Beneath Dignity

Western Death Cult

James Ensor, ‘Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring’ (1891)

Two posts merged in a weird, volatile synthesis – alchemically – in my brain Monday evening.

Mona Ramadan, still surviving with her family, still writing with the clarity of a poet and a (very down-to-earth) seer, wrote from her rain-battered shelter:

A wave after the other, a winter that’s foreign, that’s nothing to compare it with.

At this point I’m not sure if it’s normal, if this rain is pure. Soil is not taking it, as if it knows something is wrong with it, a human hand that interfered.

I replied to Mona that I thought she was right, that it’s like nature has reacted to the death cult of Israel and the West’s support… it’s heaving itself empty with wracking sobs.

I remember, elsewhere, a couple of weeks back, a Palestinian poster on Substack (sorry, I forget who) wrote that the soil of Gaza is so saturated with blood, it is unable to absorb the rain.

I do not care whether that is scientifically or geologically true or not; it is spiritually and morally true.

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Meanwhile, out of prison – from here in the UK – Roger Hallam declared, not prophetically but straightforwardly:

At some point, we must confront a simple truth: the elites are not failing accidentally — they are participating in a death project. They are driving a system that destroys itself, destroys life, and destroys the conditions for civilisation, even when warned by their own institutions and scientists.

This is not just incompetence. It is not even simple greed. What we are witnessing is something deeper and more pathological — a mixture of elite degeneration, the death wish, and a civilisation unable to confront its own end.

The difference between knowing something in theory and realising it in a bone-deep way is tricky, perhaps, impossible to articulate in words. I remember a friend mocking the lyrics of The Flaming Lips’ ‘Do You Realize?’ where Coyne sings “Everyone you know someday will die” by pointing out that it’s pretty obvious everyone you know is going someday to die – that it’s a bromidic truism. But… I don’t know. Do you realise it? Do you live your life moment-to-moment knowing and accepting that it is the case?

I’ve long understood that imperalism is a horror show; that we (in the West but also much of the rest of the world) are wrapped up in ecocidal systems that are fundamentally antithetical to life, love and interspecies flourishing; that those who rise to power within this system worship nought but Moloch, glutting themselves upon the degredation of us – workers, teachers, carers – exploiting our children, shoving our faces into shit and demanding that we thank them for it. I’m a congenitally pessimistic socialist, born three month prem with a penchant for chest infections. And yet…

This week I’ve really felt the monstrousness of what American, Israeli, British and European elites have been inflicting upon the world. Perhaps it is because we seem to be closer to nuclear war than we have been for a long time and that knowledge sharpens my pessimism… though I find it hard to care so very much, when millions are already starving and suffering and grieving to heart-shattering degrees due to very deliberate policy decisions made by men who glut themselves upon suffering.

Teaching students I work very hard to be encouraging. I teach because I care. But I wish I wasn’t teaching students to succeed in a system that I think is currently very, very sick. I don’t want my students to pass their GCSEs just so they can work for a multinational company complicit in genocide. And I would still teach even if I knew that a nuclear war was coming next week. I still believe in the Humanities even faced with what could be called a lack of humanity, but is more like a lack of animity. I’ve been working hard to help establish a Climate Emergency and Community Hub here in Ipswich because I think the coming years are going to get a lot darker still and I want to try to create a small but inclusive, loving lifeboat sooner rather than later.

I understand why Hallam has turned to Christian writing and thinking more and more during and since his time in jail. There are a lot of aspects of the Christian tradition in particular we have to reject (and I write that as a Unitarian) but there should be no mistaking that this is a spiritual crisis we are in just as much as a material crisis, a crisis very deliberately engineered by elites who would sooner we die than flourish.