The very history of the word “genocide”, meant as a mechanic of forewarning rather than some after-the-fact resolution, is littered with instances of the world’s most powerful governments going to whatever lengths they can to avoid its usage, because usage is attached to obligation. It was never intended to be enough to simply call something genocide: one is required to act.
The most frustrating aspect of all this is that most journalists know how to be tenacious. They know how to chase down a story, how to speak truth to power. In articles about atrocities committed by groups or nations that are not Western allies, nobody ever perishes in a blast. Buildings don’t collapse of their own volition. Civilian victims aren’t ordered by their interviewers to performatively condemn groups with which they have no affiliation. The violence is named, as is its perpetrator.
Narrative power, maybe all power, was never about flaunting the rules, yelling at a cop, making trouble — it was about knowing that, for a privileged class, there existed a hard ceiling on the consequences.
And on the heels of that realization, a converse one: I begin to suspect that the principles holding up this place might not withstand as much as I first thought. That the entire edifice of equality under law and processs, of fair treatment, could just as easily be set aside to reward those who belong as to punish those who don’t. A hard ceiling for some, no floor for others.
Of course the Republicans would be worse. What the mainstream Democrat seems incapable of accepting is that, for an even remotely functioning conscience, there exists a point beyone which relative harm can no longer offset absolute even. For a lot of people, genocide is that point.
The moral component of history, the most necessary component, is simply a single question, asked over and over again: What it mattered, who sided with justice and who sided with power? What makes moments like this one so dangerous, so clarifying, is that one way or another everyone is forced to answer.
Some things are complicated. Some things have been complicated.
For the gaggle of authoritarians who run most of the Arab world, there is nothing to be gained from meaningfully assisting a population so well versed in resisting oppression, lest that capacity for resistance prove contagious.
In time there will be findings of genocide. There will be warrants issued, even. The structures of international law, undermined at every turn, will nonetheless attempt to operate as if law were an evenly alloted thing. As though criminality remains criminal even when the powerful support, bankroll, or commit the crime.
It’s no use, in the end, to scream again and again at the cold, cocooned center of power: I need you, just this once, to be the thing you pretend to be.
It’s almost refreshing, then, when one is faced with the ugliest and yet most honest face of Western apathy, the face that knows full well the scale and severity of the horror but believes it to be absolutely justified, absolutely necessary. I know this face, too. It appears on talk shows and atop opinion pieces stating, euphemistically or not, that the same world in which you can buy avocados all year round and your iPhone keeps getting more powerful and you never have to live in fear of an occupying force obliterating your family with missiles is the world in which an insignificant group of people you’ll never meet simply have to die. And whatever disgust this equation, laid bare, might inspire, many know it to be true. This is the world we’ve created, a world in which one privileged sliver consumes, insatiable, and the best everyone else can hope for is to not be consumed. It is not without reason that the most powerful nations on earth won’t intervene to stop a genocide but will happily bomb one of the poorest counries on the planet to keep a shipping lane open.
Power absent ethics rests on an unshakable ability and desire to punish active resistance — to beat and arrest and try to ruin the lives of people who block freeways and set up encampments and confront lawmakers. But such power has no idea what to do against negative resistance, against someone who refuses to buy or attend or align, who simply says: I will not be part of this. Against the one who walks away.
Wherever you are, whatever sand you can throw on the gears of genocide, do it now. It it’s a handful, throw it. If it’s a fingernail full, scrape it out and throw. Get in the way however you can.
The gears will grind to a halt one day, and the silence that waits then, for those who commended this killing and for those who said nothing, will be of a far more burrowing kind. It will take the form of grandchildren who, when the subject comes up, will pretend not to know how their grandparents behaved, will awkwardly try to tak about anything else. It will take the form of previous statements quietly deleted, previous opinions abandoned and replaced with shiny new ones about how, yes, it was such a terrible thing that happened. And finally, it will take the form of a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul. And there will be no words exchanged then, only a knowing.
A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.
[E]very small act of resistance trains the muscle that’s used to to do it, in much the same way that turning one’s eyes from the horror strengthens that particular muscle, readies it to ignore even greater horror to come. One builds the muscle by walking away from the most minor things — trivial consumables, the cultural work of monsters, the myriad material fruits grown on stolen ground — and realizes in the doing of these things that there is a wide spectrum of negative resistance.
When climate change upends the lives of billions, our governments will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for violence against the hordes of nameless others to enact its cruelest, most violent fortressing. In time, negation becomes all there is. To walk away from this system is to speak the only language the system will ever understand.
Otherwise, there will be nothing left under this way of living. In the end we will be asked to normalize not just unlimited extraction and unlimited suffering but total absence, a hollo wthat will look an awful lot like the one we were asked to overlay onto the minimum-wage workers and the climate refugees and the victims of endless colonial wars and, yes, even those dead Palestinian children who, had they bene allowed to live, might have done something terrible. Just for a moment, cease to believe that this particular group of people are human.
One day this will end. In liberation, in peace, or in eradication at a scale so overwhelming it resets history. It’ll end when sanctions pile up high enough, or the political cost of occupation and apartheid proves debilitating. When finally there is no other means of preserving self-interest but to act, the powerful will act. The same people who did the killing and financed the killing and justified the killing and turned away from the killing will congratulate themselves on doing the right thing. It is very important to do the right thing, eventually.
When the time comes to assign blame, most of those to blame will be long one. There will always be feigned shock at how bad things really were, how we couldn’t have possibly known. There will be those who say it was all the work of a few bad actors, people who misled the rest of us well-meaning folks. Anything to avoid contending with the possibility that all this killing wasn’t the result of a system abused, but a system functioning exactly as intended.
For many people, that will be enough>