DEATH is Not a Party.

It is the conflation of just social-political cause with racist tribalism that appeals both to the Muslim jihadist and the European tribal nationalist.

Fear twisting into hate through the media lens: the West against Islam; radical Islam and right wing nationalist against Jews; Shiite against Sunni;

Israeli against Arab; Christian against immigrant; Jihadist against the west. Full circle.

The same putrid lubricant greasing the wheels of hate; one resentment refueling the next.
Those with the most guns, killing the most children; a perpetual hate machine.
Clive Barker’s version of the wheel of Dharma; the one that unlocks the gates to hell.

Sanity: first, there is no flavour to death. Death is death, you eliminate the identity, the reality of that person. There are no political deaths compared to jealous deaths. Death carries no attributes of its intent. it has no intent. It just is; or rather just ‘not is’.

The first step of delusion towards becoming a killer is to believe that ‘our death’ is worth more than ‘their death’. Self preservation, survival and competition are the first justifications for violence. “It was self-defense, officer, I swear he fired a scud missle first!” That’s the ticket to dehumanizing the target of your intent: to kill. Their deaths hence their lives, are less valuable than mine. The rest is easy once you’ve taken this step away from empathy. Their children are not as valuable mine, their claim to land I need, their eating habits, religion, etc. etc.

The twist in the Devil’s Tail is of course the slippery slope of dehumanisation necessary order to prepare a target for death is symmetrical: to be complicit in, to applaud the death brought upon others because they are not as worthy as you are is to dehumanize yourself. is to kill that connection you have to the rest of your humanity. It is to clog the vital faculty, the sense that connects us all as a humanity. To kill another (or to endorse the killing of another), is to kill the human that is your being.

Evil is always intricate.
For if anything can be called Evil then it must be the taking of that which we were gifted and yet we do not understand: the very lives we live. Taking one, annihilating another one of us, is akin to stealing something for which you have not only no use, but have no real comprehension of its value.

To make it easy for people to kill other people all you have to do is diminish both their value.

But the black psychological tendrals creep deeper and deeper into our worst fears.
For us to even contemplate the magnitude of the murder that surrounds us, so much done in our names and for our ‘security’. For us to even try and keep up with the deth tolls in Gaza, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond; entices us to shut down our empathy as well.

The sheer scale of death that surrounds us is so overwhelming, even to those who could actually do something about it. To us spectators (because that is ultimately what we have been reduced and dehumanized down to); we hide what our senses tell our brains behind filters of helplessness and anonymity. There’s nothing I can do, besides, we don’t know the people that we see on our screens, the children we see dead on our screens.

In that alone we are meshed, murder victim and spectator: in our mutual powerlessness and anonymity.

We do not know them so we cannot identify with them.

If we can’t be them, then we can not feel them.

Even though in fact, we are them.