The end of the world
It is 1974, I am a six-years old and tucked in bed. I can hear engines; the menacing deep sounds of heavy metal trucks. Solid metal containers with no windows that bring to mind the overcrowded cattle trains the Nazis used to transport Jews to their deaths in Europe. I know with certainty that that trucks are coming to collect my family and take us to concentration camps. The sound could be cars. It could be also my imagination. I am not yet old enough to know that when people talk about the Holocaust it is something they speak about in the past tense. I only know they sound scared and my skin is very thin; I absorb fear.
As I grow up I learn that Nazi Germany together with its allies and collaborators killed nearly two out of every three European Jews using “deadly living conditions, brutal mistreatment, mass shootings and gassings, and specially designed killing centers.” Specially designed killing centres. These words will never not play on my mind. They will always cause the temperature of my blood to drop by a few degrees, my heart to quicken, my teeth to clench.
I was about 7 years old when I knew for certain that the world was going to end during my lifetime. It’s a fear I carry deep inside me although sometimes it comes to the surface and mental health practitioners try and convince me that I am really scared of my own world ending. That’s not true, it’s more a fire and brimstone thing. An explosive, dramatic Third World War scenario that is constantly there — just to the right of my head like a speech bubble in the worst comic strip ever made. A small black cloud imploding and exploding causing horror and devastation.
I feared for the world growing up in apartheid South Africa. As a child I was petrified of the Cold War, the Israel Lebanon war, the reign of the Khmer Rouge. All this while I lay awake thinking about the Holocaust. For the longest time I believed Nostradamus was not just a prophet but that his words made sense and he kept predicting the end of the world. The war in Kuwait was a particularly torrid time — my fear became so intense I stopped sleeping. The bombing of the Twin Towers, the genocide in Rwanda, the kidnapping of 276 school girls in Nigeria, the atrocities in Afghanistan and Syria, the treatment of Uyghurs, Myanmar, the shootings at Mosques in New Zealand, the war in the Ukraine*.
Earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts, floods and fires; every time I hear about a natural disaster I am sure it is a sign. Until a couple of weeks ago I thought climate change would get us all. I became scared of plastic.
Then on 7 October Hamas attacked Israel and Israel retaliated. I am not even going to try and debate Middle East politics because many wiser and more eloquent people have tried and failed. All I know for sure is that people are suffering, hundreds and thousands of people are suffering atrocities I can’t bear to think about and everyone I know is scared at the same time.
But what makes it feel most catastrophic is the fact that we live in a ‘post truth’ world. A world where misinformation and disinformation is interspersed with fragments of truth, a world where facts are made up and sent via WhatsApp messages as if they are real. A world where people get their “news” from social media influencers and people filled with hate get to make the biggest noise. A world where we see people being killed on our social media feeds and in that same feed we see people denying that it even happened. A world where hate seeps through the rantings of angry people on the internet who suddenly know the answer to peace but don’t know how to deliver it without hating on ‘the other side’. A world where we seem to have forgotten that sometimes two things can be true at once.
It may not be the end of the world in the way I have always feared, but it certainly feels like the end of humanity.
* I could go on for pages and I can assure you if it involved injustice and suffering I worried about it and I’m left feeling terrible that you think I forgot the massacre that involved the people you most care about.
