Physician Gary Slutkin spent a decade fighting tuberculosis, cholera and AIDS epidemics in Africa. When he returned to America he began to see similarities between in the patterns of epidemics he had treated in Africa and the patterns of gun violence in his own country.
He figured the best way to fight gun violence was to treat it as a disease, to fight at the points of transmission. Retaliatory attacks did not solve the violence, they made it worse, and that preventing it spreading from one person to another was the only way to stop this epidemic.
The anthropologist Rene Girard said “Violence is like a raging fire that feeds on the very objects intended to smother its flames.” This is not just a philosophical point of view, the War on Terror has created more terrorism and more terror than would ever have been possible without western intervention. As Corbyn says “It is the conflict in Syria and the consequences of the Iraq war which have created the conditions for Isis to thrive and spread its murderous rule.”
Civilian deaths and the destruction of homes and infrastructure that is an inevitable consequence of intervention will be used by ISIL to support their view that the west is against them, and give credence to their continued violence. The people of Syria have been begging for international intervention for years, bombing to retaliate shows them the west will only act when they are personally attacked – that a French life is worth so much more than a Syrian one. And that protecting a French life at the cost of a Syrian civilian is acceptable.
So what is the answer?
For Gary Slutkin is was to create a group of individuals called The Interrupters who, when there was gun or gang violence went and talked to the family and friends or other gang members before they had a chance to retaliate, calming them down, showing them other ways they can deal with the situation – in other words interrupting the vector (pathway) of the disease.
Corbyn’s idea to “to reach a negotiated settlement of the Syrian civil war – and end the threat from Isis” by international political intervention is a scaled up idea of Slutkin’s model of Interrupters. As many others before him – Martin Luther King, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela – have realised, non-violent action is the most successful form of long-term positive change. Even when so much of their community called for violence, they kept this belief in sight, and I hope that Corbyn will too.
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