This Is the Sickest Sh*t I Have Ever Seen.

And Paralyzed, We Watch.

I have been staring at the above photograph for an hour. Two frames, stacked. On top, a city. Not a metaphor, not a symbol, not a dateline in a newspaper…. But a city. White buildings catching the Mediterranean light. Streets arranged in the patient geometry of four thousand years of continuous human habitation. Balconies where somebody hung laundry that morning. Windows behind which somebody was making coffee, or arguing with a teenager, or lying in bed a little longer than they should have. A city, which is to say, a miracle, which is to say, the particular and unrepeatable result of a hundred generations of people deciding, each day, to keep going.

Below it, the same frame. The same coordinates. The same angle. And nothing. Not ruins — ruins are romantic, ruins have arches and columns and the dignity of time. This is not ruins. This is powder. This is absolute, unadulterated depravity. This is the city passed through a grinder and spat back out as a grey, undifferentiated field of its own atoms, stretching to the horizon, interrupted here and there by a tooth of concrete that used to be a stairwell, a hospital, a school, a bedroom where a child slept with a stuffed animal that is now compressed somewhere under forty feet of what used to be its home.

I have been staring at it for an hour and I cannot make the two images be the same place, and they are the same place, and that is when it hit me, sitting at my kitchen table on an ordinary afternoon in one of the least ordinary years of my life: This is the sickest shit I have ever seen.

Not rhetorically. Not for effect. I mean it with the whole of whatever I have left that still works morally. In the entire catalogue of atrocities a human being can witness in one lifetime — and our lifetimes, let us be honest, have not been short on atrocities — I do not believe anything has ever been worse than this, and I do not believe anything has ever been watched more completely by more people who did less about it.

The Empire of Depravity

The empire is dying in public. It is dying the way empires always die — not with the dignity it claimed for itself in its museums and its mission statements, but with its hands around the throat of a child, on camera, laughing. What we are watching in Gaza is not an aberration of the world order. It is the world order. It is the thing the marble columns in Hollywood movies were always hiding. The rules-based international system, that great liturgical phrase intoned by white men in good suits on Sunday programs, has been exposed for what it has always been: a set of procedures for managing the slaughter of the poor, the black, and the brown by the rich, the white, and the odd comprador brown-face.

Almost three years of this. Three years of flesh and phosphorus and the particular grey dust that settles on a city after it has been reduced to its constituent atoms. Three years of watching, on devices we carry in our pockets, the methodical unmaking of a people.

A study published months ago — serious, peer-reviewed, conservative in its methods — estimated 680,000 dead. That was months ago. The bombs did not pause to read the journal. The starvation did not suspend itself out of respect for the footnotes. We are, by any honest accounting, approaching a million. A million innocent human beings. Each one with a name, a mother, a preferred side of the bed, a particular way of holding a cup of tea, a voice that will never again be heard by the people who loved it.

A million.

They Broadcast Everything

And the dying, terrible as it is, is not the worst of it. The worst of it is the manner. The worst of it is that the men doing this filmed it. They filmed the torture. They filmed the rape. They filmed themselves rifling through the underwear drawers of women whose bodies were cooling under the rubble of the houses those drawers had stood in an hour before.

They filmed children in cages. They filmed prisoners stripped and bound and beaten and violated with objects, and they set it to music, and they posted it, and the posts got likes. The perpetrators were not ashamed. They were proud. They understood, correctly, that there would be no consequence. They understood, correctly, that the institutions built in the smoking ruins of the last great European crime — the courts, the conventions, the solemn vows of “never again” — were paper. They understood that the paper would burn. And they lit the match on livestream, and we watched, and nothing happened, and nothing is happening, and nothing will happen, because the people who built the paper were themselves the arsonists all along.

Look at who they are. Really look. The Epstein files crawl out into the daylight one redaction at a time, and what do we find? We find the names we already knew. The presidents and the princes and the prime ministers and the financiers and the philosopher-kings of Davos, the men who lectured us for thirty years about human rights and the dignity of the individual and the sanctity of the liberal order — we find them on the flight logs. We find them on the island. We find them in the little black book of a man who trafficked children for a living and died, we are told, by his own hand, in a cell whose cameras happened, on that one night, not to be working.

These are the men. These are the custodians. These are the grown-ups who were supposed to be running things while the rest of us got on with our small lives. This is who decides whether a truckload of flour reaches a starving child in Rafah this week. Of course the child does not get the flour. Why would she? Look at the hands the decision passes through. Look at what those hands have already done.

A civilization is being erased and the men erasing it are precisely the men you would expect to be doing it, if you had been paying attention, which almost none of us were, because paying attention is painful and the algorithm rewards the opposite.

What is being destroyed is older than the countries destroying it. Gaza has been continuously inhabited for four thousand years. Churches from the fourth century. Mosques that watched the Crusaders come and go. Olive trees older than the idea of Europe. Archives, genealogies, family photographs, the handwriting of grandmothers, the recipes that lived only in the muscle memory of a particular aunt in a particular kitchen that no longer exists because the kitchen is now a crater and the aunt is now a number on a list that the people maintaining the list have themselves been killed for maintaining.

Universities obliterated. Professors assassinated in their homes, one by one, by name, because an educated Palestinian is, to the men and women doing this, the single most intolerable thing in creation. This is not war. War has rules, however honored in the breach. This is something older and cleaner and more terrible. This is erasure. This is the deliberate amputation of a people from the body of human memory.

And Paralyzed We Watch

And we watch. Eight billion of us. The largest gathering of conscious, literate, morally-equipped human beings ever to share a planet at one time, equipped with the greatest communication apparatus ever devised, and we cannot stop a few thousand men with rifles and a few dozen men in offices from grinding a civilization into powder. We watch on our commutes. We watch on our lunch breaks. We watch while the baby naps.

We watch and then we close the app and we answer an email about quarterly projections. The horror does not penetrate. It cannot penetrate. The screen is engineered not to let it penetrate. The next video is a dog on a skateboard and the one after that is a child being pulled in pieces from a collapsed apartment block and the one after that is a recipe for brown butter pasta and the feed does not distinguish between these things because the feed is not a moral instrument, it is a machine for the extraction of attention, and attention, once extracted, is not the same thing as conscience, and the men who built the machine knew this, and the men who rule through the machine knew this, and here we are.

We told ourselves a story, for a long time, about who we would have been. If we had lived in Germany in 1938, we would have hidden someone in the attic. If we had lived in Mississippi in 1955, we would have marched. If we had lived in Rwanda in 1994, we would have — what? Spoken up? Done something?

We do not have to wonder anymore. We know. We are living through one of the great crimes of the human record, with more information than any previous generation has ever had about any previous crime, and we are doing, in the aggregate, nothing. The story about who we would have been was a lie. It was always a lie. Comfort is a stronger narcotic than conscience. It turns out this was the test, and the species is failing it, and the failure is being recorded in high definition for whatever comes after us to study.

And it shows us, finally, why in all the long centuries of human striving we have never managed to rid ourselves of oligarchy. Not because the oligarchs are strong — they are not; they are vain and frightened men who would not last a week without the machinery of consent we build for them each morning when we wake up and go to work. We have never rid ourselves of them because ridding ourselves of them would require us to become, even briefly, the people we told ourselves we already were. And we would rather watch a city turn to powder than find out, in the mirror, that we are not those people and never were.

I am not exempting myself. I am not standing outside this. I am in it. I write these sentences and I will post them and then I will go and do something trivial, because the alternative — to stop, truly to stop, to refuse to participate in a world that permits this — is a thing I do not know how to do, and neither, apparently, does anyone else.

The empire is dying in public, and it is taking a people with it on the way down, and the men at the controls are the kind of men whose names appear in a pedophile’s address book, and the institutions that were supposed to restrain them have been revealed as costumes, and the rest of us — the eight billion — are standing in the street watching the building burn and filming it on our phones.

This is the sickest shit I have ever seen.

And the sickest part is not the men who are doing it.

The sickest part is the paralysis of everyone who is watching.

- Karim