An Open Letter

It’s about time I wrote this. Too many people have died because we sat around doing nothing. A lot has been said about generations – ‘Our Generation’ or every other generation – and each generation’s responsibility to stand up and change the world in a way that would seem more conducive to the world we dream of. A man was stabbed to death in Athens on Wednesday. An artist, a musician – his murderer named himself a member of the neo-Nazi party in Athens, Golden Dawn; a party like so many others than have come before, which spreads hate for the ‘others’ so often theorized about in philosophy. ‘Others’ like us – artists, thinkers, creative people – or simply, people who love life and judge no one based on their race, colour, creed or sexual preference. Last I checked, this is the 21st Century, and the 90s already happened. And yet we continue to fall into old patterns.

This might be a rant, I am fully aware of it. Some might say, so what? Thousands upon thousands have been killed in Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Thousands upon thousands have been killed since time immemorial: so many in the name of ‘civilization’, ‘progress’, and ‘society’. And yet, here we are, in a world as unequal as ever: a world that hangs in the balance.

Much has been said about how global we are. This is true. And as such, never before have we witnessed and experienced the pains and the revolutions of others; their unlawful incarcerations; their unlawful occupations. In the west, despite the distance with which we witness violence directed on others, we too are receivers of other aggressions. We have become caught in a cycle that enslaves us; a capitalist cycle that seeks to defend nothing more than a neoliberal status quo that we, a generation, only seek to survive in. We resist, of course. But resistance has proved futile. We need to think more. Try harder.

We all know Putin’s law.

We all know Putin’s law is but one grain in a barrel of figurative rice. And yet, we still don’t know how to form in a way that we might produce an effect barrier, an effective counter-measure, to what is befalling us as we continue to live the lives we so desperately seek to preserve. I am one of you, and I feel powerless. As Howard Beale once said, I’m ‘Mad as Hell’. In honour of Pavlos Fyssas, the artist murdered at the hands of fascist thugs, I quote a song Fyssas himself sampled in one of his own tracks: Giannis Agelakas’s ‘I Will Not Cry’, which talks about the choice of standing up, not slinking away – not cowering in a corner to let useless tears flow. The chorus of the song continues from the title: ‘I will not cry, I will not fear.’ If we fear nothing, we have nothing to lose. The question is, what do we really seek to gain?

I won’t quote theory. I won’t even quote history. I’ll simply speak based on what I see. And what I see is a growing fascism in the way we are being conditioned to view and live in the world; a fascism that is becoming endemic.

So I call upon a generation. A generation in the purest sense of the word – a generation that lives up to its verb: one that seeks to generate, produce, create and make possible a whole new paradigm. We need to start the discussion again, wherever we are, and with whatever means.

(contact: Anonymous1tryharder@gmail.com to join with us to combat some of the oppressive structures we need to organise against – that is, lets try harder).