Death without grief: How the global media trivialize Iranian suffering

Madrid – The explosion that demanded the life of at least 70 people and remained a thousand in the port of Shahid Rajaei in southern Iran was a national tragedy of monumental proportions. Near the strategically important street of Hormuz, an important corridor for global energy transportation, the incident not only shakes the Iranian society of humanitarian, but also reveals the mechanisms through which the legitimacy of suffering in the international media space is constructed.

Just a few hours after the explosion, large international media and certain western commentators began speculating about the causes of the incident, in some cases with ironic or condescending assumptions. In view of similar tragedies in other parts of the world, the approach would have been very different: a sober cover that focuses on the human dimension, accompanied by diplomatic gestures and institutional solidarity. In the Iranian case, however, what the theorist Jasbir Puar has described as a “necropolitan desire” in which the life of certain bodies-like, non-western, racist, geopolitical-cast opposing opposing opposing opposing opposite is less worthy than a tolerable, even predictable losses.

This differential treatment is not accidental. It is inscribed in a colonial representation frame in which the Iranian body such as the Palestinian or Iraqi body is not only expandable, but also designed as suspicious. The victims of the port of Shahid Rajaei were not constructed discursively as a citizen or worker, but as extensions of an “enemy” state company, in whose need to refer to poetic justice.

The irony of certain analysts – some that are internationally connected to military thinking factories or outlets such as the Iran – can be understood if you follow Puar as part of an “training in death” logic: a form of violence that is not exclusively manifested in the physical act of killing, but in the way some bodies can die without grief or knowledge. In this sense, the western institutional silence in relation to the tragedy with the quick reaction of Iranian society is opposed: artists, academics, athletes and normal citizens expressed their solidarity with the victims and rebuilt social bond in view of the global discursive disassembly.

In this context, it is also important to take into account the geopolitical dimension of the disaster. Iran is exposed to a longer campaign of economic pressure, the hidden industrial sabotage and diplomatic isolation. The idea that this explosion could be part of a strategy of destabilization was not rejected by various voices inside and outside the country, although there are still no conclusive evidence. But even without direct evidence, it is important to observe how the suspicion itself is part of a discourse system in which Iran appears to be guilty, even if it suffers.

The port of Shahid Rajaei is also a strategic enclave, not only for Iran, but also for international trade as a whole. The proximity to the Hormuz street makes it a symbolic and logistical goal of primary importance. In this sense, the incident concerns not only the local population, but also the regional infrastructure as a whole. However, the dominant interpretative framework reduces the Iranian pain to an attachment of the conflict to a peripheral data point in a geopolitics that rarely grants the daily life of the people who endure it.

The omission – whether consciously or not – empathy also has an internal effect. The opposition voices, which were open to the tragedy from exile or foreign media, not only showed an alarming ethical indifference, but also helped to reinforce a narrative in which the country's well-being of the country is secondary to their own political project. In some cases, e.g. B. in monarchical television channels or certain platforms, which were financed by foreign powers, the explosion was treated with sarcasm or instrumentalized as evidence of the supposed structural instability of the Iranian state.

One of these voices that dared to make the tragedy of “humor” of the tragedy was the current editor of the Middle East for the economist Greg Carlstrom, who published the following comment on X: “Looks like the people who are responsible for the Beiruthafen found a new job.” Carlstrom referred to the tragedy, which appeared on August 4, 2020 in the port of Beirut, in which large areas of the Lebanese capital were destroyed, killed over 220 people and at least 6,500 more injured. It was one of the most devastating tragedies in the latest Lebanese history. Carlstrom's use of this event as a “humor” in relation to the explosion in the port of Shahid Rajaei in Iran not only reflects a lack of sensitivity, but also the prevalence of an attitude that embraces the victims when they come from politically or geographically considered “enemy” contexts.

Carlstrom's comment, repellent and dehuman, reflects an attitude that does not recognize human suffering in order to trivialize it and to mark a clear distinction between life, which are considered “worthy” of compassion as part of the geopolitical game. This type of comments not only immortalize racial and political bias, but also normalizes the indifference to tragedies that occur outside the western framework. Instead of promoting a discourse of solidarity and humanity, the dehumanization is preferred, in which suffering is presented as inevitable as inevitable if it comes from those who come as enemies or actors who do not match the dominant global interests.

Greg Carlstrom's comment is neither satirical nor only humorous. Or maybe it is what could be called “hegemonic humor”, a form of humor that does not try to reduce strength structures, but to maintain them. This type of humor is practiced from top to bottom and laughs at opposing bodies, which are presented more as objects of mockery than as empathy. What Carlstrom does not recognize or deliberately ignores is that in this type of “humor” there is a deeply rooted colonial view: the idea that not white bodies, the body of the other, have no right to death. This dehumanization is so insidious that they are not even granted the dignity of grief or recognition, since they are politically constructed as a disposable body that neither compassion nor memory. Carlstrom's comment therefore not only trivializes the tragedy, but also increases a global power structure in which the suffering of peoples from the global south is treated as random or even inevitable without any value.

What is at stake in such comments is ultimately the ability to recognize the humanity of people suffering from dominant geopolitical structures. The silence of the international community, the contempt for the tragedy in Iran and the dehumanization, which is inherent in the comments of numbers such as Carlstrom, are connected in a wider pattern of indifference to the lives outside of the western framework. In this sense, the tragedy in the port of Shahid Rajaei should not only be seen as a local catastrophe, but also as a manifestation of the wider global dynamics of power, which shapes life, suffering and death of millions of people in the non-Western world.

Iranian suffering, like that of other peoples in the global south, is still the subject of a double moral standard: a moral standard that grants the life of the Western and a different value and dignity, which, in the case of racist peoples and those geopolitically outside the dominant global interests, consider death and even necessary as necessary, even necessary. The tragedy in the port of Shahid Rajaei is not only an irreparable pain for the victims and their families, but also a memory of the deep structural injustices that continue to define international relationships in which humanity remains a subordinate problem according to political and geostratic interests.

The silence of many international media in connection with the repellent attitude of certain commentators underlines how global politics is still a space in which life and death of racist bodies are treated with indifference, if not with contempt. In this sense, the tragedy in Iran and the comments that have accompanied this event invite you to the logic of the presentation and the power structures that the peoples remain stimulating outside the global center.