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“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilise, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one's eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilisatrice.” ― Edward W. Said
According to the 2024 Global Peace Index, the total sum invested in peace and peacebuilding represents a mere 0.6 percent of global military expenditure. So is it any wonder that our weapons-crazed leaders will choose violence over conversations? “Violence is man re-creating himself,” Franz Fanon wrote.
For those of us with a conscience, those who can see through the hypocrisy, the double standards, the madness of it all, what else can we do beyond our usual expressions of outrage and heartbreak?
The problem, writes Achille Mbembe, is that war is today seen as an end and a necessity, both in politics and in our culture, it has become both remedy and poison, our Pharmakon. And this, he says, has “let loose gruesome passions that are increasingly pushing our societies to exit democracy and, as was the case under colonisation, to transform into societies of enmity.”
With the full complicity of western journalists, the states doing the murdering and supplying the weapons, have a full monopoly on violence. Any resistance to being sacrificed offends the oppressor and justifies even more brutality. These barbaric, uncivilised people are bringing it upon themselves.
This is because we are living in an age of what Mbembe calls necropolitics, where entire populations are so dehumanised that they are reduced to barely bodies so they can be more easily killed. Necropolitics “exerts itself with a statistical perfection, it deploys tactics and strategies to put an end to certain populations, to certain bodies with minimal resistance.”
What we are also witnessing beyond the massacres and destruction, as well as their demented justifications, is an undermining and departure from international law and the global rules-based order. Or was it never real to begin with? Is this just a limited Western perspective?
Following the end of the second world war, when the world came together to establish the United Nations, the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and hopeful messages of ‘never again,’ many people, especially in Western countries, thought that this was the beginning of a new era, that we had turned the page on our most shameful history.
But, warned Albert Camus at the time, defeating nazism was not the end of unspeakable killings, they were still being carried out, just not on European soil.
This was what Camus referred to as our ‘crimes of logic,’ where we are able to rationalise the extermination of groups of people in the name of rationality, of an ideology, in the name of progress. Nazism just took rational killing to its most extreme, it was Western philosophy’s rational conclusion.
For Camus, it was crucial we ask ourselves why, and, more importantly, whether it is ever acceptable to murder people.
What we are witnessing today, is a continuation of these crimes of logic, where people are able to rationalise why some people (and much of the planet) can be sacrificed. This is what we are seeing in Palestine, in the Congo, in Sudan, on European borders, in many other places. This is what we witnessed in Bosnia, in Rwanda, for Indigenous peoples the world over.
For those of us who, like Camus, will never accept that some people can be sacrificed, what can we do? Our outrage has not succeeded in putting an end to the massacres, getting accountability, or overhauling the system that perpetuates these horrors. Our efforts to insist on the humanity of those being killed is also not working.
For those directly impacted, as we learn from history, resistance is the only option. We must be in solidarity with them. If we are witnessing the horrors unfolding from afar, we have a duty to consider our responsibilities, our professions, our platforms.
Are humanitarian organisations, for example, complicit if they insist on taking neutral positions, on being apolitical? How do we hold journalists and intellectuals accountable when they no longer pursue the truth, or only for some people? How do we support the activists who are putting their bodies on the line in the name of humanity? (These are some of the questions we will be exploring in the coming months).
War is separation, it is destruction of places, of people, of relationships. So are borders. So are most of our political narratives. The more isolated and alone we are, the more easily we will be seduced by ideas of othering. At the very least, we must take care of each other and our communities.
Rebecca Solnit once said that perhaps we are witnessing the death throes of a particular kind of white supremacy and white patriarchy, but it will destroy as much as it can on its way out. Our role should be to protect as much as we can as we usher it out.
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes.
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References
Orientalism, Edward W. Said.
Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe.
The Rebel, Albert Camus.
‘Albert Camus, The Rebel part I,’ Revolution and Ideology podcast, hosted by Jared Benson and Nick Lee. Listen here.
‘The humanitarian system: politics can not be avoided,’ The Lancet, Shatha Elnakib, Sarah Aly, Yara M Asi, Yusra Ribhi Shawar, 21 September 2024. Read here.
A Conversation with Rebecca Solnit at Shakespeare and Company, Paris, 29 June 2018. Listen here.
Further Resources
The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon.
‘Amid all the darkness: How kindness helped me survive one year of Israel’s genocide in Gaza,’ Nour ElAssy, The New Humanitarian, 2 October 2024. Read here.
‘Inside Israel’s death worlds and the necropolitics of occupation,’ Parth Sharma, AnalystNews, 17 September 2024, read here.
From Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching, A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, A New English Version by Ursula K. Le Guin.
“Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.” — Toni Morrison
“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”― Chinua Achebe
“What do you do when the highway’s famished? When it eats people? When soldiers are walking on the streets beating people up, what do you do? Where do you go when going forward is no longer possible? I think you steal through cracks. I think you do what fugitives do. I think you do what the slaves on slave ships did when they were dominated by colonial powers. You learn to fall down and sit still and await the crossroads. You learn to listen. You learn to compost yourself.” — Bayo Akomolafe
“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep spring from coming.” — Pablo Neruda
“Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.” — Hannah Arendt
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” — Anais Nin
