Aylan Kurdi’s Death

Famously, Aylan Kurdi, who washed up on a Turkish Mediterranean coast in September 2015 while he was desperately seeking safe land in Europe, instantly became a shocking image in the media. The tear-jerking picture of this three-year-old Syrian boy had broad repercussions in the world. Almost all international news channels covered the story, and the image has been shared hundreds of thousands of times on social media platforms. Self-contradictorily, while it is nearly impossible to see the dead body of a British, French or American child posted in the media, the vast majority of Western newspapers in particular had published the picture of Aylan’s body on their front pages. Some claimed that it raised awareness about the Syrian Civil War and the refugee crisis. During the “top topic” times of Aylan, a number of conferences, talks, programs and exhibitions had been organized in the United States and European countries. A lot of articles were written about this “dramatic” death. The media had produced lots of content. On the other hand, millions of people watched, listened and probably said: “Oh, you poor thing”.

Unfortunately, the social reflex after Aylan’s death has not gone beyond taking an emotional gaze and suffering from far away, for a while. Furthermore, focusing on a “spectacular” image has caused people to ignore the reality of war zones in Syria and other places. Maybe this image has become a powerful symbol of the war, people will remember it time to time, but it will have been representing the Syrians’ war. It has been consumed as media content which is feeding the individuals’ satisfaction via the media industry. Although the fact remains that the conventional and social media have set a strong agenda through Aylan, the question is what has been changed with this sensational photo of a little child at the end of the day? Has Aylan’s image triggered any mass social movement in Europe or America? How many Western governments expressed a sense of responsibility in housing refugees from Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan?

Overwhelmingly dramatizing the death of innocent children has not stopped suffering in Syria for a year. Making the pictures of Aylan a kind of commodity through the media hasn’t pushed the West to do something noteworthy about the Syrian Civil War and refugees. In this regard, Canada has become an exceptional country which succeeded in putting on a “refugees welcome” campaign. Aylan’s family had reputedly been trying to reach Canada through Europe. His story and the refugee crisis in general directly became a question of debate in the Canadian Federal Election on Oct 19, 2015. However, only 35,745 Syrian refugees have arrived in Canada since November 2015, meanwhile Şanlıurfa, a Turkish city, has welcomed more than 400,000 refugees.

Mediated Echoes of a Picture

In fact, Aylan is not the only child whose death or sad story has been heavily circulated or not circulated enough by the media. On January 5, 2016, four months after the death of Aylan, at least 34 people including at least three children washed up in the Aegean coasts of Turkey after two boats overturned in stormy weather. Although there were much more photos, the global media attention was very limited. People did not even care for their names. Because, it was not something new and “the concept of death” had already lost its impact. Another time, Omran Daqneesh’s image, probably you remember, was an unusual concept, a new “thing” to be mediated, but Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb’s photo, who was a thirteen-year-old Syrian boy who died in the custody of the Syrian government, was not sensational enough to cover. As the phrase goes, while the West brought many children to display for business and enjoyment off its own bat, it has mainly failed to receive most of the refugees, including many needed children. And unfortunately, the pictures of Aylan, Hamza Ali and many other children’s dead bodies have arrived in Europe via the media.

Aylan’s image has triggered a discussion around the refugee crisis and such a use of spectacular pictures by the mass media. In the United Kingdom, for example, while the Times newspaper argued that the UK must take more Syrian refugees and the Guardian suggested EU powers be prepared to spend more of their efforts and resources fostering the conditions for ceasefire, the Daily Express said they should not allow themselves to be emotionally blackmailed into feeling guilty that they are acting improperly by not letting even more illegal immigrants in.

Fraser Nelson of the Telegraph made a different comment: “A photograph of a drowned child is heartbreaking, but should not change policy: a botched response can lead to many more dead children. Hundreds of Yemeni children will likely starve this winter, victims of its civil war – we won’t see the pictures, so we’re unlikely to see anyone petitioning Parliament about them. But it’s no less of a tragedy.” Furthermore, a comment by Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator magazine on September 2015 was much more critical: “The global spreading of this snapshot … is justified as a way of raising awareness about the migrant crisis. Please. It’s more like a snuff photo for progressives, dead-child porn, designed not to start a serious debate about migration in the 21st century but to elicit a self-satisfied feeling of sadness among Western observers.”

Touching People, not the Screen

However, the debates have not changed anything remarkable in a positive manner. Instead, France closed the Calais refugee camp, Norway launched an anti-refugee advertising campaign. The United Kingdom has faced rising xenophobia since Brexit. Donald Trump, who is famous for his xenophobic discourse, won the US presidential election. Germany has somehow tried to send refugees back to Turkey. The rightwing pundits in the West have been given a new platform to speak, even some left-wing philosophers have joined the discussions with anti-refugee statements. Despite the rise of the right-wing in the West, many people have turned into distant sufferers on the media screens as a reaction to the heartbreaking images. This “distant suffering” has eventually become a kind of quiescence and insensitivity. Noam Chomsky, an American philosopher and political activist, considers it a moral crisis and criticized the reaction of the states: “Among citizens, there are honorable exceptions, but the reaction of the states is a moral disgrace” and he adds: “The shame is deep and persistent”.

At this point, Western nations should ask themselves in terms of their sincerity whether they are emotionally satisfied with some spectacular photos or are they really keen to do something for Syrian people by pushing the governments into action. Otherwise, the images of victims like Aylan and Omran will feed suffering “fetishes” and the emotional satisfaction of Western individuals. Instead of bestowing a hand of help to them, the Western world prefers to be distant sufferers via TV and computer screens. I shudder to think that the current situation has become a kind of modern exploitation over the children’s bodies via the media commodities. People in the West must materially and morally go beyond the pictures and do something about the crisis lived by Syrian children. They should begin to think about them outside the screen, even if they are not the “top topic” agenda in the media.

On January 4, 2017 CNN published an exclusive news story entitled “The Rohingya A[y]lan Kurdi: Will the world take notice now?” It covers the picture and story of Mohammed Shohayet, a 16-month-old Rohingya refugee whose family fled their home for Bangladesh to escape the violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, only to drown during the journey along with his mother, uncle and three-year-old brother. The title itself – “Rohingya A[y]lan Kurdi” – already means that the child’s death is not something new and different for the media and their audience.

Besides their obvious economic aspects, the human zoos had other goals as well. These human zoos were providing the basis for Social Darwinism. While European countries were decolonizing and the general population began to question their government’s roles abroad, women, men and children from the African continent were being exhibited in these human zoos. It is clear that these “exhibits” made the people think that they actually had helped these “primitives” by colonizing them.

The last zoo in which humans were exhibited was not dismantled too long ago. The Second World War had ended, the largest and most organized genocide in history was undertaken, and the very foundation of the European Union was being laid. To broker peace, Germany and France had come together in 1951 and founded the European Coal and Steel Community, which had six members, including Belgium. The last human zoo in Paris was organized in 1931, while in Belgium the last one was in 1958. This means that human zoos existed even as the European Union was being forged, and despite all the modern interpretations about what it meant to be a human. An exhibition of half-naked women, men and children…

We are now in a new age where only women remain in the cage. These events are definitely not unconnected. The representation of women as a piece of meat and a sexual object has become common. The world continues to turn with the lust of human-beings who completely forgot how to be an actual human-being. It’s completely dominated by violence, sexuality and their various derivations.

I visited the website of a prominent French TV channel two years ago, while I was looking for some footage of the Paris attacks for the documentary on Daesh I was preparing. At first, I was greeted by a bikini advertisement in which there were more than ten women, with the following phrase: “let’s warm you up in this cold winter night.” After this advertisement, there was a more erotic perfume advertisement with a worse catchphrase. Even if you want to skip these, you can’t do it immediately, as they make you watch it for some time. After these advertisements, I was able to reach to the brutal footage of the Paris attacks.

Though they seem incompatible, it’s actually a smooth transition from one to another. One supports the other and the other redirects to the one! Look at the women in the advertisements of the most renowned brands, right after looking at the news about Daesh militants raping Yazidi women. They are all exhibitionists, narcissists and only concerned with sex. Some of these advertisements show a woman waiting to be raped by men who are looking at her. It’s easy to find these images if you write the names of prominent brands in cosmetics and clothing into Google. Or, you don’t even have to do that, as all of these advertisements exist in the cities on the walls and billboards, where they could be easily seen. Moreover, you are forced to watch these advertisements to watch the news about an incident in which people were brutally murdered. They are everywhere: on your TV, in your newspapers and magazines, in your house and in your life! A renowned brand had written the catchphrase of the year right beside a teenage girl in their commercials: “Sex sells a lot.” It is obvious that we are under attack.

These attacks don’t only occur in the fashion or cosmetics sectors. In commercials about air conditioners, automobiles, ice cream and many unrelated subjects and objects, the main object is always women. A never ending supply of news about female artists, models and their accidents with their clothes… “Daring looks”, “a daring dress” and “she made hearts skip a beat,” that’s what it’s all about! Nobody asks what is “daring” about their looks or dress. Do we even have to talk about how these words were corrupted? They lost their meaning and become a commodity. It’s not only our body that is affected; it is also our soul. We’re under the constant attacks of a global perception management scheme which dictates how we should perceive and be perceived.

Women are being oppressed more than ever before. Beyond being oppressed, they are subjected to violence, abuse and rape. We don’t know what being human is and we never care to ask; we only talk about rights. Now, some are even seeking to legitimize certain “pleasures,” which is another topic of thorough discussion. Still, what a human is not being discussed; even more, it isn’t allowed to be discussed. While I was talking at a university about the media’s perception of women, a woman who defined herself as a feminist asked me a question: “Are you criticizing this perception from a feminist point of view or a moralistic one?” It’s of course a moral criticism as human-beings are divine.

The man, as in human, is being ripped from the woman. This is also true for the male target audience; they are also being dehumanized. With the remaining husks, a new world is being created. It’s a form of racism; just like categorizing people according to their ethnicities, just like seeing one’s skin color and attributing a meaning to it. Moreover, they are trying to create a new “master race” with the idealized physiology of the people that are in advertisements. Eugenics is being instilled in the minds of the people.

The propagated ideal woman’s image dominates all women and prompts violence towards them. While violent visuals can be banned and aren’t considered within the freedom of expression, pornographic and highly sexual visuals targeting women are almost never subjected to such a ban; furthermore, you aren’t allowed to even suggest that they should be banned. Why are we always confronted with delirious interpretations of freedoms? Is this the image of an independent and free woman? Aren’t there any correlations between the abuse of sexuality and the actual sexual abuse of women or violence against women? Is it possible that very real women are being sacrificed for these ideal woman figures? Someone has to ask.

We are in modern times in which women are subjected to violence and rape more than ever before! In modern Turkey, these kinds of actions were always considered as a result of “suppressed sexuality due to the conservative Muslim dynamics of the society.” At this point, a question must be asked: Why, then, are the numbers of crimes against women on the rise in societies which are sexually free? Why are more than 200,000 women in France subjected to violence, abuse and rape? Why are Northern European countries like Denmark and Sweden leading in the numbers of these crimes, even though they are considered countries which achieved male-female equality to a greater extent according to the World Bank’s 2016 data?

In Marilyn Monroe’s Fragments, a compilation of her intimate notes, poems and some letters, there’s a letter of Monroe to the psychoanalyst Ralph Greenson: “They invented a character for me and I didn’t have the strength to stand against them. Why do I feel less human than the other? I always felt myself as a sub-human creature.”

50 years ago, the feminine icon of the 20th century expressed her feelings in this way. Now, you don’t even need to be an icon or a Miss Anything. Looking at the most effective tools of our world, it is obvious that we are seen and shown as sub-human creatures. Who are they?