Context: “California warehouse worker accused of arson raged online against capitalist greed.” (NBC News) The same day that Chamel Abdulkarim burned down his workplace, the president of the United States threatened to permanently annihilate “a whole civilization”—a statement which can only be described as a threat of genocide. “The people who carry the boxes, stock the shelves, scan the packages, and drive the routes know what Abdulkarim’s quote means. Not because they think arson is justified—they don’t. Because the sentence did not sound foreign. It sounded like something millions of people say in less catastrophic ways every day, in kitchens, in group chats, in cars outside warehouses before shifts they cannot afford to quit … Criminal acts deserve criminal consequences, full stop. But punishment does not answer the question underneath all of this, the one nobody in power addressed this week: what happens to the people who cannot afford to live in the economy being built above them?...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51