Imperial tsunamis

It's reported in the Guardian today:

Members of the British public had donated more than £30m for the victims of the tsunami disaster by last night, the speed and generosity of the response amazing charity bosses.

The reaction to the appeal was described as "unprecedented" - never has so much money been given over such a short period.

But it doesn't matter what the circumstances, or how terrible the disaster, someone's got to be in the wrong somewhere; we've got to be able to take a swipe in some direction. So the paper's leader writer unloads this little item:

[P]erhaps the brutal answer to an impressive display of empathy and charity is that wealthy westerners only really notice distant disasters when wealthy westerners are themselves caught up in them.

Oh, really? Would that unprecedented reaction - to the tune of more than £30m - have been forthcoming if it had been a few dozen British tourists who had died; or not have been forthcoming if there had been no British or European dead among the victims? I think it wouldn't and would have been forthcoming, respectively.

There's a companion piece by Jeremy Seabrook which starts in similar vein and gets worse:

As in all natural disasters, the victims are overwhelmingly the poorest.

This time there was something different. The tsunami struck resorts where westerners were on holiday. For the western media, it was clear that their lives have a different order of importance from those that have died in thousands, but have no known biography, and, apparently, no intelligible tongue in which to express their feelings. This is not to diminish the trauma of loss of life, whether of tourist or fisherman. But when we distinguish between "locals" who have died and westerners, "locals" all too easily becomes a euphemism for what were once referred to as natives. Whatever tourism's merits, it risks reinforcing the imperial sensibility.

For this sensibility has already been reawakened by all the human-made, preventable catastrophes. The ruins of Galle and Bandar Aceh called forth images of Falluja, Mosul and Gaza.

It was only a matter of time before this awful disaster came to be appropriated for the favoured political cause of the moment. Strange, isn't it, how the ruins of Galle and Bandar Aceh don't here call forth images of Halabja or of the mass graves of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This is rank stuff.