“Put black on white” is a somewhat corny and clichéd expression. It would be used by someone who also said “I deny you the major” or “with lighting and stenographers.” I think about her these days because when I scroll through my networks I see the opposite all the time: notes, three or four paragraphs long, written backwards, in white on black, which are better read on Instagram. In them we read “indiscriminate massacre”, “genocide”, “dead children”.
In the era of the statement, we are used to celebrities, brands and people who aspire to be one of those two things issuing notes as if they were the UN, and the war in the Middle East has generated in many individuals the need to express their official position. , in case the whole world holds its breath until they know what the tall boy from Stranger Things thinks on the matter. Madonna has issued a statement, Kim Kardashian has issued a statement, Volkswagen has issued a statement. Justin Bieber and Jamie Lee Curtis had to delete their posts because they were wrong and expressed solidarity with Israel by posting photos from Gaza.
They are not the only ones who have not had their best week. Some of the most respected thinkers in the public sphere have been questioned for their writings on war. Yuval Noah Harari wrote in The Guardian that Gaza should have become a Singapore of the Middle East, while he admitted, in a subordinate sentence, that it is difficult to make yourself a Singapore under a blockade. Naomi Klein, who has just published an imaginative and intellectually daring book (Doppelgänger, in January in Paidós), had to correct her own article and add caveats to it on networks when it was pointed out to her that it was not true that the left was massively celebrating the murders and Hamas kidnappings. Of Judith Butler's piece on the subject, other intellectuals have said that it is a “word salad” without much depth. It seems that words are failing us, those who normally put them well and others. But we continue writing them, me here too, while we watch the disaster become even more disaster.
