French Lives Matter

Absolutely. And yet, when one looks at the media coverage that Friday's attacks in Paris (11/13/15) have received and compare it to the coverage (or complete lack thereof) of similar tragedies that have occurred routinely in the Occupied Territories, Iraq, Syria, the Yemen, and Afghanistan, one cannot escape the impression that French lives seem to matter more than Palestinian, Iraqi, Syrian, Yemeni and Afghan.

Why is that?

The inability of the North Atlantic powers to acknowledge the moral legitimacy of this question--or to acknowledge it at all--and to respond appropriately to such moral inquiry is the reason that we now find ourselves in the beginning stages of the Third World War.

The exportation of terror from Iraq and Syria to North Atlantic imperial metropoles is a declaration on the part of individuals who believe (not without reason) that their own lives and the lives of their loved ones do not matter to the inhabitants of those metropoles. Their "message" to the North Atlantic world is as simple and direct as its mode of delivery is gruesome:

If our lives do not count, then neither do yours; if our personal safety and security can be breached at will, so can yours.

Unlike the previous World Wars, World War III is not a struggle among nation-states for territory but the blood-curdling cry of the perennially insulted and horrifically wounded for dignity.

Will their tactics win for them the dignity they crave? No. They are playing a zero sum game. But that game is not one of their own invention; rather, it is a game devised in foreign capitols by politicians and generals, corporate CEOs, ideologues, and war profiteers.

It is in this diminished sense that Benjamin Barber's 1995 book Jihad vs. McWorld accurately portrays the nature of this conflict: in their desperate bid for human recognition, the "jihadis" demonstrate their willingness to sacrifice what humanity remains to them; but "McWorld" is incapable of providing them with the recognition that they crave--for it sacrificed its own humanity to a murderous greed long ago--indeed, at its very foundation.


And so this will be the tenor of our lives going forward into the foreseeable future: strike and counter-strike with the humanity of all sacrificed upon the altars of blind desperation turned violent and a boundless and overwhelmingly violent greed that does not care a damn who gets hurt so long as there is money to be made.