poverty after housing costs, including 25% of children according to government figures [PDF], and predictions suggest that by 2024-25 a third of British children will be living in poverty.

Yet we don't care. At best we say 'that's terrible' and try to remember to donate to a relevant charity. At worst we debate what we actually mean by genocide or poverty and forget that these are actual people's lives we are discussing.

I know there's only so much we can care about. And I know that there's always been awful things happening - that the main difference between now and most of history is that thanks to social media we are able to find out what's going on in places far away and hear directly from individuals affected. And I know that a lot of the conflicts that are going on are at least in part due to historic (and ongoing) meddling by countries like the UK so saying 'we should intervene' isn't the obvious solution it might initially feel. But there does feel like a massive difference between not knowing about the awful stuff that goes on and knowing but not caring.

So how do we stop the indifference? Can we stop it? Is stopping it even something we should try to do? Maybe indifference a protective mechanism that stops us from just spending our entire lives in despair. Can the world be a place where everyone has a good life or is suffering for a significant portion of the population inevitable?
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Woodchopper
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Re: Combatting indifference

Post by Woodchopper » Wed Jan 26, 2022 11:04 pm

For the Afghanistan and Syria examples, and as you write, one issue is that there isn’t an obvious answer. Maybe people do care but also feel genuinely powerless because they are wicked problems for which there aren’t solutions, just different outcomes that have different consequences, none of which looks like a long term answer.

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Re: Combatting indifference

Post by TopBadger » Thu Jan 27, 2022 7:34 am

I'm not much of a student of history, but it seems that regrettably civil wars play their part in progress. Several well developed nations (UK included) are where they are now because at some point the people had to stand and fight off their own internal oppressors.

Afghanistan likely wouldn't be starving if its better equiped and 10x larger national forces had stood and fought off their own internal oppressors. They didn't. Who knows, famine might cause them to reassess that position.
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Re: Combatting indifference

Post by Imrael » Thu Jan 27, 2022 9:41 am

I'm with Woodchopper on this - theres a sort of "solution fatigue". One part of this might be the nature of news. We mostly hear bad news, so mostly build the impression that whatever efforts were made at the time for famines relief, peacekeeping, infrastructure improvement were wasted. Maybe if instead of "All that live-aid stuff and Ethiopia still has famines" we did "Famine relief in the 80's kept people out of starvation for 40 years and positioned the country better for recovery from this one". I've no idea if thats true, which is partly my point.

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Re: Combatting indifference

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:13 am

Convincing the people of their powerlessness is exactly what I'd do if I were a billionaire with a media outlet. It's a strategy in the class struggle.

I suspect part of the solution is to stop consuming news indiscriminately and focus on areas where you and your community can actually do something, and do it.
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Re: Combatting indifference

Post by discovolante » Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:14 am

The media constantly mocking and belittling any kind of protest doesn't help hugely...sorry this thread deserves a more detailed response but yeah.
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Re: Combatting indifference

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:22 am

Any politicians with actual solutions get hounded out for being too childish and ideological, and then people go "well they weren't electable".

The only people who are electable are people that the men behind the curtain are fine with because they won't do anything to upset the status quo.
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Re: Combatting indifference

Post by Woodchopper » Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:24 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:13 am
Convincing the people of their powerlessness is exactly what I'd do if I were a billionaire with a media outlet. It's a strategy in the class struggle.

I suspect part of the solution is to stop consuming news indiscriminately and focus on areas where you and your community can actually do something, and do it.
At the risk of being a snarky a..eh.le, one way to promote a feeling of powerlessness is to say that everyone is beyond doomed. If they're doomed there is no point doing anything.

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Re: Combatting indifference

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:26 am

Yes, that was the point of the thread - how to square the reality of the environment with humans' need for optimism. It needs a practical outlet rather than denial. (But it seems I didn't communicate that very well.)
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Re: Combatting indifference

Post by IvanV » Thu Jan 27, 2022 11:16 am

The really sad thing is the UK example, because that's the one we might have a practical opportunity to address.

But somehow we have a government telling us that it is making a better world, while actually removing our rights and worsening our terms of trade. And telling us it is addressing poverty by "levelling up", when actually it is making poverty worse. And actually got a load of people in deprived areas to vote for them.

I think the difficulty lies in a disorganised/divided opposition who have got sidelined by other stuff. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, there are evil a..eholes spewing out their poison in all flavours of politics. Meanwhile those in power have been touching issues that distract from the big issue of inequality in our society. Even decarbonisation is quite useful to distract from that. It can validly be argued it is a potentially existential issue more important than all others.

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Re: Combatting indifference

Post by Fishnut » Fri Jan 28, 2022 11:53 pm

I've just watched Final Account on iPlayer (I can't recommend it highly enough) and it got me thinking about the nature of complicity and turning a blind eye.

The film is a series of interviews with Germans (and a few other nationalities) who were young nazis or civilians during the war, and has them reflecting on their memories of that time. There was one woman who worked at a submarine shipyard as a wages clerk. She talked about the concentration camp inmates who also worked at the shipyard and how she didn't have to calculate wages for them, unlike the German workers, because they didn't get paid. She talked about how they would be crammed on a pontoon to get to the work, and how some were stretchered home because the guards had to bring them all back to the camp, dead or alive. She was asked how she knew this and said they would be 20m away from her. Yet believed it was nothing to do with her.

That ability to turn a blind eye is the most challenging thing to grapple with because I honestly can’t say I wouldn’t do the same. I do do the same, on smaller levels. I have blanked homeless people, even when all they want is an acknowledgement of their humanity and there's no risk to me to provide it. I don't feel good doing it, and don't really know why I do, but it's something that's been ingrained in me and is pretty much automatic and takes conscious thought for me to counter.

And while it's further than 20m away from me, there's awful sh.t going on to people right now. There's people suffering, starving, being tortured and abused. And I'm sat in my nice warm house on my nice comfy sofa and after I stop writing this I can go to my nice cosy bed and fall asleep. I don't think we should all wear hairshirts out of some misjudged solidarity but f.ck, there's got to be something more than nothing that I can do.

How far removed do you have to be to stop being complicit in the suffering of others? Is the wages clerk right, that it's nothing to do with her? We're not all heroes willing to sacrifice our lives but isn't there something in between collaborator and armed resistance fighter that those of us who are cowards can do to help improve the world?
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