Against numbness: How to keep compassion in a time of war and disconnection

People protest against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza at a demonstration in Johannesburg on 28 October 2023. (Photo: Mark Heywood)

By Mark Heywood

2 Nov 2023

‘Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him. He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.’ — Winston Smith/George Orwell, ‘1984’.

As a child growing up in the 1970s and 1980s I always imagined that during World War 2, the whole world had literally been at war.

I imagined that ordinary life must have ground to a halt over those six bloody years in which more than 50 million people were killed. Reading about the times, it’s obvious that while life continued, it was not normal life. The war, and the fear that accompanied it, was always at the forefront of people’s minds.

compassion war gaza People protest against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza at a demonstration in Johannesburg on October 28th.
(Photo: Mark Heywood)

We live once again in a time of worldwide wars between states and against peoples. But since the 20th century, something fundamental has shifted in the human psyche, or rather some humans’ psyches.

This time, many of those who do not find themselves in a direct arena of war, behave as if they have been innoculated against empathy, assisted to be desensitised, to lose empathy and even concern with the lives that are being lost.

What has helped us to this state?

It’s not easy to attribute it to any one thing, it’s an evolutionary process humans have been subject to by their masters and the machines they own; a drip, drip, drip that has changed the way we feel and act. It manifests itself as an othering of the poor, the atomisation of society into have-lots and have-nots, the fake deaths and wars we can watch or participate in on video games, an infodemic of misinformation and the tribalisation of compassion.

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We are being habituated to horror, acclimatised to the abnormal; encouraged to compartmentalise the contiguous, flip the channel, not ask deeper questions of ourselves. I feel as if we are now in George Orwell’s 1984, a society of perpetual wars between Oceania and those on the periphery.

Never do the two worlds meet. It’s as if we occupy different planets.

The genocide will be televised

I felt this acutely last Saturday night during the final of the Rugby World Cup. While tens of thousands gathered in a rugby stadium in France, and tens of millions watched and celebrated across the world, a genocide was being perpetrated in plain view. Flip the channel and you can watch the bombs over Gaza.

“Would you like some genocide with your rugby, sir?”

This is history: the first genocide we can watch live on TV. In this way we are all participants, which makes all of us complicit.

compassion war gaza People protest against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza at a demonstration in Johannesburg on 28 October 2023. (Photo: Mark Heywood)

As I listened to the roar of the crowd in the Stade de France I thought of the roar of bombs raining down on Gaza.

As I felt the joy of the game, I couldn’t obliterate the despair and fear that engulfed millions.

Were any of the two million people who live in Gaza watching the rugby World Cup on Saturday night? I wondered.

I doubt it.

Not least because around that time, the Israeli government cut access to the internet, electricity having already gone days before.

Many of you will think I’m a spoiler raising this issue. Sorry, but it has to be done because war and rugby, or war and sport, are both at the very core of our humanity, ways of connection to each other. We thought we had outlawed one, or at least regulated it. We were wrong.

The emotions that caused millions of Springbok fans to jump out of our seats, shout, scream, go quiet in suspense, fear defeat, are the same emotions that in one way or another should be being triggered by what is happening in Gaza. They flow from the same neurological circuits in our brains.

But one set of emotions is on fire. The other is dead.

Why are we so passive and accepting?

compassion war gaza People protest against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza at a demonstration in Johannesburg on 28 October 2023. (Photo: Mark Heywood)

Thankfully, an unprecedented number of people are standing up and protesting. They come from different races, faiths, classes. They take a stand in groups and as individuals. They are expressing their humanity.

But many many more people are not.

Nearly 4,000 children have been killed so far, and many more to come. There aren’t words to express it. Pedicide? Infanticide? Genocide? Whatever it is, it’s a whole lot of horror.

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But it’s not just the children who deserve our pity. Adults are equally innocent. Young people in love. Dead. People with dreams, ambitions, desires. Dead. People who wanted to live. Dead.

Whole generations of whole families. Dead.

People in a cage, sitting ducks, unable to avoid the bullets or the bombs. Dying.

There are 230 hostages in Gaza’s tunnels and 6,600 hostages in Israeli jails. They all live with the same fear, every breathing minute.

On the West Bank settlers are being given carte blanche to act out hate, to launch brute attacks on people and villages. The police can shoot with impunity; 150 at least dead. Just for being Arab. “A new Nakba”, the original inhabitants of the land call it.

compassion war gaza People protest against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza at a demonstration in Johannesburg on 28 October 2023. (Photo: Mark Heywood)

Understandably, nobody is counting the cost of non-human life. This might seem a mundane suggestion, but can you imagine the trauma of people’s pets? Cats and dogs ripped from their child-friends.

And what about the sheer fear millions of people are living with? The trauma of a witness? The loss without emotional space to grieve? Dead people can’t speak for themselves, but diaries of the living, like this one carried in The Guardian in the UK, can transport us into the psychic line of fire, if not the temporal.

Consider the words of Ziad, a 35-year-old Palestinian living in Gaza as he tries to express his emotions in the 13th part of his diary:

“I am writing, but everything I write is a drop in the ocean. Like Manara, I feel only a part of me is expressing the pain I am going through, yet there are many left voiceless. I wish I could let out every emotion and experience and thought I have. I wish the walls could talk to share the fear we’re living in between them all night.

I wish the sky could talk to share everything it witnesses: people roaming the streets not knowing where to go or whether they will have food for the next day – or whether they will be alive.

I wish the mirrors could talk to share the tragedy on our faces that is adding so many years to our actual age. I wish someone could hug me and tell me it is over.”

Are you moved?

Culpable genocide

We can’t be unmoved by crimes against humanity. Or can we?
We can’t be bystanders to a genocide. But maybe we are?
We can’t be neutral. Neither can we get away with, “yes, buts… ”
We can’t take positions by omission.
We can’t ignore the suffering because it’s not our tribe.
We can’t abandon compassion and connection.
We can’t stay silent. DM

This article reflects the author’s own views and was written in his personal capacity.

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South Africa

The genocide will be televised

Why are we so passive and accepting?

Culpable genocide