If you show the value of a victim, you feel empathy. This increases the desire for equality but you feel bad: it endangers your health.
On the contrary, iIf you stress the mistake of a victim, you protect yourself: you feel like it should not happen to you. Society supports such detachment if the perpetrator is a white man or a police(wo)man.
Blaming the victim justifies inequality, discriminations, violence by the strongest. It normalizes (adult, white, male or cis) privileges. Therefore it normalizes patriarchy and white supremacy.
I know Mastodon is designed to keep everything nice and to shield us from the horrors of the world, and that it is good for us to only look at cat pictures all day and cheer each other up, but honestly: sometimes i also think that that is just a lot of crap and everyone who turns away and continues with their nice privileged life as if all is ok is complicit #Gaza
@pvonhellermannn
The text pointed below may help. Sarah Aziza, through a stirring mix of personal reflection and philosophical reckoning, disabuses the Western witness of its self-gratifying power, instead – amid Israel’s openly broadcast yet unimpeded march towards genocide in Gaza – unmasking the impotence, deceit and hollowness that witnessing currently entails. More than a collective indictment or last-gasp scream of defiance into the void, Aziza’s own testimony guides the reader towards a form of witness no longer elevated in angelic, uncompromised distance, but instead manifest in the embodied, intimate, ego-displacing position of “sacrifice, mourning and resisting.” https://jewishcurrents.org/the-work-of-the-witness
"We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others — even if it means taking those latter lives."