Living Through Genocide
As we go about our day, ordinary things becomes more difficult because we're living through a genocide
It hasn’t been easy doing anything of late. There’s a moment in the morning before opening my eyes when I’m aware I’m no longer sleeping. Instead of slowly finding my way to consciousness, my mind jumps into panic. A spaghetti list of urgent tasks worms through my brain. The task list is so daunting. There’s an email I need to send and it feels like a colossal effort to locate the attachment, writing simple text and sending out that email. Everything seems monumental and insurmountable.
It’s not that my tasks are difficult. In the right mindset, they take very little time. It’s that we’re living through a genocide.
Everything compared to the mass murder and torture of Palestinians seems so inconsequential. I find it hard to believe that these are our times. Genocide has always been such a remote thought, something that we read about in books, or see dramatized in big movie productions. It’s always been something distant and detached from the realities of the world we live in. Maybe it was something in the past, or something that happens to other people, but all of a sudden it’s real, it’s around us and it’s ugly. It’s in our daily vocabulary and text, it’s right outside our doors and all around us. If we search through our messaging apps, it appears regularly throughout the past months and that is something very unnatural and disconcerting.
Our inability to make a dent in the ongoing killing makes us feel hopeless and paralyzed. What’s the point of doing anything when all those people are dying and while many of us are getting a great portion of their paychecks from those complicit in their murder?
Yet survival kicks in. We live in a system designed to keep going no matter what happens. It doesn’t stop for genocide. We’re programmed to feel more guilty about pausing than we do about mass murders happening by our government. We’re programmed to feel guilty about not producing anything no matter how trivial it is. The job is what’s important in the abstract. Genocide seems to be an afterthought. If you ask officers during Nazi times why they did what they did, they would probably tell you that it was their job. I suppose that’s what most of the genocide enforcers answer when you ask them why they make genocide possible, they just have to do their job.
How do we find purpose in a world that has lost purpose? How do we keep at it with the ethics set by society while they operate with no morality? If we stop, we disappear, fade into oblivion, lose the means to affect the world we want to change or escape. We’re part of the machine, and we have to keep going to survive sometimes. And then I find the strength to find that attachment and send that email, I have to live to fight another day.
On some days I wonder what’s the point of even fighting, but on other days I realize I’d rather fight and lose than forgo my humanity. The reality is that it’s defeating and traumatizing living through a genocide. Everyday tasks seem to remind us of a simulation we find ourselves trapped in. These Western institutions forcing their version of morality down our throats, where that version includes the justification of the mass murder of innocent civilians because “that’s war”, or because fighting people who only they’ve deemed as terrorists justifies the mass murder of innocent people, or because chanting for liberation of a people is genocidal, but an actual genocide is not a genocide.
There’s no turning it off, the news is littered not, just with images of atrocities, but with Joe Biden fabricating evidence, Ursula von der Leyen rejecting that a genocide is a condition for which the EU can question its unconditional support for Israel’s actions, or Matt Miller giving ridiculous answers in the white house briefings, or Justin Treaudau, Olaf Scholz, Robert Habeck, Rishi Sunak and countless others effectively either denying or justifying genocide.
I’m lucky that opposing genocide won’t cost me my job, yet all around me people are losing their livelihood, expelled, defamed, rebuked for opposing genocide. Meanwhile ‘freedom of speech’ is heralded in German society and their media as a reminder that hypocrites rule the world. The full force of Germany’s government and institutions are in support of yet another genocide, not their own this time, but somehow the allure seems to still be there.
It’s tempting to express our resistance solely through criticism of those who are justifying mass murder and gaslighting us all. Yet our personal journeys are worth documenting. It’s not always anger, but a lot of times despair, disappointment and paralysis. What can we do about people being murdered every day? The brain overflowing with thoughts, nightmares and everything else in life that needs to be re-prioritized. A thought often visits: We shouldn’t be feeling this way, we’re still alive, we’re not subjected to mass bombardment, it’s happening to them. But in reality it’s also happening to us. We are the helpless who bear witness to these atrocities. We cannot use our platforms, citizenships or any other privileges we thought we might have to stop this explicit wrongdoing.
I turn off the news for days on end. I cannot bear to see the suffering, the murder, the impunity and the justification for such immorality. Yet there is a feeling that never leaves, that feeling of futility in things I do to distract myself from the gruesome reality. Even at the times when I’ve forgotten about them, something feels wrong about day to day life. Everything has collapsed in this conflict. Masks have fallen and I cannot come to terms with having to re-see everything in a new light.
The world’s conspiracy against the Palestinians is not new, and it’s something we’ve known for decades. But today the blatant and open support to genocide is unprecedented. It’s shocking to see the west destroy the integrity of its own institutions to pursue a genocide. How can one function with this knowledge?
In the film Shadowlands, C.S Lewis says, “We read to know we are not alone.” I suppose that’s why we write as well. It’s difficult, mentally taxing and tiring beyond words to see genocide so clearly and not be able to stop it. It’s even worse when you’re trying to convince those around you justifying it that their arguments are nonsensical and just evil. But if there’s one thing that I learned in arguing with these sorts of people it’s that they invoke morality at their discretion, with a very racist lens. They want you to empathize when one of theirs is hurt but are gleeful when a thousand they don’t care about are killed. They believe childish lies without question and reserve their critical questions to the glaring reality, in the hopes of summoning a conspiracy theory that explains it away.
This exhaustion, a constant betrayal of human decency and professed values, and in our age, the tearing down of the mirage of progressiveness that often manifests itself in the form of rights, climate justice and other forms of diversity and inclusion.
We were right to suspect that you cannot mainstream progressiveness as it fails in the face of genocide. We were right to reject the commercialized versions of liberalism and the left, which have left so many people behind.