What is it to live in a country that has consciously chosen the path of genocide? I have always taken the view – fairly uncontroversial across most of the globe – that Britain’s political role in the world has historically been deeply destructive. We are the baddies, and always were, with a few notable exceptions. But even with that as a starting point, I feel disorientated by ongoing events.
Even I, who generally felt that our current political class could scarcely plumb lower depths than those it has habitually frequented since Iraq at least, thought that the British state—and its agents in Parliament, the military, and the media—might still draw the line at openly assisting in an actual genocide that was being broadcast, by both its perpetrators and victims, live from the killing fields. Even I thought that the Parliamentary opposition, or some of the press, might have raised the alarm in such a case – you might have hoped that someone would have provided at least a clear condemnation, or have chosen to stand by the millions of people, here and around the world, who are looking on aghast and powerless; or that that they might do their much-vaunted job of asking hard questions and uncovering hard facts. But no. Clearly, I should not have thought these things; in fact I feel naïve for having even still carried this residual belief in any part of the British state. It was maybe not totally unreasonable: ‘refusing to actively assist in a genocide’ is the absolute lowest of low bars, an existentially minimal expectation of a post-war European polity. But that’s where we are. The ranks are closed and serried. It is a hypnotically grotesque spectacle. Meanwhile, in Gaza, the killing intensifies.
Genocide has still been on the table all this time, it seems. Every piety about it being the ultimate evil was just so much noise, to be discarded when it became awkward. It now appears that thinking genocide is bad is for the little people. Or perhaps it is a ‘luxury belief’. The most powerful states in the world have enshrined remembrance of the Holocaust in their public places, their calendars, their museums, their education systems. We were given to understand that this was because genocide was the final, absolute line: never, ever again, for anyone. But insofar as Britain and other nations have ignored or assisted Israel’s campaign in Gaza, it turns out that these same states have in fact kept systematic human extermination and ethnic cleansing on the list of possible political options, as rights which they might need to exercise one day. At my most grimly cynical, I fear that this is because the Northern states have concluded that the coming age will take the form prophesied by the Bannonites and neo-reactionaries—a time of sovereign power amidst climate breakdown—and this means they want leeway to operate as they will, at home and abroad, without being bound by any laws or responsibilities, moral or otherwise. Gaza is the end of all pretence to a belief in any law but that of raw force, and as such, it is the proving ground for all tomorrow’s hells.
That day is now come; the genocidal option has been taken. Our politicians seemingly expect no punishment for their role in it, and the various arms of the state are facilitating their decision with no questions asked. Punishment and law, it seems, are only for the losers of history, the vanquished Serbs and Rwandans, who can be made an example of. In Britain, the media has mostly ignored the magnitude – human and moral – of what has unfolded in Gaza (that is, when they have not been actively cheering it on, or crying crocodile tears of justification); politicians across the spectrum voice support for Israel, dismiss with contempt the charge of genocide, crack down on anyone who steps out of line or, at very best, voice mealy-mouthed platitudes that are far too little, and far too late. The military have clearly been asked to actively assist Israel through British assets in Cyprus, and perhaps in other ways. So say it again: the British state is an active and official participant in an ongoing genocide, its politicians and press are running cover, its intelligence services and military are actively involved. The fact that this is still barely in the papers, and that the people who have taken to the streets asking for it to stop have been denounced as hate-filled racists and fanatics, should tell you all you need to know about how much anyone in power or in the press ever really understood or cared about ‘never again’.
Perhaps I am naïve, but the purpose of Holocaust education, as I always understood it, was not to teach us that we should obediently wait and see what position pundits and politicians would take on urgent events, and then follow their lead. Nor was it so we could take the long view, see both sides, mutter about complexities, patiently wait for years to pass and for evidence to be gathered. No, the purpose of the quite extensive Holocaust education that most people in this country received was surely so we would know a genocide when we saw it. We were supposed to learn what it looked like so it could be stopped, and so that our perpetual duty to those who died in the camps – a duty consisting of an eternal never again, the magnetic north of personal and political morality – would be rightly discharged, should our time ever come to discharge it. It was so we would not be the ones who turned a blind eye to the removal of our friends and colleagues; so that we would know to speak, to act, to refuse to let it happen without a fight; so that we would never betray a hiding child, never denounce a neighbour, never find ourselves just following orders. Whatever else could it possibly have been for, if it was not to know these things, yourself, in your heart?
What can the story of Anne Frank mean to us, as individuals, if it does not mean that we must each of us internalise the lesson that we should never give up a child to genocidaires? And did we not learn, too, that the state would bombard us with propaganda, that the truth would be hidden, and that without effort we would become inured and complacent so that it would not be so simple to see what was before us, and so that many would simply accept what was happening without demur? Were we not warned? We were. A clearly distressed Palestinian man whose mother and family had been killed in the bombardment of northern Gaza was recently manhandled out of a Labour party event in Stockport for the transgression of asking people to look at photographs of his dead mother. In a widely circulated film, Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner stands frozen and silent as he is violently ejected. What has happened to those heart lessons she was supposed to learn? Is this not the very moment for which those lessons were prepared, the moment that we were warned about? If not now, when?
Education should exist so that people are in possession of the knowledge that they need, not so that they know how to defer to higher-ups whenever something happens. We learned about the Holocaust so we would all personally understand the injunction ‘never again’, and so that should we, in the most extreme and unutterable case, witness the systematic displacement, killing and expulsion of a subject population defined by national group, ethnicity or religion, we would have the ultimate reference point seared into us, and know exactly what we were looking at. We would even know what precedes it (denigration, discriminative legislation, violent persecution, appropriation of land and property); what sort of things the perpetrators might say (that the victims were ‘human animals’, perhaps, or that they were all in toto guilty of terrible crimes, or that eventually there would be none of them left); we would know how it might begin (they might be displaced, pushed into ghettos and prevented from leaving; they might have the essentials of life cut off). We learned these things, and more, in detail; not merely so we would be aware of the particular facts of the historical case – for that would ultimately be the gravest insult of all to the victims of the Shoah – but so we would know how to recognise genocide ourselves, without needing higher-ups to tell us, because it is usually the higher-ups who are doing it. And we learned this, we were told, so it would never happen again. Maybe it was mere idealism to take all that education at face value, but the right thing was to do just that, and so we did. And it was understood as a responsibility shared by the state: the state educated us in it, so it was not unreasonable to have supposed it might, just might, have been held as an absolute political value.
Well, evidently not, so all that is turned to dust. How do we live in this country now? I do not see that there are good futures in a place whose institutions and representatives have chosen genocide. What are we to make of our political class, and our media? Are we supposed to forget all this when we go to vote? More fundamentally, are we just supposed to go to vote at all, as though the entire edifice has not proven itself radically illegitimate? As though almost every person currently involved in frontline politics has not, in word or deed, put themselves beyond what we were educated since childhood to understand was the final, uncrossable pale of civilised life? There are crimes, and then there are war crimes; there are war crimes, and then there is genocide. Somewhere in Westminster there are surely emails, texts, call logs, chits, signatures, which directly implicate our government in what the highest court in the world may soon judge to be the latter. Who has remained silent? Who has excused, justified, equivocated? Who has assisted, aided, abetted, supported? Who signed off on the decision to suspend funding to UNRWA, on the arms deals? Who greenlit the use of British military and intelligence assets?
With the Holocaust – and Bosnia, and Rwanda, and Darfur, and all the others – as our tutors, we learned to understand these sorts of things as morally and legally culpable acts. We know what we have been seeing; we were taught to know it, we understood our lesson well, and we are not wrong in that. Am I now supposed to watch these people, the people who have defended and assisted genocide, talk about domestic policy on Question Time, listen to them yapping on Today? Why on earth would I ever vote again, unless and until the criminals are jailed and a new system stands in place of the one they have definitively, finally corrupted by making it party to worst of all crimes, the state crime par excellence, the final obscenity? The guilt flows like quicksilver. Genocide is the kind of thing governments are dismantled for, that states are reconstructed over, for which people have been pursued to the ends of the earth, jailed indefinitely, and executed for. Are we supposed to look at Gaza, then turn back to our political class and forget everything we learned?
If anything is to be recovered from the abyss into which this country and the so-called West has sunk, there is only one question left: when do the trials start?