Why We Kill Each Other The Creation of The Other.
[Music]
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