wed 6 dec
‘The A-Z clamped a grid on despair.’ Bleak narrative from Derek Jarman’s 1987 film ‘The Last of England’ has nothing on having to face your city and country divided into grid zones like a computer game, be forced to attempt to figure out which of these might be safe only to have the rules change as you go and realise - NOWHERE IS SAFE.
This isn’t Squid Games or Hunger Games. This is a grid system imposed on Gaza for evacuation warnings - breaking the strip down into 600 blocks and ‘turning life in the territory into a macabre game of Battleships with citizens left guessing which square will save their life.’ (Rohan Talbot of Medical Aid for Palestine). Accessed via QR codes and social media posts this is a system inaccessible to those without power or network access. It is a system presented as ‘warning technology’ but in reality just enables a more efficient and systematised mass extermination as ‘genocide tech’.
Unicef’s James Elder highlights the chilling absurdity - “places they are told to go are not safe zones – that doesn’t exist. They are disease zones and potentially they are zones of death’ - civilian slaughter beyond any pretence of military target. “We are no longer in Rafah we are in block xx. The reality is uglier than anyone can imagine because what is happening to us has never happened before.”
Imagine this grid of despair on the A-Z. Lynmouth Road and the surrounding neighbourhood designated London block 776 and warned to evacuate to 781 only to find an evacuation warning there. Imagine having to utter, as journalist Motaz Azaiza has just tweeted ‘Another strike on my street. My neighbours are massacred.’ No escape beyond the M25 bound by walls and snipers. A grotesque dystopian trap. A living nightmare.
And then there’s the GOSPEL (Habsora). The twisted gospel according to Netanyahu and definitely not good news for anyone as former White House official notes - ‘other states are going to be watching and learning’ from Israel showcasing its killing merch. GOSPEL is the name of the artificial intelligence system honing in on delivering target after target after target. 15,000 targets in 35 days. Targets aka homes, churches, hospitals, libraries, The Ministry of Culture, the Palestinian Bar Association, UN buildings, refugee camps, universities, journalists and their families, doctors - 1000s and 1000s of people. “This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a ‘mass assassination factory’,” (+972) processing data rapidly with an emphasis on quantity. Calculating and condoning collateral damage with the ‘emphasis on damage not on accuracy” (Daniel Hagari IDF Spokesperson) and a focus on causing mass devastation to civilian areas for strategic purposes. Disproportionate Force as core tactic.
And we see it everyday in graphic appalling detail. As Trik Cyril Amar says ‘We’ve all been to Gaza now. That’s how present this genocide is.’
‘Anyone denying that Israel has for nearly two months been wreaking on Gaza a policy of mass displacement, total destruction, widespread killing and deliberate ethnic cleansing is either pathologically delusional or engaging in brazen, cruel gaslighting.’ Lara Friedman. President of Foundation for Middle East Peace.
We take the tube into town. The announcement says we are on a train going to Walthamstow Central but it isn’t true. We are going the opposite way. Everything feels back to front and upside down. Told to believe and accept the opposite of what we can see and feel. The US House passes a resolution declaring ‘anti Zionism as anti-semitism.’ Labour fails to back a Fatal Motion on the core labour right to strike. Oil and gas deals are struck at COP28 Climate conference. Everything falling in fatal motion as we face multiple cascading disasters.
On the stairs of the Piccadilly Line time slips. 40 metres below ground. 82 years into the past. Crowds of people seeking deep shelter from 12,000 metric tons of bombs dropped on London. Platforms lined with sleeping bodies. We are flung full speed through the depths of the earth from east to west and emerge in Kensington. We know we’re in the right place when we see the word ‘Berlin’ and I wish we were really there. We’re invited to the Goethe Institute to be part of a day exploring alternative economic models of care with UAL students. We arrive as Sheridan Kates of London Degrowth Collective is speaking - of debt write off, universal public services, rethinking GDP and the unjust absurdity of the cost of living - of strategies, tactics and policies that bring the economy back into balance with the living world, reducing inequality and improving human well-being.
Artist David Cross is full of energy and fight for a higher education system that pushes back against the idea of ‘employability’, opening up other pathways and possibilities for students to become active citizens rather than consumer/producers for the corporate system. Sheridan presents a slide sharing three theories of change. The symbiotic, interstitial, and the ruptural. David talks about revolution v reform and arguments for the urgency of rupture but Sheridan understands them as inseparable - that we have to imagine and build what comes next. She acknowledges that within degrowth debate some have issues with the idea of surplus put to use in acts of collective joy and creative transgression. This is what we value the most. Turning the world upside down. Making the world we want we want to see. Showing and doing that, as David Graeber says ‘the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and can just as easily make differently.’
The Goethe institute website home page features a quote by Herman Hesse - ‘for the possible to emerge, the impossible must be tried and tried again.’ We keep trying.
Tonight, the darkness is broken by bay windows full of glistening lights. The street feels ancient. Just before the dark of the park consumes, an upstairs window glows with an arch of candles. A beacon at the end of the road. Admiring it I find out that this particular bridge of light is common in the former mining area of The Ore mountains of Saxony, East Germany. Silver mining may have ended in the 1970s but these candle arches still populate the snow covered towns - greeting a memory of miners emerging from deep underground into relentless darkness. I walk the streets delighted by each sparkling window and thoughts of the lives inside and remember how Sheridan had talked of the degrowth movement’s recognition of the ‘pluriverse’ –a methodology of hope and action for the multiple worlds that are already here and that ‘breathe seditiously’ (Bayo Akomolafe). My breath rises through the cold night air.
