Paris, West Papua: Trying to right every wrong is a task beyond
17 November 2015
CHRIS OVERLAND
THE awful events in Paris have underlined the cruelty and irrationality of the criminals who the Arab world call Daesh.
Dreadful as this outrage was, I agree with Gary Juffa that other criminals, freed from both official restraint and media scrutiny, continue their evil work in West Papua.
It says a lot about human nature that our responses to similar events in different places can be so different.
We see those harmed in Paris as being like "us" and so their suffering and death resonates powerfully.
Those being killed, beaten and imprisoned in West Papua are part of the great, undifferentiated "them", who live lives that we do not comprehend nor much care about.
Such apparent indifference is, in part at least, why the world's many authoritarian regimes can get away with their routine inhumanity and criminality.
It seems to me that the sum total of human avarice, cruelty and stupidity so grossly exceeds our psychological ability to cope with its consequences that we deliberately numb ourselves to it.
We instinctively know that trying to right every wrong in the world is a task that is beyond even our collective capacity: even open warfare against truly evil regimes rarely solves such problems.
We cannot impose peace and the rule of law: only those suffering under oppressive regimes can do this for themselves, usually at enormous cost.
We can lend moral and material support to West Papuans and others in the same situation, but the task of fighting and dying for freedom will inevitably fall to them.
As for Daesh, we can help others kill it only if they are minded to do so.
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