The Word "Bombing" Means Different Things Depending On Where It Happened

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

The word “bombing” is interesting, because it becomes a different word depending on what part of the world it’s being used in reference to.

If I look at you with a shocked and serious expression and say “There’s been a bombing,” you’ll immediately assume I mean there was an explosion in a city near you, or perhaps in some other western city like New York or London. If you see me reading the paper and casually stating “Wow there were dozens of bombings last night,” you’ll probably assume I mean military explosives being dropped on people in the middle east.

If I was in the UK in the nineties and said “There’s been a bombing,” everyone would immediately assume I meant an IRA attack on British soil and respond with grief. If I made the exact same noises with my mouth in the UK today, people would assume I’m probably talking about Gaza, Lebanon or Yemen, and they’d shrug.

It’s two very different words. They’re spelled and pronounced the same. They have basically the same meaning. But they’re different words. At least in the parts of the world where English is the dominant language, they have a completely different weight, and they land completely differently. One is shocking and horrifying, while the other is normal and expected. One will be the leading story in your news media for days, while the other might not even get mentioned.

The words have two different meanings in our society because western society does not regard non-westerners as fully human. An explosion of deliberate human origin taking place in our own neighborhood is an unacceptable outrage that we’ll speak about for the rest of our lives, but the exact same thing happening in a neighborhood in the middle east is just the natural order of things — even if it was perpetrated by our own leaders.

Someone exploding a building full of pale-skinned English speakers is an earth-shaking tragedy, while someone exploding a building full of darker-skinned Arabic speakers is just Tuesday.

They’re viewed as two completely different things because the victims are viewed as two entirely different species. The victims of the bombing campaigns the western empire perpetrates and sponsors are seen as subhuman. They are seen as subhuman because we’ve been propagandized to see them that way, and we are propagandized to see them that way because if we saw them as fully human, nothing about our society would make sense.

If we saw the inhabitants of the global south as fully human, it would not make sense for us to be extracting their labor and resources at extortionate rates for our own benefit. It would not make sense for our leaders to be staging coups, interfering in elections, and launching all-out regime change invasions to ensure they have governments which serve our interests. It would not make sense for the US empire to be setting up military bases in and around their countries to ensure its planetary domination. It would not make sense for an entire industry of war profiteering to be built around manufacturing consent for needless military operations and military expansionism in impoverished nations. It would not make sense for western governments to be shipping their trash to developing nations whose populations are now drowning in garbage.

Our entire civilization is built around this division. The division between westerners whose lives matter and non-westerners whose lives do not. This split is the unacknowledged elephant in the room in most aspects of our day to day lives. It directly touches the products we use and discard, the energy we consume, the status quo political systems we talk about and vote on, the very device you’re reading these words on. It’s all made possible by the fact that our lives are built on the blood, sweat and tears of the majority of this planet’s population whose lives are not regarded as fully human.

We like to think of ourselves as having transcended the evils of slavery and genocidal colonialism which ravaged so much of humanity in previous centuries, but we haven’t. Not really. We’ve made it more sanitized. More photogenic. Now you can read about slavery and shake your head about how terrible it was while wearing and holding objects that were manufactured by the outsourced slavery of the 21st century. You can vote for a politician with brown skin or see someone of Asian ancestry play a character on a TV show and think nice thoughts about how far we’ve come as a society, even as your government drops military explosives on people on the other side of the world because they’re not seen as real human beings.

Our species won’t find health and harmony on this planet until we truly start seeing everyone as equal, and acting accordingly. This tyrannical, exploitative way of living is only driving us toward annihilation and dystopia, and poisoning the planet we all depend on for survival.

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