Stumbling Over Humanity

“A single episode of suffering and death is a tragedy – Yet a million such deaths is a statistic” . That’s probably the first time a JDOV talk has included a quote from Josef Stalin, but on this occasion I think his observation says something valid. As human beings we are attuned to care about individual stories, whilst somehow our minds – and hearts – find it difficult to comprehend the scale of mass catastrophe.

My passion as an academic is to understand how the media reports faraway humanitarian crises. What is it that makes us switch on and switch off?
Invariably the media plays a role in the construction of such crises to capture our attention. Because we can’t actually be present on the ground when a crises is occurring, we are dependent on the media to understand and relate to what’ s going on, so if there is no media coverage we know nothing about it because we have no other means of communication, it might as well not exist accept for those who are actually involved in it.

But the question is, why are certain stories told to us yet other events pass us by altogether?–– How many of us know about the Chinese famine under Mao between 1959-61. By the number of deaths this was the greatest humanitarian crisis in the late 20th century – and yet it went unreported – there are no images and even forty years later the Chinese authority did not want to speak about it and is referred to three difficult years.

If we think about the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide that garnered plenty of coverage and media attention and the same will probably happen this year in the 20th anniversary. Yet when the genocide was taking place in 1994 it went virtually unreported.

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 – and there was widespread media reporting all about the victims and then about the aftermath and rebuilding. Yet Hurricane Stan hit nearby Guatemala in the same month – there was a similar scale of damage and similar death toll, yet who ever heard of it in the years that came afterwards or even at the time?

If we want to be responsible world citizens and not simply allow the media to choose where to place our empathy and attention, we need to explore how the media reports distant suffering and how we can engage with faraway Others. This is particularly anybody working in the humanitarian aid field – because garnering public support for their work is obviously very, very important and is a keystone to be able to do anything.

The reporting from the Biafran famine in the late 1960s was a turning point. Here black and white images of extreme suffering provoked worldwide attention and an explosion of public sympathy. Similarly, the reporting of one of the most well-known famines in 1980s Ethiopia was also one of the most misunderstood because of the way the media utilized powerful and disturbing images.

While there may have been short-term benefits of raising public awareness both in Biafra War and Ethiopia, ultimately the reporting and the way that the NGOs used these potent and powerful images may have done more harm than good.

Because we were reliant upon the media, and some well-meaning NGOs, to convey this distant suffering, the public in some ways became complicit in the distortions and unintended outcomes from objectifying anonymous victims of tragedy in order to raise funds and portray sensation.

There is of course an irony I understand because I am using the same images here I also have a risk of manipulating your emotions for a higher cause, but I hope you will trust me in this way not to take advantage of the power of these images for some other purpose – such as raising funds or gaining viewer ratings.

So the challenge is exactly what Stalin points to, while we can understand these statistics intellectually, we are not wired to relate to them. To feel empathy, we need to engage with individuals and their stories – otherwise we dehumanise. We dehumanise their suffering and fail to convey the central truth that each of us individuals is created in G-d’s image and therefore is deserving of dignity and respect.

Media can sometimes fail to give this humanity, leading to a commodification of suffering or what is known in the field colloquially as “the pornography of poverty.”

Part of this denying the humanity of others is that our media employ double standards – so that we would never use this kind of nameless anonymous victim or intrusion into privacy in our own society. Despite carefully constructed codes by the Red Cross and others, I have seen some crass examples and often sanctioned by NGOs: such as filming the moments of a starving child’s death or cameraman and photographers walking up and down rows of suffering victims to find the ‘best’ pictures – one reporter called that ‘instant coffee journalism’

Let’s be clear. It’s not that we don’t know how to report stories of individuals with names and identities.

Consider the media reporting of the Australian floods in 2011. There the coverage was about identifiable families and their individual stories, meanwhile reports of flooding in Bangladesh and in South America but that was just a mass of nameless victims. We need to think long and hard about why it is we can identify with individual tragedies in Western societies while reporting similar crises in the developing world very differently.

Our experience as Jews can be instructive here. The Torah tells us 36 times to care about the stranger in your midst, thereby attuning us to be aware of our own experience of alienation and needing to make sure we don’t alienate others. So Jews do this through stories –using stories about individuals to frame and understand events.

Each week we read a sedra– a section from the Bible – often based on some kind of a narrative . We hear about a succession of humanitarian crises – but they are conveyed through individual stories. So we don’t hear about statistics and declining food production, but we experience the famine through the story of Joseph and his family. That makes it real and vivid, it allows us to relate and read ourselves into the story.

Similarly, we experience the implications and the terror of the flood because we engage with Noah and his family. Or the destruction of the Temple through the stories of the martyrdom of particular rabbis.

Centuries later the same is true of Anne Frank – millions can understand and relate to the holocaust in her story, that they are unable to comprehend from a mass of statistics.

This premise is the basis of Yad Vashem’s mandate; to preserve the memory of Holocaust victims by collecting their names, the ultimate representation of a person’s identity. In the words of Isaiah:
“And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (Yad Vashem), an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.” (Isaiah 56 : 5)

One of the most innovative ways I’ve come across to restore individual humanity is the Stolpersteine Project, literally means stumbling stones, and it rose from the Jewish tradition of placing stones on graves. It was the idea of a German sculptor Gunter Demnig who makes these stones which are placed in pavements across Europe.

He started by researching and remembering groups of Sinti and Roma who were deported by the Nazi’s from Cologne, where he was living. Demnig encountered someone in Cologne who said that the town had never had any Roma inhabitants and he realised they had been truly wiped out from municipal memory and conceived this idea of memorial stones as a way of responding.

Now, thanks to him, all over Europe there are thousands of Stolpersteine in the pavements of cities where individual Nazi victims lived.

Last year I visited the house my father lived in a leafy Berlin suburb – it’s still there still today, a pleasant villa from which he was forced to flee as a teenager in 1939. But just across this quite, suburban street lived his good friend Walter with whom he went to school . My father recalls how they played and rode their bikes together, but Walter had a different fate. When my father returned to Berlin (as a British soldier) in 1945 he found no sign of his friend’s family, they had vanished.

But now in 2013 I saw in the pavement some recently installed Stolpersteine ‘Walter Goldman and his parents and siblings’. The inscription as always read ‘Here lived…’ and then what happened to them.’

The family of 5 were transported and died in 1943 to the ghetto of Piaski, when Walter was aged 17, not much more that is known but at least this story and the name have had some vestige of humanity restored through this innovative project. Pedestrians cannot help but stumble over the story of Walter and thousands of others across Berlin and other European cities.
The Stolpersteine are one way of restoring an individuality which is innovative and thought provoking – ‘ Here Lived..’ and an identity is restored and a sense of place, the victim is returned to the neighbourhood where they came from. No longer vanished.

According to one historian: “It is not what is written on the Stolpersteine which intrigues, because the inscription is insufficient to conjure a person. It is the emptiness, void, lack of information, the maw of the forgotten, which gives the monuments their power and lifts them from the banality of a statistic.”

There are parallels in how we engage with faraway contemporary suffering. We need to preserve the humanity in these stories, to counter the danger that the media can sometimes dehumanise,
We need to create stolpersteine- like ways to re-humanise their stories, and engage with them, as well as being open minded about what stories are being told.

This is the way we can really empathise with others, and ensure that we use Stalin’s insight as a warning and not a description of reality. A single episode of suffering and death is a tragedy. By ensuring that each episode has a story, a stolpersteine, – a restored dignity – we ensure that a million deaths is not a statistic. It’s a million tragic stories, each one reinforcing the fact that we are all unique individuals created in the image of God.