Making Ethical Sense of Too Many Deaths

While posing as a peacenik, Trump has supported 'collective death'. In his worldview, migrants as well as indigenous people are dispensable. Bureaucratic neglect can lead to a similar apathy

- Shiv Visvanathan

Over the past month, newspapers have been packed with reports of death. Death, in effect, haunts the newspaper. And the individual reading about it feels a sense of futility and helplessness. The citizen—as a reader, spectator, or critic—feels the importance of ethicality. He realizes a mere act of fury will not be enough; one has to rework one's concepts and move towards action.

While discussing this, a philosopher friend of mine made an important distinction. He distinguished between individual death and collective death. Individual death, in search of structure and meaning, has found its symbolism and its philosophers. It fits into the philosophy of everydayness and the concept of rite of passage. It fits into the cosmos. Collective death, on the other hand, offers no such possibility.

It is in this context that we shall analyze five recent events—the Iran-Israel war, the question over the Gaza strip, the Pahalgam incident, the Air India accident, and the stampede in Bengaluru.

Haunting the first two events stands the figure of Donald Trump, the American president seen as a clown, a jester, a monster. He is always a caricature. Despite all the attention given to him, Trump has not acquired a full semiotic effect. Symbolically, he represents a new wave—he has not only created a new politics beyond the Cold War, he has provided it with a new sociology of death.

Trump has become the master of collective death while playing the deceitful role of a peacenik. He pretended to arbitrate between Iran and Israel while getting ready to bomb Iranian installations. There is a sense of machismo—a technological superiority—about Trump. He feels he and Israel are mature enough to be the masters of nuclear death. Iran and most of the Third World are immature for nuclear development.