Dubai at war

We have found the planet’s most unsympathetic victims

Amid the terror and incoherence of America and Israel’s ongoing war with Iran, horror is in ample supply. The death toll on the ground for Iranian civilians is large and steadily growing, with the aerial bombing of a girls’ school in Minab, killing 150 children, serving as its most prominent, and horrific, exemplar. The conflict, which has spread to 14 countries, could yet prompt Gulf states to reassess their relationships with a US that seems incapable of shielding them from Iranian missiles, and risks raising the global oil price to $150 per barrel. All this while Trump and his Republican cronies keep describing it as both absolutely a war and definitely not a war, while declining to offer consistent justifications or war aims to either Congress or the American public. It is, in short, a black hole of illogic and horror from which no light can escape. Which might be why so many have sought to pick some tiny speck of glee from the debris.

For almost everyone a specific target of shameful joy has been alighted upon, possibly best introduced by a quote the Financial Times managed to elicit from “an executive at a large global hedge fund with a presence in Dubai”. Quoth he: “It’s pretty scary – this is going to have implications for some of my guys… The trade was not that you were getting exposed to geopolitics when moving to Dubai.”

It was manna from heaven for those chasing the one aspect of this confounding morass which appears to be uniting the entire internet: the reactions of wealthy expats and influencers in Dubai, and other wealthy Gulf cities, trying to post their way through a war. Doha-based sport presenter Richard Keys suggested that he hoped the coming football broadcasts might serve as a “distraction” from the violence. The Dubai-based Isabel Oakeshott praised the “severely disabled” tutor who braved air raids to teach her daughter, prompting more than a thousand puzzled responses. (One particularly barbed reply serves as a handy summation of their form and tone: “My favourite thing about living in a tax free petrostate built on a vast graveyard of dead slaves is when disabled teachers run the gauntlet of falling Iranian bombs.”) Ian Miles Cheong posted a stream of chillingly inert promo vids for his adopted city-state. Andrew Tate danced to a Dubai sunset, and bragged about his plans to cross from Saudi to Dubai, only to be detained by Saudi authorities. All amid a trend in which expats and influencers depicted the trouble-free luxury of their lives beneath the caption “You live in Dubai – aren’t you scared?”.

Dubai has long been a target of ire. It is, unavoidably, a tax haven for the super-wealthy, with a strikingly high population of oligarchs, criminals, cartels and various ne’er-do-wells. It’s an oil-rich city-state governed by an autocracy infamous for its human rights abuses, where homosexuality is illegal, where low-paid migrant workers must endure the kafala sponsorship system which, according to the Global Slavery Index, helps to consign 132,000 people to modern slavery conditions. But it has also come to represent a wider, ostensibly less political, place in the global public’s minds; as a gauche bauble inhabited by insipid twats.

Some – Dubai residents, mostly – greet such reactions as a clear sign of begrudgery. Since that reaction has proved so vehement and universal, it’s hard to discount their argument completely. It is not the many volumes of text written each year by our media’s crime, politics and financial desks that furnish the average person’s mental image of the city. In a sense, those who deride Dubai as an artless vacuum that contributes nothing to global culture are wrong. They forget its most saleable export: a seemingly guilt-free punching bag of garish decadence. A Benidorm for billionaires, now sentenced to be the Florence of Schadenfreude.

Most who’ve gotten a peek behind its gold lamé curtain have done so through social media, where aspirational luxury-posting from Dubai-based influencers has long been ubiquitous. This may be why so many find it hard to mount a systemic critique of Dubai’s many horrors without lapsing into the sort of sneering that would be unthinkable for any other city experiencing aerial bombardment, much of it expressly classist in form. Particular chagrin is reserved, not for the sovereign wealth grandees or cartel bosses in their high-rise offices, but for Dubai’s more self-made influencer class, attacked in a manner that would not be out of place in 18th-century broadsides against arriviste gentry; loathsome parvenus living lives of unearned luxury in their gilded Instagramopolis. Some even express open delight at the idea that these oiks might be obliterated from above, with little reflection on the fact that it would likely be – how shall I put this – literal slaves that would vaporise first.

In a sense, the timeline envy provoked by the internet’s most rich and beautiful long ago reached its ecstatic zenith in Dubai, fuelled by endless snaps of sterile suites, palm-view penthouses and Lamborghini-peppered sidewalks. A groaning grid of Turkey-teethed sponcon shout-outs, and POV tours around icecap-melting indoor ski slopes. All of which has created the planet’s most unsympathetic victims; the unfortunate sin-eaters for the wider horrors of capitalism. A place with little pretence towards embodying what we call Western values, which nonetheless sums up so many of those values completely. A place populated by the celebrities we can’t stop clicking our way towards each day. A place fattened by the fuel we consume, flattered by the leaders we elect, and now at risk of being flattened by the nation those leaders bomb.