“A badly burned toddler screaming for the mother he doesn’t know is dead — and screaming because doctors do not have enough painkillers to relieve his suffering. An eight-year-old boy whose brain is exposed as bombing damaged parts of his skull. A teenage girl, her eye surgically removed, because every bone in her face is smashed. A three-year-old double amputee, whose severed limbs are laid out in a pink box beside him.
“And in the background is the stench of rotting flesh as maggots ‘creep out of untreated wounds’.”
These horrors are all caused by a genocidal onslaught that is being backed to the hilt by the US government, who just single-handedly blocked a UN resolution demanding a ceasefire to end this nightmare. Instead of focusing on the unfathomable depravity of all this, Americans are being propagandized into worrying about a completely fictional epidemic of university demonstrators chanting for the genocide of Jews.
But for all the efforts to spin, justify and distract from the mass atrocity Israel and its allies are perpetrating in Gaza, more and more people are opening their eyes to what’s happening, and are ceasing to fall for the propaganda any longer.
This is largely because for the last two months the horrific images described in text by The Independent have been cascading down our social media feeds in jarringly graphic photos and videos. Those who’ve only been peripherally aware of Israel’s actions in Gaza may find those descriptions astonishing, but for anyone who’s been following the Gaza massacre it’s just a verbal description of what we’ve been looking at since October.
It’s much, much harder to propagandize the public into accepting military atrocities when they have decent visibility into how those atrocities are actually manifesting as they inflict themselves on human flesh. In an age where photos and videos of events can go viral within minutes of their occurrence, and in an area where it’s still possible to upload some footage onto social media, it’s far more difficult to persuade people to believe this is anything other than what it is.
If everyone on earth could really truly see what’s happening in Gaza, and actually viscerally grasp and appreciate what they were seeing, the killing would end tomorrow. It would end tomorrow because the entire world would force an end to it by any means necessary. These atrocities would no longer be tolerable by humanity’s collective consciousness once they had been fully seen.
And really all of humanity’s problems are like this. If everyone could really see and deeply comprehend how horrific war is, war and militarism would end immediately. If everyone could really see and deeply comprehend how insane and self-destructive ecocide is, ecocide would end immediately. If everyone could really see and deeply comprehend the horrors of poverty, abusive prison systems, police brutality and institutional injustice, these things would no longer be permitted to exist in our society.
Seeing is all that’s required for humanity to begin moving out of dysfunctionality and towards health. That’s true regardless of what scale of humanity you’re talking about, from the largest problems of global civilization right down to the subtlest dysfunctionality in the inner processes of the individual. Once enough seeing has happened, the dysfunctionality cannot continue.
Corruption and malfeasance doesn’t stop until it has been exposed to the public. Abuse doesn’t stop until the abusiveness has been clearly seen for what it is and brought to an end. Addiction and other self-destructive behavior patterns don’t abate until the inner dynamics which drive them have been brought into consciousness and seen clearly. Self-realization only occurs when there’s been a clear seeing into the nature of awareness and perception.
Seeing is crucial to ending dysfunction at every scale of human life. That’s why Julian Assange figured that the best way to help the world would be to find a way to make it easier for the public to see what’s going on behind the veils of secrecy that the powerful enshroud themselves with, and that’s why Assange is now currently in prison. Those who want more health and harmony are always trying to find ways to make things more seen, while those who want to preserve the status quo of domination and dysfunction are always trying to keep things hidden.
In this sense we actually are kind of looking at a struggle between light and darkness, because there is an ongoing battle between the impulses within our species to make things seen and the impulses to make things unseen. On one side you have real journalism, true education, authentic activism and dedicated inner work trying to bring the unseen into the light of awareness, and on the other side you have government secrecy, censorship, propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and the war on journalism trying to obstruct and obfuscate the truth from the public eye. Those who desire peace, health and harmony will always find themselves on the former side, while those who desire domination, destruction and exploitation always find themselves on the latter.
That’s why Israel has been systematically exterminating journalists, artists and academics in Gaza, and why it tries to restrict internet access and communications as much as it can get away with. It’s why the US empire is imprisoning Julian Assange and continually working to control what information the public sees online while hiding a tremendous amount of its activities behind government classification. It’s why the abusive husband works to isolate his wife from her friends and family and tells anyone who says anything about his abusiveness that it’s none of their business. It’s why when we sit in meditation there are forces within us which squirm and flail around rather than allow stillness and inner clarity to set in. Humanity is in a constant struggle with itself — between staying hidden and becoming a truly conscious species.
But we can’t hide from ourselves forever. Already more and more cracks in the walls are appearing, and the light is streaming in through them. The aspects of our species which want to remain hidden are leaving fingernail marks on the floor as the aspects of ourselves which want to be seen are dragging them kicking and screaming into the light of consciousness.
There can only be one winner in this fight. We’ll either become a conscious species that is guided by truth and lucid understanding or we’ll kill ourselves by nuclear war or climate catastrophe in our frantic efforts to remain hidden. Either way, the tower of lies and secrets is coming tumbling down eventually.
