The Starving Child, Then and Now
There was a time when the image of a starving child could still demand a response. In 1984, a million Ethiopians faced famine. Britain responded. Not with rage, not with demands for justice, but with coins, concerts, celebrity tears. Compassion was summoned from a distance, abstracted from cause. We were not asked to think about empire or war or trade policy. Just to care.
Quietly.
Generously.
Momentarily.
It worked. In its own depoliticised way. Live Aid raised millions. A generation grew up believing that famine was something that happened “over there”, and that those of us “over here” could do something about it. This wasn’t solidarity. It was humanitarian spectacle. But the affect was real, even if the politics were absent. A starving child on British television still had a chance of being seen as a child.
Now look again. Gaza, 2025. The child in the photograph is dying in front of our eyes. Not in a drought. Not in an abstract geography. But in a besieged strip of land bombed by a close ally of the British state, armed with British weapons, protected by British diplomats. And the gaze has shifted. The same image that once invited pity now triggers suspicion. The child is not innocent. The mother is not grieving. They are Hamas, or tools of Hamas, or symbols of some regrettable complexity we are too busy to face.
It is not that the child does not resemble the one in Ethiopia. It is that we no longer resemble the people who were moved by such images. Or more precisely: we were never those people. We were just less implicated. The structure that allows us to “care” about one starving child and condemn another to silence has not failed. It has functioned exactly as designed. The difference lies in the coordinates of blame.
What mattered in 1984 was distance. Today, what matters is complicity.
The Optics of Innocence
Famine in Ethiopia was presented to the British public as a natural disaster. A drought, a failure of rain, a catastrophe without authors. The image of the starving child appeared in isolation from geopolitics. There was no mention of the Cold War, of Haile Selassie’s legacies, of the Derg regime’s forced resettlements. Famine was what happened when the world forgot. Charity was how the West remembered.
The appeal worked because it demanded nothing of the viewer beyond sentiment. The child’s suffering required no context, no complicity, no history. It was pure need. The British response (Band Aid, Blue Peter, school raffles and Bob Geldof) allowed people to feel they had done something good without questioning the system that had rendered the child disposable in the first place.
That same structure now recoils when shown a child from Gaza. The optics have been reversed. The Gazan child is not perceived as pure need. They are positioned. By the press, by politicians, by the logics of war, as a complication. Not a victim, but a context. The suffering body becomes suspicious. The camera lens has not changed. The viewer has.
This is not mere indifference. It is the ideological work of imperial realism. The child in Gaza breaks the illusion that humanitarianism can be separated from history. She does not die from drought, but from blockade. Not from absence, but from design. Her starvation is not incidental, it is the point.
The Dialectic of Selective Vision
Here is the contradiction: liberal humanitarianism teaches the public to respond to suffering only when it appears apolitical. But suffering is never apolitical. The starving child is never neutral. Their appearance in the media is never unmediated. They are curated by power, framed by ideology, made visible or invisible according to the dominant narrative.
In 1984, that narrative demanded pity and donation. Today, it demands deflection and doubt. The public has not become crueler. It has become more integrated into the system that produces cruelty. British bombs are dropping on Gaza. British press outlets run defence industry adverts between articles about ceasefires. A Gazan child starves on camera, and the comment section asks: “But where are the fathers? Are they Hamas”
This is how the dialectic reveals itself: the more visible the structures of oppression, the less believable the suffering. In the Ethiopian famine, the West could pretend it was a saviour. In Gaza, the West knows, somewhere under the noise, that it is the perpetrator. So it chooses silence. Or suspicion. Or, worst of all, neutrality.
Crisis Aesthetics and the Management of Empathy
Empathy has not disappeared. It has been managed, redirected, weaponised. The image of the starving child no longer activates moral reflex but triggers ideological reflex. Is this photo staged? Is the child a “human shield”? Was aid blocked because of security concerns?
These questions do not arise from curiosity. They are defences. They are the ideological immune system of a public trained not to see what implicates them.
Live Aid was possible because the system required no reckoning. Gaza demands one. That is why the image does not produce action. It produces paralysis.
The State and the Manufacture of Non-Personhood
The image of the starving child in Gaza is not just disturbing, it is dangerous. Not because it lies, but because it reveals. In the face of such revelation, the British state acts not to remedy, but to obscure. From Whitehall to Westminster, from the BBC newsroom to the op-ed pages of The Times, a machinery of obfuscation begins to grind. It does not deny the child exists. It denies that her death matters.
This is the essence of state ideology in the post-humanitarian age: the move from managing appearances to managing perception. Under Thatcher, British statecraft tolerated the moral spectacle of famine because it could be bracketed, distanced, sanitised. A child in Ethiopia could be helped without implicating the imperial ledger. The ledger itself remained hidden.
Under Starmer, the opposite is true. The ledger is open. Britain sells weapons to the Israeli state, signs trade deals with occupation baked into the margins, criminalises protest, and proscribes groups like Palestine Action. The child in Gaza is starving in real time, and the government’s only innovation is to legislate against noticing.
There is no party of opposition. Labour ministers parrot the same bloodless language: “Israel has the right to lay siege, to defend itself.” Starvation becomes collateral. Children become fog-of-war. Gaza becomes a problem of tone and language, not policy and consequence. In this theatre, even acknowledging the child’s suffering is treated as evidence of radicalisation.
The state, in its current configuration, cannot recognise the starving child in Gaza without indicting itself. So it refuses to see her. It permits discussion only in euphemism “deteriorating humanitarian situation”, “urgent need for aid”, “complex conflict zone”. The child is not silenced. She is abstracted out of existence.
Labour’s Complicity is the System’s Continuity
Labour’s role in this is not anomalous. It is exemplary. Starmer’s Labour has no critique of Israeli siege because it has no critique of siege as such. Gaza is not an exception; it is a test case. A state can blockade a people, bomb them into starvation, and still be described in the Commons as a democracy under threat.
That is the real content of “progressive realism” the ideology that dresses complicity as responsibility. Labour does not deny the image of the child.
It absorbs it,
empties it,
files it under “international concern.”
No action follows. No sanction. No rupture. Just the dull throb of managerial speech.
There is no aid effort to match Live Aid. No chorus of concern from celebrities or schools. No humanitarian exception. Instead, there is the quiet erosion of language. Gaza is not famine. Gaza is “insufficient caloric intake.” The child is not starving. She is “suffering the consequences of aid disruption.” Britain is not complicit. It is “monitoring the situation closely.”
The Dialectic of Exposure and Immunity
So the state completes its inversion. Exposure no longer produces shame. It produces immunity. The more the image circulates, the more impervious the system becomes. The photograph of the dying child becomes one more data point in the managed crisis. Tragedy is no longer an indictment. It is routine.
If the 1980s image of famine made the state appear benevolent, the 2020s image threatens to make it legible. That is what must be prevented. The response to Gaza is not apathy. It is active suppression. It is the banning of solidarity. It is the turning of children into provocations, grief into extremism, memory into criminal intent.
The state knows exactly what the image means. That is why it insists it means nothing.
Racial Hierarchies of Suffering
To understand why a starving child in Gaza is met with indifference, we must return to the architecture of British imperial perception. The empire is gone, we are told, but its categories endure. At the apex: the white, civilised subject capable of tragedy. Below that: the non-white victim, pitiable but passive. Beneath that: the racialised threat, for whom victimhood is suspect, and sympathy subversive.
In 1984, the Ethiopian child was legible within this hierarchy. Suffering, yes. But suffering at a distance. A body to feed, not a politics to confront. The image fit the frame: black skin, bloated stomach, Western saviours waiting in the wings. A humanitarian morality play in which Britain could cast itself as the redemptive force.
Gaza shatters this theatre. The child in Gaza is not allowed to be only a victim. She is Palestinian. Muslim. Arab. She exists within the racial scripts that post-9/11 Britain has internalised as common sense: suspect before seen, guilty before proven, hated before heard. Her suffering is not perceived as senseless, but conditional. Why was she there? Why do they breed in war zones? Where is the father? Are they Hamas? Why won’t they leave?
These questions are not inquiries. They are deflections. They are the conditioned reflex of a public trained to think of brown children not as victims, but as threats. The British state does not protect them. It protects itself from the consequences of recognising them.
The Colonial Logic of Deserved Death
Imperial ideology does not only produce war. It produces the moral framework in which war becomes tolerable. When Britain backed the siege of Biafra, it did so while decrying starvation. When it partitioned India, it watched Bengal starve, invoking “natural disaster.” The logic is durable: some deaths are regrettable. Others are necessary. Still others are not deaths at all, merely interruptions to the flow of stability.
Palestinians have never been granted full humanity in this schema. To do so would destabilise the entire ideological edifice. If they are human, then Israel is an occupier. If the child is starving because of us, then charity becomes insufficient. Action is required. Solidarity must take the place of sympathy. The British state cannot allow this.
So the colonial subconscious is activated: they hate us anyway. They teach their children to kill. They bring this on themselves. This is the grammar of empire, repurposed for domestic consumption. The child starves not because of policy, but because of culture. The siege is not military, but moral. The dead are not evidence, but propaganda.
This is how empire reproduces itself through the denial of grief.
From Ethiopia to Gaza: What Has Changed Is Not the Child
The racial and imperial coordinates of British public consciousness determine which lives are grievable. The Ethiopian child was made grievable through distance and innocence. The Palestinian child is made ungrievable through proximity and blame. This is not accidental. It is structural.
In both cases, the child dies. But only in one does her death produce action. In the other, it produces anxiety, silence, denial, or a perverse form of satisfaction.
The Political Economy of Empathy
Empathy is not a universal human reflex. It is a managed resource, allocated through systems of value that are, in the final instance, economic. The starving child does not enter public consciousness as a body in need, but as a figure in a political narrative shaped by capital and empire.
In 1984, the famine in Ethiopia was detached from the violence of structural adjustment, Cold War proxy conflict, and imperial underdevelopment. It was presented as crisis without history. Therefore solvable without transformation. The British public could respond within the safe limits of the market: donate, consume, feel. Bob Geldof, after all, was not asking for revolution. He was asking for a cheque.
But Gaza resists commodification. There is no Band Aid for a child killed by siege. No benefit concert for collective punishment. No consumer redemption for genocide in real time. The image of the Gazan child does not circulate freely because it cannot be instrumentalised. Her suffering cannot be turned into an opportunity for capital or moral performance. She is surplus in the most violent sense: surplus to the needs of empire, surplus to the moral economy of the West, surplus even to the language of humanitarianism. She dies outside the frame of marketable suffering.
This is the truth the image threatens to reveal: that under imperial capitalism, not all suffering is profitable. Some suffering must be ignored, because to acknowledge it would be to acknowledge the system that produces it.
Security, Spectacle, and the Starving Body
The transition from Ethiopia to Gaza is also the transition from the humanitarian to the securitised state. In the 1980s, the state permitted displays of suffering because they did not threaten the structure of global order. But in the 2020s, suffering has become inseparable from resistance. A child dying in Gaza is not simply a tragedy; she is a political scandal. Her body becomes evidence, not of weather, but of war. Not of misfortune, but of policy.
The British state responds accordingly. Images of Gazan suffering are not amplified, they are contained. The risk is not public outrage, but public recognition. Recognition that this is what siege looks like. Recognition that the bombs carry British parts. That the starvation is not incidental but engineered.
So the image is treated like a weapon. Those who share it (journalists, medics, mothers) are treated like combatants. All Hamas, all terrorists. The photograph of the child is not censored outright. That would reveal too much. Instead, it is drowned in doubt, in “both sides,” in procedural ethics and bad-faith questions: Is this real? Who took it? What was the context?
This is not discourse. It is suppression by other means.
Disposability and the Management of Grief
A child is starving. The correct moral response.
Grief,
outrage,
solidarity.
Has been short-circuited by layers of imperial narrative and racial coding. What remains is not apathy, but something colder: administered forgetfulness. The child becomes part of a blur. One more number in a conflict that has been framed as “intractable” and “ancient,” as if the ongoing siege were some stubborn aspect of regional temperament rather than a live colonial process with a clear sponsor and a clear enabler.
This management of grief is essential to the functioning of empire. If grief is allowed to accumulate without ideological containment, it becomes dangerous. It asks questions. It demands names. It identifies culprits. So grief must be pre-emptively neutralised. Redirected toward safer objects, or suppressed entirely.
That is why the child in Gaza cannot be seen. Not truly. She is too real, too close to the wire, too full of consequence.
What Cannot Be Watched Must Be Broken
We are past the point of appeal. There is no petition to sign, no parliamentary ally to count on, no panel show argument that will redeem the child from silence. Gaza 2025 reveals the limits not just of humanitarianism, but of liberalism itself. The image of the starving child does not fail to move the public. It threatens to indict them. So the system’s reflex is not to act, but to anaesthetise.
If this is what the image cannot do, then we must ask: what can it do? It can rupture. It can expose the lie that history has ended. That politics is management. That the West has moved beyond empire. It can remind us, viscerally, that we are still living in the furnace of imperial capitalism, and that every so-called value (democracy, rights, order) is suspended the moment it conflicts with domination.
But the image alone is not enough. It cannot redeem the dead. It cannot feed the living.
It must be weaponised.
Not commodified,
not mourned,
but turned outward against the system that created it.
That means stripping the image of its pity and reloading it with consequence. It means pointing not to the ribs of the child but to the suits in Westminster and the defence contractors in Farnborough. It means naming names.
This is not a failure of compassion. It is a triumph of control. And control cannot be countered by feeling. It must be countered by force. Not individual violence, but collective rupture. A politics that refuses the terms on which grief is granted. That does not ask whether the child deserves sympathy, but whether the system deserves survival.
Towards a Politics of the Ungrievable
Judith Butler once asked who counts as a grievable life. The British state has answered: not them. Not the children of Gaza. Not the unyielding mothers. Not the teachers killed by airstrike. Not the disappeared medical staff. They do not count. Their deaths are not tragedies. They are background noise.
So let us speak instead of the ungrievable. Let us build a politics rooted not in shared pain, but in shared refusal: refusal to play along, to look away, to call this anything other than what it is—slow genocide facilitated by the polite institutions of liberal imperialism.
The time for appeals is over.
The question now is how to make Britain ungovernable by those who would trade a child’s life for diplomatic standing.
How to turn solidarity into disruption, memory into militancy.
How to ensure that those who govern in silence cannot sleep in peace.
No More Starving Children
This is the task: to abolish the conditions that make images like this possible. Not to cry over them. Not to explain them. To end them. That means dismantling the siege. It means ending arms sales. It means taking aim at every institution (from Parliament to the press) that has chosen complicity over conscience.
We do not need another Live Aid. We need a rupture. We need rebellion. We need the kind of politics that refuses to let this image become history without justice.
No more starving children. Not in Gaza. Not anywhere. And not in our name
