Western liberal democracies are ripe for dictatorship. The signs are everywhere: police abuses, extrajudicial killings, dehumanization of immigrants, indefinite states of emergency, etc. Now, we can add the victimization of children to the list.
Today, I will focus on the extremely disturbing reactions to a recent video that shows UK guards trampling on a child at the Tower of London.
This is the video:
First, the propagandistic techniques of ITV News. Notice how the headline ends with a question mark: "Guard tramples a child at Tower of London?" Yes, he does, as the video clearly shows. Yet, the editors at ITV News have decided to put that into question, as if it was something debatable. Moreover, at the end of the clip the newsman said that after the incident the guard checked to see if the child was OK, as if to say that that was enough to justify the guard's behavior.
Now, from what I've seen, the vast majority of online reactions to the video are a clear case of blame the victim: since it was the child who stepped in front of the guards, the heartless logic goes, it was his fault. Period. A variant of that blames the parents, particularly singling out the mother.
But, regardless of who was at fault, the fact is that the guard could have done several things:
1) He could have sidestepped the child. The fact that he had the time to yell "Stand clear!" demonstrates that he could have easily sidestepped the child and chose not to.
2) He could have stopped to check on the child. Not only he did not do that, but he didn't even turn to look at what happened.
These are two of the things that a caring human being would and should have done. For example, had the child stepped in front of a moving car, the driver, no matter how in the right, would have had the duty to stop. This is the good samaritan principle which has been encoded into law in much of the world.
Is the military exempt from that? Judging from the online justifications, it seems so: "the guard was doing his job," "the guard was on duty," "the guard was following orders," "if the guard had stopped he could have lost his job," etc.
Incidentally, all these types of justifications of military personnel have been deemed unacceptable at the Nuremberg trial and yet, today, most people are choosing to embrace power over the defenseless.
This extremely cruel and inhumane structure of feeling has reached a level that is worrisome.
More and more people today are willing to unquestioningly and reflexively defend and justify power and its abuses no matter how clear and self-evident they are.
It is a sign of a people that feel scared, under siege, and thus, like small children, they flock under the mantle of authority hoping to be protected.
This fear, this terror, has become so deep and entrenched that it has wiped away any kind of human empathy; leaving, in its wake, a dark void filled with anger, sadism, and a pervasive nihilism.
Sadly, a society that has reached this level of callousness is a society that is ripe for dictatorship and all the horrors that come along with it.
