Ten million famine deaths are expected to take place in parts of Africa over the next few years. Around 300,000 indebted farmers have committed suicide in the hinterlands of India since 1995. At least 150,000 people have been killed by war in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001, and about half a million in Syria since 2011.
Do you want to be quoted the figures from Iraq, Libya, Sudan? The Christians killed in Egypt; the Muslims killed in Burma; the innocents mowed down by gun-rights fanatics in the U.S.; the refugees allowed to drown off the coasts of European nations?
There is a monster sitting in our drawing rooms, and it has been swelling like a bedbug on all this bloodshed.
Was it always there, a homunculus hidden in the folds of our sofa, sucking tiny drops of blood every time we refused to protest the brutalisation of some person or group different from us in terms of caste, colour, religion, region, gender or sexuality?
How did it enter?
Or did it enter our drawing rooms, wafted like a germ from the neighbourhood, where people spoke of teaching some other people a ‘lasting lesson’? It might even have entered on the glare of the TV set, for instance, when talk panels justified the sufferings of the poor and the vulnerable by quoting economic factors. I don’t know. But believe me, even if we do not see it, the monster is there in our drawing rooms. Yours and mine.
Recently, an American friend exclaimed to me: “I do not understand how these Republicans can deny medical care to Americans! Can’t they see that thousands of poor Americans will die needlessly and, at times, horribly?”
I felt like asking her, haven’t you seen the monster in your drawing room? But I didn’t because I have myself been avoiding the monster in my drawing room.
I can sense the monster getting bigger, but I refuse to look at it. I can feel its foul breath on my neck; I can hear its vicious whisper. I pretend the whisper comes from elsewhere. It is easy to do so: there are similar whispers coming from elsewhere too, other drawing rooms, even the TV sets, for of course a similar monster is breathing down everyone’s neck.
Often, the monster says this: Capital is the only index of value. Sometimes it also says this: You are only responsible for yourself. Or this: If they cannot manage, it is their headache. Or this: God would not have made them sheep if he did not want them butchered. Or this: Evolution means the survival of the fittest. Or this: Greed is good. Or this: Violence is natural. Oh, the monster says a lot of things. But there is one word it does not utter. That word is its own name. That word is: Genocide.
It does not utter its own name, because it does not want us to see it. Yet.
Yes, the monster is called Genocide, and it sits in our drawing rooms, justifying the eradication of those different from us in the name of wealth, science, god, nature, necessity, whatever. The monster whispers to us that this is inevitable. Some people just cannot manage, it murmurs. The world is over-populated, it smirks. Who cares for losers, it scoffs.
The monster has its own priesthood. There are people – often very rich, very privileged – who are convinced that (for whatever reason) many millions need to die. Some because of a different faith, some because of a different lifestyle, some because they are farmers, some because they are unemployed, some because they are poor Africans, some because they are poor Americans. The reasons do not really matter. This elite priesthood would find other reasons, if necessary, to justify the murder of millions.
I suppose when 1% of the world comes to own more than half of its wealth, it is inevitable that the lives of the other 99% will be progressively devalued. Some cut medical benefits in the U.S.; some talk of colonising Mars. It’s the same devaluation of life on Earth.
People say we are living through an ‘Age of Conflicts’, an ‘Age of Anger’, an ‘Age of Fundamentalisms’. I am convinced that we are living through the ‘Age of the Monster’. And that monster is a hidden genocide, a slow genocide that is meant to cull the Earth of its ‘undesirables.’ In some circles, I suspect, this is said; in other circles, it is implicit. But the genocides are on, and they are multiplying, even as we sip tea in our drawing rooms.
Other mass murders
And behind these silent genocides are other, larger and more silent, mass murders: those of entire species of plants, birds, fish, animals, insects. The ‘necessary’ killing of those we can use in the short term, and those we find useless in the shorter term. The ‘market-justified’ reduction of the immense complexity of life on Earth — to the simplification of capital, usage, convenience. The monster in our drawing rooms is swelling. It looms over us now, but we still refuse to see it. Will we ever see it? Or will we see it at the last moment, and realise that we are powerless to do anything to stop it now?
As it always happens in horror movies, the last moment is too late for words: one can only shriek then.
