It feels intolerable to realize how many of our neighbors are genocidal racists. How many others are indifferent and unmoved. How commerce and trade and normal relations can go on while genocide is ongoing. Our minds are repelled. We’re emotional wrecks alternating between panic, guilt, rage, and helplessness.
From this place we write our laments.
The world has failed.
We have allowed this to happen.
We are cowards.
These are our human reactions.
The lament is necessary to feel the futility of appeals to our elites who are more rotten than we could have imagined; to feel the futility of appeals to laws that are on the books but that depend on these same rotten, racist elites for enforcement. When we tell ourselves that we have allowed this to happen because we are cowards, we are challenging our own courage.
How could we not? We share the world with people in Yemen who have said that they will support Gaza even if the sky falls; we share the world with Aaron Bushnell and a growing number of political prisoners. The people of Lebanon had their villages destroyed, thousands killed. The people of Palestine are struggling against a whole West bent on exterminating them. Are we doing enough? It’s a good question, a just question.
But, my anti-genocide friends, we have to focus!
We have to accept the reality we are in. We can’t afford illusions about power we don’t have. We aren’t allowing this to happen: we lack the power to stop it.
We aren’t allowing this to happen: we lack the power to stop it.
The genocide is indeed facilitated by mass Western racism and mass global cowardice. The genocidals have indeed created a world system of legal impotence and racist indifference to their use of unlimited violence. Everything is permitted to them. They repeat lies that even they don’t believe as a way to signal their affiliation to one another, and to show us that they can say and do what they want and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s incorrect to believe them. But it’s equally incorrect to believe that we can stop them with a shrug.
Many of us do have courage (see Palestine Action) but a small number of extremely courageous acts cannot turn this around. If millions reached that level of consciousness and of action, the genocide would quickly end. The actionists are at one extreme of courage. Risk-free support for fundraisers, awareness-raising, and boycotting are at the other with demonstrating in the middle, we need all of this. Not a few people doing everything, but more people doing more. Focus on that equation: More people all the time, each with a bit more courage all the time.
About 100 years ago one anti-war writer wrote that “the struggle against a centralized state’s powerful terrorist military organization is a difficult and lengthy business.” At the time, that writer argued that leaders of the movement needed to “express themselves in favor of the defeat of their own governments”, to “set up an international apparatus for the purpose of carrying on propaganda”, “organize the publication of illegal literature on the necessity of starting revolutionary activities.” He concluded “we cannot tell whether a powerful revolutionary movement will develop immediately after this war or during it,” but the only worthy thing to do was to “work in this direction.”*
In the Thorn and the Carnation, Yahya Sinwar’s characters organize for struggle while going in and out of prison, under surveillance and torture. These characters have a matter-of-fact attitude about all of it. They debate strategy and principle, they take risks at times and act with caution at others. What you won’t see them doing is lament the indifference of the world or call themselves cowards.
We have the world we have. Take a moment to lament it. Then take back your anti-genocide focus.
*The writer was named Lenin.
