Impunity, Functional Equivalent of Genocide: Collapse of Social Institutions
September 7, 2015
Impunity, Functional Equivalent of Genocide: Collapse of Social Institutions
by Norman Pollack
The horrific refugee problem we see today, so reminiscent of population movements during World War II, next to the Holocaust itself in the historical annals of Crimes Against Humanity, and to which it was then related, remains in our times below the moral radar screen as though somehow inevitable, beyond solution, something that just happens. That is how jaded the world has become. Human flotsam, period; humanity, as the central organizing principle of life, stinks in the nostrils of nations preoccupied with other things to do. This is what I mean by the collapse of social institutions, with no guiding hand (where in all of this, e.g., is the UN or some suitable alternative if such were possible?) to prevent the humanitarian crater where a power vacuum reigns and the bottom has dropped out of global responsibility for the lives and dignity of people.
Events (i.e., human suffering) have already gone beyond what self-proclaimed civilization would allow, raising questions about whether or not there is a moral order shaping, defining, underpinning the international political system and its capacity for ensuring, or at least working toward, social justice and even human sustainability. Children and their mother drown, trucks sealed tight become mass graves, ordinary people, their belongings on their backs, pushing baby carriages, marching/walking along railroad tracks—from a descriptive point of view, prelude to World War III? Perhaps not. The world can contain (somewhat) volatility, but does a lousy job at removing the causes of human misery, indeed seems to require such a condition as validation of power and national sovereignty.
Why do present-day actors, starting with alliances, nations, social movements, and corporate units of the great chain of capitalistic being, finally, individuals in their asocial behavior, have and enjoy the capacity to act with impunity—no effective whistles blown, the smugglers of human traffic (impersonalization as seldom seen in recent years) serving as a microcosm of the whole. The world is out of whack, or so we leave matters at that in our collective flight from social responsibility. And still the people come, children clutching parents, no apparent mechanism for welcome, settlement, citizenship. As I describe the Middle East and Europe here, I totally forget the human drama at home, the anti-immigrant feeling if not political hysteria, talk of thousand-mile fences, etc. (Trump did not create but is riding the wave of US xenophobia and ethnocentrism, world diseases the affluent nations practice on their victims.)
Her/his name is Million: the plight of the refugee qua world historical figure revealing both the moral emptiness of global arrangements (including what defines national aspirations–from hegemony and militarism to material striving at others’ expense)—to the wretchedness of social conditions driving people from their homes and source of livelihood. In this epochal societal collapse it is not just capitalism’s doing—or if it is, socialist countries nevertheless have thus far not offered safe havens to the masses. Russia and China stand as idly by as do countries in the West. Marx was more right than he believed in perhaps his darkest moments: the human being is a commodity cheapened to the last cent. There is enough blame for this happening to pass around.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/07/impunity-functional-equivalent-of-genocide-collapse-of-social-institutions/