Bearing Witness In The Age Of Atrocity

I just spent another few days with a very good friend I hadn’t seen since the first year of the pandemic.

During these days of connection I didn’t check social media at all and only briefly scanned the news once or twice.

Then when she left I immediately logged back on.

I logged back on to blood flowing from El Salvadorian concentration camps.

I logged back on to genocide, to starving bodies being burnt alive in tents.

I logged back on to emaciated dugongs and melted ice.

I logged back on to fascism 2.0. It looks like it got an upgrade. The new operating system pumps out government-approved snuff videos in HD. The horrors are fresh for consumption, technologically modern.

The logging back on made me, as you can probably imagine, immediately angry, sad, guilty and rageful. I somehow couldn’t believe it was all still happening. Why can’t the people with all the money and all the food and all the luxuries and all the power just stop endlessly murdering the people who don’t have any of those things?

Why can’t these people just be happy and FUCKING STOP.

Then my thoughts, as they do, tipped to ones of urgent change: we need to do something, everything must change, this can’t go on one second longer!

And that got me thinking: how do we stop ourselves becoming grist for the outrage machine when there IS so much to be outraged by?

How do we bear witness to genocide, to overwhelming demonstrations of violent, murderous force while also believing that it can be stopped, let alone changed for the better?

How do we bear witness to ecocide, the industrialised extinction of entire species, the end of habitable conditions on Earth without succumbing to fatalism and nihilism?

How are we, who can bear witness like never before, supposed to react to all this content?

It feels as if we’re destined to passively consume unending, unaccountable, violent power forever, and never turn away in despair.

I don’t know if we were designed to see this. I don’t know if we should be seeing this.

There was a hope, wasn’t there? A hope that with a camera in everyone’s pocket the evil doers would be defeated by accountability. There was a hope that when we could clearly see evil in its purest form, it would all be so obvious. When we could see human norms blatantly transgressed, when we could see how ethical and moral boundaries were being stomped over, it would all just…..stop.

But no.

In this age of atrocity it appears evil thrives on reproducing its crimes for consumption.

Nothing just stops.

We must build alternative power. Somehow. But let’s be honest, we don’t know how. We don’t. Not now. Not for this time. And that’s the torment. That’s the nub of the pain.

In America some people are swerving (back) to the Democrats, to Bernie Sanders and AOC. What a waste of time that is. At least Sanders got booed for his genocidal “right to defend themselves” rhetoric at their big rally. Rightly so. This is the absolute minimum that should be requested. The Gaza genocide must be humanity’s red line. It must be. If we don’t make genocide a red line, if we don’t make it very obvious that the mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of defenceless human beings is not ok under any circumstances, if we don’t oppose it, we will be next. We actually will be. This is not some hyperbolic extrapolation from a situation “in the Middle East.” We know this. Because look what’s happened. Allow a genocide, get deportations to foreign concentration camps. Allow deportations of non-citizens to foreign concentration camps, get domestic concentration camps for dissenting citizens.

In America, Sanders and AOC are obviously not the answer. Nowhere in the west is there anywhere to turn electorally. Canada is about to have an election. The choice is between a genocidal Trump tween in Poilievre and a smooth handed genocidal “return the hostages, do a ceasefire” liberal in Carney. Europe is lost. Its new strategy, which people are supposed to feel hopeful about, is to spend trillions on new weapons and tell us to fear Russia. Britain is worse. A right-wing Labour government cuddling up to Trump is handily paving the way for the neo-fascism of Nigel Farage. None oppose genocide. Many, like Germany, Italy and the UK, support it unapologetically—politically, financially and militarily.

We must build alternative power. We don’t know how. Sorry, but we don’t. If we did, we’d have done it.

Is bearing witness part of that process?

I think it probably is, but only if we can channel the outrage and not succumb to the bait.

Only if we can channel it towards decently productive ends.

Only if we turn the HD reproduction of evil into a cost.

Only if through bearing witness we can make connection which helps organise political alternatives.

Only if through bearing witness we are motivated to take a stand, to protest, to disrupt the status quo, to seize agency, to make it clear who we are.

And these acts of agency that make it clear who we are and what we stand for can start really small. With avocadoes. Like the British guy who went into his local Tesco supermarket and when he saw the avocados were from Israel he crushed them all to a pulp, surreptitiously.

It sounds silly, but this was an act of humanity, of agency. You can just do things. Sometimes those things can be silly. Sometimes they have to be.

After all, the bad guys actually do have names and addresses. From the Israeli avocado importer, to the missile maker to the tech giant to the fossil fuel corporation. They have material interests. They have buildings. They have fruits. They have windows.

In conclusion: bear witness, seize agency and impose costs, starting with the avocados. We can work upwards from there.