Those to whom evil is done

September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Settler Colonialisms and Ethnic Cleansing

Many states that were built through settler colonialisms (frontier state building) have in common a belief that they are God's 'chosen'. From the Puritan belief in the 'City on the Hill' and the need to drive out, convert, or annihilate the American Indians to the Afrikaner belief that Zulus were Amalikites to be driven out or killed to the Israeli belief that the must go forth and take the land that God gave them, settler colonialisms specialize in justifying the eviction, if not annihilation of indigenous people. In fact settler colonialisms often specialize in uniting a diverse immigrant population through aggression against a subhuman 'other'. The commonalities cannot be missed nor are Americans, South Africans, and Israelis it's only practitioners. All settler states have this commonality.

Intriguingly--despite all the hoopla and media-generated fear of some sort of Islamic will to convert or annihilate another people, we've never seen this happen. Settler states seem to have exclusively grounded their ideologies in the Old Testament and European racism. While it's likely this is something of a consequence of European power, it's odd that some people insist upon seeing an Islamic menace for what has been done exclusively by Europeans.

Running Away or Common Sense?

I'm really not sure why but Instant Messenger conversations with Y. tend to throw off my plans to work for the day. Our conversations are usually brief and usually we just update each other and how we both are and what we are doing. Today he was complaining that he might have to go to China--yeah, yeah, I know poor baby! My main concern here though is that I tend to get nothing done for the rest of the day. I really don't understand myself here. I'm not consciously pining for his company.

Maybe it's just sad that our conversations have become so superficial? Maybe it just reminds me how much I enjoyed having him around and regret that I never told him so until after he was gone? Or could it be deeper?

Do I really need to stop talking to him if I want to become unstuck? I question this all the time. Partially because I don't want to cut him out of my life and he gets so unhappy every time I have tried to just remove Instant Message from my computer. I don't like making him unhappy. I'd rather just understand myself better so that my conversations with him didn't send my whole day awry. My day is my responsibility and it doesn't seem as though cutting him out of my life really meets my responsibility to myself. It seems like running away.