It is 2023 and I, like millions of other people around the world, am watching Israel commit genocide in occupied Palestine.
For the first time in human history we can all watch a modern-day Holocaust unfold in real time, before our very eyes, courtesy of social media.
I’ve seen toddlers gasp their last agonising breaths on cold bloody hospital floors and I’ve witnessed parents desperately clutch the lifeless bodies of their sons and daughters, pinching their cheeks and kissing their eyes.
I’ve seen boys as young as 12 and men well into their sixties kneel naked in the dirt, surrounded by Israeli “defence” forces. I’ve seen whole apartment blocks levelled by Israeli missiles, Universities and libraries deliberately gutted by US-provided explosives. I’ve had the misery of listening to Israeli soldiers sing and chant with glee at the prospect of annihilating a whole population that they’ve labelled as “Amalek”.
And I’ve had the distinct misfortune of listening to spokespeople, celebrities, disinfluencers, and news anchors repeatedly and unshamedly lie, support and encourage this mass slaughter.
An oft-maligned Jew called Karl Marx once said that “History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce”. But there is nothing farcical about the wholesale murder being perpetuated by the descendants of Holocaust survivors.
The old grand mythos of the West as an evolved, enlightened, beacon of progress has teetered unsteadily for some time like a like a perilously layered jenga tower (built as it is on a toxic mix of colonialism and capitalism). The West’s ancient fables of Reason, Logic, Debate, and “Common Sense” have been rotting for some time, devoured by the forces of neoliberalism, US-UK imperialism, and oligarchies.
But could this be the final death blow? Could the full-throated support that our leaders have shown for mass murder and ethnic cleansing be the tipping point?
For me personally all language, all syntax, all meaning, has vanished. Faith in humanity, in the arc of progress, and in the power to change minds and appeal to our better natures has finally disappeared. Our species is darker, more dangerous, and more primitive in my eyes than ever before. The paradigm has shifted, my worldview has warped completely.
Even as I write this, I no longer have an audience or intention in mind. And yet some human need, some impulse in me, compels me to try to weave what I’m experiencing into some semblance of coherence. To try outline it so that I might integrate it into my mind’s schema somehow.
“The plotting of stories remains necessary, even when we have ceased to believe in the plots we use” — Peter Brooks, Reading for Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, p.242
Pictures and images seem to take over when words fail. So instinctively I have taken to drawing and sketching instead, often frantically and angrily. It comes out in bursts and scratches, stabs and splotches, faster and more immediate and more raw than anything I could ever write. It is an action of necessity, but also of hopelessness and futility. The desperate miserable scribblings of someone who sees millions suffering at the hands of bullies and knows he is powerless to stop it.
