Appeals within the West to recognise and engage with humanitarian crises are always fraught with reactionary controversy from the beginning. What should be of equal concern, however, is not simply the more overt cases of political discourse which justifies military-economic interventions directly contributing to crises, but a sympathetic, conditional discourse which stresses our need to 'care for others'.
The essence of humanitarianism lies in this apparent universalist appeal to our duty of care towards foreign lands and unfamiliar populations. However this universalism of care is often underscored by a relativistic anti-humanism. With the threat of global environmental catastrophes and humanitarian crises that begin by disproportionately affecting underdeveloped countries, the archetypes of sympathetic Western narratives on foreign aid return. The problem, however, is that by an appeal to duty, such aid is rarely unconditional.
In the UK, for example, the beginning of April saw Prime Minister Rishi Sunak heavily criticised for his unsympathetic policy towards Palestinians, opting to unquestioningly continue supplying Israel with military aid. A well-placed humanistic concern was apparent here. Yet in the same week, criticisms shifted from Sunak's Middle East policy onto his choice of sneakers during a televised interview. Universalist concerns for Palestinian liberty were inexplicably exchanged with a flood of op-eds and articles about why Sunak should not be wearing Adidas trainers simply to appeal to youth culture.
Whilst in the US, pro-Palestine campus protests suggest a stronger fidelity towards a directed critique of Biden's policy towards the Middle East, a similar (and inevitable) fragmentation of the humanistic narrative eventually rears its head. Protests have been marked by internal frictions regarding what is to be chanted ('From the river to the sea' being a particularly divisive phrase in pro-Palestinian movements), tactics by which protests should be organised (either by external third-party mediation or as organic grassroots protests with students and faculty staff), as well as how popular attention is to be divided between crises such as Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan.
The problem is that humanitarian concerns often miss their own mark, or more appropriately they cling on to a false universalism. Their 'duty of care' is a contingent and often conditional duty. It is a humanism coloured by the implicit conviction that whatever is going on is going on 'far from home'. It is this conditionality of standard humanist discourses of care that allows for narratives to quickly change, and for consistent and targeted policy criticisms to often be dissolved or fragmented in their very conception.
With Ukraine and with Gaza, a certain historicisation underscores our attempts at articulating the need to directly engage with and alleviate a series of crises. Russia's invasion is conveniently conceptualised in the narrative on fascism, allowing for numerous WWII comparisons, and the recent military escalations in the Middle East have been compared to the moments preceding the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War of 1973. Political discourse concerned with what it is that we should do seems drawn towards a tendency to see the idiom of 'history repeating itself' actualised before their eyes. It is a historical frame which allows for concern to be articulated, yet it is this same historical frame which often obscures our capacity to deal with an immanent crisis for the global catastrophe that it truly is.
In itself, there is of course nothing wrong with a need to construct narratives of current geopolitical events by relying on historical comparisons. Yet it is worth remembering Marx's famous reformulation of Hegel's argument that history repeats itself: it may repeat itself, but once as tragedy, and then as farce. 'Farce' is to be understood not as a description of some form of humorous quality latent in a political event, but rather as our inability to respond to events even though they have seemingly occurred twice. Even in its historical recurrence, a political event inevitably occurs as something radically new and at first inarticulable, for which our responses are unable to rely on a preformulated historical template.
It is precisely this historicist humanisation which we must be cautious of. The sense, underlying a humanist appeal for a duty to those countries that are far from home, that our Western compassion can be best utilised by historically framing global crises, is at times deeply misleading. Properly speaking, each humanitarian crisis is a crisis precisely because it is so unrecognisable. It is a crisis because we cannot coherently place it or manage it according to a pre-conceived formula. Whilst it can (and should) be studied as belonging to a historical development of political-economic relations, serious responses to a crisis should recognise its qualitative break from historically comparable forms.
The humanitarian approach to our 'neighbours' on the other side of the globe often leads to a form of indifference: a paradoxical recognition of the cruelties and brutalities plaguing a population which simultaneously disavows our organised, collective political intervention. Crises are historicised, and in so doing the disparity of the current event from its historical avatars produces only a conditionality of our 'duty' to care, contingent to the narrative frame which any current crisis may be fitted into.
What should concern us is that there is no humanitarian crisis 'far from home' - the divide between 'here' and 'there' is quickly losing ground. The current crisis in Gaza may echo aspects of the 1973 war that deeply changed political relations in the Middle East, yet the Israeli focus being on Hamas and not Arab-backed resistance movements and the PLO, and the major displacement of Palestinian civilians which the West will have to respond to, mean that a new dimension to the Israel-Palestine conflict is emerging. A new type of global question is becoming apparent in which the underlying security in humanitarian narratives that the conflict is taking place 'far from home', will have to be abandoned. Similarly, global internet-based disinformation campaigns and the obscure conjunction of right and left-wing support and criticism for Russia in the Ukraine war make this conflict categorically irreducible to historical comparisons to fascist movements. Any comparison to of Putin to Hitler, for example, cannot be sustained when we recognise a further degree of inconsistent radicality in Russia's narrative: for example, Russian political philosopher Alexandr Dugin ('Putin's brain') insisting that, not only a conservative Orhtodoxy, but a post-modern relativism justifies the war on Ukraine ('Russia have their own relative truth which the differing Western truth must nevertheless respect...'). Hitler finding justification for the final solution or the invasion of Poland within post-modernism is inconceivable.
Fundamentally, humanitarian crises must be placed under a new light. They are no longer external to Western identity, but shake the Western position at its own core. Historical comparisons, which all too often cause a conditional and indifferent support, no longer hold up. The humanistic narrative that we have a duty for crises taking place far from home has often led to a temporary and conditional sense of responsibility. Humanistic concerns have in other words often been marked by a kernel of indifferent anti-humanism. This is however no longer an option.
Today's crises are to be conceived on a global scale, intimately disrupting the Western sense of security. There is repetition in humanitarian crises only insofar as each repetition is simultaneously irreducible to historicist frames. It is for this reason that collectively directed and organised diplomacy movements are more crucial than ever. Crises should be unconditionally and unequivocally recognised as such, as a threat far more serious than what the contingent humanist 'duty of care' would have us think.
Post Article Comment and Rate This Article
