Chaos theory will have it that, when a butterfly moves on one side of the world, it can cause a storm on the other.
It is palpably unavoidable, and I just cannot get away from it: I know nothing. I sit here in rural Belgium and I read the news and Internet articles and blogs, and levy judgment on what I read. Some of those whose journalism I read are in New York and have seen the encampment at Columbia University, and some of them have seen the horrors of Gaza and been on battlefields in Ukraine, have witnessed the civil war in Sudan, and are suffering under the crushing heat of man-made climate change. But not me. So what gives me the right to formulate a view on what is, juridically, nothing but hearsay?
When we read a novel or watch a television programme, visit the cinema, we submit our emotions to the manipulations and machinations of others. Authors and novelists, actors and film directors, theatre producers, musicians, poets. When I went to see Madame Butterfly, many, many moons ago, I was inconsolable as I left the theatre. I wept the whole way home and it was only when I was entering my flat that it struck me: it was only a story.
Why do I get so upset? Why do I feel such empathy with figures and personages who are nothing more than the fruit of a librettist’s imagination? Such is the power of good storytelling, and such is the power also of good journalism. I don’t know if it’s possible to tell the story of Madame Butterfly and not evoke sympathy. Take away Giacomo Puccini’s music and the tale perhaps rings that little bit more mundane. But surely the tender of spirit could still muster an expression of sadness at her love’s disappointment, irresolvable other than through suicide? I think Pinkerton was a bastard; but do I hate him? It’s only a story.
Will we, too, die with honour? How you die is your affair, at least I hope so. But how I live is not. I’ll never ask you to live differently to how I live myself. I ask you: do not ask me to live differently from how you live yourself. And, before you answer, reflect on how you live.
Whether you have been of my view all along or whether my view has changed yours, whether your views are adamantly different to mine and always have been, I will never tell you that I told you so. I was never right. I never knew it all, and I never will know it all, but I’m so frequently reinforced by kindly others, who reflect my feelings, that I know at least this: that I’m not alone and that, if you’re with me, then you’re not alone either, even if we’re alone in not being alone.
I was horrified when Russia invaded Ukraine, and wished against wish that things could be different for them. I was bucked by their defence, felt proud of their self-appointed glory, and was saddened at the horrors inflicted on their country and their poor people. I thought they could win, but they can’t. I’ve said it before, thousands of Ukrainians who are now dead would still be alive if they had capitulated within three days. And thousands of Russians too. For over two years Ukraine has fought for an ideal that its western supporters now no longer believe in, if they ever believed in it before.
Not because the prospect of a defeat at the hands of the Russian Federation would mean a loss of their freedom, but because the prospect of a victory against the Russian Federation might never procure them the freedom they think that they are fighting for.
George Orwell once wrote that a pacifist is a supporter of the enemy. He was wrong, but he wasn’t one, so how could he have even known? It isn’t because they don’t support their own side that pacifists support the enemy: they support life. If Ukraine is conquered, even in part, and should the current battle then fail, will the ideal that galvanised a nation into defending itself against a leviathan one day resurge to repulse the invader? The answer to that lies not with us outside Ukraine, but in the hearts of the Ukrainians: therein lies their own destiny. Just as in ours lies ours.
The battle in Palestine is a different one. Not the Arabs, but a faction of the Arabs provoked the invasion, and yet they didn’t provoke the annihilation they got in return, and that’s come notwithstanding; they provoked an attack, not by Israel but by a faction of Israel. The one faction is destroying the other faction, and yet neither of them has destroyed the ideas that gave birth to them as factions in the first place. Such are factions. For young Palestinian Muslims and for young Israeli Jews, the reasons for this fight are as unreal as the libretto of a romantic opera. And yet these reasons have the power to move to violence, just as did Butterfly’s grief.
Butterfly wasn’t real, but she’s emblematic of tragedies that are.
The Gaza conflict has done more than bring to a head a battle that has gone on since the Mandate. It has struck a victory for the far right, in places where this fight is not even being fought. It will take strength from this and then the swathe of so-called elections that our democracy deems must decide the wills of peoples across Europe will reveal what damage has been done, in Brussels and capitals elsewhere, by the damage that has been wrought in the Gaza Strip. May you live in interesting times, so the old Chinese curse. These are times that are no longer interesting; they are dangerous. Some anticipate them with glee and others with dread. The anarchist should welcome revolution, the conservative should fear it; but this is one driven by conservatives and feared by radicals.
A fellow blogger at Okaythen points to high immigrant populations in London, Amsterdam and other European cities, and wonders whether replacement theory is or isn’t a conspiracy any more. The eminent domain cited in Newport News to expand a university at the cost of a black community, and the sales of homes from under the feet of single, black women in Detroit in a corporate campaign to whiten the population of that city give pause to consider who it precisely is who’s replacing whom under a replacement policy cited decidedly one-sidedly.
But, then again: what do I know? I can assimilate every piece of knowledge about every fact on this Earth and still know nothing because nothing is all that I need to know. What increasingly matters is not what I know, but on what side of what line I stand, and with whom, if anyone. They used to ask gay men, “Are you a friend of Dorothy’s?” Nowadays, knowing anyone is such an aleatory matter, it’s better in the end to be a friend of no one.
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