by Rani Rasiah
Aliran Monthly Vol 25 (2005): Issue 1

	A natural disaster is obviously a great opportunity for capitalists and governments to improve their reputation, and so governments have been tumbling over themselves trying to outdo each other. Rani Rasiah

More than a 100,000 people have been massacred in Iraq since the USA�s brutal �war on terror�. The city of Fallujah was flattened and reduced to rubble in November 2004. Hundreds of thousands of people have lost their loved ones, homes and property. Children, suddenly orphaned, lead wretched traumatised lives that stretch painfully over a seemingly endless war.

Yet, the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, one of the criminals behind the war on Iraq, walks into savagely ravaged Aceh and makes a pious statement that he is �shocked� by the devastation visited by the tsunami and has never seen anything so �horrible� in all his life. What a hypocrite! More than 200,000 wiped out almost instantaneously in Aceh and 100,000 killed in cold-blood in Iraq in a prolonged war and hundreds of thousands more as a result of sanctions imposed on Iraq before that. He and his class need to know that to the ordinary human mind the numbers are similar, and in fact more monstrous in Iraq since it was entirely man-made.

Donning human face

Germany tops the contributors of aid with USD660 million. German workers must be in a daze at this gesture on the part of their government, which at home holds an axe in the face of its workers and poor. Over the years, the German working class has seen a relentless attack on the benefits that were put in place for the workers and poor after the Second World War. Many neo-liberal governments, including Malaysia, and employers are in the same league as Germany, donning a human face for this �public occasion�.

A natural disaster is obviously a great opportunity for capitalists and governments to improve their reputation, and so governments have been tumbling over themselves trying to outdo each other. Exploitative, rapacious, uncaring bosses and governments, who every day and hour cause misery, hunger, deprivation and slow death to their workers have been rushing to the fore, with the dubious aim of providing humanitarian aid to the tsunami hit areas. Barbaric warmongers who have blood on their hands put on charity masks and dole out money squeezed from workers locally and abroad.

Not all is bleak in the politics of compassion, however. In the awesome black episode of the tsunami-triggered earthquake, some simple truths once again reveal themselves. Amongst the most striking of these is the great wave of genuine compassion and solidarity across the globe with the victims - not the hypocritical show of compassion by imperialists looking to redeem their reputations or using the tsunami to generate profit.

Human compassion

Across the globe, we see natural human compassion, moved by a deep and aching sadness for the massive loss of human lives, born out of empathy for the shattered lives of survivors, humbled by the potent waves of nature and driven by an urgency to intervene. People from all walks of life, even prisoners, have selflessly and spontaneously contributed to the rebuilding of the disaster-struck countries. Here lies no interest in reputation or reward, just sheer empathy. Some of the questions ordinary people ask are, �Are you doing a tsunami collection?�, �I have collected x bags of rice. Do you know anyone who can send it?�, �I�m collecting sarees. Do you want to give any?�

Virtually everybody is either giving or organizing aid for people who live on foreign shores. The planet has become like one family, sharing in the sorrow of the unfortunate, feeling a painful sense of bereavement.

This overwhelming wave of human compassion then is the bright side of the terrible tsunami. It shows the human face of mankind, unstrapped by creed, colour and national boundary. It shows what humankind is capable of, and what human nature can be, given the material circumstances. For the critics, here is proof that socialism is not alien to the human race.

Even under the barbaric capitalist system that is characterized by greed and competition, an unhampered media can help evoke compassion and solidarity of such magnitude. (Unhampered only because tsunami news is safe news to the capitalist, as nature is the culprit.)

Compassion and solidarity are certainly not strange to human nature. It is only the ideological weapons of capitalism that suppress these and other human values.

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Aliran member Rani Rasiah is a central committee member of Parti Sosialis Malaysia (PSM).

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