This newsletter discusses genocide and the current attacks on Palestine.

Update 10/19/2023: Minor editing for clarity, and a note on the term “open-air prison.” (see note)

When I was in middle school, I had a choice: did I want to take a language as an extracurricular? Then, the next choice: what language did I want to learn?

I chose Spanish. Even as a child, I made this decision pragmatically. I live in Los Angeles—I was going to start with the language that would let me speak with the most people around me.

By my junior year of high school, I had taken all the Spanish classes my school offered, but I knew there was an AP Spanish Literature test. If there was no one to teach it, I would teach myself. All I needed to do was read.

But reading a story is only half the experience without understanding the context the story comes from. As I read the words of Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Federico García Lorca, Octavio Paz, and others, I read, too, about the sociopolitical backdrops against which their imaginations unfolded, the historical events that precipitated their words.

And in their words, despite the differences in the details, the specific experiences, I found resonance in the narratives of marginalization, and of resistance.

I can’t describe now all that I have thought recently, have felt, about living in a timeline where there are multiple genocides happening concurrently around the globe—so many concurrent genocides that I am haunted by the fact that I may miss one in listing them. East Turkestan. Tibet. Artsakh. The Rohingya. Ukraine. Sikh people. Trans people. Continued genocides of Black & Indigenous peoples in the USA. Of First Nations peoples in Canada, of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia.

This devastating genocide of Palestinians, backed by my own government. With tweets of support from figures such as Barack Obama.

It’s like I’m living in some kind of hallucination. How could people see things so differently? How could anyone understand this as anything but genocide, no different than World War II?

And so, when I read this tweet by the President of Colombia Gustavo Petro, I felt that same profound resonance, that shift in reality—a new clarity about the world, about my own place and power in it; that slipstream of ever-shifting landscapes, of being unsettled—that has defined my experiences of reading Spanish-language literature, especially Latin American literature.

La barbarie del consumo basado en la muerte de los demás nos lleva a un ascenso del fascismo sin precedente, y por tanto, a la muerte de la democracia y la libertad. Es la barbarie, o el 1933 global, como la llamo. 1933 fue año donde ascendió Hitler al poder.

Lo que vemos en Palestina serán tambien los sufrimientos en el mundo de todos los pueblos del sur.

Occidente defiende su consumo excesivo y su nivel de vida basado en acabar con la atmósfera y el clima, y para defenderlo, sabiendo que provocará el éxodo del sur hacia el norte, y no solo del pueblo palestino; se alista a responder con la muerte. No quiere fransformar su sistema económico sino hasta donde llegue el mercado para descarbonizarlo. Y sabe que el esfuerzo será minúsculo para salvar la vida en el planeta. Su política busca defender la búrbuja del consumo de los ricos del planeta y no salvar la humanidad, cuyas mayorías le son desechables, como los niños de Gaza.

Por eso las fuertes políticas anti inmigración, los campos de concentración para inmigrantes, los miles de naufragos muertos, por eso el tapón del Darién, por eso los bloqueos económicos a los países rebeldes.

La derecha de occidente ve la solución a la crisis climática, como una “solución final”, la derecha vuelve a soñar con Hitler y conquista la mayoría de los pueblos ricos y arios de occidente y nuestras oligarquías latinoamericanas, que no ven otro mundo en donde vivir que el de los “malls” de la Florida o de Madrid.

Las derechas del sur usan la violencia, quebrantan la democracia, se sienten, por el norte, legitimados para ello. Creen que pueden matar y hacer genocidios, solo necesitan la bendición del poder mundial.

Vamos a la barbarie sino cambiamos el poder. La vida de la humanidad y sobre todo de los pueblos del sur, depende de la manera como la humanidad escoja el camino para superar la crisis climática producida por la riqueza del norte. Gaza es solo el primer experimento para considerarnos a todos y todas desechables.

pathttps://blogs.publico.es/cristina-fallaras/2023/10/15/nuestra-barbarie-protegida-por-cuchillas/

— Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) October 15, 2023

by Gustavo Petro (@petrogustavo) October 15, 2023

The atrocity of consumerism built on mass death has brought about an unprecedented rise of fascism poised to kill democracy and liberty. It is an atrocity, or, as I call it, a global 1933–for 1933 was the year when Hitler ascended to power.

What we are seeing in Palestine will be the same fate suffered by all of the Global South.

The West defends its excessive consumption and its standard of living that depends on the destruction of the atmosphere and climate, and to protect it—knowing that to do so is to provoke an exodus of the South to the North, and not only a Palestinian one—it stands ready to respond with death. The West refuses to change its economic system to decarbonize the market, even while knowing that saving the planet would require a minuscule amount of effort. The politics of the West prioritizes preserving its consumerist bubble for the rich over saving all of humanity, the majority of whom are considered disposable, like the children of Gaza.

And so to this end, the powerful anti-immigration policies, the concentration camps for immigrants, the thousands of shipwrecked dead; the Darién Gap; the economic sanctions against rebel countries.

The right wing of the West views the solution to the climate crisis as a “Final Solution.” The right dreams of being Hitler and conquering the rich & the Aryan of the West and our Latin American oligarchs, who do not envision any other world to live in than the malls of Florida or Madrid.

The right wings of the Global South violently quash democracy, legitimized by the North. All they need to kill and commit genocide is the blessing of global powers.

We are headed toward atrocities if we don’t change power. The survival of humanity and, above all, of the Global South, depends on what path humanity chooses to overcome the climate crisis produced by the rich of the North. Gaza is only the first experiment to model us all as disposable.

https://blogs.publico.es/cristina-fallaras/2023/10/15/nuestra-barbarie-protegida-por-cuchillas/

I have also translated the enclosed essay linked to in Presidente Gustavo Petro’s tweet.

Our atrocity, protected with knives by Cristina Fallarás

Every time we hold our heads before a wall, I try not to look at my little girl’s face. There is evidence that is impossible to cover up about living in an incoherent world that we pay for with every heartbeat.

We ask ourselves why the right won in the European Union. At least I, and I hope many others, ask myself every day about the Meloni Government, about the Italian far right, about the advances in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Sweden… and also in the governments of over half of the Spanish autonomous communities. I can’t stop thinking about it.

But how would they not win? The world we live in is designed by them.

All the comforts of our society, all the economic advantages that we enjoy—and they are not few; just look beyond our borders—all the “security” that we enjoy, all of our capacity and freedom of movement, everything absolutely has been built at the cost of the lives and peace of others—millions of them.

Here and now, in Spain, some of us hold our heads in our hands over what is happening in countries outside of the European Union. And we do it while surrounded by fences crowned with knives! We, who say we abhor these criminal actions and condemn the lukewarm posturing before them, do so while in a space designed by them. We do it because we live in their world. In the world of the “bad guys.” The contradiction is unfathomable.

Now, faced with the horror in Gaza, we’ve gone back to the same. It was easier for us, of course, when it came to the war in Ukraine. Russia is an outside agent, a country of a supposed “axis of evil,” and in the imagination of the European Union, an “outsider,” “enemy.” We must assume as the foundation of any analysis that our unrest, our terrible conditions, have been produced from within our own European Union. Because when it comes to Israel’s attacks on Gaza, this brazen crime broadcast live, the attacking country, the “bad guy,” is part of our world—the same world we are from, supported by the United States, with no confrontation from Europe. What am I supposed to do?

The people who are killing and will kill in Gaza die on the shores of the Mediterranean—our Mediterranean—surrounded by a fence, like that of our own country: a fence crowned with knives. Theirs imprisons them in an open-air jail¹. Ours imprisons us in the contradiction of protesting these atrocities from within an even larger atrocity: the walls we have raised to feel safe from the lives of the rest of the world.

Then we ask ourselves why the right is winning, why the far right is advancing in Europe. Simply put, it is because the world we live in is theirs.

“Global South” was not a term in common use when I was learning geography in school. We learned to divide the world into “First World” and “Third World” countries. Where China fit in to all this was always a mystery to me. It wasn’t even until graduate school, really, that I learned there was even a term “Second World” at all—I had gotten used to China’s exclusion from the USA, not only in law, but in the imagination of the US. I had assumed that “Global South” was a term about physical geography, one that, like the First/Third-World division, excluded China, located in the northern hemisphere.

But to translate this post, I needed to make sure I understood the terms that were used. And so I found out that “Global South” is a term describing human geography and human patterns of movement, and that many Global South countries are located in the northern hemisphere.

Including China. And suddenly, my place in global politics clarified. That contradiction of being Chinese-American crystallized into a sudden realization that I was a product of those same migration patterns of the Global South to the Global North; that I had one foot in both worlds.

And, as I read the Spanish of these posts aloud to my boyfriend, and then my English versions to make sure I had understood the original correctly, I saw with a new clarity that despite the fact that his family had immigrated from Guatemala to the USA under vastly different circumstances than my family from China to the USA, we were nonetheless both part of that movement of the Global South to the Global North as described by Presidente Gustavo Petro.

I don’t know if I can describe how I felt reading both these posts. “Relief” isn’t the right word for sobering consciousness. Perhaps this is what “comrade” means: Finally, a global leader who sees the same course of events unfolding; finally, a journalist who sees as I do the breadth of the encroachment of fascism, the cognitive dissonance of protesting from within the Global North.

Finally, words that show me I am not crazy for saying, 2023 is no different than 1933, and we, too, have Hitlers.

I translate to understand the world and my place in it. To recognize our interconnectedness. And to share the words of others, in hopes that to do so is to share ideas that words cannot even convey; in hopes that others, too, can be transformed.

There is still time to make a choice.

It is never too late to do something differently.

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