The only way of preventing death culture is the Universal Truth: It is either we are all sacred humans or none of us is.

Thought on the age of total de-humanization from Charlie Kirk to Gaza

---

My favorite writer and teacher, the seminal Sudanese and African historian Abdullahi Ali Ibrahim, made an observation about us Sudanese people in the US: We belong to three identities that Americans have some “issues” with: we are Arab (this is an internally contested claim among Sudanese people, but nonetheless), Africans, and Muslims.

Before leaving the door open for some “woke” interpretations, I should say that in general I think Americans are among the least racist or bigoted people, including, of course, white Americans. Not because they are exceptional, but because their hegemonic geopolitics made them the ideal host for so many types of people, and just enriched their culture and ability to accept foreignness. I for example in the 10 years or so of living in the US did not face any significant discrimination, and in my work and otherwise I get the same amount of kindness and general vibes, that is sometimes feel isolating, that Americans treat each other with (I came to conclude that the American radical individualism reached a point of general non-social state that in a sense everyone became foreign not only me, recently there has been a discussion about young men and their poor social life, I think this discussion should be expanded, one question that we can start with is: What happened to the idea of the Neighbor, not the biblical one, the one next door?).

But in a more general way Ibrahim’s idea of the troubled identities (Arab-African-Muslim) is true: One of the reasons that the Israel lobby in the US go unopposed is the inability of the Arab/Muslim community to organize, and that in turn is related to the general feeling after 9/11 among the Arabs that their organization might be unwelcome, years of surveillance and some cases of unusual prosecution, created a general sense that the “Arab/Muslim-American” is not just another of the “Italian-American” or the “Jewish-American” etc but a group that supposed to remain, in a way, self suppressed. For example, and based on recent events and discussions, it was striking to me that the late Charlie Kirk counted among the top things he did not want his kids to be exposed to was the sound of the Muslim call to prayer five times a day. In the US, if I was a conservative christian (And maybe I’m not too far from that spirit actually), would be more worried about OnlyFans, the Porn industry, Alcoholism, etc before Muslims noisy, lets say, call to prayers. Also, the hedonistic individualistic materialistic ideology of market consumerism has, provably, far more ability to convert good Christians than Islam (especially the current mainstream form of fundamentalist Islam, which has actually stopped being able to convince a lot of even Muslims).

In a “non-woke” sense, these Identities are troubled, and obviously troubling, indeed. Yet, in my day-to-day life, I feel as normal and productive a part of society as anyone else, and this is perhaps the best way to understand the success of American society: the mix of constitutional democracy, free enterprise system, and individualism has proven and is proving its longevity.

(While I was writing this article, the events in Dearborn, MI, regarding the Muslim mayor, Mr. Hammoud, unfortunately unfolded. And I want to just say that the mayor’s “unwelcome” remarks to one of Dearborn's residents are as repulsive as shockingly moronic.)

I thought this introduction to myself and from where I see the whole situation is important to understand what’s coming next.

---

There is one clear idea behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk: from the assassin's point of view, regardless of whether he was a right-wing or left-wing, Charlie’s life had no value. Charlie, according to the assassin, was not a human worthy of living. The more troubling idea is that more people seem to share this conviction regarding Charlie’s life than one expects (or wants to allow oneself to expect).

The same, in a clearer way, applies to the late United Healthcare CEO. Unfortunately, in the CEO case, it seems (maybe because being an otherwise unknown CEO is inherently opaque and non-personable) that it is more difficult to convince people that a rich CEO is still a human being. This form of trivializing the sacredness of human life is the underlying, lethal aspect of most mass shooters’ worldview as well. It is not enough to be a sociopath to commit mass murder; you have to be a sociopath with a specific disregard for human life.

A specific sentiment that, as it becomes clearer by the day, is somewhat mainstream. If you want to understand the depravity of this common sentiment that normalizes a loss in human life, just think about the following: In other times, people did not only think a corrupt, let’s say for the sake of argument, rich CEO does not deserve to die… people thought even proven serial killers or rapist do not deserve to die! (Just two months ago, the Atlantic’s Elizabeth Bruenig went to great lengths to, in a sense, force all of us to watch executions and struggle with this question)

---

Recently, we started to hear in the news about the American military targeting boats close to Venezuela and killing whoever is on them. In the Middle East and before that in Vietnam, a similar approach to “suspects” has been the normal practice. Who orders these operations and who executes them? We won’t be able to examine their philosophy regarding the value of human life, but one can guess.

When the US military (or any military for that matter) commits things like Tokyo Firebombing, uses the atomic bomb, performs indiscriminate drone killings in Afghanistan, etc. The idea is that this outside-oriented anti-humanist philosophy will never come home.

I think in the Gaza situation, there is a lesson that should be learnt (there are more important ones, but this one is relevant here):

Hamas, as a leading organization of the Palestinian struggle, has proved that, in its leaders’ grand strategy, they don’t seriously count the loss of Palestinian lives.

Regardless of any moral judgement, one can safely assume that when Hamas leaders meet to discuss their tactics and future operation, etc, they don’t stop and ask “but how many Palestinians will die?”, they just don’t ask this question. One should be arrogant to claim he has any solution whatsoever for the Palestinian predicament, and it is true that the Israelis didn’t face peaceful resistance with anything less than lethal suppression, but one can’t help but conclude from this tragic history that Hamas is not limited by any concern for Palestinian lives. (We should still keep in mind that the Israeli military and not Hamas is doing the current daily killing, and we should never excuse or downplay the Genocide Israel is committing. Two thoughts can be held at the same time.)

I want to argue that to understand Hamas’ disregard for Palestinian life, you should understand it as a “coming back home” phenomenon:

In the 1990s, and as the Palestinian tragedy got to a point where no solution appeared on the horizon, Hamas, among other Palestinian resistance groups, started employing Suicide Bomber tactics. This tactic, which by the way has been used in other places and by many non-muslims historically from Japan to Sri Lanka, involves a person wearing a bomb detonating and killing himself with whoever is close to him. In the Palestinian situation from the 1990s to early 2000s, multiple of these attacks were carried out against civilian targets like buses, markets, nightclubs, etc. The ability for most prominent Palestinian resistance groups to carry such operations meant that large percentage of the Palestinian society accepted this tactic from a moral and spiritual standpoint, declaring in a way that the civilian Israeli is not a human, or he/she is a human but can, in the way of just cause, be sacrificed; and it is “brave” to make such a sacrifice.

Such an Un-Truth, no matter how ideologically manipulated, has to come back home. The nihilism of despair through the other eventually gives way to a nihilism of despair within oneself. When the Israelis succeeded in making the Palestinian struggle about death, they already won. If we are allowed to use “won” in the sense that the Germans in 1939 “won” in Poland.

---

The saddest part of Charlie Kirk's death is that it was not followed by the deserved quietness every human death deserves. The political cultural war machine started from the zero second, following it.

This phenomenon of starting the political spin machine immediately after major tragedies is already apparent after every mass shooting; Fox News and MSNBC won’t waste time mourning kids meaningless death and will immediately start a cynical competition about “Guns Control” vs “Second Amendment”, maybe not noticing that everyone is seeing through them, from one side appears the Democratic Party with it’s political interest in the guns hating votes, and from the other side appears the NRA or weapons manufactures special interests etc. Sometimes you wonder if people in the newsrooms stop to think for a second about the facts they are reporting: A child decided to kill all of his classmates!

The reason why the newsrooms are able to treat the incident in this non-human way is that a significant part of the audience also treats it the same way. On one side, people think gun control is the answer for this unimaginable darkness, as if guns are the only available weapons, or lack of guns would bring peace to the troubled mass-shooter soul, and from the other side, Fox News will try to get the teachers armed to the teeth… a form of “peace through strength”, I guess.

Will American society be able to have an honest cry about the sacredness of human life as a collective spiritual response to these mass shootings or political assassinations? A response that addresses, maybe also in art and culture, the underlying nihilistic madness of the whole situation?

To do that, the response should be based on a universal truth, not a pragmatic, convenient, selective talk. If the US state is funding and arming the genocide in Gaza, then it is hard to claim that as an American society, you value human life; it is not a faraway abstract conflict; it is so many real human lives lost directly through your tax money. That’s why we could say apropos the Gaza students movement in the US that they are truly the “consciousness of the nation”, the main and meaningful collective response to the death culture.

---

There must be hope in people realizing that we went too far in the path of this techno-industrial moral nihilism. It first appeared towards foreigners through the American military and the security state (you can read the great book about the nihilistic secret operations worldwide, The Jakarta Method). And once the American society got desensitized towards “the act of killing” of humans far away, the value of the American human naturally suffered the same fate.

You will not be able to watch what is happening in Gaza indifferently, then claim the next day that you are humanely moved by Charlie Kirk's tragic early death. You can rage or hate, exactly like the killer of Charlie, but you can’t claim to be genuinely sad or truly see the eternal injustice of the lost young life.

Truth … at the end exists. And the truth of this matter is: It is either we are all humans, or none of us is.

---

To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,

An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail,

Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.

Walt Whitman - The Wound Dresser