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all of us are transient, fleeting.
nothing is stable.
no-one will save us.
we have to save ourselves.
events are not self-contained.
if you want to remember genocide, remember too the conditions of possibility for them.
work to change them.
if the extermination of a group of people is taken as an administrative goal, an apparatus can be created that will carry out that task with great efficiency. people will adapt to it. the goal will seem to them normal. professional duty, administrative rationality, the distancing of oneself from ethical considerations...all are routine, all are present all around you.
all that is required is political consensus around the desirability of the end.
you can create that consensus through any number of means.
the elimination of political opposition is one of them.
the problem, then, is the nature of the end, and whether that end is taken to be legitimate.
contestation of a particular administrative end is political.
without political contestation, what possibility do you have of changing anything?
and without the possibility of change, what is the point of remembering?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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