Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold
"Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...The blood-dimmed tide is loosed...The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." -- W.B. Yeats
The doomful poem “The Second Coming” was penned by Irish poet William Butler Yeats over a hundred years ago, in 1919. It is apocalyptic in tone, filled with spectacular imagery, and ends with a vision of a gruesome future that awaits us. Contending with the devastation and ruins of World War I, Yeats was decrying the unraveling of humanity and the coming of end times.
Sound familiar?
The US and Israeli war on Iran has encircled the entire world into a state of crisis. Fear, paranoia, hyper-anticipation and shock at violence is now being experienced collectively, by everyone, everywhere. Finally.
The brutality of the genocide in Gaza and the sheer enormity of numbers of people dying or being displaced for two and a years never registered for vast swathes of people worldwide. Not because people don’t have news or internet but due to the enormous power wielded by mainstream media in imperial and sub-imperial countries. The vile anti-Muslim narrative and the animus against Palestinians specifically has peaked in the last couple of years, and has gone hand in hand with extremist, racist and pro-Zionist politicians consolidating power. The same mainstream media has also ignored the war in Sudan coming up to four years next month.
Without a doubt, there have been big shifts when it comes to popular opinion on Palestine and the Muslim world, broadly, and we should be heartened by the massive effort to dismantle misrepresentation and produce counter-narratives in social media, publications, films and documentaries. That said, I remain impatient and discontent (rightfully so) with the math of gains versus losses, and optimism versus pessimism.
The disinterest and the deliberate lack of engagement with Palestine has now been spelled out in big letters with the Trump obsession and the war on Iran. Suddenly, everyone has been activated. Atrocious numbers of children dead, accounts of torture, and unseeable images of suffering in Palestine did not move the needle for the media and the general public. But now, suddenly, outrage about Trump and sudden desire to protect immigrants against ICE has erupted. The war in Iran has plunged everyone into a state of great despair and stupidly, a state of surprise. Suddenly, everyone is asking why Trump is bending to Israel and Netanyahu, or why should US interfere in a country so far away. This is an unbearable and performative innocence. As if the process of Americans spending billions and billions of dollars either to wipe people out or to choke them to death is new. Think Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba, Yemen, Venezuela, Iran, the list can go on.
Suddenly, its not only media, politicians and entire nations calling for an end to the war on Iran, but even friends, relatives and acquaintances that have not given two hoots about Palestine are all twitterpated. For the last two years, social interactions have been difficult whether in real life or online, and these same people have created and nurtured a depressive state of cognitive dissonance for me and other like-minded folks. Now, suddenly, these same people have become political! They are posting online about ICE and Trump and Iran. Suddenly, everyone’s making all the connections between oil, weapons, economy, politics, what have you. They are attending idiotic No Kings marches. (Yes, they are idiotic because Trump is not a king but a democratically elected leader and protests should focus on the system and not Trump.) These same people not stand in solidarity with Palestine encampments where students were being brutalized.
Today, I feel disgust and disdain about all this. Tomorrow, someone wise will ask me to look at this moment as an opportunity to build solidarities, resistance, and coalitions, and explain to me that we should focus on how to instrumentalize this political energy. Perhaps this is possible but the road looks long, weary and paved with suffering. How many people have to crushed by the machinery of terror that the US and Israel reign over? Recent research by Lancet Global Health claims that the US and European sanctions have killed 38 million people since 1970. What kind of astounding number is this?
How many more people have to die before the world decides its time to be on the right side of history? When will people stop indulging their dangerous selective empathy? How much longer will people live atomic, individual lives in echo chambers pretending that what is happening in Palestine is somehow not connected to Iran and ICE and the rise of fascism? Last week, Israeli soldiers tortured an 18-month old Palestinian baby with nails and lit cigarettes to coax something out of his father. Big media outlets didn’t carry this story and all those people in my life who are angry about Trump and Iran did not bring this up. This is the perfect illustration of “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” as Yeats called it. How many children have to be sacrificed before the world rises up?
Love and solidarity❤️🔥
Bhakti Shringarpure
Recent publications on the Radical Books Collective
1) A conversation with writer Tareq Baconi about his memoir Fire in Every Direction that explores his interconnected queer and Palestinian identity👇🏾
2) A guest essay on Michael Jackson and how his positions were erased, especially around the Middle East. A provocative and enjoyable read👇🏾
3) A recent episode of the media gaslighting podcast about Iran and the proliferation of AI and Lego videos, fake news, memes and fake movie trailers👇🏾