It is Friday, noon here in Korea. I have just returned from my father-in-law’s funeral. Very visceral affair. Touching the dead body, wailing women, finally the wrapping of the body, money stuffed in, the body lifted and the coffin lid closed. Everyone should have to dig a grave …
I get home and learn of the death of Refaat Alareer, a poet and gentle soul. Him and all his immediate family, wiped out from AI targeted missles, the heights that technology has brought us to.
I’ve been a poet for decades. I’ve dedicated much to my craft. This includes thinking constantly about the world I live in, reading and studying voraciously as my discipline demands. This includes being a voice of justice and sanity. This includes an intimate knowledge of the bestiality of man and the Shoah. This includes solidarity with the poets of the world - people who dream of a better world and point their fingers at the hypocricy and lunacy with / among.
I will like Refaat, throw my Expo marker at the death merchants when they come for me - as they surely will. I will not go gently into their good night. I will not die quietly or be silent. Hear me out …
Think about it … the real bottom line here.
Say, a crazed man shoots and kills your sister or brother or even kills your whole family, in a random act of violence. Does that mean you have the right to kill anyone related to him, the whole neighborhood where he lives? Drop bombs on them all? Does this stand up as a “right to self-defence”? No. Anyone in their right mind would understand your anger, wish for revenge but condemn you ever trying to kill others in retaliation, especially many, many other innocents.
But in the realm of fanatical, murderous ideology and countries - the nation state … we argue it is okay to kill 1,000s in response. And we watch it all on TV.
In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Where is the decency? The norms of society and values of men and women that have the interest in “a better world” in mind? Or even at a minimum a world that obeys and follows legal standards and that values the lives of each and every person? Where is the world where children can live in peace? Where is our true understanding, our natural morality and response to nurture, understand and live by a rule of law not violence?
Tolstoy once said - “No one knows how inherently evil and violent the nation state is, who hasn’t been in jail.” I would add, “who hasn’t been in an concentration camp, like Gaza.”
We live in a crazed, insane world. That a holocaust can happen before our very eyes - and the world,this comical world of self-interested borders and fantasy nations, does nothing, is the proof. I feel like Stefan Lux, that crazed Jew who burst into the League of Nations 1933 and commited suicide because the “civilized” world would do nothing to help stop the murdering of Jews.
I leave you with this video of Refaat from a few days ago - caught in the lunacy. I leave you with the same poem he posted on Twitter, a few days ago … “Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives.” - W.H. Auden.
Expo Markers