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Op/Ed
2/19/2014 @ 2:37PM |37 views
Forbes
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Sochi -- Syria: How Can We Watch The Olympics Knowing What is Going on a Few Hundred Miles Away in Syria?
Day after day for the past 10 days, two realities have been unfolding virtually side-by-side with no apparent acknowledgement of a connection between them. Every evening, we get to see the amazing feats of the world’s most talented athletes competing in the Winter Olympics at Sochi and providing a stage for Vladimir Putin to boost Russia’s international standing.
At the same time, a mere 700 miles away, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria continues his campaign of systematic terror, torture, and starvation against his own people.
How can it be that both governments and citizen-viewers can practice the “double-think” and tolerate the cognitive dissonance implicit in the awareness — no matter how much we try to keep it at bay – that these two spectacles are intimately connected?
Russia – and the Soviet Union before it – has been the major supporter of the Assad regime going back forty years (first Assad the father, now the son) and uses the Syrian port of Tartus as its base in the Mediterranean. Without Russian military, financial, and diplomatic support the Assad regime would not be able to stay in power.
We should recall that the popular revolt against the Assad regime broke out in 2011, following the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and other countries, known as the Arab Spring. In one early incident, suspected members of the resistance, including children, were taken into custody and tortured in the city of Homs. From that moment on, resistance to the regime has grown spontaneously in different cities. The regime has felt free to use all means at its disposal to crush the opposition, even if this means shelling of civilians and denying food and medical supplies to besieged neighborhoods.
To date, according to the UN at least 100,000 people have been killed in the war, including over 10,000 children. Two and a half million Syrian refugees have fled the country, and tens of thousands are displaced within Syria, having been driven from their homes. UNICEF estimates that 400 children have been arrested and tortured in Syrian prisons. Last month a compilation of 55,000 photographs by human rights organizations provided chilling documentation of the scale and the depravity of the “industrial killing.”
World leaders have, of course, expressed outrage at events in Syria, and last August President Obama went to the brink threatening to unleash a “limited” strike in response to the determination that Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians. Obama’s threatened “pin-prick attack” was deftly exploited by Russia and Assad, who unexpectedly agreed to turn over his stocks of chemical weapons to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
But paradoxically, this diplomatic step has bolstered Assad’s position and has allowed him to continue to wage a relentless war by conventional means with total impunity. (It has been estimated that the use of chemical weapons by Assad accounted for roughly 1 percent of all deaths in the civil war).
Apparently, the fact that a measure of cooperation between the U.S. and its European allies and Russia has been achieved on chemical weapons and the convening of peace talks, somehow means that we have done what we can do and we can proceed with business as usual and participate in the Olympics with a clear conscience, as if everything is as it should be.
Needless to say, boycotting the Olympics would come at a steep cost to the athletes, who have been preparing for this event for years, as well as to the vast business interests that have an investment in the games.
Nevertheless, the contrast between the feel-good symbolism pervading the Olympics evoking national aspirations, physical prowess, and international cooperation, on the one hand, and the sickening and unending reality of a decimated Syria, on the other, should make us stop and contemplate what we really care about.
Hannah Arendt’s much-debated and much-misunderstood phrase “the banality of evil” takes on a new and less controversial meaning in the light of the spectacles in Sochi and Syria. It starkly raises the question: how can people who consider themselves civilized and ethical accept their country’s participation in the games, and how, on an individual level, can people watch and enjoy the feats of competition, knowing that 700 miles away Syrian civilians, including women, children, and the elderly are being bombed, tortured, and starved, with no end in sight?
Geoffrey Kabat is an epidemiologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the author of Hyping Health Risks: Environmental Hazards in Daily Life and the Science of Epidemiology.
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