An essay from the Refusing Complicity project.
A prisoner who refuses to speak under interrogation does not end the occupation, nor the extermination of her people, but she does not contribute to it, either. This is not nothing, though she has done nothing. It is very difficult to do nothing.
There are collective forms of refusal — a strike, a sit-in, or an organized boycott — that can bring the killing machine to a stop. I am not talking about these. I am talking about the small rejections, which one must insist on if they wish to retain their humanity.
Though I attended many street marches and wrote and organized, though I quit my job at a media institution I felt was complicit, donated money, and all the rest, I know I did not stop a single bomb from falling on Gaza. It fills me with shame to say that, but I know it is true. I did not stop a single child from dying, a single home from being destroyed, a single person from starving.
Still, I refused to vote for the party that armed the genocide, refused to publish in outlets that manufactured consent, refused to make an equivalence between Palestinian resistance and their annihilation, refused to capitulate to the framing that history began on October 7, and refused to buy products that materially contributed to Palestine's destruction. Though I know I did not stop the genocide, I know that I did not accelerate it either. That is not nothing.
There is, also, another dimension to this. Call it psychological or spiritual, whichever you prefer. Each refusal was a fortification of the self against the forces of destruction. I do not believe that I am incapable of evil, that I cannot become the person dropping a bomb on a refugee camp or shooting a child in an aid line. People lose their clarity slowly, over time. A compromise here or there until you've convinced yourself that it is not so bad to work at a company that builds weapons, and then, if that is not so bad, using them cannot be so bad either. There is not a clear signpost to tell you that you've finally crossed over the line that separates good from evil, though the world is filled with incentives to get you there. You might need to put a roof over your head or want to have dinner with a relative and not fight. Is biting your tongue or providing for your family really all that bad? Or, your country may have mandatory conscription, and you may ask if taking a simple administrative role — filling out forms — is really killing anyone.
I am trying to say something unfashionable, which is that there is such a thing as a soul and that one can lose it when they do something they know to be evil, no matter how small that evil is.
Over the last two years, I often quoted Wendell Berry, who wrote: "Protest that endures, I think, is moved by a hope far more modest than that of public success: namely, the hope of preserving qualities in one's own heart and spirit that would be destroyed by acquiescence." Refusal cannot stop the forces of destruction; its only gain is the preservation of your heart and spirit. That is not nothing.
Read the next essay in the
Refusing Complicity project here.
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