Your oppression will not save you

Who are we without our identities, sense of self and social constructs? A brilliant TV series, Severance, offers an enthralling thought experiment. Certain employees of a fictional company, Lumon Industries, voluntarily undergo a procedure through which their work-related memories are separated from their regular memories and are locked out of their reach. This is done to ensure the confidentiality of their work. In this way, their regular selves collect their salaries for what appears to them daily eight hours of blacking out. Meanwhile, their other selves, called into existence specifically for work, have no recollection of the outside world, their identities, or their true selves. And because they are not allowed to sleep at work, time is an illusion to them. The implications of all this hit you very gradually, but there is no turning back once they do. It is a fascinating story, and you will not know what you are missing until you watch it.

When it comes to political shocks, the surprise victory of Donald Trump in 2016 was a big one. Even the four years of Trump's rule did not compare to this shock. The resulting trauma eroded my trust in politics, media and, above everything else, in punditry. The reason is that, in most cases, you find snake-oil salesmen using their usual tricks behind the thin veneer of punditry. Good, honest opinions and analyses are hard to come by in this day and age of hyper-spin. It took me a while to recover from it, but the work of a few good men and women helped me rebuild this faith to some extent. Two such examples are John Oliver and Jon Stewart. I know both are actors and comedians. Since they started dealing with serious content, their work speaks for itself. I follow YouTube channels that feature their works. A few days ago, I found a clip where Jon Stewart interviewed a black man. This gentleman turned out to be the famed author Ta-Nehisi Coates. He was there to promote his new book, The Message. I knew of his previous work, especially his award-winning Between the World and Me. Now when I came across that one during Trump's term, I was not immediately impressed. He was a very gifted author and had a way with words. But the question was of the content. Every era produces echoes that reverberate in all directions. Since, during Trump's time, white nationalists went from strength to strength, it was likely to find an equal reaction in the opposite direction. Trump had quite effectively used divide and conquer policy to rise to power, which entailed creating, amplifying and exploiting conflicts. In those cynical times, I thought I had found the other pole and dismissed it.

However, once I started listening to this deep, soulful talk between Stewart and Coates, my view changed entirely, and I was compelled to go back and reread his celebrated book. I couldn't be more wrong. The book has a lot of genuine pain, anger and heartbreak, and if such pain gives you empathy for others, it has done its job. Here were a Jewish American and an African American discussing, amidst other things, the latter's visit to the West Bank, which he has included in his book. Some great questions followed. Why is the arc of the moral universe so resilient to bending towards justice? How does an author cope with the frustration caused by this realisation? And how do we reconcile the suffering of the Jewish people in the Holocaust to whatever oppressive methods the Jewish state uses today to manage the non-Jewish people under its control? And this is where the interview does its magic. Coates says that there is a chance that after enduring something truly terrible like the holocaust, you may emerge morally improved. Still, there is an equal chance that you may conclude that the world is this cold hard place where the only thing that matters is how to survive and who has the guns. This take is an infinitely vast improvement upon my previous explanation of the matter I borrowed from Arrested Development: "Hurt people hurt people". Then, a haunting line from the new book I have begun to read but have not finished yet: "Your oppression will not save you". In this book, he also writes: "It is never enough for the reader of your words to be convinced. The goal is to haunt." Mission accomplished, I thought.

It is a twenty-minute must-watch segment, and you can easily find it on YouTube. But then, something in the comment section caught my eye. Somebody had written: Thank you for not being CBS. It made me wonder what this was about. And the answer was not hard to find. Before this segment, the author had appeared in CBS Mornings obviously expecting a softball interview but where co-host Tony Dokoupil, a recent convert to Judaism and whose two children from an ex-wife live in Israel, unleashed on him. He was accused of writing a book which would not be "out of place in the backpack of an extremist". A terrorist manual, in other words. "Is it because you just don't believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?" he asked. Remember, the question at hand was not of any condition but the current apartheid condition. Ad hominem attacks like these are rampant these days. When you cannot defend Israel's actions, attack the questioner's integrity, civility or, as in this case, humanity. I thought Coates defended his position well, and you are free to look the segment up and make up your mind after watching. That is not what is bothering me now. What bothers me is the growing demand from countries like Israel to buy their spin hook, line and sinker. Of course, this can owe itself to the very nature of a state or then the precedents set by the world's leading superpower in its global war on terror. But even more worrying is the ease with which these elements excommunicate you or declare you a traitor to your cause and get away with it. Why should it be so difficult to say, "I see your pain, but I do see your oppression too"?

I am sure Stewart has been called a self-hating Jew many times. In comparison to him and his platform, I do not compute. Still, I have also been shouted at on live television for committing the simple sin of questioning the rationale of supporting the Afghan Taliban. Why are your own in such terrible haste to cancel you?

Then I decided to return to the book I believe broke the world and reading which still causes me physical pain. Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, and the place where he elevated the following line from Michael Dibdin's novel Dead Lagoon to the status of weltanschauung: "There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven." This is how evil primes and conditions you. Beyond the grave, the old man keeps doing it again and again.