Recently, someone asked me why I care about Beijing’s campaign to exterminate the Uighurs, stating that he had little sympathy for them; he appeared to believe the Communist Party’s designation of them as “terrorists”, a word calculated to shut down cognition in anyone predisposed to believe that governments, even oppressive governments, are generally trustworthy in their statements. Presumably, this person was just intelligent enough to grasp that if he questions the Chinese government’s right to oppress a Muslim minority, the right of his own government to do the same is suspect. I quickly dismissed him as an odious clod, but was irresistibly reminded of the words of John Donne:
No man is an island, entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend’s were.
Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
These words are not merely true in a philosophical and moral sense, but in a practical one as well; for every time we allow tyranny and oppression to go unchallenged, we participate in normalizing and excusing the behavior, and establishing it as international precedent. Then one day soon the victims may not be a strange people in a distant land, but familiar people in our own country. Therefore, send not to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Yes, it’s a perfectly legitimate sentiment, but Donne didn’t intend for it to excuse tyranny.
I still recall reading this poem as a teenager in the Hemingway book by the same name. If you’re fortunate, you accumulate a lot of information when you are young that will bring you comfort when your experience and emotional development catch up.
What has changed drastically for me is the realization of just how rare the humanity in this poem is and how our State institutions are designed to act directly against that.
The State encourages us see the different as unworthy of the humanity we seek for ourselves and the people we love. How most people can objectively see what the Turks did to the Armenians and Greeks, the Nazi’s did to the Jews, or Stalin did to the Ukrainians (and closer this story, what the Han Chinese already did to the Tibetans) as not just wrong, but evil while simultaneously ignoring similar policies through mass incarceration, cruel sex registries, or the extermination of the Uighurs in China takes and impressive level of disassociation to silence the cognitive dissonance that should be clanging together like empty boxcars on the train.
Toni Morrison famously said ““The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
Unfortunately, she ignored it’s ugly and far more common corollary.
If you have chosen to live your life as a slave, then your goal becomes to either help, or give a free pass to the State enslavement of others.
I still recall reading this poem as a teenager in the Hemingway book by the same name. If you’re fortunate, you accumulate a lot of information when you are young that will bring you comfort when your experience and emotional development catch up.
What has changed drastically for me is the realization of just how rare the humanity in this poem is and how our State institutions are designed to act directly against that.
The State encourages us see the different as unworthy of the humanity we seek for ourselves and the people we love. How most people can objectively see what the Turks did to the Armenians and Greeks, the Nazi’s did to the Jews, or Stalin did to the Ukrainians (and closer this story, what the Han Chinese already did to the Tibetans) as not just wrong, but evil while simultaneously ignoring similar policies through mass incarceration, cruel sex registries, or the extermination of the Uighurs in China takes and impressive level of disassociation to silence the cognitive dissonance that should be clanging together like empty boxcars on the train.
Toni Morrison famously said ““The function of freedom is to free someone else.”
Unfortunately, she ignored it’s ugly and far more common corollary.
If you have chosen to live your life as a slave, then your goal becomes to either help, or give a free pass to the State enslavement of others.