The Age of Peak Gaslighting

If there is a word that has discovered a contemporary relevance in the modern world far beyond its original raison d'être - as a gag used to psychologically manipulate a hapless spouse in a movie first made in 1938... a word that was also Merriam Webster's Word of the Year in 2022, gaslighting has so thoroughly transcended its common usage in quasi therapy-speak as to now actually and fully describe the current status-quo of global realpolitik.

It is fortuitous that I finally write this long-distilled screed during the exact moment when the International Criminal Court as well as the International Court of Justice finally begin the process, after eight long months of genocide, to assign the nation of Israel a richly deserved pariah status and declare it a country so far beyond rehabilitation (despite the best efforts of the world's richest and most powerful countries to save it from itself) to be almost doomed to disappear after a mere hundred years of contentious existence.

In time, these events will barely warrant a footnote in the history books; inevitably remembered as an interregnum during which madness took over the earth and comeuppance eventually claimed the wicked... to be included amongst a million other footnotes describing various times in history during which humankind's march towards emancipation was periodically stymied by the tenuous bonds of our wild evolutionary passions. But I don't think a lot of us who have lived through these last eight months will ever cease being uneasy that all this was allowed to occur in a world where the confluence of technology, ethics, and entertainment delivers to us day-after-day a chimeric vision of a world marching towards a real and everlasting justice - for all the peoples of the earth. 

We see the righteous protagonists emerge victorious in fantasy-world creations in our cinemas, learn about Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela in our classrooms, go to see Ai Weiwei's latest exhibition at the gallery or take in David Attenborough's latest entreaty about climate change on our subscription streaming service.The lessons from almost every media landscape we inhabit lull us into this notion of a reflective parody of a time when justice was once hard-fought which thankfully is now overcome and whose retelling we can take for granted as natural heirs of a world enlightened.

The tens of thousands of the children of Palestine now lost to us will never have that luxury.

The tens of thousands of homes destroyed, of futures ended, of families erased will not have that reposeful relief.

The tens of thousands of histories and stories and dreams eradicated will never see the light of that day.

What we have allowed to occur over the last eight months is evil - in every possible sense of the term that has ever been allegorically and explicitly used since the dawn of time. And I hope the blood of the children and the innocents we have allowed to be massacred stains our souls and haunts our quiet reflections right until we close our eyes for the final time.

We live in a world in which we look at ourselves in a giant mirror - as we wilfully dim and brighten the gas lights that allow us to be seen - all the while wondering why the lights are getting dimmer and then brighter..... dimmer and now brighter.... now dimmer and then brighter.

Ignatius Hirudayaraj

 My Father doesn't exist on the Internet.

I google his name expecting to see some rare snippet of lost information about him

As if the ghost of his passed life will somehow emerge

In the memory of someone who was so inspired to enter it into:

a post/ a comment/ a reflection/ a reference...

For me to see

And to know that

His life made a difference to someone somewhere,

Other than me.

My Father doesn't exist on the Internet.

That's because he died in 1987

A few days after my 9th birthday

During the same week when a much-loved and much-loathed political man in our city died too.

So, there was a public mourning,

And much wailing and gnashing of teeth...

For me to ponder

That I knew that the people around me were not mourning for him or anyone like him

But for themselves and the void in them for now so to co-exist with mine.

My Father doesn't exist on the Internet

He's not there for me to look up or follow or stalk

He's not there for me to sound off to about war and regret

And failure, and the shape of clouds.

My Father doesn't exist on the Internet.

The Voice to Parliament 2023

Far be it from me to ever claim that I am anything but mostly ignorant of the lived experience of the First Nations people of this land; of those who continue to experience one of the worst ongoing atrocities ever to be committed on Indigenous peoples anywhere in the world through time and space in the history of our civilization. But I do want to weigh in on the sad debate that is currently doing the rounds as it relates to the contentious realm of the colonial project that continues to be modern-day Australia.

I hope that while doing so I do not seem unknowing of my place and status as an immigrant living as a guest on Wurundjeri country of the Woi-Wurrung language group of Indigenous people - members of the Kulin nation.

There are very few occasions in history when one is invited to be a part of the turning back of time as it relates to our barbaristic, predatory and unconscionable actions through our collective history as colonists who have come to inhabit a geographical region in the world today having displaced in our wake a culture that thrived and cared for this land over so many millennia that the comprehension of its passage, itself, challenges our sense of time. 

The imminent Voice to Parliament referendum is a singular event in history in which I am honoured to be allowed to play a part, but to see the vile misinformation and innuendo being spread about its value to modern Australia, blak and otherwise, is disheartening and cruel; both to the memory of the atrocities committed on the original inhabitants of this land, and the clear opportunity that it now presents - to retell a history of dispossession and disgrace by writing a new story that could point towards a future of hope and regeneration.

I acknowledge the groundswell of scepticism and suspicion that has now emerged about the referendum's enactment from what, effectively, are two factions; one - that is made up of academia and activist groups that bemoan the small step that The Voice represents when viewed against the entirety of what needs to be done towards actively decolonising this country, and two - a group that merges disingenuous multi-national corporate interests centred on the mining and resource extraction industrial-complex with the recalcitrant 'quiet Australian' contingent of white-supremacists who will never change their inherent racist prejudices and will forever fight against any acknowledgement of the continuing devastation their enduring actions have spawned over the last six hundred plus years all over the world.

To the first group, I say - Leave your ivory towers, your vast libraries and secure tenureships aside for a minute; desist from your weekend activism and put down your fashionable banners for just a second, and see the referendum for what it is... a small step down a long, rickety staircase of emancipation and reconciliation for the multitudes of people who now collectively make up this continent and whose own cultural histories, wherever they come from in the world, may include revolts, genocides, and erasure from the 'white' history text books. Acknowledge that all this moment in history represents is but incremental progress towards the future that we all want and strive for - one that embodies a true and authentic decolonisation, once and for all, and a collective moving on from a violent and unforgivable past.

As for the second group, there is really nothing anyone can say to convince you to change. But know this; you cannot stem the tide of history. There can be no future without reckoning, there can be no sustainability without acknowledgement, there can be no progress without reparation, there can be no You without I.

Vote Yes to The Voice.