Crisis after crisis, the dead bodies look the same.

They drown; they were about 42 this time, maybe more; no one came to the rescue, at least not when they were alive. They wanted to leave behind the conflict in Yemen. 

Yemen has been the theater of power and control struggles far beyond the region. In fact, the country became another victim of the war on terrorism waged by the United States after 9/11. The war was waged from a cave-type military compound in Colorado. Under President Obama’s watch, the military drone program had become a way to attack without being in danger and without accountability. It demonstrated one more time that it does not matter who the president is, there will be a war in a third world country, and the empire would administer the war and precipitate the start of a conflict.

As a result, Yemen is a place where children and women suffer gravely, imagine giving birth with malnutrition and war around; women die in childbirth from preventable causes. In all these conflicts whose origins are related to the constant state of crisis,  Women may disappear, and it is fine with the current profiteers of this money-making machine de-territorialized and dehumanized. 

The 42 plus young people drown off the coast of Djibouti. The UN report called them migrants and states: “we do not know why the vessel has capsized.” As long as the wrangling over the reasons for these deaths goes on; as long as refugees are labeled migrants; as long as we do not recognize our responsibilities and the responsibilities of this system of profit-making in creating these crises, including the Covid 19 crisis that is part of the same vision of the world, the violence over bodies will continue, and we will live in fear. 

The Covid 19 epidemic/pandemic, interestingly, brings a new level of crisis. The official discourse claims to do everything to save lives, while the link between the occurrence of the virus and deforestation, massive killing of species, and the corporate-agriculture and its Monsanto-like companies are not part of the overall conversation. The virus has revealed the pitiful state of health of modern society. 

Vanished also from public discourse is the discussion about the industry of war that has impoverished people from Yemen and elsewhere. Also vanished the relationship between the dreadful war weaponry, which includes drones, and the dematerialized, de-territorialized digitally organized and tax-free investors.  

These countries are the battlefields of this intricate system: the fight for natural resources, globalized markets, cheap markets, discarding cheap labor and its expendability by any means, a steril digital market, and so on.

As long as we ignore our symbiotic relationship to our planet, we will be living in fear. We all need to find the way back to ancestral technics and traditions to understand that we lost that relationship due to de-territorialization. Meanwhile, the very few pulling the neoliberal strings that dehumanize our society are eager to use fear tactics to get more power. We have to liberate ourselves from these fear-tactics if we want to find back the power of solidarity.

 

(By Brigitte Marti)