Take your eyes off the fucking clown show
thinking morally about war
I am quietly angry and scared.
We live in a world that’s getting very, very complicated, and no one’s paying attention.
Some people have asked me my opinion on the war. My opinion is this:
Pay fucking attention.
There is an incredible amount of misdirection, propaganda, and sheer complexity that goes into keeping a conflict like this going on. Begin learning about it.
Take your eyes off the fucking clown show and onto the war
I’m going to use a character that society seems to have decided it is okay to pick on: the Karen. Or, if you’re familiar with The Hunger Games, imagine a Capitol resident.
To Karen, war is just a symbol of war. To Karen, who grew up in the United States, war isn’t quite real. She knows cry when she sees videos of Hamas brutalise children. Perhaps she knows to post on social media about the history of the occupation, and how supporting Palestine is only human.
To Karen, this War(tm) is about picking sides, Israel or Palestine. To this Karen, the war is barely real.
Sure, she confronts some of the tragedies of the videos and stories. Maybe even “her body has been struck by grief” and “she feels the world suffering.” But the war is not real to her, because she cannot account for its complexity; it will always remain somewhat of an abstract story, told to her by politicians or Facebook friends, as she remains in employ of in America, one of two main mentally bankrupt ideological armies.
I’m bitter about Karen, because Karen is part of the fucking noise. Her grief, compassion, moral reckoning are part of the clown show. I’ve spent four paragraphs on her in an article titled “take your eyes of the fucking clown show,” so instead I’m going to talk about what I think is important.
What keeps a war in place?
What is the reality of the war? What is happening? How is it staying in place?
These are important questions.
Did you know allowing Hamas to exist has historically been part of Israeli defence policy, as part of a strategy to divide-and-conquer Palestinian political parties, delegitimise Palestine, and avoid a 2-state solution? Did you know that without any one actor uniquely planning this or being uniquely evil, there’s reasons to understand Israel’s political situation as stuck in a deadlock, where extremist Hamas action and extremist Israeli parties, who depend on not making concessions, and avoiding peace talks, cycle, peace not unequivocally desired by either side?
Did you know for reasons I don’t understand enough to confidently elaborate on, we’re stuck in a world where all major American news outlets, NYT, WSJ, CNN, in the first 24 hours of an alleged brutal hospital attack in Gaza concluded it was Israel, a story that turned out to be a hoax? Even after US military ruled out an Israeli strike with high confidence, and daylight brings with it the knowledge everyone got hoodwinked, these outlets barely report updates . This is not reliable reporting. Why is the world reporting and operating this way?
Did you know even if Hamas is wiped out tomorrow, it’s entirely probable new groups of young men with nothing to lose and everything to resent will gather the next round of munitions, recruits, and vengeance, and call themselves New Hamas tomorrow, because Hamas is in some ways an emergent phenomena of the Palestinian situation?
Who do you trust? The 2-party ideological battles of the U.S.A. are inane and hopelessly insulated from reality, the mainstream news outlets seem to have consistently become dysfunctional, even the main political actors (Biden, Netanyahu, etc.) seem to be dead actors, with no one in control, as chaotic patterns of events continue to dictate the events all world actors are responding to.
If you hope to have any sort of moral reaction to this war, it means coming to terms with at least some of these full complexities of war.
There’s so much to pay attention to. In creating space for these real complexities of the war, there’s chance to begin responding and paying attention to world events with a tempo that notices real reality.
You don’t get points for speaking. Silence and ignorance is an understandable option. Use your spare energy to listen and discern. It will keep priming you more to move with the true complexities of the world.
But I hope you’ll pay attention.
The clown show
It seems in modern American society, thinking "about the Israel-Palestine conflict” itself is actually hard, rare. Instead, what people think about are the symbols that the Israel-Palestine war represent in the context of the American culture war. The translation and substitution of I-P conflict for its symbols happens too quick, one might not barely notice it. But as a foreigner myself, I do; it's one of the more bizarre things about this country.
Everything is so unreal here, the memory of the direct conflict so weak, it becomes substituted by symbol, operations of those symbols, and the rhetorical intensity is ramped 1000x fold to make up for that lack of reality.
The intensity of much rhetoric from people here is so high, the actual encounter with the Israeli-Palestine conflict is shockingly low.
It feels like hearing residents of the Capitol in Hunger Games talk about a "conflict war" in District 4. It’s that unreal. It’s that level of “these people have no idea of what they’re talking about,” some of them seem to have reasonably picked up a lay understanding of colonisation, some have picked up a scary disregard for life, but their application seems wholly unreal, theoretical, and Capitol-rhetoric focused.
Every move and way people interact with the war in this country seems to be less interacting with it and more chaotically reacting to the occasional ripples the war sends out in the global and American consciousness with salient pieces of drama, like the latest instalment of a soap opera. It’s less war, more a new episode of Game of Thrones. Pinballs in a media and ideology machine.
20 years ago, I wouldn't have applied this to Indian society, because it seemed they still knew something about direct conflict, in a way American society has forgotten. Today, I'm not so sure. People count the calories at Starbucks, everything is mediated by symbols, politics is too, in a way that makes the whole thing unreal.
The 3 clown sides
There's 3 extremist moral positions, each fearfully common:
The "kill the jews!" people (flanked by their fringe leftist apologists, "they don't really mean that, it's a metaphor for decolonisation").
The "kill the Palestinians" people.
The "both is bad!" pearl-clutchers, content to stick to this simple refrain, and not think about the conflict other times, it's not their problem, really, they don't have to encounter the complexity of it.
The last side particularly bothers me, because on the face of it, "killing civilians en masse is bad" is, how to say this, simply true. What makes it morally bankrupt is something more subtle, a disengagement.
It’s perniciously, in a way the first two are more obviously clownish.
What do
What does it mean for a fundamentally powerless foreign citizen to think about the Israel-Palestine conflict?
The most important thing it can mean is Encounter. With the truth.
Sharpen discernment, become more clever. Perceive a little more clearly how the networks of ideologues and support in the personal networks around them work, how the networks of political incentives and international relationships in the world hold together conflicts. Then, take whatever actions organically emerge and make sense to take from that "fundamentally powerless" place as a the average resident of a foreign democracy.
For some, that’s meant not learning too many specific details, but grieving, their direct, ancestral connection to that trauma. For some, it’s meant donating money. For some, maybe it means listening to family members and friends, and in quiet ways, opening their minds a little.
“Peace”
It unnerves me a deep part of me when people “pray for peace” without having understood the necessities for war.
When they don’t seem the understand the need for a militia, the rule that sometimes the final rule is violence.
I know mentally, they’re talking about aggressive versus defensive wars, non-initiation, and so on I know energetically, they’re maybe touched simply by the reality of the suffering of war.
Do I trust them to have my back in any meaningful way, or are they noise?
I’m woo enough. I think intentions directly affect the fabric of the universe and all that. but also, intentions are literally also intended to be intentions for actions; love is a feeling, and feelings are meant to guide action. Prayer is a call in every sense of the word.
In a healthy community, the purpose of “love and prayers” is actually to organise one’s will and communities into networks of actions, responsiveness, and discernment. Song circles and action go hand in hand, informing each other, breathing life into each other. A community that only prays and sings is dead. A dead end of life energy.
“Peace” pt 2
Some influencers, after a lot of admonishment of “both sides,” land on the simple solution: advocative for peace. They have got something deeply right, and something deeply wrong.
The something deeply right is children, by principle, are innocent. The Palestinian children do not deserve to live in an impoverished, occupied state. The Israeli children do not deserve to live besides the rocket fire of terrorist violence. Peace is an imperative.
But “peace” so often seems to mean the busy parent, annoyed their kids are fighting, telling them to “figure out out” without really caring. It’s like “peace” matters more because it disturbs the foreigners’ psyche than the reality of the place.
It’s not that simple.
“Peace” is not so simple.
It’s not simply an absence of something: an absence of deciding to do the conflict bit.
It’s a positive thing—it means building viable, functional societies, where the choice to participate in those societies is good enough it doesn’t crumble into ruin, scarcity, and terrorism-fuelling deprivation again.
That’s hard. Politicians could agree to a two-state solution tomorrow, and it wouldn’t solve the problem. Getting over to the other side is not obvious.
If peace was as simple as simply Getting Rid of the Evil Actions, some meddling foreign country would have done it by now. But coups are easy; setting up a functional state is something the CIA hasn’t mastered despite 50+ attempts.
Peace is absolutely the right thing to advocate for. But morally, to advocate for it, means keeping the whole scope of peace in mind—the building something after. To simply advocate for the flattened, whitened “peace” is yet more noise.
“Peace” pt 3.
Peace is an unequivocally good goal, and active war is so much worse than occupation and periodic conflict.
But there’s an edge to people calling for “peace” that scares me— like comfortable people living far away think, “if only we had peace, everything would be okay!” when the only time they think about the conflict is when it flares up like this.
That version of peace feels like “hey, can you keep it down?” “Can we return to previous conflict levels where international attention is not on the conflict?”
But that’s understandable, that’s how most of the world relates to problems elsewhere. The problem is worse: it makes people living in those far away countries think “peace’ (i.e., absence of international-attention warranting conflict) is the answer when it’s not. It desensitises them, leaves them interacting with a hallucinated version of reality where such a “peace” would solve all problems.
It scared little me when the adults in the room are interacting with hallucinated versions of reality. It eroded my faith solutions will emerge. This is a personal fear; the older I get, the more I realise, this is the way it’s always been, and will continue to be, and we get by anyway.
When people call for peace, part of me goes, “but what about fairness and justice?” What about a notion more active than absence of something warranting the policeman’s attention?
Pre-October, ordinary Gazans still lived in an economically bereft state, whose ranks keep losing members to radicalised Hamas terrorists, and whose land is occupied by a foreign militia, that injures, evicts, and kills periodically, often in response to Hamas attacks. Ordinary Israelis, despite having best-in-the-world levels of education and development, live next to a terrorists militia publicly vowed to end their people entirely with rockets that cannot all be stopped.
Changing all that? Is not simply about peace talks. It’s about one of the hardest things civilisations ever do: set up successful societies, from one of the worst situations possible: a huge ideological, economic, and political divide to cross.
I imagine when people say “peace”, they don’t just mean return to this, they mean create a truly sustainable, humane set of states.
But “peace” is an infirm concept, particularly for this conflict.
staying sane
Keep an eye on deeply moral imperatives.
In psychotic information environments, hear everything, trust nothing.
misc caveats
By learn more, I don’t mean OSINT information chasing, war’s own hyper-real immersive crime show online.
i don’t mean the hypereality isn’t the important. but just the opposite: it’s important to track just how important the hypereality is becoming
in a world where you need to brace for increasingly psychotic misinformation, staying in touch with reality supports all other real action
postcript: NPCs
“NPCs” is a term from video games, to refer to non-playable characters, the stock video game characters you interact with but don’t control yourself. In internet parlance, NPCs refer to people seen to not have a lot of agency or self-awareness as they live their lives.
A reader said:
I've been introspecting regarding the topic of your essay.
How does one avoid becoming an NPC? Obviously, everyones abilities, influence, capacity and discernment are different.
It follows: How do I accurately assess the real impact I can and perhaps have the ability and responsibility to make. How do I sink into a serenity awareness; How do I know when I have done enough and must accept what I cannot change?
Accurately assessing the real actions and agency and scope of impact available to you is the first step to agency. Even if “you can’t have an impact on the conflict at all,” what options do you have about relating to your immediate social circle, your relationship to information, your morality, energetics? Do they cause you to take other actions, or affect the way you think about other things? These are real levers to pull in your life, because no one else is going to be pulling them for you. They bootstrap agency. Accurate discernment of impact matters.
postscript: further resources
scale of devastation (more 1, 2; caveat 1)
wow, I want to say this is the piece about the war(s etc) I wish I had written but I hadn't quite even made my way to thinking the thoughts needed to write this piece. I'd been sort of groping for something and this names it.