tumbledry

Nothing to do with this

Omar El Akkad:

For members of every generation, there comes a moment of complete and completely emptying disgust when it is revealed there is only a hollow. A completely malleable thing whose primary use is not the opposition of evil or administration of justice but the preservation of existing power. History is a debris field of such moments. They arrive in the form of British and French soldiers to the part of the world I’m from. They come to the Salvadorans and Chileans and Iranians and Vietnamese and Cambodians in the form of toppled governments and coups over oil revenue and villages that had to be burned to the ground to save them from some otherwise terrible fate. They arrived at the turn of the twentieth century to Hawaii (the U.S. apologized for the overthrow of the Hawaiian government—almost a hundred years later.) They come to the Indigenous population eradicated to make way for what would become the most powerful nation on earth, and to the Black population forced in chains to build it, severed from home such that, as James Baldwin said, every subsequent generation’s search for lineage arrives, inevitably, not at a nation or a community, but a bill of sale. And at every moment of arrival the details and the body count may differ, but in the marrow there is always a commonality: an ambitious, upright, pragmatic voice saying, Just for a moment, for the greater good, cease to believe that this particular group of people, from whose experience we are already so safely distanced, are human.

Now, for a new generation, the same moment arrives. To watch the leader of the most powerful nation on earth endorse and finance a genocide prompts not a passing kind of disgust of anger, but a severance. The empire may claim fear of violence because the fear of violence justifies any measure of violence in return, but this severance is of another kind: a walking away, a noninvolvement with the machinery that would produce, or allow to produce, such horror. What has happened, for all the future bloodshed it will prompt, will be remembered as the moment millions of people looked to the West, the rules-based order, the shell of modern liberalism and the capitalistic thing it serves, and said: I want nothing to do with this.

From One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.

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Alexander Micek

I think I’ll leave some more quotes from the same book in the comments.

… the chief concern of so many stories is not the substance of the policy proposal but the way it moves the polls. It’s a bizarre, destructive form of pragmatism—the jettisoning of moral faculties in favor of a near-Machiavellian view of the world.

Alexander Micek

… the bedrock of polite intellectual discourse that liberalism so desperately and invariably sees as a hallmark of its own enlightenment is shown to be a phantom thing—a premise that, when most needed, cedes the floor to the concrete vocabulary of violence.

Alexander Micek

I’ve seen the Punisher decal on the bumper, the stylized American flag denoting the thin blue line: I’m an outlaw; also, anyone who disobeys the cops deserves to be killed.

My first impulse is to mock the contradiction, but there’s no contradiction, not really, because the bedrock of this particular identity isn’t conformity or nonconformity—it’s self-interest. Anyone who buys into both the narrative of American rebelliousness and the reality of American authority understands that both have been created to serve them.

Alexander Micek

I ask my friend how the years following the Arab spring have been for him, and he shakes his head.
Everything’s falling apart, he says.
I had heard the same sentiment before, from many members of my family—Egypt’s precarious upper middle class, for whom democracy was a nice abstraction, but the janitor’s son getting all worked up and forgetting his place was very, very real. With a strong, decisive man at the helm, you have stability, I was told time and again—not this chaos where all norms and values go out the window, and who knows what your kids end up thinking or saying or doing. Years later, I’d hear all this again on a different assignment, interviewing Trump voters.

Alexander Micek

It’s not surprising, I don’t think, that in the midst of this indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most active work in opposing genocide are Jews. Here is love born of pain, of the past century’s most horrific crime, love of one’s own spread outward into love of another. Whatever the empire is, it has no idea what to do with this kind of love, which adheres neither to the empire’s own central principle of self-interest nor to the adjoining principle that solidarity is only with one’s own, that love for one’s people may never become love for another.

Alexander Micek

Daily we are told there is nothing better than this. Our graphics cards and loafers arrive at our doorsteps the same day we order them—what more is there to want? We hurtle from shock to shock, bubble to bubble, oriented in the direction of complete ecological collapse and a future mortgaged beyond any hope of repayment. Yet we are told the most frightening thing is not this building chaos, but rather the possibility that any other course might end in secret police and breadlines. Daily the entirety of the right-wing sphere and an alarming number of liberals fret about a generation of young people deluded into Marxism or some other ideological bogeyman. When students at the most prestigious universities in North America build encampments in solidarity with Palestine, it’s difficult to believe the institutional response isn’t colored by a sense of betrayal. These young people have been afforded entry into the heart of the system, with all the privileges that entails. That they should jettison such a privilege in favor of a people on the other side of the planet who are able to offer nothing in return—to an ideology fixated on self-interest, it must seem like an embrace of nihilism.

In reality, what is happening is the opposite of an embrace. It’s a shoving aside of the present system, a system that makes it more and more clear there is no future, no community, for this or any other generation to come. Only endless taking—and if these young people must pay for it by forfeiting hope or possibility or clean air or a livable planet, so be it. A system more petulant and intransigent than any protester who ever lived. A system that can only ever say: There is nothing better than this.

Alexander Micek

To orient oneself in relation to this kind of equivocation as it exists in the West—where a genocide is a conflict of equals, and really who’s to say what a sufficient number of dead civilians is, and it’s all so complicated anyway—is to temporarily forget that most of the world sees this for what it is right now. This mandatory waiting period, in which the rest of the planet politely pleads with the West’s power centers to bridge the gap between its lofty ideals and its bloodstained reality, to do anything at all, is not some natural phenomenon, but the defining feature of neoliberalism. What purer expression of power than to say: I know. I know but will do nothing so long as this benefits me. Only later, when it ceases to benefit me, will I proclaim in great heaving sobs my grief that such a thing was ever allowed to happen. And you, all of you, even the dead in their graves, will indulge my obliviousness now and my repentance later because what affords me both is in the end not some finely honed argument of logic or moral primacy but the blunt barrel of a gun.

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