IMPERFECT SOLIDARITIES

You are listening to Radio, a podcast for cultural professionals where we explore the ethical dilemmas around the intersection of art and politics. I'm your host, Asia Tsisar, and in this season we're going to drown together in the question of solidarity.

Intro: People who work in culture, like anyone else, open their social media at any given hour, and we've almost gotten used to the anxiety of this knob triangle. The image of someone suffering, us, observers, expected to witness, yet striped of any tools to stop this suffering. And the person in the image, somewhere, out there, waiting for the image to change something.

As a Ukrainian, since the full-scale invasion, that very same triangle kept haunting me at every exhibition, every international show that was supposed to show me a war, any war, a protest, a revolution, a genocide. And the only thing I was able to see was this gap between the observer and those being watched.

For a long time, I was searching for someone to talk about this, until a friend of mine handed me a book [1] Imperfect Solidarities by writer and art critic Arona D’Souza. This episode is titled after and inspired by her book. And I'm very grateful to Aruna for finding the strength and words to be with me in this very uneasy conversation.

And I guess it's my duty to warn you, it might be uneasy to listen as well.

Asia Tsisar: So I opened my Instagram feed today just to get a conscious snapshot of the content I consume every day. And, in a nutshell, it stands on three pillars: my friends, career updates, niche clothing brands, and something I can broadly describe as crimes against humanity.

Aruna D’Souza: That seems to be for a lot of us! I think that's almost exactly what my Instagram feed is these days as well.

Asia Tsisar: From the perspective of a writer and someone who works with visual culture, what do you think about the coexistence of these visual narrations in our everyday life?

Should they be separated somehow or mediated?

Aruna D’Souza: Well, look, I think that life is complicated. And I think that one of the strange things about living in today's world is the way in which we are sort of coerced—even in the most dire circumstances—to act as if life is normal. And, you know, certainly in the States, normal life means consumption, continuing to hustle, to do our professional work, and hopefully some attention to the world going on. What's clear to me is that social media reinforces the need to experience those things simultaneously—which is bizarre to me, right?

You know, the U.S. is not under siege, but Americans feel very under siege right now because of Trump's policies across the board—from, you know, the kind of attacks on immigrants, the attacks on green card holders, the attacks on institutions, everything like that. And a friend of mine the other day said, it may not look like it on paper, but we're actually living through a wartime. And for me, hearing that was really revelatory, because it put into perspective this idea that, yes, okay, if I think we are living through wartime, and yet I still have to deal with the 200 emails I get every day in my inbox, or I still have to deal with deadlines writing about art, or I still have to go and see museum exhibitions—it's a kind of disconnect.

But I think that social media really reinforces or normalizes that disconnect, right? It normalizes the idea that all of these things have to go on simultaneously. And, you know, we saw it during COVID as well. The whole strategy in the U.S. was: go on as normal, even though life was really not normal at all. So I think, yeah, social media really does a lot of work normalizing some really abnormal situations and understandings of what it is to be in the world.

Asia Tsisar: True, true. But one day a reel appeared in my Instagram feed, and it was the video of someone taking care of their very nice backyard garden. And this image was voiced over with the message that said something like: “We, as humans, were created to live in small communities. We have capacities to care for a small piece of land and the people around us. We were not designed to carry all the pain and emotions of the world. And it's the internet and social media convincing us that we should—but we don't have to. We are only capable to do what we can, and we should not invest emotions in tragedies we cannot manage.”

What do you think about it?

Aruna D’Souza: I think that I get the impulse. You know, certainly with everything going on in the world, it's hard to know, in a sense, where to start with one's caring—and perhaps starting with one's own community makes sense, as long as one has a sense of who one's community is. What I worry about is that people hear a message like that and think, well, I only have to think about the people I already know, the people that I already care about,

who are part of my social circle—which is clearly not enough, right? When one builds community around such narrow definitions, you leave out all sorts of other people that, in fact, are part of your codependent relationship with the world, even if you don't want to admit it. So you leave out, you know, in the States, the undocumented immigrants who actually do so much work to support your community, even if you don't see them as part of your community. So I think that that's a problem.

But I think—just going back and thinking about this particular example that you give in relation to your first question—when I say that social media normalizes the kind of disconnect that we have between consumer culture and work culture and the horrors going on in the world, it does that normalization by turning everything into a kind of single form of spectacle. It doesn't just say, okay, these three things are going on, but somehow these three things are kind of equal, and we consume them in the same ways, right?

We consume an ad for a niche clothing company in the same way that we consume videos about the horrors happening in Gaza or in Ukraine or in other places. And I think that a reel of an influencer working in her garden, talking about needing to make our world smaller and concern ourselves with our immediate surroundings, is another form of consumerism, right? You know, they're promoting this, in a sense, to develop their own followings, to develop their own cloud, right? They're selling you a product too, basically.

And I think that that is where the reality of how much damage social media has done is really coming out at this moment—because we're dealing with these events around the world in which people are suffering to horrific degrees, right? And these are events—not only war, but certainly war, as well as environmental damage, as well as all sorts of things—that are creating genuine and really attenuated suffering of people. And we are being exposed to it through this numbing device of spectacle.

I'm someone who developed, in large part, my career through social media. My book Whitewalling—the first chapter really developed out of my online interactions on Facebook around an art controversy here in the States.

I was using Facebook at the time as a platform for art criticism. So I'm someone who has very much been involved and very much benefited from the connection that social media offered. But I think that, at this moment, when the effects of social media's role in surveillance andnarrowing discourse, highlighting certain things, slowing down the information about other things, tamping down certain subjects—that's really surfaced, I think, for many people, especially since October 7th, when certainly social media companies around the world, but especially U.S.-based social media companies, had a kind of vested interest in

promoting the interests of Israel and diminishing the ability for people to converse about what was happening in Gaza. You really started to see platforms which many people imagined were going to be public squares or sites of public discourse were emphatically not that. And in fact, now, I think for U.S. people—especially those who aren't citizens but living in the U.S.—the fears about social media being used to trigger deportations and all of those things are very much on people's minds. And I include myself in that.

I'm a green card holder here, not a citizen.

Asia Tsisar: Do you believe watching something on social media puts the observer into the position of a witness?

Aruna D’Souza: So, you know, I think that social media, in relation to wartime conflicts, has played a really important role in allowing people to understand what's happened, what's happening in the world—what's happening in Ukraine, what's happening in Gaza, and what's happening in Sudan, so many places, right? And that is especially important when the kind of legacy media—the newspapers and news conglomerates—

are not showing things that are happening, or not showing them in their full accuracy. So, for those of us in the States who are looking at publications like The New York Times, Washington Post—if that's all you're looking at, you're getting a very partial view.

I think social media has played a crucial role in broadening that view, especially the Palestinian perspective in Gaza. So, on the one hand, I think the role social media plays in these moments of siege, of genocide, has been crucial. I don't want to undermine that. The journalism that has gone on in Gaza by Palestinian journalists has been absolutely crucial for people who are trying to find out what is going on.

I think that what I'm troubled by, and I'm not troubled by it in terms of the people making the content, I'm troubled by it in terms of people consuming the content, is that one of the things that social media does, one of the things that it encourages is a kind of self-revelation about the horrors that one goes through in order to generate empathy in the viewer. And so, you know, even before what was happening in Ukraine, even before Gaza,

when the Me Too movement took hold on social media platforms, one of the ways it took hold is women, largely women, talking about their own experiences of sexual harassment and sexual violence, right? Because, in the face of a kind of longstanding skepticism about women's experience, the antidote was seen to be this sort of confessional: 'This happened to me. I promise you, this happened to me.' And the hundreds of thousands of voices of people saying, 'This also happened to me.'

In the face of George Floyd—when, again, there was skepticism about the Black experience in the U.S.—'Oh, it can't be so bad'— you had hundreds of thousands of people saying, 'This is what happened the last time I was stopped by a police officer. This is how I was abused by the police.

What worries me about that is twofold. One is that the people who have experienced the trauma are put in the position of having to re-narrate that trauma in order to get other people to believe what's happening in the world. And to me, that seems a particular cruelty, right? For people in order to be treated as humans, that they have to just relive their trauma.

And the other part of it is that for the viewer it reinforces something very subtle, which is that empathy is something that they own, that they can dole out. That they are in the position of needing to be convinced to act in a human way by caring for other people. And I always say, I don't want your well-being to depend on my capacity to empathize. I don't want my well-being to depend on your capacity to empathize.

I think your well-being, my well-being should just be guaranteed by the fact that we're living beings, right? And so what this sort of empathy building on social media, especially when it's coming from people who are in genuinely life-threatening situations, dire situations, and they realize that they can only be saved by displaying their suffering for others in the hopes that empathy will emerge. To me, A, it's not a short-term solution in emergency situations. Waiting for people to change their hearts and minds is not sufficient. But B, for me at least, I feel like it eats away at my soul a little bit in Gaza to see these children on social media explaining the fear and the privations and everything of their day-to-day lives. I think, why should I need this in order to care for them? Why should anyone need this in order to care for them?

If people are dying, stop the killing and figure out all the rest of it after, but just stop the killing, right? And so I think that social media, the way the algorithms are designed, if you've been on Instagram, if you've been on TikTok, they're designed to highlight or to promote those sort of confessional modes of address, right? Anything from makeup videos to celebrities apologizing for their last gaffe to these stories from victims of war. They're all a form of confessional videos. And because of how they're structured, the algorithm raises them up. And so people then

are trained to A, watch them and expect them, but also to make them because that's what's going to get the most reach. So I think the idea that we should be changing hearts and minds through this confessional kind of mode or through revealing our own trauma, getting people to understand our situations, this putting the onus on the victim is very much part of Western thought, you know, of liberal thought, right? And the importance of empathy and empathy building is very much part of liberal thought, but it's also very much part of the kind of algorithmic structure of social media as well.

Asia Tsisar: This is very interesting because you also mentioned in your book on the one hand very obvious idea on the other hand it's not so obvious at all that the ability of the person to develop the empathy to someone also depends on the person's race, nationality, political views, any, you know, micro circumstances, which is so… weird. I mean, it's kind of natural that we sympathize with someone we understand, or at least we pretend we understand. But at the same time, it literally creates the situation when your life depends on the ability of the other person to empathize to you?

Aruna D’Souza: I always think of it in relation to hiring practices. I used to say that, in the States, when companies hire white men, it's because the person doing the hiring recognizes: 'Oh, this is who I used to be when I was that age,' right? 'I see myself in him. He has potential. I can see where he's going to go.' Whereas when women—especially women of color—apply for jobs, they have to apply with résumés that are ten miles long. They have to show a track record of what they’ve already done, not of what they could achieve. And that’s because the person hiring has empathy for the white guy but doesn’t have the capacity to relate to the woman of color—or the white woman. That empathy is, in fact, responsible for a lot of the inequalities

and injustices that we see in the world, right? Not just because of preferences for people who may look or have the same background as us or share a similar history of us or come from our same communities, but also because the whole mission of the Catholic Church, missionaries in relation to empire building and slavery was based on a kind of empathy for people and wanting to save them from themselves, essentially.

And you know, I should say, because I love empathetic people, and I try and be empathetic myself, I think as an individual quality, as a human quality, it's very important. I think that it does make us better people. But I've been thinking about the way it's come to structure our political landscape. That is a problem. You know,

like, as I said, I don't want to have to wait for my empathy to kind of kick in before I can act to preserve life. And that's why when the siege in Gaza started a lot of people were saying like, you're not empathizing with the right side, you're not understanding the complexities of what's going on. And my response was, I don't need to understand any of the complexities to demand a ceasefire, right? I absolutely do not need to understand any of the complexities to ask for a ceasefire. And there was a sense, I think, among a lot of people that somehow empathizing with Israel and what Israelis had gone through with the October 7th attack required supporting a military assault on Gaza.

It's the same way right now in India, where the terrorist attack in Kashmir is being used to justify a really terrifying attack from India onto Pakistan. I have family members on very different sides of that, you know, conflict. And it just seems to me that one can empathize without authorizing the destruction of human life. But if the idea of empathy is used to support the destruction of human life, that's to me, that's a perversion.

Asia Tsisar: What really distracts me in this situation is that, basically, this gaze of the observer or a witness is supposed to legitimize or prove that the suffering is real—in other words, that empathy ends up measuring how valid what you're going through is, and how real your struggles are. And I think, when you mentioned Me Too, I think most of the women had in their life this feeling: when you experience a form of discrimination and there is someone, I don't know, a colleague, a passerby, who acknowledged it. And this support can mean everything. But their denial can lead you to question your own perception—like, the reality of what you feel.

Aruna D’Souza: Absolutely.

Asia Tsisar: And when Russia launched its full-scale invasion on Ukraine, I was in Warsaw. And the internet just exploded with calls for protests and for people to go on streets. I joined protests too. And it was a very comforting place to be, because you are surrounded by people who share your beliefs. It was kind of a validation. But at the same time, I remember I was so confused because I wasn't able to understand why the number of people on the streets determine whatever or not my country should exist?

Aruna D’Souza: You know, it's funny because I think it's probably different in Central Eastern Europe than it is in the States. But I think that one of the things, sadly, that the situation of Israel and Gaza has shown in the U.S. is that the disconnect between the will of the people and the policies of the government is so vast, right? It's hard to imagine given how many people were in support of a ceasefire, given how many people were out on the streets, all of that stuff, despite a real clamp down on people's ability to protest, college students especially, that it seemed not to move the needle at all in terms of how the US was conducting itself in relation to that particular conflict. I think that, you know, right now, a vast majority of Americans support Ukraine and don't think that Putin should be able to kind of annex the country in this situation. And yet it's not actually moving the needle in terms of government policy. And our government has become increasingly distant from public opinion, except at these moments of election.

Asia Tsisar: What I'm trying to say is that I don't think any war, or the life of any people, should be determined by the sympathy of certain people in other parts of the world, or governments of other parts of the world. You know, it's just ridiculous—because if you are my friend, I'm going to help you to kill those guys. This is basically the level of international policy we're facing now.

Aruna D’Souza: No, exactly. And that's the most crazy-making part of all of this, right? Like, we should be able to say, let's not be killing, right? And, you know, I think that we have gotten to the point where this sort of ongoing violence that we see—whether it's like the so-called War on Terror that we've been living through since the 90s basically to today—just this everyday, normalized violence, that is just the price of being in the world, you know? It just really isn't. It doesn't have to be—except that we accept it, that we tolerate it. And, you know, and yes, you're right that the idea of empathizing with the desires or the trauma or the suffering of the perpetrators of violence is being deployed to justify the violence. It's perverse. You know, it really is perverse.

At the same time, what's interesting from a U.S. perspective, and I think that it was very clear when Russia's attack on Ukraine, full-scale attack began, was that, you know and here again the strangeness of empathy starts to come out. Americans were being told we have to care about this because ukrainians are white and so this is…

Asia Tsisar: Literally?

Aruna D’Souza: I'm not sure if it has been really apparent in Ukraine, but there was a very famous incident of a reporter—I think he was from CNN—who was in Ukraine, seeing the attacks happening. And he said: ‘The kind of war that we're seeing here, we've seen in other places in the world. But what makes this one so upsetting is that the victims here are blonde and blue-eyed.’ And it was really striking for a lot of people, the way in which whiteness specifically was actually being deployed by politicians, by the media as a reason why we should care more about this war than other wars.

Now, for me, we should care about all wars. So I don't think that the whiteness of the victims should be understood as a reason not to care about the war. But it was so striking for me the way in which empathy was working there. It was an assumption that, well, of course we're going to care more about this war—because of who the victims are. And, I think, there's a little bit of that going on in Israel as well. We should care more because Jewish people, whether or not they're Israeli, are sort of provisionally coded as white in the U.S. at least. And so that sort of was a subterranean kind of idea of, like, okay, our empathy should be for the white victims. And so I think the problem for people who are victims of this is that these discourses can be manipulated. These discourses around empathy can be manipulated in a million different ways. So, on the one hand, yes, the things that we see on social media are a form of witnessing .

They are a form of becoming aware of what's happening in the world, but they are also a form of real manipulation—in ways that I'm sure many Ukrainians would be appalled to find out: that they were being held up as, like, somehow the good victims, as opposed to, you know, in relation to the bad victims in other places.

Asia Tsisar: Yeah, and I think it could be relative not only to Ukrainians, because basically you find yourself in the situation when all your world is crumbling and falling apart, and instead of doing something or going somewhere and bringing something from there—something that can actually help the situation in your country or in your community, you find yourself sitting in a nice suit at some round table, explaining and playing some kind of mind games, when you need to understand the smallest details about cultural codes in every country, and you need to fight the narrations that were projected on you—while, like, I cannot deny the fact that the majority of Ukrainians are white.

Aruna D’Souza: Of course you don’t have to!

Asia Tsisar: Yeah, but, you know, basically we were objects in this conversation, in this kind of discussion.

Aruna D’Souza: Absolutely.

Asia Tsisar: But also, okay, let me put it this way, because I think it is important…

Because victims are forced to, let's say, fight for the attention of the observer, it creates something people also call the Genocidal Olympics. So you basically need to show that you're suffering the most and that you most deserve attention. And I believe neither the people of Palestine nor the people of Ukraine wanted this, but we were put in this kind of competition between each other. And it's observers who began to compare the situation in Ukraine and Palestine, to judge who deserves support more and who deserves attention more. But from the perspective of the observer, all this is happening on the phone screen, and for me, it ends up looking like people are just ranking their favorite Netflix show.

Aruna D’Souza: I, I mean, I don't… I don't blame you for thinking that. I feel a huge amount of guilt, personally, for the fact that I have not paid nearly as much attention to what's going on, say, in Sudan, as I have to what's going on in Palestine or what's going on in Ukraine. Partly that's because there is so much less news about what's happening in Sudan. It doesn't cross my social media feed nearly as much. And the fact that the news isn't there to be reported, or the things aren't coming up on the social media feed

has very much to do with the fact that these are African victims. And so, in that Genocidal Olympics, they're very low on the list, right? I think for the West—which tends to assume that Africans will just go on killing each other and there's nothing to do about it. And so, I like what you say about the objectification of the victims of these conflicts and the lack of agency that they are afforded.

But I also think that there's something about how we imagine that justice is a sort of finite quantity that is doled out in limited amounts, right? That there's a kind of scarcity thinking behind how we dole out empathy. And for here, around the war in Ukraine, a lot of that was because of a question of how much money does the U.S. give to Ukraine to help them defend themselves against the Russian incursion. And so I think there has been a sense of, like, you know, why are we taxpayers paying all of this money? In Gaza, all the U.S. had to do was shut off the tap of money going to Israel, and that stopped, right? It wouldn't have cost a penny, right? So people are still being put in this scarcity model of: there's only so much empathy to go around. And so there's only so much support to go around. There's only so much justice to go around.

I think the danger is that people who are in positions of oppression will start believing that. You know, there was this very famous incident where someone stood up to receive a Hollywood award—it was an Academy Award or an Emmy Award or something like that. A female actress. And she stood up and said, you know, we've been fighting these last few years for Black people to be more present, and to get more jobs, and to be a bigger part of the film industry.

And now it's your turn to step up for us women. And this is one of a very highly paid actresses who's been in many big television shows and everything like that, and who was sort of thinking about this all as a kind of, "OK, you got yours. Now I need mine," This sort of quid pro quo. And I think that that, in the States, really came around full circle with Israel and Gaza, where there were a lot of people saying, "Okay, I've been on the front lines fighting for racial justice for Black people. Now you have to support Israel in this moment of crisis," as a quid pro quo. And I think that comes from this scarcity model, right?

Or this idea that fighting for each other is transactional, and that empathy becomes, you know, somewhat transactional. And that seems to me a real—you know, I keep using the word "perversion" today, but I think that right now it's the best word that I can think of to describe the state of the world, when it feels like the way that we're being asked to relate to each other is absolutely inhuman—inhumane as well as inhuman.

Asia Tsisar: There is also a very interesting concept that you mention in your book. I think you call it problem of translation, and you describe it as the need to explain yourself in the words of the observer. And I agree with you that this is probably the legacy of colonialism, and it is also a game which is impossible to win—because when you are expected to fit into a cultural code that was developed without you, you're always positioned as secondary. And I believe this problem is familiar to many people who come from marginalized geographies or groups, because from the very beginning, you are not treated as equal, and you will be judged by how well you perform these cultural codes, which were clearly not designed for you. And obviously, it is unfair, but I used to think of it more as a cognitive problem.

So, translation is supposed to make an understanding possible, but also to help to build trust. And those two things were kind of supposed to clear the ground for what we might call a better world. So my thinking was rooted in the idea of limited narrations. In other words, we can make more things normal. And with this kind of broader concept of normality, we open ourselves to more solutions. But you disagree with it, right? Your perspective is completely different.

Aruna D’Souza: My perspective is that—and this may mean that I'm a way too trusting person—but my perspective is that around certain moments, I shouldn't have to understand everything that someone else is thinking or going through. I shouldn't have to understand every part of their history in order to say: this person shouldn't have to die.

And, you know, one of the reasons that I talk about Amitav Ghosh's novel Sea of Poppies is because I think it's a really great exercise for people who convince themselves that they are masters of the English language to have to read a book in which English is spoken in so many different forms, many of which are completely incomprehensible to most of us. You know, you have to just keep plowing through and trust that you're going to understand enough to understand the story.

And I think that that is a position that so many English speakers, so many Americans, so many, people in the Western world—Western Europeans, Canadians, Australians, whatever—rarely have to be in the position to be, right? People who are from smaller places, from minoritized places—and minoritized has nothing to do with population, right?

Like, India has a billion people and yet, right? And yet, you know, there's a great obligation to translate themselves into these sort of normative codes that, as you say, are connected to colonialism. I'm not expecting that somehow we can come together without understanding anything about each other. But I think that we don't have to understand everything about each other.

And I would hope that, when faced with human suffering, even if we don't understand anything about each other, we understand humanity, right, as the minimum quality. And then, of course, you know, I know that the definition of humanity is a kind of exclusionary term as much as it is an inclusive term. But let's at least start there and then get better as time goes on.

But yeah, when I talk about translation, it really is from the perspective of—or trying very much to convince—the people who, like me, are on the privileged side of the conversation around understanding. They're the people who are being invited to understand. They're not the people who need to make themselves understood, because I think that it becomes an ethical question about one's own privilege, right?

So it's interesting to me to hear you talk about it from the other side, in a certain sense—from, you know, both in terms of the war in Ukraine, but also in terms of the way in which Central and Eastern Europe is, in a sense, marginalized in these larger political landscapes.

Asia Tsisar: I agree that our current models of solidarity depend on empathy. And I also believe that solidarity is a kind of resource, and also a mechanism that has a potential risk to divide people into those who can be in solidarity and those who need solidarity in order to survive. And one of the important problems, I think, is that in order to deserve solidarity, you are expected to act according to a specific set of rules. You have

to fit into a narrow concept frame of what a victim is supposed to be. For example, you know, at least until the latest interviews with Donald Trump, Ukraine was relatively privileged. Well, at least it was clear who attacked

whom, and who was defending themselves. But in the case of Gaza, for many people, it's not so clear. And if empathy drives solidarity, then it also ends up prescribing what a victim can or cannot do. A victim, for example, can die, but cannot be aggressive. A victim cannot act according to their own set of rules.

So, linking this to what you said earlier, I wanted to ask: do you think it's possible—or even allowed—for a victim to set the terms of how their situation should be treated, or how the solidarity should be performed?

Aruna D’souza: I think that—and I was thinking this actually when we were talking about translation as well, that the ultimate solution to all of these kinds of problems, including the ones that you're talking about with the limited set of actions a victim has available to them, is to privilege people's sovereignty and self-determination.

And so, if I say that people have a right to sovereignty and to self-determination, that flies in the face of what the country I grew up in and the country I live in now both are founded on, right? Which is the suppression of Native American, Indigenous people's sovereignty and self-determination, the suppression of the enslaved and their sovereignty and self-determination. And yet I know that sovereignty and self-determination is correct, right?

And so, I can say, yes, if I am not recognizing someone's sovereignty and self-determination and they react—even violently—to me for that, I can suffer from it, and maybe I will suffer from it, but I can recognize their need for doing it. I can recognize that they are being denied something very basic in the human condition. And that is also why I think that I can live as a political subject without requiring myself to understand

everything about someone else. I can just take as my understanding that part of the human condition is the right to sovereignty and self-determination. And so, in those cases where people don't have it and they are fighting for it, I can accept that—even if it goes against my sort of Enlightenment culture kind of predilections towards, like, calm and lack of conflict and all of that stuff.

I can recognize that concepts of nationhood, as the idea of the state—those are concepts that are built on a great deal of violence and a great deal of imposed homogenization, bringing together people that have very different understandings into this very artificial situation of the nation-state, at the same time as often making illegal those differences, at the same time as repressing those differences. And so, I can say, as long as I'm privileging—or as long as I'm cognizant of—people's right to sovereignty and self-determination, that is the basic thing that I have to recognize. And so, I can hold my judgment in suspension.

Now, I can look at a situation and say: strategically, maybe that wasn't the best thing to do, right? In cases of violence, in cases of attacks, in cases of these sort of extrajudicial kind of actions, right? I can say, okay, strategically, I may not agree with what this person has done, or what this group has done, what this political entity has done—but I can recognize the logic of their doing so, right? I can recognize that they're doing it from a place in which their sovereignty and right to self-determination has been trampled upon now for decades, for centuries, whatever it is.

And so, I think that part of it comes from not privileging the state as the thing that has to be protected,

but privileging people as the entities that have to be protected. And I think that once one does that, you're left with a very different kind of moral calculus than if you're starting out with the idea that the state has to be protected at all costs.

Does that make sense?