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.