Necessary Political Activism

In his Syria intervention talk, Barry Andrews asks why, despite being the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of our time, people don’t care about Syria.

As far as we know, there are 160,000 killed, 3 million forced to leave the country as refugees and 6 million internally displaced. And yet people don’t have a sense of fellow feeling for the suffering of the Syrian people.

Andrews states the morally outrageous reality is this was avoidable because it’s man-made (compared to natural disasters). While we hear that it’s morally indefensible for children to die of starvation and curable diseases, this same feeling does not exist for Syria. He believes this is due to a bias against the Middle East and an inability to separate politics from humanitarianism. The Syria intervention talk states three ways to take action without taking the military intervention route. We need to instill a sense of determination to protect humanitarian supplies for the people who need it. We also have to develop a sense of political activism.