Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2023 12:09:08 PM
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - "Israeli forces raid Gaza's largest hospital"
--i read an editorial in the french press that summed up well what victor just wrote, it was about the ills of positing the situation in terms of us versus them.Victor's piece is so well put because at every moment one could say, yes, this applies to me, if you were israeli; or yes, this applies to me, if you were palestinian.He's captured the psychology of this situation pretty well, and it is "insanity" because it details how people, decent people, give themselves permission to commit atrocities and to justify it.Hobbes concludes that people are just wolves, beasts, innately, because of this. But we are also able to criticize the wolves, in others, in ourselves, and try to not be beasts.To do this you have to be willing to listen to, to hear, the others; and secondly, to feel their pain, and not just your own.Can we do this?If it sounds reasonable, try to ask this in the midst of a war, of any war.That's what we are facing.Ken
every line of victor's piece
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
517 803-8839
From: 'Victor Okafor' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 15, 2023 10:03 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - "Israeli forces raid Gaza's largest hospital"My Musings on the Insanity that's Unfolding in Gaza
Has it not been said by the wise that in human affairs "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Indeed, without checks and balances, it seems that the default human tendency is to abuse secular power.
When the spirit of hate and revenge takes over and beclouds our judgement, we degenerate (don't we) into animal-level reasoning and rationalization, and all the moral corpus that socialization (otherwise known as education) had induced on us, flies out the window almost in an instant. Though still clothed in human skin and still speak a human language, we begin to behave in much the same manner as the ravenous lions, tigers, hyenas, dragons, leopards, wild dogs, and other types of brutish and blood-thirsty carnivorous species that we watch and get entertained by in animal kingdom television documentaries.
We also become the terrorists that we see in the cultural other, if not worse. We convince our ever-righteous selves that the cultural other's aspiration for human liberation, which we had all the while stridently tried to squelch with brute force, is nothing but an indulgence in animalistic terrorism. We convince ourselves of our eternal innocence—that we have nothing to do with the cultural other's revolt and rebellion, which were provoked by our own long years of recklessness, suppression, and brutality.
As we confuse symptoms with causality, we conveniently forget that we are merely repeating the fruits of the seeds that we had sown. We conveniently forget that the chicken had come home to roost. Instead of correcting our wayward ways and joining hands with noble well-wishers and advocates for peace, we resort to labeling and blacklisting anyone who dares remind us of how the misdeeds of our past have come to haunt us like a ghost.
Just as was the case during the centuries of chattel slavery and colonial domination, our victimized population, as well as bystanders, get divided and balkanized into groups of shameless and selfish supporters of the status quo on the one hand and courageous and conscientious resisters on the other. Some are intimidated into silent rage.
Having defined and convinced ourselves that the cultural other is a "human animal," we lose all sense of proportions and all sense of human empathy in our engagements with this cultural or racial order, aided and abetted by our international network of like-minded human bullies and cold-blooded geopolitical powers who themselves are burdened with and desensitized to the human pain of the cultural other by a historical legacy marked by egregious and unspeakable forms of man's inhumanity against fellow man as manifested by centuries of chattel slavery, bloody colonial brutalization and continuing neocolonial exploitative deeds and proclivities.
Our selfish understanding of humanity tells us that we are the only true and deserving human beings, and all the panorama of human rights instruments, such as the United Nations 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, are enforceable and mean what they say only when members of our racial or cultural tribe are violated.
Alas, as we proceed on the same path of human depravity that our ancestors threaded, we audaciously recall and employ the same types of rhetorical subterfuge (such as "a war of civilization against barbarism," a "civilizing mission," the "pacification of the natives") that our forebears unleashed as they marauded and pillaged the world of the racial and cultural other not too long ago.
Oh, how daily should be thank our Almighty God that fellow human beings do not have control over the natural air that we breathe to stay alive. For if any segment of this earthly human community was vested with control over the natural air that we breathe, the cultural and racial other would have long ceased to exist!
--On Wed, Nov 15, 2023, 7:02 AM 'Victor Okafor' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
----
Sincerely,
Victor O. Okafor, Ph.D.Professor and HeadDepartment of Africology and African American StudiesEastern Michigan UniversityEmail: vokafor@emich.edu
Tel: 734.487.9594Food for Thought:"The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." -- Frederick Douglass
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