CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Delusion of Safety “Here”

Photo by Nick Fewings

“It’s not meant to be happening here.”

Louise Starkey, an Australian influencer in Dubai posted those words to the internet in response to Iranian missiles hitting the United Arab Emirates. The adverb says everything. Life is forever nice “here” because all the crimes we commit “there” are denied a response and whitewashed out of the news “here.”

The phrase, which Starkey erased in response to a tsunami of indignant criticism, aptly sums up the dominant attitude in the Global North, where misfortune is happenstance and the organized brutality undergirding economic life merely makes for an “interesting proposition” in an academic seminar, if even that.

The “here” makes clear that there are places that can be bombarded, like Palestine and Venezuela, and other places no, like the United Arab Emirates, an oil and gas tax shelter for the fabulously wealthy. The fact that a missile can explode “here” shows that the rules are changing. The new reality to which all of us have fallen heir is that everywhere is subject to bombardment at a moment’s notice. Not just “there,” but everywhere.

What the influencer demonstrated was not ignorance but a sense of reality and a “common sense” grasped intuitively by everyone, but rarely articulated, and virtually never with such directness. But they are the same ingredients at work in the odd reaction of the majority of European governments to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, though each one has its particular nuance. German Prime Minister Friedrich Merz questioned international law and said........

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