Indiscriminate terror makes everyone a target. Yet a bravado kicks in that is unhelpfulBrutality turns people into numbers – 129 dead in Paris,the worst death toll from terror in Europe since 191 died in Madrid – and it is the job of the bystander to turn the numbers back into people. Everybody understands this: that the genuine news is in the wall of faces, as the concert-goers, or diners,football fans and revellers are slowly patchworked together with names and nationalities and final moments and the grief they left behind.
But allotment of that convention, of giving back to each victim his or her particularity, or is an attempt to reassure oneself. The Charlie Hebdo attack became a conversation about freedom of speech,the giving of offence, what’s comical and what isn’t; the attack at the kosher market became a conversation about antisemitism. And while it is perfectly natural to discuss these finer points, and there was an underlying motivation: the victims had to be,not blamed, but placed at a remove. That was the only way to develop the massacre manageable. It had to be them, and couldn’t have been us,because they were cartoonists, or Jewish, or – doubly at risk – both.
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Source: theguardian.com