Letters & Opinions
Farewell to political activism: response
Jacques Depelchin
2007-08-08, Issue 316
http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/42967
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Mukoma wa Ngugi's article (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/42869) article is still resonating inside me, but I did not know what to say at the time. But on this anniversary of Hiroshima (August 6th 1945), it hit me again.
Significant anniversaries come upon us now and again like flood waters and we are caught speechless, and then, the very thing you point out happens: "Oh well, next time we shall speak up", thus losing the opportunity to wake up, stand up, resist with all one's might against apathy, lethargy, accommodation to a growing cancerous mindset.
With regard to Hiroshima/Nagasaki, my sense is that the master narrative still dominates and threatens us with severe and collective punishment if we were to call it, as it should be, i.e. the modernization of Auschwitz, itself the modernization of previous unspeakable crimes against Africans and Native Americans which continue unaccountable. If we are going to repair, as in healing, the human conscience, then one should work at making it ultra sensitive to any form, intention of maiming, diminishing life in any of its manifestations. Gaia is a living organism. The level at which it has been violated is still misunderstood and/or denied through the use of propaganda which is no longer perceived as such. On this anniversary, is it possible for people to stop any business as usual? Is it possible to insert in our lives, consciously, a moratorium, a sort of time out away from the modernized enslaving system called globalization. Time out to treat our nuked selves, time out to take time to heal and rebuild, really, a conscience worth calling a conscience. Time out to reconnect with the collective conscience of those who, like the Native Americans, like Corbin Harney, who warned against the idea of messing up with the yellow cake (uranium), long before the physicists decided that splitting the atom was not an act against nature.
You asked at one point why do we have to keep laundering our history as though it was for sale to the richest bidder. From your article I get that you are wondering how and why our collective mindset, consciousness have been brought to the point where we would rather be activists than revolutionaries, to the point where Mandela sees nothing wrong in creating a Rhodes-Mandela Trust so as (my words) "to capitalize on both sides of the old and new capitalist", not that your words are less cutting, as if it is ok for Elie Wiesel to join hands with Himmler to create a Trust Fund. Some people will not forgive you for thinking such thoughts.
Yet, we are living in the kinds of times which do call for thinking unthinkable thoughts because the unthinkable, the "never again" have been said and trespassed so many times that it seems futile to remember all of the unthinkable things which continue to be committed today.
As we were talking about these things (crimes against humanity) with another person here (just met). He asked me if I were a priest. I laughed because that question reminded me of a certain mindset today in South Africa where such horrendous things are happening that it has become a custom to turn to pastors and the likes (how many?) of Desmond Tutu to provide a believable ethical compass for a humanity which has been so mangled that it can no longer recognize itself, except by way of people like Desmond Tutu, the presumed Global re-conciliator.
Here we are once again remembering Hiroshima/Nagasaki, and all of the things which led to it, industrialized slavery to individualized and industrialized ways of killing as savagely as possible, perpetrated against the Jews, the Palestinians, the Ota Bengas, the street children, the raped babies, women, the Armenians, Chinese in Nanking, the people of Rwanda, DRCongo, pygmies, Namibians, Native Americans, Amazon Indians, Aborigenes in Australia, Inuit, Untouchables, the list is almost endless. If we do not join hands with the current Hibakusha, sooner or later we shall be sorry we did not, whatever the reasons might be, because we are all being led, some knowingly, some not, to a nameless slaughterhouse.
How did we get from Hispaniola to Hiroshima and still doing even more horrendous things than then. We have become so accustomed to them that until we see another mushroom cloud we shall think it is OK. Yet, if one were to look at the Planet today, from the lens of an astro physicist trained, in quantum physics, I would not be surprised if such a physcist were tell us that the Planet is closely resembling a mushroom cloud...if one looked from a virtual telescope on the Moon.
Mukoma, you have expressed the thoughts which have run in the minds of the countless terrorized from way way way back when the roots of the current system were hardly visible. Then, women, children, men were violated, raped in unspeakable ways. Countless screamed. Are we going to need the help of quantum physicists to confirm to us their words? The list of names should be put on a roster as a sort of unfinished, in the making Humanity Holocaust, an art project. A sort of monumental, planetary reminder that the smallest, least victim, most forgotten, must also be the most remembered.
Which kind of humanity has this become when it is considered ok to kill anybody, but especially the most vulnerable people, in the name of making a killing at the bank. Which kind of consciousness are we referring to when more and more philsophers, psychologists, psychiatrists and scientists are trying to study it (consciousness), and understand the material basis of it, while sensing (from which physical sense?) that such an entreprise would be futile.
My problem is.....and, I am afraid, this rambling letter is not helping resolving it: Is it possible to reverse the mindset, the consciousness (or whatever is left of it) which has brought us to the point where one is ready to accept any unacceptable outrage, crime against humanity?
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