Q&A: Is it all about to go boom?

Welcome to my first Q&A, where I’ll be trying to answer some very serious and some not so serious questions contributed by subscribers. Let’s get straight to it, and start with the big ones.

---

When Syria descended into civil war countries that wouldn't accept refugees were vilified. The Egyptians and the other Arab countries won't accept any Palestinian refugees while they are being slaughtered in their thousands. Why is the world dead silent on this? – Russel Newby

I don’t agree that the whole world is completely silent: I’ve seen conservative commentators making this point for some years, and they have made it even more vocally after Hamas carried out the massacre of October 7 and Israel responded by unleashing the crime of collective punishment on the civilians of Gaza.

I would agree, however, that the liberal press (or whatever passes for it these days) has not echoed this criticism of Israel’s neighbours, because, I suspect, it supports the argument made by those countries that refuse to take in Palestinians.

To understand this argument, and to answer your question fully, one has to start by looking at the word at its centre – “refugee” – and recognize that it is a highly loaded term and one that’s blurring all sorts of truths.

Firstly, the use of the word “refugee” to describe the stateless residents of Gaza feeds into Israel’s narrative that this is a war, which is clearly not the case: any conflict in which one side has total air- and sea superiority, billions of dollars’ worth of American weaponry (including an Iron Dome defence system that largely neutralizes its opponents’ chief offensive weapons), and easily maintains total blockades of food and water in targeted areas, while the other side has none of those things and sees its soldiers and civilians killed at a rate 20 to 35 times higher than its enemy, has surely stopped being a war long ago and is now simply a system of oppression.

Secondly, refugees return to their homes once the fighting is finished, but there is no indication that once Palestinians leave Gaza they will be allowed to return. On the contrary, current rhetoric by Israeli politicians suggests that these so-called “refugees” will, in fact, become permanent exiles.

I understand that it can seem incongruous that Turkey can support Hamas but refuse to take in suffering Palestinians, especially when it took in 3-million Syrians, very few of whom have returned to Syria. But the reason for this, I think, is fairly simple: taking in Palestinian exiles would, at best, make Israel’s neighbours enablers of the crime of ethnic cleansing, and, at worst, accomplices.

Conservative critics continue to accuse them of monstrous callousness: Palestinian civilians, they claim, are dying in Gaza because Egypt and the rest won’t open their borders. But that’s as disingenuous as it is cynical: Palestinians in Gaza are dying because Israel is shooting and bombing and starving them. The moral failing here is Israel’s, not the Arab world’s.

---

Why is the world such a mess? Are we really at the precipice of world war and/or final apocalypse, or is that just a perception induced by globalisation in general and social media in particular? – Sioux McKenna

Your first question deserves an entire post, but as to your second one, when I find myself worrying about dramatic and unpleasant futures, I try to remember two things that I think are true.

The first is that great many people depend for their income on selling us the message that things have never been worse and, more importantly, that we’re only a few years away from everything going straight to hell.

The specifics vary depending on whether the person doing the selling is a politician, a religious charlatan, a podcaster or a journalist, but ultimately it’s all part of the same hustle that’s thrived on the fringes of circuses and marketplaces for millennia: getting paid for pretending to see the future. Which is why we should approach the entire idea of an apocalypse with the same scepticism we reserve for shifty-eyed financial advisors in shiny suits offering us returns of 30 percent.

I’m not even sure that a majority of the hard-core fundamentalists and fanatics who salivate over the prospect of Armageddon (or End Times or the Rapture or whatever their spiritual kink happens to be) want it to happen: for the leaders of most fundamentalist groups the promise of the apocalypse is a money-printing machine, and given the choice between dying for their purported beliefs or continuing to loll about in in their marble mansions with their four mistresses, I think most would take the latter in a heartbeat.

Secondly, I think about our growing awareness of how late capitalism saturates our world from before the cradle to beyond the grave (microplastic in your mother’s placenta, your digital likeness exploited after death) and I have to admit to myself that if I believe that shareholder value has the power to dominate life on Earth, I must surely also believe that it has the power and motivation to prolong it. After all, a good parasite doesn’t kill its host.

Put another way, nuclear war is very bad for share prices.

Perhaps I’m deluding myself, or being too cynical, but in a world full of absurdities and ironies I’m willing to believe that our species will be kept alive not by a shared vision of humanity but by greed and the profit motive.

Well, at least until someone figures out how to make AI work properly and it realises that we’re the greatest threat to its water supply. But that’s another story…

---

How do we help in the face of <gestures at everything>? I'm so tired of the state of our country, of the world, but feel so helpless. And local and international politics certainly don't seem to have any solutions – Mandy Collins

I wonder if this helplessness you write about and that so many people feel is fuelled not only by the overwhelming amount if <everything> we see online every day but also by a subtle but powerful sense that the only appropriate response to that volume and intensity of <everything> is to make a big, bold, even heroic contribution; the sort of thing we see all over the internet from doctors and activists in war zones, or from the Gift of the Givers here at home.

Certainly, I think it’s quite easy to start feeling that the sort of contributions that most of us can make are pathetically tiny, the equivalent of offering a thimble-full of water to help put out a forest fire.

But this is a mistake, not least because it convinces us there’s nothing we can do when in fact we can contribute in a myriad small but meaningful ways, often simply by doing what we do.

In your case, as a writer and language person, I would argue that you make a meaningful difference every time you enthuse friends and family about your favourite novels (what with fiction now being recognized as a powerful empathy-building medicine, especially for young men), or when you edit jargon that seeks to numb our human connection and limit our capacity for thought, or when you read at a high level of comprehension and then discuss what you’ve learned with the people around you.

I know that these might seem insignificant, especially given the apparent speed of the advance of autocracy, corruption and know-nothingry, but I think the most likely consequence of feeling that one is contributing nothing useful – overwhelm, burnout and the kind if creeping, Zuckerberg-engineered apathy that follow them – is infinitely worse.

---

At the War Museum in Johannesburg there's a very sleek silver Spitfire – a Mark X, I think. There's also a FW190, a relatively recent acquisition. It strikes me as very crudely slung together (not unlike the Japanese Zero I saw at their War Museum in Tokyo, in terms of finish). The FW190 is regarded as arguably a better fighter than the Spitfire. So is the Messerschmitt Bf 109. And so is the P51 Mustang, by some. Too many variables to pick one as the best of all. (The Mark IX that you mention seems to be regarded as possibly the best Spitfire.) If you could choose only one of the abovementioned, which would it be and why? – Peter Terry

I think it depends on what I’m choosing it for.

If it’s to own and display in a specially built wing of my house, where I deliver lectures about it and read at length from Pierre Clostermann to an ever-dwindling number of visitors, it would have to be the Spitfire (although on second thoughts I’d prefer a Mk V which is prettier than the IX).

If, however, I’ve been sucked through a wormhole (which has shortened me by a foot) and told by my alien abductors that I am to be trained to fly a World War 2 aircraft in which I will fight for my life against other wormhole abductees, all for the viewing pleasure of our captors, I suspect it would have to be the FW190 – as long as the rules of the competition allowed me to stay at low altitude so I can lurk around just above the synthetic treetops and pick off the over-ambitious fools in their P51s who’ve ventured down to come and have a look.

I admit it’s not a very poetic impulse of delight driving me to a tumult in the clouds, but such is life in the Mid-20^th Century Death-Match Leagues of Alpha Centauri.

---

And finally:

How is Honey? – Suzy

Honey remains convinced that being pampered is punishment, that treats are torture, that walks are work, and that any human who sits on any couch in her house is trying to steal from her. She is also adorable and smells fantastic. In short, we are stuck in the worst kind of relationship.

---

If you’d like to join the next Q&A please send any and all questions to me at tomeaton@substack, or post them under this.