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I’m on a “break.” But I felt the need to share these thoughts. I’ve been thinking a lot about “how we got here,” and struck by the ways “we” tend to pin everything on Donald Trump. I don’t offer this up as anything more than a set of speculations. Do with them as you will.
The scenes are shocking in their brutality and, every day, the violence is somehow worse. People are being pulled out of their cars, pulled and dragged along streets, beaten with chains, pushed and pummelled, kicked, and flung into waiting vans as if they are already nothing but lifeless carcasses.
This is about a deep contempt for The Other.
This is about a societal disdain for those perceived as non-human, not worthy of anything other than a kick or two, a beating, complete and utter degradation. It is about whiteness, yes, certainly, but it’s also about a quest for domination that exceeds racial categories. The term “white supremacy” fails to explain what we see happening all around us.
I loathe and despise universalist frameworks, but I cannot but help think of the utter and complete denigration of, for instance, Dalits in India, who have their hands chopped off for daring to drink the water reserved for Brahmins, or who are made to literally eat shit, whose children and women are routinely raped and disposed of. Their treatment at the hands of society exceeds anything we might even call brutality.
What we’re seeing right now is the spectacle of groups of people — not just men, and not just white people -— being willing to punch, kick and, based on reports, rape people, all under the purview of the state.
But is “the state” all that’s giving them this permission? I hesitate to offer an incomplete analysis here, but I will allow myself this much: liberals keep insisting that this is not who we are, but this is exactly what and who “we” have been, from the beginning. I will go further and say that many of “us” who are perhaps even genuinely horrified at what we see, want it all to continue.
The violence we see manifesting on our screens and in real life is the violence we want to enact. I can offer no empirical proof of this or, perhaps, I would find too much if I went looking. (There is the fact that the history of humankind is replete with death-making.)
I am and will always be deeply suspicious of human beings. I don’t believe that “we” are inherently good (whatever “good” means): I think we are, at heart, the worst of creatures, and that our base instincts have to do with destruction. If we make friends, lovers, families and actually manage to not hurt and wound all of them, it’s because we accidentally do the opposite of what we’re programmed to do.
I think of prisons, and how the furore is that the new ones are too brutal — but we ignore the fact that prisons are inherently violent, dehumanising places and that no one should be in one. Would it be better, preferable if we never had to see or hear from those imprisoned, if entire populations were simply siphoned away quietly, without all the media fuss about alligators and new Alcatrazes? On a recent TikTok, a liberal commentator sought to explain that the Obama and Biden administrations were better on immigration despite the higher number of deportations because so much happened on the border. Not having to watch the desperation of millions trying to escape the broken worlds that we helped to create would be so much better. On Twitter, the liberal John Ganz snips, “And if you want to talk about US responsibility for what’s happening in Gaza, the rate of death has accelerated under Trump.”
Ah, for the days when genocides were slower and more leisurely.
Despite all this: It is incredibly moving to watch the pushback and, as much as I hate the word, resistance. There are protesters, of all ages, willing to sacrifice their lives and bodies for people they don’t know, and I am endlessly moved to tears.
At the same time, each and every one of us has to ask: How did I help bring this into existence? What part of me wanted to see this brutality? What is the world I helped to create?
See also:
“People Are Fighting for Strangers.”
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Image: Emil Nolde, “Mask Still Life,” 1911.
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