The threshold of what is familiar
Venturing into the unknown world of others’ pain
Mentour is a YouTube channel dealing with aspects of air safety, from analysis of the procedures that airliner pilots go through in their daily work, through developments such as remote air traffic control, to analysing what went wrong in some of the world’s worst airliner disasters and close calls. The presenter and owner of the channel is a Swedish professional airline pilot, who takes a friendly but sober and non-sensationalist approach to the matter at hand.
On only one or two occasions in the dozens of episodes that I have watched does his face redden up and his voice reach excited pitches, saying, “I can’t believe they did that.” For the rest, you can learn a great deal about how to pilot an aeroplane just from paying attention and taking a few notes. He must sometimes speculate on what the operatives were thinking, how they came to be distracted or why they believed one thing when something else was happening. But his speculation is born of his own vast experience as a pilot, instructor and examiner. He speaks with authority and is widely praised for his sober, analytical, detailed, but lay-comprehensible, approach to explaining what happened when a particular aeroplane tumbled from the sky.
Many of his programmes end on a sad note, obviously: the terrible loss of human life. He warns the viewer up front when a mishap has resulted in death and even, in one broadcast dealing with a mentally disturbed pilot, gives suitable advice on where others with mental afflictions can seek help.
He practises his video craft with such enthusiasm, passion and knowledgeability that I can only imagine the skill and precision with which he flies the world in his Boeing 737 aircraft. But when the moment comes to describe the final seconds before an aircraft founders, he pauses with a look of harrowed sorrow in a moment of suspension: to regain his composure, and as a silent memorial to those who perished in the disaster. It comes because he knows that, but for the grace of God, it could be him. It comes from his sense of humanity, for whoever they may be who died. It is a very moving experience.
So, why is it less moving when we read about the thousands dying in the Gaza Strip? Why does the horror of caesarian delivery of a child without hygiene, without anaesthetic, with bombshells exploding around the expectant mother, not raise so much as a shiver of empathy?
Is it because they deserve it? They asked for it? Is it because justice and humanity and civilisation are terms that are so malleable—at such a distance as we are at—that we can redefine them at will, as soon as they become concepts beyond our own living sphere? Do the victims of an airliner crash deserve it if the airline is Iran Air? Do they deserve it less if they’re businesspeople on an executive jet crushed by a commercial airliner on a Los Angeles runway? Would it make more of a difference if we knew that the occupants of the smaller plane were tax dodgers, who exploited their workers and operated sweat shops in Thailand? Is there a scale for the value of life, like the Nasdaq 100, with some lives up top having premium value, and others that can be picked up at the bottom, for a few pennies?
When the Allies finally broached the borders of Germany in World War II and discovered the horrors of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp and its cholera, why did we not just lay the entire nation to waste? Carpet-bomb it to smithereens and drive every last German into the Baltic Sea? Why did we not simply exterminate this evil population, which had willingly voted with vehemence in favour of its despotic dictator? Was it because of the vestiges of decency that resided within them? Or because of the vestiges of decency that resided within us?
“The argument may as well simply say: they are not like us, and they started it.
“It is an argument that is a race to the bottom of humanity, giving licence to smear a whole population with the crimes of its worst, and abdicate the responsibility to think critically and empathetically about cultures and politics shaped by years of occupation, crisis and siege. In the US, a voter on the news programme Face the Nation said she was concerned about her reproductive rights, but that it would be ‘hypocritical’ to use those concerns to justify voting for Joe Biden when he is supporting strikes and blockades on a population that have led to calamitous maternal experiences and outcomes. That sort of clarity feels like a lot to ask at the moment, among competing influences of parochialism, tribalism and propaganda. But the details coming out of Gaza are so graphic, so relentless, that now may be the time to think about what progressive values, feminist or otherwise, really mean if they stop at the threshold of what is familiar.”
Nesrine Malik, Guardian columnist
What brings the tear to Mentour’s eyes as he pauses when telling of an aircraft accident, what held the Allies back from hateful destruction of a country that had so hatefully destroyed, and what must raise concern at the laying-waste of the Gaza Strip are our progressive values, and more precisely: our pondering what they even stand for, if they stop at the threshold of what is familiar. For, when they stop there, they are not our values; they are our prejudices.
Hi Graham. I do very much appreciate this post, but I am going to comment on the Gaza horror part of it. There is no excuse for the wanton slaughter of civilians for any of those doing the slaughtering. But, and yes this is a big but, we have to understand that the guilt is evenly spread against Hamas and Netanyahu. Both the Israeli army - on the orders of Netanyahu. and, Hamas on the orders or at least the persuasion of Iran, kill Palestinian citizens ever single day, with no apparent remorse. If any country had the will power to takeout Netnyahu and his avid followers (not necessarily the Israeli army) and simultaneously take out Hamas then this mass mutual genocide would end. As to whose life is more important - I'd say the health care givers.