If I told you about a blog written by Iraqis working for an American news service, you would probably be interested in the glimpses it provides into the lives of ordinary Iraqis. After all, American reporters in Iraq today have little chance to tell such stories, and many of us feel a responsibility to try to understand the consequences of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq.
But empathy for people whose lives may be very different from our own is a value that often separates progressives from conservatives.
How one right-wing blog (Redstate) responds turns out to be very revealing.
Empathy, the capacity to feel what others feel, and responsibility, the action that empathy requires, form the basis of progressive morality, as Chapter 4 of Thinking Points by George Lakoff and the Rockridge Institute discusses. If you were to watch detailed interviews with survivors of a natural disaster on another continent, and learn how their lives were affected by the devastation, their stories might activate your sense of empathy and possibly even move you to act, perhaps by donating to an international relief organization. You probably would feel far less empathy if you merely heard a headline read on the hourly radio news about the number of people killed by a mudslide in a distant rural village.
Most of the time, this is the nature of reporting from Iraq: X people killed by a car bomb, Y bodies found tortured. While necessary, such body counts alone do little to activate our empathy because they do not depict the lives of individuals. We occasionally see exceptions to this, such as the reports of women who have been raped by Iraqi soldiers and police. Many progressives treasure the dispatches we read on Riverbend's blog because they are more personal and vivid in their accounts of the lives of Iraqis than we typically see in conventional media. This was certainly true of her postings this week.
This week, I started reading a blog by Iraqi journalists working for the McClatchy News Service, which was noted in two articles in Editor & Publisher. The first article is entitled "Iraqi Correspondents, Blogging for McClatchy, Provide Brutal Insight" and the second is "Iraqi Correspondents Maintain Sense of Humor -- And Outrage." But don't take Editor & Publisher's word for it—or mine. Check out the Iraqi journalists' blog.
One of the journalists, who uses the pseudonym Sahar, describes his her trip to the morgue to pick up the remains of his her nephew. Another, Laith, describes the impact of the security checkpoints on the lives of Iraqis. Dulaimy describes the office phone list, and thinks about all of the coworkers who have fled, or been killed or kidnapped. Some of the postings express longing:
"It was long time ago since I went out at night, not only me but all Baghdad’s citizens.
You can go out maybe in the street you are living in or to the next block but no more. I miss going out at night especially this time of year where weather is perfect and Baghdad is really beautiful during night. So I decided if I am not going out let me take some photos of Baghdad. It is the most beautiful city in the world, at least in my
eyes ..."
Others express the bitter humor of a survivor amid chaos:
"Recent studies proved that Iraqis are the most romantic people on the globe for the following reasons: 1. They are used to have dinner using candle lights (because there is no electricity). 2. They sit in front of a wooden stove (no electricity or fuel, no other alternative). 3. When the husband is late for more than 5 minutes the wife will call repeatedly (he might get kidnapped). 4. A wife will sell all her golden possessions (to pay the ransom). 5. All men are back home by 5 p.m. for their wives (because of the curfew)"
All of them express humanity, which allows us to feel empathy.
To the conservatives at Redstate, that is intolerable. Mark Kilmer at Redstate entitles his posting "A Baghdad fairy tale from McClatchey?" and suggests that the postings are "inventions and fabrications." In response to Dulaimy's posting about a friend who was killed, Kilmer writes:
"If it is true, that he lost a friend, it is very sad. On the other hand, it's a simple thing to invent and type if your goal is to slander the United States, its soldiers, and its mission. That's what McClatchy is doing, and their propagandizing shows no real knack for bending any but the most malleable (or already twisted) minds." [emphasis added]
To that right-wing blogger, it is to be assumed that an established American news service would impersonate Iraqis and make false claims about horrific conditions in Iraq in order to impugn the United States. (Of course, to many right wingers, any number of claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction spirited away to Syria or Iraqi involvement in 9/11 or the Oklahoma City bombing are regarded as facts.) I'm not sure that even he believes this, but perhaps it does show that empathy can be a threat to the right wing. To him, we must not be weak ("malleable") lest we succumb and feel empathy. After all, if we feel a personal connection to someone and can relate to him or her, it makes it more difficult to abide by or prolong that person's suffering.
Written by Evan Frisch, an employee of the Rockridge Institute, who blogs as evan_at_rockridge at the Rockridge Nation blog, where this is cross-posted.