TW: discourse on genocide; descriptions of violence
“Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.” — Eugene Ionesco
The current reality is a rough one. It always has been rough, but recent decades of technological advancement have pushed much of the roughness to the forefront of our perceptions. For most of our existence, we have occupied spaces with narrow vectors of awareness. We have never found the need to worry much beyond our villages. Gradually, we did come to worry beyond them, then beyond our towns and cities. Now, our concerns have the pragmatic capacity to extend to the furthest reaches of our planet. We have access to all the Worry at all times.
This is unique and horrid.
It is unique because it is unprecedented. We do live in the most privileged of times, living as Gods by the standards of our ancestors. We have the abilities of Gods, also. The technology of the past century is the magic from antiquity. There is little doubt of this. To many of us, it is modern magic still. Most folk don’t know how the Internet works, let alone a lightbulb. It is horrid because it is unprecedented. Ours (1990 onward) is the first generation to truly live with the world at our fingertips. From our youth, we have been raised in a dual-nature reality. We have two worlds we occupy now: the real Earth and the real World Wide Web.
This is a problem. It is a problem because anyone older than our generation struggles to understand how this changes the framework of our perception. One could use allegories like the Cave, but I think they are ultimately unhelpful in this case. Simpler it is to say this: It is difficult to excuse ignorance when one has access to the Library at all times. Likewise: It is difficult to excuse complacency when one has access to all the horror and harm at all times. Older generations are accustomed to ‘the way things are,’ failing to understand that we are living in times when things simply are not ‘the way they have been.’ They are engaging with shadows as the true state of things has left them behind.
There is a famous photo discovered in 1944, later featured in Life magazine, depicting the eminent beheading of the American soldier Leonard Siffleet by the Japanese officer Yasuno Chikao (Yasuno had asked a private to photograph the act). It is famous because it is horrific and shocking. When it appeared in Life magazine, it brought to the public an awareness of the depth of atrocity (an awareness being a choice term: the total atrocities would not be known broadly until much later). It is a chilling photo that exposed sheltered people to what was happening in a part of the world far removed from them. The same year, we would receive the Sonderkommando photographs while Nazis compiled the Auschwitz Album, and later we would have books of the photographs taken by Allied soldiers as they liberated the concentration camps and documented what they found there (no additional commentary necessary here). These are among the documentation of the real atrocity that happened during World War II. For generations, this was broadly how the public received such intel: in photographs witnessed much after the fact of the killing. Such a relationship with media continued into Vietnam, though photographs of the horror were then more often in colour.
Then, in the early 2000s we had 9/11: a terrorist act witnessed live by millions. I need not discuss here the fallout of 9/11 but say only what Shane Gillis has said: The entire Iraq War is on YouTube.
Why is this relevant? Because—
Sunday, I saw on Instagram the beheaded body of a child, blackened from fire and limply hanging from the hands of the man who pulled them from the rubble of Rafah. I saw multiple corpses, dust-covered and black, pulled from the melted tents of their refugee camps there (these scenes from Israel’s weekend strikes). Several weeks ago, I saw people being rescued from loads of ash and stone from the concrete buildings blown apart over them. A month ago, I saw a compilation of Gazan cats clambering for food, pawing their path from rubble piles, chewing the dead flesh of their owners, sleeping filthy on filthy carpets and drapes, or killed (little has been said of the non-human cost of war). I have seen the interior of maternity wards abandoned due to relentless Israeli shelling; the cots left with small, mouldered black masses on them. I have seen adolescent boys carrying their younger brothers in balled-up blankets that drip blood. I have seen a young boy covered in bandages telling his father not to be afraid as they deal with the shock of having become white phosphorus victims. I have seen war crimes minutes after they’ve been committed; I have watched the Israeli Genocide of the Palestinian people happen live over the past eight months.
Things simply are not ‘the way they have been’ and the older generations will be utterly alienated from the younger if they cannot come to recognize this. While anyone over fifty engages still with legacy media, the younger generations wrestle with the overwhelming fact that they have the world at their fingertips and it ain’t lookin’ good. To say nothing of the ongoing climate crisis, the social crises, or the culture war: The world is a dark and struggling place. We have access to that darkness and struggle in a way we never have before. The human race is more connected—has more in common—than ever before. Yet, we are caught in this idea of separateness, as though the violence and degradation will not affect us all. As if any of us morally disagree with the fact that dropping 2,000-pound bombs on a refugee camp is a bad thing that a government shouldn’t be allowed to do, regardless of anything.
Last week, Karim Khan, Chief Prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) applied for arrest warrants for the leaders of Hamas and the leaders of Israel. With great sanity, Khan did this, knowing that the fault of this genocide lies at the feet of the grown men who cannot see beyond blood and hatred. These men, separated by their ideologies, are so stupid they cannot even recognize their dreams and anguish. Of course, nothing may come of the ICC’s motions. Such is the nature of a system so bogged in bureaucracy and held on multiple leashes by countries with dire interest in the Levant. So it goes.
Dreams & Anguish bring us together and there is a tract of powerful folk failing utterly to understand that. Such people think the masses can be kept imbibed by consumer products, media misdirection, and the inconvenience of cultural standards. They are wrong to think this. The new generation has grown up in a parody of their grandparent’s Earth. We’ve not accustomed ourselves to the comedy of errors permitted by our progenitors. We’re upset, emotional, and scared. We’re angry. We don’t like what’s happening. We intend to do something about it, recognizing as we are that Dreams & Anguish overrule ideology.
But first, we’ll probably check in to what horrors await us on Instagram—again.