The latest attacks in France should remind Australians that our hands are far from clean in the growing global conflict. Georgia Sheales explains.
Every time a terrorist attack occurs in the Western world, news outlets are very quick to scapegoat a demographic. The only reason white people are so powerful is because our fuel is the blood of the poor.
We invade, terrorise and destroy their countries in war and greed, we bully them deeper into poverty and fear. We fight them and portray them to be less than human, effectively removing the only non-violent retaliation they have – their voice.
Of course this creates anger, and equally as importantly, this creates divide – a divide that is only widened by the biggest media voices in the world, overpowering the now silenced murmurs of the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Turks, the Somalis, the Pakistanis, and countless other victims of the US’s War on Terror.
In 2015 alone, the US dropped over 23,000 bombs on Muslim-majority countries. Compare this to the total of zero bombs dropped by Muslim-led governments on US soil. Also compare this to the over 4 million Muslim lives lost in the War on Terror. And then compare that to the approximately 3,500 American lives lost world wide at the hands of Jihadists in the same period, and note that almost 3,000 of these deaths were just from September 11.
That’s 3,500 American deaths in 20 years. Let me do that math for you. On average, that comes to less than half of one American per day. For the same period, it’s approximately 440 Muslims deaths per day.
Muslim communities have lost double the amount of people per day than has America lost in the past 10 years. That’s 114,285 times the amount of American casualties. And we Westerners still sit in our brainwashed bubbles and wonder why these types of attacks keep happening to us.
The world would be a lot different if the media monopoly were not there to trick the people into fearing other people’s pain. What if this was happening to your people? What if your families had been killed at the hands of another group of people, another country. Who would you direct your anger at? The perpetrators, obviously.
And we already do that, even though we have experienced 114,285 times less horror than they have. It’s already evident in the news headlines, the trending tweets, the comments sections – “deport all Muslims”, “eradicate Islam”, “bomb them all”– don’t you see the irony?
Apparently the West has all the justification to say and believe that we must react with violence (and we do) to the injustice caused to our people, but we do not allow people of colour the same anger, the same grief, the same pain.
People are not bad because of the colour of their skin, or the country that they were born in, or the language that they speak, the food that they eat. People are bad because of the circumstances in which their ideologies were conceived. They were born in blood.
I can’t be the only one to see the obvious mirror between unvictimised Westerners and the real victims of the War on Terror. It’s clearly evident whenever Donald Trump or any other white bigoted human opens their mouth.
We normalise the hatred and ostracisation of people of colour, but will not accept the same “prejudice” against our own. We have the ingrained belief that the West are the brave and mighty and free – but in reality it is us who are who are taking the freedom and rights from others.
It is us who have built our privilege and power and wealth over the bodies of those that were born differently. For centuries.
Every time there is news of a white mass shooter in the US, there is always a background story. “Lonely Young Man”, “Sufferer of Domestic Abuse”, “Outcast”, “Bullying Victim”, “Mentally Unstable”. I’ve seen many left-wingers react to these types of details by saying “no, treat those white guys as they are – terrorists”. I disagree, I think we treat our own with the respect and care that they may not deserve, but the kind of respect and care and understanding that may help us prevent something similar in the future.
Instead of labelling every person with a gun as a ‘piece of shit terrorist’, perhaps we should ask those questions. What happened to that person that made them do that? He was rejected by society. He was scared of his own sexuality. He saw another country, another race, bring pain and horror to his people for decades.
Of course, none of these reasons excuse the horrific things that were brought upon innocent people in political battles, but the first step to resolution is understanding. We have been taking it in the opposite direction for decades – centuries, perhaps.
Do not let the media divide us and categorise us. Do not let them tell you that we are free. We are only free if we comply. We are only free if we accept what is happening.
I do not accept, I will not allow the media monopoly and the bigots to tell me that the oppressed minorities all over the world are enemies.
It’s time to take off that star-spangled superhero mask and reveal what is underneath: a deep and dangerous desire for money and power – at the cost of millions of innocent lives, global fear and interracial hatred.
It’s time to hold the hands of your coloured brothers and sisters, and time to listen to how they feel. For once. White people are not the only ones with feelings and the need for justice.
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