Why are some deaths more mediatic than others?

 
Why are some deaths more mediatic than others?

x Miguel Alejandro Rivera: The bourgeois media cover the mass murders committed by a white supremacist in the US, but silence the deaths in the rest of the world

Last week there were two violent events on the African continent, and this is just to mention some of the dozens that happen there daily. In the town of Nganzai, Nigeria, the terrorist group Boko Haram killed at least 65 people who were in a funeral procession; On the other hand, in Maiwut, South Sudan, a group of rebels killed 11 civilians. The crazy monitoring of international media never showed up, because it seems that there are human beings in the world who are priority, countries that are priority, and others who simply do not care what happens to them.

This weekend there were three shootings in the US: one in El Paso, Texas, which left 20 dead and at least 26 injured, and another in Dyton, Ohio, which records the deaths of nine people. To these two we can add even the one that happened a few days ago in Gilroy, California, where three people died, including a 6-year-old boy, and twelve more were injured.

And to these last yes the great mass media have given a tremendous follow-up, because these crimes happened in the USA. In a matter of hours, sometimes minutes, the files of who the shooter was already circulating on the networks, why he did it, if he was supremacist, what school he went to… Anyway, the whole card of the criminal, when in the attacks that they live in Africa, for example, we can hardly have a historical context of what happens.

And it happens that in the US it is very easy to unravel the motives of attacks like those that were experienced these days; Sometimes common sense is enough: you have a racist president like Donald Trump, which has empowered subjects who raise hate speech and discrimination; you have a culture of entertainment based on violence: video games, television series, movies; You have a legal system that allows you to acquire firearms in any store, sometimes even in supermarkets they sell rifles, almost next to carrots.

But in Africa, the causes, the actors, the history, everything is more complex. Is that why the West wants to ignore it, because it knows it is to blame? To begin with, the African continent was one before and it was one after the Berlin Conference (1885), where the great powers such as Germany, France, the US, Belgium, Great Britain, put the rules of how the distribution of the trade routes and African territories.

Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, these nations marked the borders that would not only divide the “new states” of Africa, but also break the territorial bond between sister tribes that now, to trade or live together, needed a passport, and on the other hand , they would unite in the same territory tribes that had been ancestral enemies. It's that simple: how on earth would there be no attacks, wars, genocides to this day?

The most popular of these bloody events happened in Rwanda, 1994, when the Hutu tribe, at that time in power, slaughtered hundreds of thousands of members of the Tutsi tribe; however, this continues: on July 22, armed men murdered 19 people in Mogadishu, Somalia; in June, a suicide attack left 30 dead in Nigeria; In mid-May, six people died in Burkina Faso after the attack on a Catholic church ... And so we could go on.

Although they happen where they happen, these shootings, murders or attacks against the population are terrible, reprehensible and sad; In the face of tragedy, we should ask ourselves why the deaths of certain human beings are more transcendent than others. Geographical proximity, preponderance of Western culture, mediation of the message? Or simply the question is: are there categories of people in the world and some are worth less than others?

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Full text at: https://www.lahaine.org/cH1V