You’re Not Crazy. This Genocidal Dystopia Is Crazy.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
You’re not crazy. They are crazy. The ones who are going around acting like everything’s fine. The ones dismissing the Gaza genocide as a “single issue”. The ones who don’t like it when you talk about this stuff because it bums them out. They are the crazy ones.
I say this because living in the west during a western-backed genocide can make you feel like you’re going insane. Like maybe there’s something wrong with you for not being able to go along as though your government isn’t helping Israel burn people alive, shoot kids in the head, deliberately destroy Gaza’s healthcare system, and target civilian populations with deadly siege warfare in order to annex Palestinian territory. Like maybe you’re defective if you can’t be as chill about all this as everyone else is being.
But there’s nothing wrong with you, and you are not defective. There is something very wrong with a civilization that could go along with all this. It is our genocidal dystopia that is defective.
History is rife with examples of horrific mass atrocities to which the majority of the population did not respond with the appropriate revulsion and urgency at the time. Slavery. The Holocaust. The systematic extermination of other indigenous populations in other settler-colonialist projects. Most of the people who now look back and judge those evils correctly in hindsight are sleepwalking right through their present-day reiteration in Palestine.
Those who stood against the mass atrocities of history tended to be in the minority, because if opposing them was conventional wisdom they wouldn’t have happened in the first place. This shows us that there is no correlation between conventional wisdom and real moral clarity. We cannot look to others to evaluate whether our position on an issue is the correct one, because history tells us that the majority is very often wrong on the most important issues in the present moment when it matters.
And the majority is wrong now. The ones flagrantly supporting Israel’s abuses are wrong. The ones who try not to think too much about what’s being done in Gaza and Lebanon are wrong. The ones who say it’s all so tragic and heartbreaking but it’s oh so very complicated and Israel has a right to defend itself are wrong. The ones who don’t oppose Israel’s atrocities but only oppose their own country sending boots on the ground or spending their tax dollars on it are wrong. The ones who know a genocide is happening but avoid making too much noise about it because they want to make sure the Democrats win the election are wrong. The ones who know it’s a genocide but don’t respond to this reality with the appropriate level of urgency, forcefulness and focus are wrong.
All around us we are bombarded with messages trying to gaslight into believing that we are the ones who aren’t perceiving reality correctly. These messages can be overt, like the propaganda of the mass media and the talking points of the Israel apologists we run into online. They can also be subtle, like the unspoken messages we get when nobody around us is talking about Gaza and how people grow uncomfortable when we do.
But those messages are lying to us. We absolutely are the ones who are seeing things correctly. We absolutely are the ones who are responding to this nightmare appropriately. They are the ones acting like a bunch of lunatics casually strolling around in the middle of a house fire.
Don’t look to others to evaluate your own level of clarity. In a civilization that has gone insane, you have to sort out what sanity looks like for yourself. When our leaders are throwing their support behind an active genocide in a society that is awash with propaganda-induced delusions, we’ve all got to be brave enough to stand on our own two feet.
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Featured image via Smeerch (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0), formatted for size.
