We can make love, not war

Unhappening erasure

Erasure. Is there anything from your past that you’d like to erase? A friendship that turned sour? A career decision that led to nowhere? A safety precaution you neglected? Faith that was broken?

Maybe there’s something in, not your past, but your town’s past that you’d like to erase. Or your state’s past, or the world’s past. Here you are: a great big rubber. What would you like to erase?

South Africa believes right now that Israel wants to erase the Gazan Palestinians. There are some, including Israel, who point to legal documents and contend that what is happening in the Gaza Strip is not genocide and, if that is true, I would ask Israel:

• Whether they believe that, if what they are doing to the Gazan Palestinians is not genocide, they would refrain from raising accusations of genocide themselves if the same were to happen to their own people.

• And, if what they are now doing in Gaza is not within the statutory definition of genocide, whether they believe that what they are doing is something that is not contrary to any law at all.

• And whether they believe that those who framed the terms by which genocide is defined would have been insouciant to the acts being committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip.

One of Israel’s defences to the accusations levelled against it of genocide is that fair warning was given to the Gazan civilian population, giving them ample opportunity to evacuate to safe areas. Here is a cinematographic representation of a similar warning being given in another place at an another time in the world’s past:

It’s cinema, so the blood isn’t real in that film. The terror was acted, and the dispassionate cruelty was acted. But the event was real.

Should we erase this from our history and make it unhappened? We could say, “Yes. It was awful. It should never have happened. Let’s make it unhappened.” But if it had never happened, perhaps the Indian Empire would never have ended and Britain would still be there. Ruling in another man’s country. But perhaps it’d be ruling there benevolently. Perhaps there would be love and understanding in the Indian Empire. Maybe.

Today, in India, there is still no universal love and understanding, unfortunately, even though the British have gone. On the spot where a mosque was torn down in Ayodhya by a mob in 1992—illegally, so said the highest court in India—now stands a Hindu temple, consecrated by the country’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Some say it is a political act. One pilgrim, Arjun Kumar, age 22, who attended the ceremony, said, “I think every Hindu should walk up to here to send a message that this country belongs to us and no one can stop us.” I think Mr Kumar believes there are still other men ruling in another man’s, his, country, even though the British left. I wonder who us are, who it is who wants to stop us, and how many mosques Mr Kumar would like erased before he could happily proclaim that his country belongs to his us. Whatever, the 500-year-old mosque that stood on the spot until 1992 was erased: unhappened.

Last year, I posted an article mentioning the 1988 purge in Iran, in which 4,000 people were erased. Unhappened from existence, to the extent of being scratched out from photographs of them. Here is the article:

Maybe you never read the article. Or maybe you’d forgotten about it. Or maybe there are a few who remember it and recall what I said about eradicating the soul by eradicating a photographic image, which was that I didn’t know if the one has the effect of unhappening the other.

That is the problem with unhappening: you can always simply not make something, not do something, refrain, abstain, forbid, proscribe. But unmaking, undoing, contravening, transgressing, unremembering, these are things that are more difficult. Like telling a jury to pretend it never heard certain disallowed evidence. Difficult but, I guess, not impossible. Men in Black.

Archaeologists constantly dig up things from the Earth that had been lost and forgotten. But they are things that had lain covered in dust and dirt for thousands of years, and no one alive could remember them, or had grandparents who had remembered them, or had access to history books that remembered them, and so they were easily erased, until their unhappening itself was unhappened. I wonder if the unhappening of the mosque in Ayodhya will ever be unhappened. The British once tried to unhappen the independence of the United States, and perhaps it will one day try to unhappen the independence of India. Or perhaps the Muslims in India will do that. We’re going to need a bigger rubber.

Even with enormous rubbers, erasure is never complete. Even when a pop singer reinvents him or herself, they do so in recognition of the style that brought them success and to where they now are; and in recognition of the fact that their current age, or today’s tastes, mean they should move on from what they were before. I once attended a concert given by the Welsh singer Shirley Bassey, and, on the stage of the Edinburgh Playhouse, she dismissed her earlier work: hits like Kiss Me, Honey, Honey. I happened to very much like her song Kiss Me, Honey, Honey and I must admit that her lack of respect for her own former success drove a cleft between her and my admiration for her. It’s as if she wanted to erase the very hits and successes that had made her into the great performer that she was, and which had persuaded me to buy two tickets to her Edinburgh show.

Mr Modi’s party’s approval of the erasure of a mosque and the implantation of a Hindu temple doesn’t fill me with admiration for Hinduism: it makes me pity Hinduism, which, it seems, cannot exist in harmony with others, and makes me pity Mr Modi’s political party, and pity Mr Modi, for the same reason. Just as the massacre of Amritsar made me pity General Dyer, for the same reason, and the men ordered to shoot defenceless children and mothers, old men and peaceful protestors, for a different reason.

Dyer chipped away at the very foundations of empire in India that he’d intended to preserve; just as, for me, Shirley Bassey chipped away at the very foundations of her stardom in Edinburgh; just as Israel is chip, chip, chipping away at the very foundations of its statehood in Gaza. Because they are all examples of breaking faith with others. Breaking faith is different from unhappening: with unhappening, forgetting becomes impossible; but with breaking faith, it’s remembering that becomes impossible. Anything is possible, with a little respect.