Have you felt sorry for Olivers Twist when he asks for ‘more’ ? I am sure you have. And yet, how many of us feel sorry for infinite unkown children in the world, children of Oliver’s age, who cry for more food, more crumbs of bread, with nobody to made their hunger known. Writers like the gifted Charles Dickens can bring tears in the eyes for the death of one little girl yet reporters tell us there are hundereds in hospitals dying of wounds and cold and starvation in Afghanistan. Robert Frisk did bring to notice the plight of Afghan families in Quetta but otherwise they are invisible.
Visibility comes from power. If one is a member of a powerful group one controls the means of making one’s voice heard, one’s face noticed, one’s anguish known. If one is not, then one has to appeal to the self interest or emotion of the powerful to become visible. If none of these things possible one lives and dies in obscurity without anyone knowing or caring what one feels. That is why the most visible are always the rich and the famous. If one looks at fairy tales one finds the narrator focussing on the prince and the princesses while ignoring the wretched peasants who made their idle lives possible. One adores the beautiful princess living for her rescue at the hands of the handsome prince and if the prince has to wage a battle so much the better. Nobody pauses to ask what happened to the soldiers or their children from both sides. Within our own society, while people of the comfortable classes appear as real people, the others do not. Why? Because nobody makes them visible. They are seen as means to an end; as providers of services; as machine-like beings who exist but do not live in the human world of the moneyed classes.
What is at work is something which can be called sub-speciation. Although, in theory at least, all human beings to one species called the homo sapiens, in reality this is not taken as being true. Human beings who are dominant shape the thought pattern, or world view, of there who confer visibility i.e., writers, artists, narrators, poets, myth-makers etc. They do it simply because they are powerful and human beings, including the intelligentsia, is generally impressed by power. Moreover, they provide employment, grants and other kinds of gratification to the intelligentsia. Above all, the intelligentsia itself is related, although generally at a subordinate level, to the wielders of real power. Thus women and working-class people, whether wage workers, slaves or peasants, have always been obscure, invisible, unheard. The contemporary proponents of subaltern History used to write about kings and their glory. Queens were put in merely as decoration pieces if they were mentioned at all. However, queens who wielded real power were classified as honorary kings and given respect. One can look at Ferishta, Budaoni, Khafi Khan or any medieval historian of India and find accounts of battles, politics, laws, architectural achievements and so on but hardly a word about women and the common people except that they died like flies during famines. It is from historians like Irfan Habib that we learn that the unmentionable peasant was taxed so excessirely that he ran away from the land in sheer desperation or slowly starved to death. What the historian makes visible is the glory, the resplendent parade, the chivalrous deeds of knights in armour but never the rags, the orphans, the ulcerous wounds and the empty stomachs. All these belong to a species inferior to man. This is sub-speciation within one’s own society.
Sub-speciation is also practiced in respect of an ‘enemy’ group. We know how Muslim historians, the ones mentioned above and others, dubbed the enemy as unbelievers (Kaffirs) and praised all kinds of violence against them. In histories by non-Muslims, such as the Crusaders, the Muslims are seen in the same way -- as if they were all barbarians. The modern state, though somewhat hypocritical in its approach, tries all tricks to make the ‘Other’ appear as a lower species than themselves. Derogatory names -- Dagoes, natives, Huns, Commies, Reds, Soviets, Terrorists – take away the individuality and humanity of the ‘Other’. The positive emotion is turned inwards and sufferings of one’s own group appear real whereas the ’Other’ is seen merely as an abstraction. Since it is an abstraction, its sufferings do not appear real at all. This is how the human emotion of pity, love and feeling are switched off. One does not see the ‘Other’ as fully human; one sees them as incarnations of evil or, what is usually the Case, one does not see them at all.
The nation-state and ecspecially the armed forces do their utmost to make the enemy invisible in the manner I have mentioned above. They paint stereotypes, usually negative, of the ‘enemy’. They focus all love on the in-group (the nation) and all hatered on the out-group (the enemy). They prevent meetings of people at the individual level as far as possible. They even block off the cultural products of the ‘enemy’. In Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet On the Western Front there is a scene where a German soldier kills a French soldier. He feels no remorse initially but when he finds the photograph of the dead Frenchman’s wife it suddenly dawns upon him that the ‘enemy’ is human like him. It is then that he realizes that he and the Frenchman had both been duped to kill each other. What has happened is that the ‘enemy’ has become human; a member of the same species. This is just what the authorities do not want. That is why soldiers are not allowed to fraternize with each other. There are stories of how they refuse to flight after having played with each other. That is also why the warmongers do not want anyone to see the films, dramas and cultural programmes of the ‘enemy’. When one seen such things one perceives that the ‘enemy’ is human like oueselves. Then come emotions and it becomes difficult to talk of the number of enemies killed in boartful tones.
This process is now more evident then ever. From september 11 onwards the world’s most powerful image and myth-makers have concentrated on making only Americans visible. Their deaths have been mourned by almost anybody who makes it to the news. One can see the suffering of their relatives again and again on the T.V screens. The few American soldiers killed, whether by accident or in action, in Afghanistan have been given visible burials. The American youth fighting with the Taliban has drawn headlines. What is visible is the pain and the suffering of the Americans. This convinces many that their anger is natural and, therfore, their revenge justified or, at least, understandable. The world news also shows the sufferings of Israelis at the hands of Palestinians terrorists. One looks at weeping mother and one’s heart wells out in sympathy. But the Afghan and the Palestinians remain almost invisible. One hears of hundreds massacred at Mazar-i-Sharif, people suffocating in containers, but one does not know them. One does not hear their near and dear ones pining for them, terrible fire power turning mountains into rubble with children and women cooped up inside them. One does not know them as human beings; one know of them merely as numbers. One does not also know exactly what kind of villagers were wiped out near Kandahar in a war they just could not comprehend. This is all ‘collateral damage’ ---- an excellent term in the process of ‘sub-speciation’. The term does not even refer to death or human suffering. It refers to ‘damage’ as if it were a machine being broken or goods being lost. It is because of this sub-speciation that the world goes its way not thinking much about the Taliban being massacred whether they were part of Al-Qaeda or not.
Can the situation ever change? No. Not until the invisible become visible. And that is only possible by acquiring power over the written and the spoken word and the images which shape social reality. This means that the war against the hegemony of the West or globalization can only be fought by acquiring knowledge and skills and producing enough wealth to dominate academia, media and research. This arguably, is easier said than done and it certainly is different to get out of the hole where we find ouselves. However, if a large part of our wealth and energy is sincerely turned toward making our people knowledgeable and skilful we may be able to make ourselves visible. Then our pain will be seen as pain; our death will be treated as death; our beings will become real – we shall then become members of the secies hemo sapiens.