Anatomies of silence and speech
How we self-censor and can it ever be helpful?
Although one pales beside the other, just as no Palestinian writer or journalist ever wanted renown in return for the risk-to or loss of their life, it is actually no fun either to forgo or worry about career opportunities, professional advancement, or even bland-but-pleasant acquaintances and — you thought — friendships, as a penalty for the need to speak the truth when silence is easier.
It might in the end be clarifying, but nor is it any fun to pay social or professional penalty for insisting on retaining the sanity it is to state that all life is precious and genocide bad, when the world will make it far easier to be insane with it.
Even without the irrefutable truth of it all, I know enough people in Palestine that I could never be quiet about that which is done to Palestinians by the Israeli project that stole their homes and has been cruelly placed on top of their lives since 1948.
I know Palestinians who self-censor — for reasons ranging from personal safety to threats to their businesses — and, faced with no such threat myself, it would be cowardice of me not to speak to the best of my ability on their behalf. It is, apart from anything else, what I would hope someone else would do for me, were I in such an unfortunate situation.
There does exist the temptation of an easier life; of letting the world outside of you stay outside of you, but in that obedience there is an acceptance that the silence you consented to keep made you less than you are; because you stopped yourself from stating your convictions, from stating that which you knew to be true and important. It is to admit that you were afraid to say these things, and therefore it is to admit that you were living in fear, which is neither an admirable nor desirable way to accept that you live.
To accept this is to accept that you cannot be publicly who you actually are. Not only that, it is to accept it to such an extent — knowing what you know — that in time you cannot be alone with yourself either, and ultimately it is of greater importance to be able to live with yourself in private than to labour and compromise tediously in pursuit of nothing more fulfilling than to thrive incrementally more in public.
Burke and silence
Some weeks ago, one of those bland-but-pleasant writer acquaintances, in a private but predictably self-involved message concerning what he interpreted to be my disapproval of his silence at the genocide in Palestine, declared how he had realised on some issues — including, apparently, genocide — it was sometimes more important to say nothing.
First and to be honest most irritating of all was my resentment, as I watch Palestinian colleagues and friends do all they can to survive, that I had to take time reassuring a needy Western writer safe at home that — in a media landscape stacked with some of the most vicious hypocrisy, racism and complicity imaginable — his was certainly far from the worst. But still, his claim struck me as interesting. It struck me most of all for its natural inversion of the famed Burkeian maxim “All it takes for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”.
By his logic, the theory in fact might run contrary: All it takes for the triumph of evil is that good men to do something. Or at least, good men say something. There is, apparently, nothing more evil than using speech to stake out a moral conviction on a simple subject made artificially controversial. This is a position all the more shameless for anyone who ever identified even partially as a writer, the first duty of which is arguably to be almost uncontrollably disgusted at a world that is beautiful but which inflicts needless suffering on its best and least-deserving of such fates, while the worst of us lead lives unafflicted by doubt or want.
Like farting at a dinner party, by this Burkeian inversion, there is now northing worse than the risk of incriminating yourself as outside of a consensus that is deliberately made comfortable, and departure from which is deliberately made uncomfortable. Virtue here is one where —even if your instinct is to oppose genocide, and somewhat conscious of the long history of brutality in Palestine— you have wisdom enough not to speak of it publicly. The prospect of adding your little voice to the dissent is an evil far greater than not doing so.
“I’m Spartacus”
Thinking often these last months of silence, recently I considered the famous scene from the film Spartacus, depicting the crescendo of a slave rebellion against the Romans, in which Spartacus gives himself up with the words “I’m Spartacus”. The words famously lose all effect, because everyone, as we know, proceeds to also say “I’m Spartacus”.
A rightly renowned scene of classic cinema, the principle on show here is, likewise, the anatomy of silence or speech. The scene, re-run to the formula of my erstwhile acquaintances, where silence equates to virtue, sees Spartacus say “I’m Spartacus” as everyone else who previously stood beside him remains quiet. Perhaps they even agree “he is Spartacus”, the Romans take Spartacus, and that’s that. The hero is dead, the rebellion is over.
A part of this formula is hardly new. It is not new that dissent requires some degree of either bravery or rebellion — but the idea of a specific morality in silence, as horrors unfurl, struck me as novel; like children in the classroom who know they are to stay quiet, no matter what the teacher is saying. The only version of regime where I could imagine the formulation of silence as a virtuous obedience is, naturally, a totalitarian one.
It is telling also that in 75 years of very successfully disregarding international law, opinion, and Palestinian rights to life and their property, the Israelis have never for a second considered that silence in support of their aims was useful. Rather, the forward line of Zionist defence is quite often Jewish Zionists being specifically loud about how pro-Palestine expressions, no matter how tightly-corresponding to history, law, evidence and facts, actually make them feel uncomfortable. Equally, non-Jewish Zionists are encouraged not to be silent either, but to loudly advocate the same concerns on behalf of Jewish people.
That the tail of this speech leads not only to murder in Palestine but also the erosion of law, broad racism, virulent Islamophobia, and dehumanisation of anti-Zionist Jewish people who loathe such corruptions of their upbringing or a two-millenia faith, means that such speech should really be regarded as a matter of public concern.
And yet silence has reigned.
In Praise of Silence
I remember the story of an Iranian friend, born shortly after the Revolution of 1979, when the politics and destiny of that revolution remained wide open. My friend was born to a mother whose sister was more politicised than she was, and as a baby her aunt carried her niece with messages hidden inside her blankets, helping deliver them undetected to dissident groups as a new and revolutionary state tried to rebuild control.
This, for all intents and purposes, is silence. The message was hidden in the blankets of a baby because it was not safe to write that message on the banner, even if that banner might remain the ultimate goal towards which the silence of the hidden note builds. Silence, then, in some circumstances has value.
By the same token, it is perhaps useful if obvious to note that silence is just another word for secrecy; so let us add that to believe in a need for silence is to believe in a need for secrecy.
In such circumstances, the value of the silence corresponds directly to the penalty placed upon the speech; so let us also add that it is perhaps counter-intuitive to praise the silence rather than condemn the penalty.
Each approach, moreover, is self-fulfilling; we either exist in a society where the currency of silence is valuable and so silence circulates, in which case silence becomes valuable. Alternatively, we live in a society where the currency of speech is valuable and so speech circulates, in which case speech becomes valuable.
There is an implicit confusion, one with consequences we are likely to see play-out in the coming years, that the West tends to think of itself, and certainly brands itself, as a social model where speech is — to borrow a metaphor from marketing — the Unique Selling Point, and yet Palestine now shows clearly that silence is in fact the currency.
What do the silent do next?
As Palestine is bombed and the Israeli genocide machine spins even faster than it has for the last 75 years, silence does probably still sadly hold some virtue. At least — pending any radical reorientation— it will hold value in the near future.
After this immediate moment is behind us, when millions of Palestinian lives have been ruined but the amorphous, sprawling notion they (not very silently) call “Hamas” has not been disarmed, when support for Palestine — armed resistance and all — has globalised further, intensifying in the West Bank, Palestine proper, and neighbouring countries; there will be a value to those who did not openly declare themselves for Palestine. The notes may have to be carried in secret for a while.
Those who did not mark themselves for Palestine will — after others among us were possibly cancelled while the silent kept their jobs — continue to be able to write and commission and advocate for the principle that every life on earth is sacred, and that this utterly basic notion obviously includes Palestinians and Palestine. Perhaps the sacrifices of speech when it mattered most will at least allow them to work in future for the statement that no Israeli genocide or Western moral inconsistency will achieve its goal of permanently silencing the Palestinian truth. Even with this proviso, still we must note that every I’m-Spartacus act of speech made at the current time decreases the (wrongful but nevertheless) potential costs to those who are right now refusing silence.
There is also a version of events where — as the ICJ rules in favour of the merit of South African charges of Israeli genocide — the cretins who knowingly stayed silent out of cowardice see a tide of history turn against them, and realise they actually needed a little speech to remain relevant, to retain credentials to talk in future on morals, ethics, the world, or life.
But just as I’m no authority on anything, none of what I outline here is an exhaustive list of those I disdain or don’t either. There are those who I would never condemn for their silence; it is clear that those who always had the wisdom to be quiet in the clamour of the internet are worthy of respect. It is often those who practice this version of quiet who are also performing much of the best work— rather than the words — that just about keep the world afloat.
I have endless compassion on the part of those — from Palestine, but also of Lebanon or Afghanistan or other countries so mercilessly destroyed over time — who already lost so much to the trauma of Israeli-US violence, and who don’t want to relive it again for the sake of online or public expression. There can be great wisdom, reason and virtue in silence, none of which is diminished by the fact the act (or the absence of act) is also practiced by cowards and hypocrites.
“Working from the inside”
Beyond this inalienable truth of its potential virtue, there is also much about silence that warrants not just condemnation but a final closer examination.
A friend in US media sent me an Open Letter; in it, notables of the media condemn the Israeli genocide. They ask if I will circulate and sign, though my friend will not be doing so, because they can be more effective from the inside. From the inside. Because virtue untested is no virtue at all, I wonder if, on their salary, I too would be more effective from the inside? I wonder also how many the inside can sustain? Can I come too? I do, after all, want to help, and have no aversion to flattering salaries.
But if we can’t all be from the inside, why must I be on the outside? If the inside needs the outside to change a thing anyway, then maybe… join us on the outside? And then, beyond these simple questions, the most important: if 30,000 Palestinians are dead in Gaza, then truly, how effective was your inside? When will you join us in ending what was, quite literally, and to to the tune of your salary, a sponsored silence?
Of course my disdain for the silence in such a time runs deeper than this. My disdain is not just for the strategically — they say — committed. It is also for those who like to loudly proclaim their disgust (often embellished, for effect, with swear words) for the systems under which we live, but who find not a public word, not one, for tens of thousands of murdered civilians; deaths paid for with their own taxes and even demanded by their own representatives. My disdain is for those who exalt —rightly— the innocence of childhood, its intrinsic beauty and its precious discovery of a beautiful world, but who found no public word for the Palestinian children who proved less precious than the value those individuals placed upon their silence.
My disdain is for those who feign awe at life when really they mean their own life; it transpires that awe compels them to stay silent on matters of importance rather than to speak, it transpires that Palestinians were not welcome in their communion of awe. My disdain is for every person who gave their speech to the Ukrainian right to resist domination but not the Palestinian. My disdain is for every run-of-the-mill “journalist” type who dabbled at that time in foreign policy, but now suddenly decides it best to stick to their domestic beat; who suddenly concerns themselves with impartiality, with not showing enthusiasm for specific outcomes.
My disdain is for so much grotesque hypocrisy: the clamorous speech for one white-skinned journalist wrongly jailed but nonetheless safe and fed by Russia; the silence for a hundred and more Palestinians journalists slaughtered or left homeless by the Israelis.
Balancing
Perhaps the correct combination of silence and of voice is, as in all things, to be found in balance. In some of those who are silent I have total faith, in others, none at all; or rather, I do have a total faith, but only in the fact they are indeed a mixture of coward and racist.
Silence, then, might indeed be a virtue, but its virtue is proportionate to its prevalence. The value of a strategic silence extends from the fact that most can be guaranteed to remain silent, ensuring a dangerous conspicuousness for those willing to speak. Zionism, which few could credibly accuse of having failed to achieve influence in Western capitals, certainly never practiced silence to achieve that clout. Indeed, it has worked ruthlessly to cultivate the silence of others.
Taking all these thoughts to their logical conclusion, clearly it is the culture of silence that — as in totalitarian states — leaves the dissident to be hunted-down. A society of speech, meanwhile, renders the dissident no such thing. It renders that individual nothing more than one further voice in a multitude for truth and for a better world.
Intellectualism perhaps has something in common with silence, in that some of it is essential and too much a vice. The utility of intellectualism is not as a performance or an exercise in its own right, or for its own enjoyment, but rather, it is to establish solidity; a sort of bedrock of thought, emotion and logic, from which it then becomes possible to state something important uncontroversially. There is a problem, however, in that stating something plain and uncontroversial — especially once it has been made unprofitable to voice — is often a pursuit insufficiently flattering for the self-identifying (and often self-regarding) intellectual.
The problem of Palestine in the West, as we see overwhelming public support for both Palestine broadly and a ceasefire immediately, is that although popular support for the only morally correct position — a permanent ceasefire, a political solution —does exist, and needs no explanation, most of the mouthpieces now refuse, or turn from the task, of mouthing it.
They prefer to practice silence.