The Politics of Death: Charlie Kirk, Gaza and the State of Humanity

The unjust loss of human life, in theory, should shake us to our core.  

It should evoke from us a visceral grief, the innate and primal reaction that arises when something sacred has been extinguished. For indeed, human life is sacred and the loss of a life should, at the very least, compel one to pause and reflect. 

And yet increasingly, it doesn't. 

In the backdrop of a politically tense and volatile global climate, plagued by the ongoing slaughter of Gazan civilians, widespread social unrest and most recently the high-profile assassination of conservative American commentator Charlie Kirk - our exposure to death has not only become increasingly more frequent but far more distorted. 

The truth is that despite all our apparent 'Western' advancements, we are no longer disturbed or even remotely moved by human violence. Whether it be mindlessly scrolling past images of lifeless, amputated children, with a million justifications or brazenly sharing footage a man being shot in the neck the result is the same. 

Perhaps this is moral fatigue.

Perhaps this is mass desensitisation 

Perhaps it is a consequence of a humanity divided along partisan lines. 

Perhaps it is all of these and perhaps these are all fragments of a wider, uncomfortable truth.

But what does it mean when the death of a human being - whether a controversial figure or a distant other, immediately becomes a proxy for politics?

The killing of Gazans, the death of Kirk, and particularly the discourses following these events have unraveled far more than the life of one man, or the lives of a besieged people. They act as mirror to a deeper collective moral fracture, an inability to reflect on the state of humanity without burying the dead in the battleground of political ideology.  

When the first biblical murder occurred, when Cain rose against his brother Abel, the story ended not merely with the first sin of murder but with greater sin of indifference. The sin of moral apathy. 

But Cain's sin did not die with him. It echoed through the tunnel of time. 

So when death is dissected along partisan lines, and when we respond to loss of life not with a burning desire to stop it but rather to qualify or justify it, the question that emerges is: 

What does human life mean to us? 

Whether it is blaming Palestinian deaths on a Hamas terror agenda, or celebrating the murder of a controversial political figure, if someone else's lack of humanity, ideological differences, or perceived flaws can so easily erode our own, can we truly claim to have morality? Do we really value the sanctity of human life?

In these troubled times, the greatest tragedy facing humanity is not merely the frequency of death. It is that the sanctity of human life has died too often in the machinery of politics. 

Human life has become a tool, a symbolic ammunition in a broader political struggle. We do not protect human life, we politicise it perhaps as a means to absolve ourselves of our failure to uphold its sanctity or confront our own complicity and selective outrage. 

And so we must ask ourselves, what does it take to uphold the sanctity of human life in times where politics and society are ever so divisive. 

Ultimately, if one claims to value the sanctity of human life and to oppose unjust suffering, then one must value the sanctity of all human life and oppose all forms of unjust suffering, including the lives of those with whom we vehemently disagree, those who are far away from us and even those who may reject this very principle altogether.

This is the only morally consistent humanitarian position.

And it is the only position that will allow us to approach death, not as a political by-product, but as a grave sin and one that ought to be grieved and above all, prevented.