Why Your Solidarity with Paris is Misguided

By Claire Bernish

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

The world at large — we — are in mourning. Again. Indeed, Paris is in mourning, again. For the second time in less than a year, we are all de facto Parisians, with Facebook profiles, casinos, and whole buildings draped in the blue, white, and red of the French flag. It is solidarity as sympathy,bien sûr — a most poignant message that humanity stands with Paris and will act decisively to avenge the “carnage” unexpectedly wrought by those whose motives most will never comprehend.

Most? Evidently, despite the accumulated knowledge of the entire planet at our disposal through the computer screen, solidarity has escaped some of us. And I am weary.

Without question, I mourn for Paris’ recent victims and their families — and I would never claim knowledgeable firsthand experience of the same. But I refuse — despite my partial French heritage — to cloak myself in nationalism of any stripe or star, particularly not now. Because, besides victims in Paris, an incomprehensibly astronomic number of people have been grieving loss of the highest order for some time — in places whose names roll off our tongues as if it’s accepted that violence simply happens there — and a majority likely couldn’t guess the colors on these victims’ flags.

You see, I also mourn for those killed mere hours before Paris crumbled into chaos, in strikingly similar attacks in Beirut.

I mourn the hundreds of thousands displaced or killed in Syria, no matter their pledged allegiance. No matter their professed religion. No matter.

I mourn for the millions killed in ongoing and renewed, illegal United States’ aggression in Iraq — and those facing a torturous demise from exposure to depleted uranium employed in violation of international and humanitarian law — for reasons far closer to ‘American’ and corporate hegemony than compassionate principle.

I mourn the untold number killed in the United States’ insidious — and seemingly permanent — war in Afghanistan. And the countless children there who know nothing of peace, much less the feeling of safety it brings. And patients and staff recently targeted, bombed, and then shot while fleeing the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital in Kunduz — and the irony of that humanitarian organization’s French roots.

I mourn those forced into human slavery or sex trafficking in Malaysia; and curse the scant hope they escape, now that the massive TPP has garnered U.S. government’s tacit approval of the abhorrence that is human trade.

I mourn for Palestinians, whose land was usurped — and whose lives and infrastructure and families and sense of security and homes are under siege and occupation by an illegal andactively terrorist State.

I mourn the patients and staff at the over 100 healthcare facilities in Yemen that have beenbombed since March, and the apparently soulless who found an acceptable target in hospitals. I mourn for Yemen.

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