From: "Margaret Trawick" <trawick-AT-clear.net.nz>
Subject: Re: The Hierarchy of Death
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 12:49:14 +1300


This actually brings us back to what Maldoror was trying to say:  a person
is a person.  The boundaries between nation-states, or between different
"categories" of people, are just artificial constructs and no particular
boundary should be seen as an essential division among human beings.

Some say it is natural to feel more empathy for people "similar" to oneself,
or for people in the same country as oneself.  I don't think it is natural
at all.  There are a few human universals, and grief is one of them.  It may
be expressed in different ways, felt for some and not for others.  But to
plead that it is "natural" to feel more empathy for grieving Americans whom
one has never met than for grieving people in India or Afghanistan whom one
has never met smacks of something evil that I don't even know how to name.
A perversion of humanity.

Offers of assistance for cleaning up ground zero were made by other
countries, but since America has more resources than anyone else in the
world, it was felt that charity from abroad was not necessary.  However,
America has called upon many nations to assist in its "war against
terrorism", the response to 9-11. And many nations are giving personnel and
resources to help.   There are New Zealand Special Forces in Afghanistan
right now, risking their lives for the sake of assisting America to victory
in this war.  How many Americans would risk their lives to help New Zealand
if it decided to make war against some central Asian country?

While so much effort is being poured into identifying DNA of human tissue
found in the rubble in lower Manhattan, no effort at all is being made to
assist the Afghan people who have fallen victim to America's war against the
Taliban. The dropping of food parcels was a travesty.   The US and the UK
send airplanes to this deeply impoverished country to bomb the hell out of
it, and Americans are told, or tell themselves, that it is perfectly natural
for them not to care what happens to the people on whom the bombs fall,
because those people are "other", they are not "us".  When I see this
attitude expressed, I feel like I want to vomit.






----- Original Message -----
From: berry anchang <nttd-AT-email.com>
To: <postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Friday, November 30, 2001 11:56 AM
Subject: RE: The Hierarchy of Death


> I'm not sure I totally understand this. Many people who died in NYC were
US citizens. The excavation work to recover the dead is being done by their
fellow citizens, their government, the US. They are helping out their own
citizens. Ok, yes, maybe it's going a bit overboard, but, is Anne Karpf's
point that the US didn't recover India's dead when they died in an
earthquake?
>
> Um, who went to the US to help after 9/11? I think no one.
>
>




     --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---