Why We Kill Each Other The Creation of The Other.

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assault

torture rape

murder massacre

crimes against humanity war crimes

genocide

as a lawyer i’ve seen these things

i’ve dealt with these things i’ve seen

the most troubling things

in the most troubled places

but my own upbringing was very far from

these things

it was a very idyllic childhood in a

small village

in the west coast of ireland

that other that utilization of something

different

to kill to maim to murder

that wasn’t there or was it

i grew up in a place where there were

travelers ireland’s ancient

ethnic minority unlocked shul the

walking people

they were treated badly then they’re

treated badly now

i woke up as a child every morning as a

teenager

and heard stories from 150 kilometers up

the road

news reports of abductions in armagh

beatings in belfast tit for tat killings

in tyrone so that other was there

it was being misused and used and

utilized

for hatred and wickedness

and evil

i moved to new zealand when i was 22

years of age

i suppose it was the first time i’d

really lived in a place where people

were visibly different as i walked

around the streets of wellington where i

lived

like generations of irish people before

me i started working in an irish pub

one of my friends in the pub was a big

new zealander

guy paulie of european descent apache

has they called him

in new zealand he encouraged me to come

out play rugby with his team and i went

out and played there

most of the guys on our team and most of

the teams we played against were

or maori or a polynesian descent to

kalau

to cook island samoa tonga

i remember turning to paulie one night

at the entrance of the pub and saying to

him

is it ever weird with the lads and

paulie looked at me

and he smiled and said we all bleed mate

we all bleed

those guys taught me a lot they taught

me

so many things we had such fun times

i used to be in stitches of laughter

going out at the rugby pitch and coming

off the rugby pitch so many times

because of them they were different to

me of course they were

but they were just normal lads

they were fascinated by my love of rap

music which they failed to

which they said was impossible how could

a white european guy love rap music so

much

i remember after one auspicious victory

which i can sadly claim very little

credit for

and spending three hours in the dance

floor in the early hours of the morning

in a club where most of the people were

polynesian

a few of the lads turning me to me and

saying you really do like rap music bro

but those differences that started to

fade into the background

and that became very clear to me when a

friend of mine who was visiting when

driving around new zealand in a camper

van

he came out and watched one of our games

and i said to him after the game what

did you think

he said it was great he said but very

weird and i said why and he said because

you look like a little white dwarf

running around with a lot of big black

men

i suppose by then the differences

just faded into the background and i

didn’t even consider them

even though they were completely visible

but the other was there in new zealand

it just wasn’t a powerful murderous

force

but it was there it’s not a perfect

country but in bosnia i saw the power of

that

murderous force in its full

deathly glory in three and a half years

in the mid 1990s

people who grew up together who spoke

the same language

who ate the same food who served in the

same army

who celebrated each other’s festivals

they tortured murdered massacred

ethnically cleansed each other

there’s six and a half thousand people

still missing from that war

in a place that’s less than two hours

flight from dublin less than an hour’s

flight from vienna or budapest or rome

i remember a friend of mine telling me

how her grandparents were in their

late 70s were taken away in the middle

of night and shot dead

and their bodies have never been found

they were taken away and shot dead

because of their religious or ethnic

affiliation

so in essence the real reason they were

killed was because of the fact that they

celebrated two or maybe three festivals

that some of their neighbors didn’t

in kosovo i saw the exact same things

that utilization of

ethnic religious sectarian slurs and

differences

the words of the balkans still roll off

my tongue

chetnik

but in a weird strange

dystopian way i also saw the fallacy of

it all how the other was just a creation

a utilization a molding of people

i worked on organ trafficking cases

where we saw people

buy kidneys of other people from across

the great divide in the middle east

so even though those people were from

the other side the side that is animal

that is terrible that is terrorist that

is killer

the organs from their bodies could still

save the other people from the pain of

daily dialysis

in cambodia i saw potentially the most

egregious of that othering

the khmer rouge took over that country

in the 1970s and tried

to to set up a new society in a

area nirvana a place where people live

would live happy lives far removed

from towns from big urban centers

that agrarian nirvana necessitated that

those who could not form part of that

society

had to be expunged removed

liquidated

so if you were educated if you spoke a

foreign language

if you had worked in bureaucracy that

sometimes even if you wore

glasses you were out

you were gone you would probably be

killed

so after all this death and destruction

and hate

you would think that i would be

incredibly despondent about

the future of the human race about our

species about homo sapiens

but quite the reverse

because in my wanderings and in my work

i have had the great honor

and pleasure to see the most amazing

people

to witness the strongest hardest working

toughest people who’ve overcome the most

terrible things

i think of my friends in the balkans

who’ve crossed the ethnic

divide and national divides to go out

with or marry

people from across the divides i think

of friends of mine

or a friend in particular who talks who

tell me frankly about

how her father was killed by a different

ethnic group in the war

and yet a lot of her friends are from

that ethnic group and some of her

friends and family think that odd

but to her it’s quite normal how could

it be otherwise they’re just human

beings how can they represent

something that was not done by them

because those divides are farcical

they’re creations of us

in sarajevo they used to tell a joke

before the war that how did you know

a serb from a bosniak the serb was the

one who didn’t go to church in the

bosniak was the one who didn’t go to

mosque

so what i asked you today is this

that john you once said the essence

of our humanity is our differences

those differences are indeed the essence

of us they’re why we go on holidays to

see different places to see different

things

they’re why we read magazines and listen

to podcasts and pour over paintings from

far away countries

but there are two other things that form

that essence of our humanity one is our

frailty and fragility and the fact we

are full of flaws

and the second is our commonality

what divides me from a poor refugee

afghan refugee woman in the camps of

iran

or a rice farmer from southeast asia or

a miner

from the indigenous peoples in the far

north of canada or

or a gay man in rio de janeiro is a base

very little

very small very very tiny even

because our commonality of humanity our

commonality of our

our essence of our human beingness

that is what we really are so i ask you

today to call it out if you see hatred

being utilized for that

i ask you to do it in the pub in the

nightclub on the sports field

online say it we are all human they are

not

subhuman they are not different they are

not hateful they are not evil

because we all bleed mate we all bleed

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you