Expendable - The Characters We Are Happy to Casually Kill Off

Oh no, I’m not talking about tv shows

Foreword: I spent all of yesterday - October seventh, 2024 - digging around the darkest recesses of my mind for something meaningful to say. I came up short. So here’s this instead.

My kid has an interesting problem. Ever since he was little, he was weirdly drawn to villains - but never the main Big Bad. More like the armies of cannon-fodder type generic bad guys. In Star Wars he loved the Storm Troopers, then there was a long period of obsession with the Tusken Raiders, then he discovered the Imperial Royal Guard. (They’re red, and everyone knows red is the best color). 

In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles he loved the Foot Clan, as well as a series of forgettable third rate throwaway villains. (Was super fun fulfilling his Christmas wish lists, Santa had to write to private rare figurine collectors). In every show he ends up getting into, he sort of gravitates towards the henchmen. 

I wonder if you’re ahead of me in spotting where the predicament lies. 

The henchmen are…. disposable. Expendable. Nobody cares about them. We can’t see their faces specifically so we don’t have the opportunity to get attached and start questioning the heroes when they blast them full of holes without a second’s hesitation. So Lu faces constant heartbreak as his favorite characters are perpetually disposed of in very unceremonious ways. He is misreading the emotional coding of the stories. They weren’t the ones he was supposed to care about.

I carry a number of traumatic memories from when I was a child, but possibly the worst is the memory of a children’s poem about a wolf. Now children’s poems in the countries of the old socialist bloc were often pretty darn high on the emotional damage scale, apparently there was a general belief back then that depression is somehow good for the soul. But this particular one doesn’t come up in other people’s memories, which leads me to believe it’s my personal tragedy, even though it was written by an extremely well known author. 

The poem, as I mentioned, is about a wolf. But this wolf was different from the other wolves in the forest, he was kind, a gentle soul, and he dreamed of having friends ‘among sheep, and dogs, and men’, instead of skulking around the woods forever alone. One day, not able to bear his solitude any longer, he decided to head towards a human village and try to explain himself, and possibly find some empathy and warmth. But he ran across some hunters who shot him dead on sight, without a second thought. He was a wolf, after all. That’s what you do with wolves.

The final line of the poem, which can make me tear up right now, quite casually, says ‘No one felt sorry for him - they thought he had been evil.’

It is one thing to die. It is another thing to be killed. It is a different thing altogether for no one to mourn you, because they have declared you evil, or expendable. Or both.

Image by Hattori_Han_Hanzo on Reddit

The West has decided that the people of Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti, and so many others - are evil, or expendable, or both. All the media messaging presents them as a movie villain’s armies of faceless henchmen. No names, no faces, no personalities. An amorphous mass of ‘terrorists and haters of western freedoms and human rights’. And this emotional coding is working like an absolute charm - I know masses of people in real life who are absolutely capable of empathy towards their fellow man, but don’t blink twice at news of thousands of deaths in these ‘evil henchman’ countries. 

The fact that our entire establishment is presenting Israel’s genocide of Palestine as ‘self defense’, and Israel’s terrorist attacks against Lebanon as ‘clever Trojan Horse operations’ or ‘shrewd tactical genius’, surely must give a thinking person some pause. Have we any doubt what Israel’s blood campaign would be described as if it were conducted by Iran? Do we question for a moment what the West would be saying if the ‘strategic genius’ of blowing up the pagers of doctors and government officials had been orchestrated by Hamas? If it were charred body parts of Israeli infants gathered out of the crumbled ruins of multiple residential buildings obliterated in ‘a surgical strike on a military operative’?

We don’t. We know that would, obviously, be unacceptable. Just the thought of thousands of devices exploding in hospitals or in people’s homes in America, England, Germany, France, Israel, having been purposely rigged with explosives and distributed to civilians - is enough to give us all the shivers. ‘The barbarity! The viciousness! Attacking innocents! Only animals would do that! We must wipe them off the face of the earth to make sure such a monstrous act is never committed again!’ 

You can hear it, can’t you. We heard it after 9/11, we heard it after 7/10. No mention then of clever tactics and genius strategies. 

So how can we explain this eerie discrepancy? Well it’s easy, you see. Those countries that are suffering right now, being relentlessly attacked - I mean sure, human suffering is sad, in theory. But those countries - they just aren’t inhabited by main characters, you know? It’s just a bunch of faceless evil henchmen and random NPCs. You ever see anyone cry over a shot Storm Trooper? Anyone have any feelings about the deaths of individual Death Eaters? Of course not. You’re not meant to. 

So I don’t know if you know this, but a massive portion of Hollywood movies are bankrolled in part by the US military, with the proviso that the military gets to sign off on the script. That’s why they all have so much admiring footage of various weapons and army vessels, that’s why if the bad guys are part of the system they will always be ‘a bunch of bad apples’ who can be nearly excised by the heroes before the movie ends, and the goodness and righteousness of the entire military apparatus goes back to being beyond question. 

It makes sense for the army to invest in triple A movies that would show off its power and its toys, as they make great recruitment tools. But it also makes sense to promote the image of certain groups of people as non-entities. It makes sense to desensitize the viewer to a certain type of killing. To make sure we intuitively understand not all deaths are a loss, and not every murdered child is created equal. 

Even when we’re shown massive damage in our own cities - say Superman is fighting Squidtron or whatever, and entire blocks of apartment buildings are coming down - we all understand those sacrifices are unfortunate but inevitable. It’s always a ‘gotta break some eggs to make an omelette’ situation, and not ‘little Susie who lived in apartment 205 of that building Superman just threw at someone loved playing the piano and dreamed of becoming a teacher one day’. 

If we start to pay attention to how different information is presented to us, we can start to tease out these overarching thematic motifs - who are we meant to empathize with? Whose lives are a loss to the world? Who is worth mourning? 

And who has been relegated to Storm Trooper rank. 

Image by Brick Connection Central on Ebay

So if you are one of the people who instinctively react with resignation rather than anguish at the desperate fates of people in ‘those other places’, whatever that might be for you - if you are the sort of person who feels it’s unfortunate but sort of legitimate to bring down an entire apartment block in Lebanon to take out one supposed military target, while you know in your heart of hearts you would NOT be so casual about that technique if it were used to neutralize a suspected terrorist in YOUR home town - (and I am not trying to single you out here, because this was me too until relatively recently) - let’s sit with that thought and try to actively unpack it. 

Obviously in the first spot we have human nature - we are not originally built to have equal empathy for the entire planet, because for such a long time our communities were kind of small. There was evolutionary advantage to believing your group/ tribe/ village was special and the other guys from over the hill were just evil jerks who were jealous of your freedom. But the world has evolved into a true global village today, so we can’t really afford to keep functioning on instinct alone.

Secondly we have the fear factor. Things are just scarier if they can also happen to you. Hearing statistics on how many girls get raped every year in some country where no one looks remotely like you? It might give you an unpleasant jolt but isn’t likely to ruin your day. Ehh they’re just a different sort of people, it’s unfortunate but what can you do. They’re not like us. Hearing statistics on how many girls get raped every year in your state? Eh it might make you a bit more uneasy but those girls are probably different from you, maybe they weren’t careful enough, maybe they took unnecessary risks… Hearing a woman your age got raped on your street? Suddenly you’re terrified. You need a chaperone to go to the corner store for chips and ice cream.

Finally, we have the influence of a lifetime of conditioning that tells you that your group - that you personally happened to be born into through absolute sheer happenstance - just happens to be objectively superior to all others, to the point where they’re all literally a little bit less human than you. Sometimes we see this conditioning in odd places, for instance in things like humanitarian campaigns. 

What is your general memory of humanitarian drives while we were growing up? For me it’s mostly images of skinny African kids with flies on their faces. I never recall any of those kids getting to say anything in those ads, or being asked anything. I don’t remember them even being shown as ever doing anything except waiting morosely in line for aid, whether medicine or food. I never remember being told which country they were from, beyond ‘Africa’. 

I certainly don’t remember ever being told why they’re in the horrible situation they are in. (Hint resource extraction by western powers and violent regime changes orchestrated from the outside in order to facilitate said extraction hint hint).

So I genuinely believe this sort of systemic presentation of Other Places as essentially one-dimensional - The Poor Children of Africa, whose lives consist of waiting for our help apparently, The Crazy Terrorists of The Middle East, whose entire existence rotates around ululating wildly and blowing shit up, The Cheap Workers of China, who work day and night to produce cheap tat you buy on sale, nevermind that China actually produces most of the products we consider top quality as well……. This forcible pancaking of vast and diverse groups of Other People into one ugly caricature - could it be part of the reason why today we seem to genuinely believe that sacrificing their rights in order to preserve some of our rights is the ONLY logical political move? 

…Because it doesn’t make sense to us to sacrifice The Heroes for the sake of some random background characters?

I’m just asking.