We like to think that we’re enlightened. That we are ‘correct’ in how we live our lives. That the things we teach the next generations are the true and historical record of things and that the times in which we’re criticised are merely propaganda from those less civilised than us.
There are people who claim, without irony, that nothing we do is wrong because we, as the top of the pyramid, only do the right things. Obviously, there is so much wrong with this stance that its hard to know where to start to dissect it. But even if we could, even if we sat people down and showed them, frame by frame, how wrong and often dangerous it is to say or believe these things, it wouldnt do anything. Those people are often so far into the delusion, so deep into the ideology, that anything that contradicts it is seen as censorship. As silencing them.
But the truth is that we arent as enlightened as we think we are. We arent the moral force for good that people delude themselves into believing. We might well be the powerhouse in the world, but its not possible for that to last. The cracks arent just appearing now, they were there the whole time. Its just that, now, people dont care enough to plaster them over. To make them look whole.
We have made mistakes. Lots of them. Pretending we havent leads to a lot of situations that are worse than owning up to them. Sure, we might get criticised, but we cant avoid them a second time if we ignore the first. We make models about things in order to be able to understand them better. We scale things back so that we can fit those ideas into our heads and, in turn, explain them to others. Some people think those models are literal interpretations and spend their days picking them apart, thinking they have a handle on the actual truth. When you cant accept that we have to simplify things, you get to believe a lot more incorrect ideas. And if your thinking works in a particular way, you become unable to understand how we think about things at all.
For some, this level of abstraction is already far too much for them to handle. Metaphor and analogy do not work in order to help them understand. If you dont use specifics, they dismiss you as propaganda. They write you off as someone who cant explain anything, much less the thing youre trying to explain.
So, specifics.
Some time ago, we fought in a war. We all know this. After all, the famous canard is “we won.” Perhaps we did. Perhaps the lack of a global authoritarian government is evidence of this. But we know, even if we choose to not believe it, that the war was not solely about that. The war was a global conflict. It might have started in one place, but it was continued in others that had no real connection to the first. Were those other conflicts specifically related? Not really. Did they contribute to the overall narrative we like to build as ‘Us vs Them?’ absolutely.
But they were, taken as their own thing, something apart from the main conflict. There were similar themes, similar ways of thinking that we disagreed with, at least in principle. So we fought them under the same banner.
One of these smaller conflicts was dragged to our own shores. Again, we know this. Its written into the record. We have been, and should be, criticised for it. We should teach it to our children so they dont repeat these mistakes. But we dont. At least, not as we should. We sanitise it. We diminish it. We consider it acceptable so that we dont have to think about it so hard.
Some people say, and on certain days I am inclined to agree, that we did the same thing as those we label as The Bad Guys. We took a group of people we didnt like and we locked them up. We labelled a certain group of our friends, our neighbours and even our families as evil. Another war waiting to happen. We had to, understand? Otherwise the real war would be upon us without our realising it.
To most people, that was it. They were locked up and when the war ended, they were released. End of story. We prevented a war. Our society was restored and forgiveness was accepted.
But thats not true. Its a lie. We lied to them and they have not had a chance to refute it. Because most of them died. At our hands. We killed them. We committed the same crimes that launched us into a global conflict. No one invaded our nation because, as you all know, ‘we won.’ And the winners arent guilty of anything except exceptionalism.
This is the part in the movie where the camera pans from the heroes, battered, bloody and victorious to the piles of bodies and freshly dug graves they left behind.
The irony here is that the prisons we made, the places of horror that our own citizens were locked in as a ‘precaution’ are now tourist locations. Not in the sense of a warning about mistakes made, but a place where you get to see how those people lived before. How they used their resources before we came in, before the civilised people taught them how to be ‘better.’
They swim out there, just off shore, within the ruins of their prison and they pretend that everything is ok.
We’ve all seen them, mostly on television, but some of us have been out to the west coast. Seen them in their natural habitats. They have a name for themselves that we dont use. We just call them mermaids. They dont like it, but they have a diminished population these days. They cannot stop us. They say the word is a slur. Its offensive. It was used as a way of othering them during the time that we rounded them up and forced them into their offshore camps.
Remember, once upon a time, they lived in our towns. They had their homes – specially made – next to ours. Theres little evidence of this now. Time moves on and theres only so much you can fit into history books. Some of it is considered ‘less important’ and is dropped.
The mermaids, then, are that ‘less important’ part. The war only extends as far as the continental part, across the world. You can see it being abstracted away. The conflict that scared us into committing those same crimes is barely mentioned, and when it is, its never about us. It was always about them. They were fighting their own battles, again away from us. We were just sitting here minding our own business. We reacted. We never acted. Thats the difference, you see. They hit us first. Are we to ignore that? Of course not. We were justified. And as the eventual winners, everything we did was justified by the same logic.
But Im getting off topic again. Drifting away from the specifics. Its hard to focus when this topic comes up. As the grandchild of someone who was locked up, its hard to be dispassionate, or objective. The letters my grandfather sent to his wife and to their children – including my mother – arent in any history books. The events these letters, and myriads of others, arent taught in any school. The horror and cruelty of our own people arent in the historical record.
The truth is that fear of some hypothetical event caused us to attempt to commit genocide against a people who, and this is in the record, left their homelands in order to escape the things that led to their own conflicts. If you dont understand that, our own history, at the birth of our very own nation, explains it better.
My grandfather died within those camps. He wasnt starved or tortured. He was executed. He was the second group of mermaids rounded up. The first being those who spoke out against the war publicly. Note, please, that non-mermaids that did the same were not rounded up in a similar way. My grandfather was not political. He wanted to lead a quiet life. A happy life. One where his children and their children could do the same. When he was younger, our nation prided itself on making that happen.
My grandfather was arrested for having children with a non-mermaid. This, of course, isnt illegal. Never has been. They try to make it illegal every few years, but it fails each time. Still, it was an excuse. There were thousands like him. Men and women, young and old. If they were even suspected of it, they were arrested. Taken to the camps and for weeks, they were kept, isolated. Fed just enough to keep them alive.
And then, as the war hit its zenith, and peoples opinions swayed on a knife edge, they were executed. There were no trials, no verdicts, nothing. They were simply killed. Usually in the dead of the night and without ceremony. Under those tourist traps where you can buy offensive costumes of my ancestors for insanely high prices, lay the mass graves of innocent people. Killed for what they said and who they loved and not at all for anything they did.
The war ended, yes. We were declared one of the victors, despite a very minimal appearance compared to other combatants. We took the spoils and we were able to rewrite our history. We denied the atrocities that we committed and we pretended the people whom we imprisoned understood why we did it. Anytime someone spoke up with a contrary opinion, we spoke louder. We yelled at them that they were wrong, that their experience was incorrect. We screamed so much that other nations, even those who won alongside us, started to question our side of the story. How was it that these other stories were coming out so often? We shouted at them too.
It happened this way once before, therefore it will happen that way again. Its a fallacy. There is no guarantee that things will repeat. Even if you do everything you can to account for every variable. There will be something you miss, or something that isnt as accurate. Thats why people are so invested in keeping history the same. If everyone believes the same thing, even if its wrong, when something bad happens again, we have a framework for how things will turn out. And we won. So we will win again. We dont have to change.
But everyone changes. Us, and them. The world has moved on. Many of them have, themselves, acknowledged their roles in the causes of the war – ultimate and proximate – and have done what they can to prevent it from happening again. Most of them are waiting for us to do the same and the longer we refuse, the worse its going to be. Take, for example, a recent diplomatic mission to the, now fully democratic, nation of my ancestors. Their underwater home is as lavish as it used to be, and by many metrics, their population – still recovering from the war – is happier than ours. They will not allow me, not even a half-breed, a quarter-breed, to emigrate there. But they recognise me as part of their culture. It does nothing for me, but its something.
Our mission there was to present a request for mutual aid. The east coast of our nation was ravaged by a series of huge storms. Many major cities were devastated. Thousands drowned as whole towns were pulled into the sea.
Our diplomats stood before their government, hands outstretched for something, while they sat there and demanded answers to our crimes.
There has been no official reply yet. From them to our request for aid, or from us to their demands. I know how it will play out, though. The people who are suffering in the aftermath of some of the worst disasters in living memory will continue to suffer because the people who ‘know better’ argue the increasingly fictional history we presented to the world. And others will eat it up. Will sit there and swear black and blue that every word of it is true. We will stand alone against the world and I do not like where that will lead us.