Gaza and death camp logic

The total obliteration of the war by information, propaganda, commentaries, with camera-men in the first tanks and war reporters dying heroic deaths, the mish-mash of enlightened manipulation of public opinion and oblivious activity: all this is another expression for the withering of experience, the vacuum between men and their fate, in which their real fate lies. It is as if the reified, hardened plaster-cast of events takes the place of events themselves.

Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

Live tracker. War as entertainment. So much engagement. So many clicks.

23 910 Palestinians “and 1 139 people”. Is the choice of words intentionally sarcastic? One hopes so.

More than 7 000 missing. Over 50 000 severely injured, and how many of them will die as a result?

We count the dead in numbers. Replaceable abstractions, reducible to their position in an imaginary line. Of course, this was always the case since ancient organized warfare. Rank. File. Divison. Decimatio. Fustuarium supplicium.

A number, not a person.

Mostly women and children have been murdered. More than 14 000.

About 600 000 men are so far needlessly slaughtered in Ukraine.

We can’t understand these abstractions. We have no idea what’s going on behind them. They shut us off from anything akin to a real experience of the situation.

And in the absense of any real experience, even mechanical warfare and mass murder get boring. Switch to another channel.

So do you have a child in your family or circle of acquintances? Imagine this innocent little person of unimaginable beauty and wonder being bludgeoned to death by concrete fragments. Then imagine it happens eight thousand times over. Is there in your life a mother, sister, friend?

Is there perhaps a woman you love?

Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

(neruda)

Six thousand times she has had the life smashed out of her defenseless body, by the relentless iron logic of industrial warfare.

What… Is the meaning of this?

Oh, we can talk geopolitics. We can discuss the reproduction of power structures, of patterns of dominance as old as civilization. We can reflect on the role of patriachy, of religion. Of racism.

But these are at best merely causes. They can’t tell you whether there’s ultimately a point to all of this or not.

And in fact, there is no meaning here.

The only one to be discerned is that meaning itself is abolished by the absurdity of the situation.

There is here, in other words, no meaning that can be accessed or understood by us. And that’s the inevitable and horrifying point. We cannot ourselves perform any redemptive work that can remedy this infinite and inexpressible loss, the depths of which are unfathomable.

That’s the abyss that needs to be confronted here. That needs to be seen in all of its ghastly negation. The existential experience that enables us to affirm that there’s at least a gaping wound here, even if we can’t imagine how it ever could be healed.

Focus your gaze on that wound. Hold it within your mind. This injury is as much a spiritual as a political reality. It’s sin. It is also the naked face of capitalism.

It’s the myth of Cain and Abel, as well as the heart of the issue that Marx attempted to address in terms of the “false consciousness”, how enduring injustices are hidden beneath the facade of picturesque bourgeois small town picket fences and the suffocating meaninglessness of sequestered suburban unlife.

Nobody who really sees this evil for what it is can remain on the sidelines. There’s an immediate inversion of the problem of suffering when you’re face to face with the actual reality, a sort of theodicy inherent to the irrefutable presence of genuine evil rather than merely the armchair reflection upon its abstraction.

And it’s covered up in complacency and anodyne, jingoistic, secular mythology.

More than 220,000 civilians have been killed in the West’s proxy war in Yemen, and the starvation caused by blockades and embargoes. These numbers mean anything to you?

Now, the US and jolly old England have embarked on an undeclared war, in an extension of “Operation Prosperity Guardian”, against this de facto sovereign state since Yemeni militias had the gall to protest the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

I.e. we're literally bombing this impoverished and war-torn state in response to Iranian threats against the supply chains of the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, which in turn are a consequence of the Western-backed genocide in Gaza.

Pray that it doesn’t escalate further.

But it’s for freedom and democracy, you see. To safeguard prosperity and free trade and the future of our children.

Children. Yeah. More than 10 000 children disappear in the US every year, never to be found. You knew that? Half a million are reported missing to authorities, sure, but “almost all of them” (97.8%) are apparently recovered. 10 000 left missing is an astonishing number.

In a small country like Sweden, we only lose about 30 people of all ages in total every year. Of course, this doesn’t include about a thousand undocumented immigrant kids vanishing from the governments purview per annum.

And as it happens, more than 10 000 kids have so far been slaughtered in Gaza.

“A voice was heard in Ramah,
wailing and loud lamentation,
Rachel weeping for her children;
she refused to be consoled,
because they were no more.”
- Matt. 2:18

There’s a death camp logic to all of this. To the entire reductionist spectacle, to the numbers and figures and insipid justifications, to the hollow and dishonest comforts of homes built on a foundation of third world and working class corpses, all of which conspire to defeat this painful realization of actual abysmal evil.

And I think each one of us must discover our revulsion against these sickly-sweet anaesthetics, and fix our gaze on the ghastly wound beneath all of it. That’s where actual experience begins. And this naked appreciation of the world around us, with the scales dropped from the eyes, is paradoxically also the only way out of the trap of cynicism.

Cynicism is namely just a half-measure. It’s a childish pout. A bland complacency. It rests with a disappointment in the loss of mediocrity and goes no further.

Only when sated with false pleasure, disgusted with the goods offered, dimly aware of the inadequacy of happiness even when it is that – to say nothing of cases where it is bought by abandoning allegedly morbid resistance to its positive surrogate – can men gain an idea of what experience might be.

Adorno, ibid.

Yet when faced with the irrefutable, undeniable presence of evil as such, there’s also the inevitable reflection, the tacit affirmation of that Other, that transcendent, of whose actual existence evil’s only possible mode of being is nothing but a parasitic negation.

if I believe in death
it is because you have loved me.

if i believe
in death be sure
of this
it is

because you have loved me,
moon and sunset
stars and flowers
gold crescendo and silver muting

of seatides
i trusted not,
                    one night
when in my fingers

drooped your shining body
when my heart
sang between your perfect
breasts

darkness and beauty of stars
was on my mouth petals danced
against my eyes
and down

the singing reaches of
my soul
spoke
the green-

greeting pale-
departing irrevocable
sea
i knew thee death.

                              and when
i have offered up each fragrant
night,when all my days
shall have before a certain

face become
white
perfume
only,
          from the ashes
then
thou wilt rise and thou
wilt come to her and brush

the mischief from her eyes and fold
her
mouth the new
flower with

thy unimaginable
wings,where dwells the breath
of all persisting stars

- E. E. Cummings