Reality Check on the “Value of Human Life”

19.01.2022

This article is written in praise of the equal value of all human beings. 

During the colonial era, it was common to hear an abominable statement along the lines that, for such-and-such a colonized people, “life is cheap.” 

In fact, colonization constantly promoted the idea that “the life of one person amongst the colonizers is more valuable than the life of one person amongst the colonized”. Note, for a start, the attribution of commercial language to describe the value of human life: “cheap”. And remember that for much of the colonial era, “lives” were indeed bought and sold. Slaves were bought, and they were sold supposedly “in perpetuity”, in other words forever, meaning one’s descendants, like oneself, would be made to labour according to the demands of the owner. But that was long ago. 

Or was it? 

Are there still “cheap” lives? Do people still talk in ways that betray the truth i.e. that this colonial ideology is still here today?

In the 1st Millennium

Long ago, in the First Millennium, according to the western way of counting time, the life of one “citizen of Rome” was worth more than the lives of hundreds of “barbarians” or hundreds of slaves. Then, the Vatican ruled over most of Western Europe imposing all manner of hierarchies. And for a thousand years, there was a “caste rule” in that same Europe. Those with “blue blood” ruled, and their sons after them. That, too, was in supposed perpetuity. This went on right into the Second Millennium. 

In the 2nd Millennium

After the first half of the 2nd Millennium, Europe was ruled less and less from Rome, more and more by the local Kings and their nobles, who owned the land and the serfs or peasants, who lived on it, until the early 1800s. The value of a serf’s life was definitely considered by the powerful to be “less” than that of a nobleman. In fact, the hierarchy was strict from God through angels to kings and nobles and, via minute gradations, to “nobodies” like serfs, and then on down to animals.

At the same time as the Kings were sharing power with the Pope, during the Second Millennium, European nations began to colonize the rest of the earth. European colonizers, faced with the suffering and mass deaths that their colonization often caused amongst its victims, would sigh and say, “Oh, dear! How cheap a life in the Indian Raj is!” talking about Indians. “Oh, dear! How cheap life in the Congo Basin is!” talking about Africans. Native Americans were just invaded and annihilated, with a sigh about the “cheapness” of their lives. Thus, the responsibility of colonizers for the deaths of the colonized was apparently, by this sigh, cleansed. And so, a phrase that is objectively an abomination, and that feels like an abomination to the person who is the “object” of the comment, becomes something soothing to the speaker and quite a “normal” thing to say: “Their lives are cheap”. Those amongst the colonizers, any individuals who object to this idea are up against an ideological mountain every day. 

But that was long ago.

Or was it?

Do people today still talk like this? With minor differences? And do we today just not notice it?

In the USA, in the 2nd Millennium, it was quite “normal” to write a Constitution, a much-glorified one at that, that specified that for the purposes of sharing out seats in the House of Representatives and for sharing out the federal tax money to the individual states in the USA, Native Americans were not counted as people, and slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person. It goes without saying that the U.S. federal government did not guarantee them a right to vote at all. But they gave the States where slave-owning was rife one-third more representatives in the House of Representatives, on the basis of their owning people who were worth an extra vote to the owner, and one-third more federal public funds. 

It is worth quoting from what was in the US Constitution for nearly a century, lest you think we exaggerate:

 “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States, which may be included in this union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons” i.e. slaves. How is that for an estimation of how “cheap” some lives were? “Indians” were “excluded” as worth zero, and each slave counted as 3/5 of a person. This Constitutional definition of the value of human life was only repealed 80 years later. Then voting rights and other rights were still denied black people by the so-called “Black Codes” imposed by individual States, which then became illegal, only to be re-instated in the so-called “Jim Crow” era laws, which lasted in many States in the USA another 100 years. Voting rights for all Afro-Americans were only guaranteed by the federal law with Civil Rights legislation in 1962, repeat 1962 (this is not a typo) after a long, hard battle. In Australia, Aboriginal Peoples only got the right to vote in that same year, there also after a long battle.

In South Africa, the “value of a human life” in terms of “one person one vote”, only came in 1994 after a long struggle. This is less than 30 years ago. 

So, is it over? Is this estimation of some lives being “less valuable” over now? Is it now no longer possible to talk about “the value of human life” being different for different nations or peoples? We will soon see that we are still not there.

Meanwhile, in the last Century of this same 2nd Millennium, in the heart of civilized Europe, Germans acted against “their own people”. The German State denied the rights to Germans of Jewish faith or culture from 1933 onwards by means of hundreds of specific laws. It is worth quoting one, “A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich. He has not right to vote in political affairs and he cannot occupy public office.” Marriages of Germans with German people of Jewish faith were outlawed. Talk about violating the rights of one’s “own people”? The ultimately “civilized” German people ended up with a State that managed to impose this and much worse on people, killing them – “their own German people” as well as people not “their own” in Austria, Poland and elsewhere – as if it made a difference. What a terrible concept, “one’s own people” being somehow better than “the other”, or, as a corollary, that it is “immoral” to be cruel towards “one’s own people” and not necessarily immoral to be cruel to “others”.

In the 3rd Millennium

Now, today, in the third decade of the Third Millennium, we read in newspapers, online, and hear on TV last year, “Bombs strike Kabul airport, killing at least 13 U.S. troops and dozens of Afghan civilians”. Note the language: The U.S. troops who die are an exact number of individual human lives lost. Indeed, only five days later, you read each one’s name, their individual life story and you see a photograph. This, even though they were paid soldiers, even though they were part of a military occupying force on someone else’s land. The Afghan civilians lives’ lost are estimated, by contrast, and again note the language used, like so many eggs, in “dozens”. And the above is a quote from the relatively civilized NY Times (26 Aug 2021). Similar quotes can be cited from CNN, NBC and even the US’s National Public Radio. As an exercise, we suggest people note down every time a mass media outlet, or a politician or the Pentagon, talks about American lives lost differently from other people’s lives lost.

Anyway, five days later, the BBC, referring with no shame to the US’s “retaliatory” strike (yes we are back to the days of “vengeance” as an ordinary, acceptable mode of military operation), writes this on its site: “A US drone strike in the Afghan capital Kabul has prevented another deadly suicide attack at the airport, US military officials say. The strike targeted a vehicle carrying at least one person associated with the Afghan branch of the Islamic State group, US Central Command said.” The drone strike, without comment from the BBC, “prevented another” attack by killing at least one person in ISIS. Before they know who the US armed forces killed, the BBC writes, as if it’s gospel, they “prevented another” attack. The things we have to read! Even now, in the Third Millennium!

As it turned out – and that we know this is to the credit of the NY Times, whose reporters investigated on the ground – those who got wiped out (killed forever and ever) by the said drone strike were wiped out by a drone strike that did nothing whatsoever to “prevent another” attack. That drone strike was, itself, “another attack”. The truth came out. The reporters found that the US drone strike killed a family of 10. This family had nothing to do with Islamic State or any other military outfit. Seven of those killed were little children. Yes, children. They just lived there, in their house. The man killed, Mr. Zemari Ahmadi, was in fact a longtime worker for an American NGO based in California. Three months later it was widely announced that “No US military” will be held accountable for this attack. How is that for the “value of human life” in the year 2021, in the eminently “civilized” USA? 

Yesterday on Amanpour’s CNN program, there was good journalism by Hari Sreenivasan from her team. He interviewed a colleague journalist called Azmat Khan of the NY Times Magazine. She has done outstanding work. How did Ms. Khan do her investigative journalism? There were two stages. Ms. Khan first applied, for “several years” under the US’s Freedom of Information Act, and even had to take the Pentagon to Court on the way, for the US military records on (i) what the they believed the original threat was before the airstrike, (ii) what exactly they aimed at by the strike, and then (iii) what their own evaluation was of who and what exactly they hit. Armed with these three kinds of information (threat, target and later assessment), Azmat Khan, “a lowly reporter”, as she describes herself, then, secondly, went and looked on the ground in person. She did this for 60 different “credible” airstrikes. She also went to 12 or so other sites where people said there was a strike, but the US does not call it “credible” – which is a bit ludicrous, because the USA must know where it did its air strikes. (“Credible strikes” is part of that peculiar branch of military language that includes notorious expressions like a military action that is “plausibly deniable”.) Anyway, the USA systematically underestimated civilian deaths “severely”, Azmat Khan found. Often it was due to “mis-identification” (the USA intelligence believed a little textile factory to be an arms manufacturing plant when it was not; the USA intelligence thought five men on motorbikes were an ISIS team when they were just five young men out riding their motorbikes; USA intelligence thought something being transported was material to be used to make explosives, when it was bales of cotton.) To give an idea of the under-reporting of civilian deaths, the US records say in 27% of cases of air strikes children were killed (already an horrific figure – one quarter of these intentional strikes kills children), when in fact in 62% of such strikes Ms. Khan found children were killed. Yes, 62% of the airstrikes killed children, often many children. Intelligence is just wrong “over and over”, she concluded. Compensation for victims, she says, is extremely rare. A dozen payments in all, she estimates, have been forked out by the USA to families killed this way in Syria and Iraq added together. The sums paid are pitiful. $2,500 for a death. And not enough ever to cover the cost of medical care for injured and disabled survivors. It is not “liberation”, as the USA says in its propaganda pumped out through the Press, day after day, but rather, according to people on the ground, the “destruction of humanity”. (Worth watching, a 15 minute clip, just go to YouTube and then search for “Amanpour: Azmat Khan on U.S. Airstrikes”, 17 Jan 2022.)

So, to kill “the other” (Syrians, Iraqis, Afghanis) is, to the USA, both routine, and also somehow worthwhile to “save American lives”. The only way this can be true, is if the lives of these “other” people do not have the same value as US lives that are purportedly being “protected”. After the Azmat Khan interview, Ms. Amanpour herself, as her take-away from the interview commented that this kind of killing will not help the USA “to win hearts and minds”. This is not just a take-away, but also a “give-away”. She sees the lives lost, if we judge by her comment, not so much as valuable human beings’ lives lost, but as a disadvantage for the US foreign policy objectives. 

In sum, the lives of the victims of airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan are systemically treated as being worth less than American lives.

So, that is the logic underlying the US military strategy, and it is routinely reported as fact. 

And then, a corollary is the following, just listen for it on the mainstream international TV news broadcasts, and take note of it, too: The “other” (sometimes Mr. Putin, or Mr. Xi Jinping, or the late Sadam Hussein, or Mr. Bashar-al-Assad) is portrayed as a barbarian because he uses weapons “against his own people”, or “kills his own people”, while we, the “civilized”, we, the “superior”, use our weapons only on the “other people”, whose lives are “cheap” so it does not matter.

 That is the underlying meaning. 

This is, of course, all wrong on many counts. For a start other people’s lives are not cheap (the subject of this article) but in any case, the USA does kill around 1,000 of “its own people” every year with weapons, mainly in its cities. This is the genocide being meted out by the State through its police forces on young Americans (“their own people”), and it is so habitual that it is not noticed as falling into the category of “killing your own people”. The Guardian newspaper kept the figures for the US deaths at the hands of police for the years 2015-2019, and on average the American State every year killed, with weapons, 1,000 “of its own people”, mainly young men. As The Guardian is a mere newspaper, and as it is a UK and not a US publication, the estimates must surely be low-end. 

So, what lies underneath all this propaganda about the different estimations of “the value of a human life”? Basically, it is the rampant capitalism we are all living under, in its more extreme form over the past 40-years of neo-liberalism, since Reagan and Thatcher declared war on the people of the world, in the name of finance capital. It has no moral justification. And so the assumptions of present-day imperial capitalism are not that different from colonial ideological assumptions about the “value of life”. It is really staggering.

But, there are cracks in this ideological edifice.

Covid deaths Expose Hypocrisy about Value of Life

With the Covid epidemic, some of the blatant hypocrisy of this “value of life” propaganda has been exposed. Who seems, in their action against the Covid-19 epidemic, to have valued the lives of “their own people” more? Who less? Let us look at an indicator.

Here are the figures for selected countries, in order of number of Covid deaths per million inhabitants, as of 18 January 2022 on the Worldometers Coronavirus site, as an indicator of the “value” their strategy to fight Covid-19 puts on “human life”:

China                   3 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

New Zealand      10 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

Nigeria                15 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

Australia            107 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

Singapore.         142 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

Afghanistan       183 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

Syria                  162 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

India                   347 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

Iraq                    583 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

Mauritius           598 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

South Africa   1,546 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

France           1,943 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

UK                 2, 222 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

USA               2,618 Covid deaths per million inhabitants.

These figures give an indication of how many of “its own people” that each State apparatus sacrificed to the epidemic. Or how that nation values “its own people”.

[To keep the statistics in proportion, it is important to remember that the Covid virus kills older people at higher rates, and that, while only 3% of Nigerians are over 65, in the UK there are 18% of people over 65, and in the USA 16%. In addition, statistics are kept better in, say, the UK’s centralized NHS than in rural areas of vast countries like India and Nigeria, or in war-torn and/or occupied countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. These two factors may temper, to some extent, the much better respect for life in the less developed countries listed. But there are pressures working in the opposite direction, remember, too: Health care services are better in the UK than in, say, Iraq post-US-invasion-and-occupation, and fully vaccinated rates are much higher in the USA (63%) than in, say, Nigeria (2.4%). So, this means the rich countries should have, all other things being equal, fared better in terms of respect for the value of human life than poor countries with less means to do so, however good their intention.] 

But, leave aside comparisons. There are now over 850,000 total American deaths. In terms of sheer numbers, it is staggering how blithely the USA has allowed these preventable deaths to happen. And all the more staggering that the hypocritical US official language continues unabated about the superior value of their own human lives, and their accusations that only other leaders “kill their own people”. American political representatives, the Pentagon, the White House and almost all the mainstream Western Media continue with their daily messaging of the high “value of American lives” compared with the cheapness of everyone else’s life. We are still so colonized that we absorb all these insults without really taking them in. 

Conclusion: Importance for Today’s Politics

The aim of this article has been to de-code one aspect of the language that re-inforces colonial tropes. 

It is important for us to see the enormity of our “colonized minds” for its own sake, but also because it affects day-to-day politics in Mauritius. 

Take the outrageous offer of Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth to rent Diego Garcia to the USA for 100 years. This is a truly hideous proposal he has emitted. And yet it passes as “normal”. Even all the opposition parties that pretend they oppose Jugnauth on every single thing, and all those individuals and small groups who hate Jugnauth’s guts and run their whole outfits on this, do not utter one word against this, so colonized are their minds. 

For this kind of military occupation, for this kind of continued military colonization, to persist, for Jugnauth to get away with this criminal offer of his, it means that there is an ideological underpinning that is invisible: Americans are more important than us, than Chagossians, and than international law. The USA can occupy our territory illegally and to our detriment and to the detriment of the people forcibly removed, and flout international law while doing so. This can happen even as the USA accuses its enemies like Russia or China of acting outside international law.

But, the stakes are now high for humanity. We have to control our leaders, and the leaders of the world. We have to in order to avoid nuclear war and destruction, and in order to avoid the collapse of the natural systems that nurture all life. We also have to control our lives, and the only way to do it is to continue the struggle of past generations towards an egalitarian society, in which there are no longer classes. It is the different classes that underpin the colonial hierarchies. We must work to do away with these, and bring about a society in the whole world where there is equal value accorded to all human lives.

Lindsey Collen

for LALIT