Cycle touring during genocide

The disconnections, interconnections and fragility of the world

When I first cycled around the world I sent a daily text message to a short phone number saved in my phone, and the message was then uploaded to a website. That was Twitter, and the idea that I might one day attach photos or article links to the message, or send the message directly via the Internet on my phone, rather than via traditional SMS, was a futurism that wouldn't have occurred to me for a moment because it already seemed fantastically futuristic.

I have just cycled through the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The name has had a romantic ring in my imagination since forever; perhaps it is unfortunate though also perhaps only natural that in present circumstances it meant less to me than I once thought it would.

Deserts, since the first time in Kazakhstan, have always captivated me. I love their space and their emptiness, and in normal times there is a beautiful, mind-altering recreation to the philosophical musing that you are barely even there. That the desert is so big and you so small that you might not even exist, that against the enormity of the world, you barely do exist. Looking away from the road and into the sand can have in it a sense of vertigo, which it is sometimes said is not a fear of heights but a fear of jumping. You could walk from the road and then be gone.

All these musings, which ordinarily have a pleasing ability to heighten existential experience, feel trivial and self-indulgent at the present time. I ride an empty road that I am unlikely to jump off of. I see traffic for the mines that mine the copper wiring up US jets with which the Israelis bomb Palestinian schools and hospitals and families. My titular musing that I might not really be here, that I could if I were careless run out of water, that I could be gone, is made real by the shuddering evil perpetrated by the Israelis and the US against Palestine and increasingly Lebanon. Parents wake up to find their children gone. Children wake up to find their parents, their siblings, killed by these cruel murderers in their cowardly planes and cowardly tanks. My musing that I might not be here, that I could slip away, is but recreation, and in present circumstances a tasteless one, when some 50,000 Palestinians have not so much slipped away but been torn from this beautiful world. It was here and now it's gone might be the pondering of a lone cyclist in a desert, but it is the reality for those Palestinians in Gaza who try to survive a genocide perpetrated by the Israelis, the US, the UK, the EU.

When you are so entirely alone and there is no society around you to please or advance in by virtue of your silence, the idea of staying quiet on the matter of mass murder, of genocide, of patent lies and double standards, is revealed for the absurdity it is. In this, alone, you realise the power of a frown; that as humans and social creatures we will do almost anything not to upset those around us, no matter the horror that condones, and the likelihood that eventually that horror will move closer to us. The cause for the frown will grow.

Some say that horrors are always happening. This may be so but it is neither entirely the case nor the point. There is practically a genocide unfolding right now in Sudan, perpetrated like the one in Palestine using mostly US weapons and perpetrated by the chief regional partner to the Israelis, the UAE. The evil of what the UAE is doing cannot be overstated, but nor can the connection of the Israelis to it, because at root both share a commitment to the eradication of any rights or hope for autonomy across a half dozen countries, leaving the populations subjugated by monarchy in the case of the UAE and a Jewish supremacist state in the case of the Israelis. But even with that it is not the same, for even with their doubtless lowliness, the UAE do not wage the same war against western democracies that the Israelis commit themselves to so energetically; they do not work to have people lose their jobs for speaking truth, they do not machinate so tirelessly to rewire democracy so that we fear to speak truth at all, nor to rewire human moral codes so that murder is security and genocide is liberty. The Israeli project in Palestine, and its constant affront on western society, the racist propaganda it produces to justify and reproduce itself, is the most totalitarian affront against truth in the world today. Still more than that, the idea of silence in the face of it stems more I feel from a desire that the world's dispossessed be averaged down; that the volume of Palestine be turned down to that of Sudan, not that we free Palestine so that we can then turn up the volume for Sudan. This is the only way, the only morally acceptable course of action.

The Atacama fascinates me because it is one of those places where you see how the world gets made. The corollary of that is an obvious reflection on the world we have made. Here is the world's largest source of copper, and the earth is a red almost at times the colour of wires themselves, so that it is as if to lay down a bulb and battery on the ground then the bulb might flicker. I watch mine trains pushing through the wide sands as I ride, I watch trains carrying tank after tank of sulphuric acid, in baths of which the rock meets an electric current and the copper comes away to eventually be reformed in the wires of warplanes, or the insides of a plethora of domestic devices we seldom need and which bring us as a species little happiness, often inducing greater emptiness despite how much we fill our lives with them.

As I go, I ponder how the world is made and the world we have made. I watch the world now and then through my phone, taking in acts of great evil and cowardice but also defiance of great beauty and courage. I think of my place in all this, I feel far and sometimes futile. I consider what next and what I do after my return, from Atacama on the edge of the world to those places closer to the centre of how it is formed. I reflect constantly on how we move from the world we have to the one we want, I ask myself what more could I do.