Why Do We Ignore the War in Syria?
By Andrew Quist
Why is it so hard to get people to pay attention to the continuing atrocities committed in the war in Syria, now in its seventh year? That is the subject of this BuzzFeed News article by Rose Troup Buchanan. Despite an uptick in violence in the province of Eastern Ghouta this month, Buchanan writes, “Global interest in the conflict is waning, and analysis by BuzzFeed News shows the number of shares on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites of the most-read stories about Syria in the past two months were a 10th of what they were just over a year ago.”
The article contains an interview with Arithmetic of Compassion contributor and professor of psychology Paul Slovic. According to Slovic, we show less interest in Syria than is warranted due to psychic numbing. Our minds are incapable of coping with prologned catastrophes like genocide and mass atrocities.
And when shocking images do get our attention, we feel helpless and hopeless and tune them out. “We do numb to repeated photographs, just like we numb to increasing numbers of individuals,” Slovic said. This is a form of pseudoinefficacy, part of the flawed arithmetic of compassion that allows catastrophic abuses of human beings to continue unabated.
We must appreciate the individuality of each human being suffering in places like Eastern Ghouta, Syria in order to combat psychic numbing and this false sense of inefficacy (false because there are meaningful actions we and our government can and should take).
One way you can help people suffering in Syria is by donating to the International Rescue Committee, which is supplying nutritional supplements to more than 3,300 malnourished children in Eastern Ghouta.
Professor David Frank commented on this article by noting that history reveals we do have the capacity to stop this violence:
“Between 1944 and 1997 the presence of peacekeeping missions has reduced recidivism to violence and civil war by 80%. [Edward Newman, Understanding Civil Wars: Continuity and Change in Intrastate Conflict (New York: Routledge, 2014), 158.]
The United Nations reported an 80% decrease in genocides and politicides between 1988 and 2001, in part because of successful third-party intervention to prevent and mitigate mass atrocities, suggesting the world community can respond effectively to prevent and contain mass atrocities. [Virginia Page Fortna, Does Peacekeeping Work?: Shaping Belligerents' Choices after Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2007), 116.]
The world could have prevented the Rwandan genocide. Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, the Force Commander for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda, needed a mere 5,000 well-equipped troops to prevent many deaths; he was left with 270. [Roméo Dallaire, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, 1st Carroll & Graf Ed. (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2004).]
Chivvis, in the most careful study of the Libyan intervention in 2011, concludes that it succeeded in “averting a slaughter in Benghazi.” Unfortunately, many misuse this intervention to justify inaction. [Christopher S. Chivvis, Toppling Qaddafi: Libya and the Limits of Liberal Intervention (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 90.]
The state department dissidents in their 2016 memo outline several steps that could have mitigated the suffering in Syria, which Obama and Power ignored.
The UN needs to enforce Resolution 2401 and a cease fire.
We need to visualize mass atrocities and pepper these accounts with realistic action steps backed by a history that offers us some agency.”
To learn more about psychic numbing and pseudoinefficacy visit our pages on these subjects.
To learn more about overcoming psychic numbing and related psychological biases that inhibit compassion, visit our Take Action page.
The above photograph is of ruins in Zamalka, Eastern Ghouta, Syria, February 22, 2018. CC 3.0 Qasioun News Agency.