Aly Janes

“If A Tree Falls (Sonnet)

If a tree falls in the forest, but
nobody hears it, did it really fall!

If children are bombed to death,
but it's omitted from the news,
did the children really die!

If people are massacred by law,
but it's not on Netflix,
is it really a genocide!

If democracy is dismantled piece by piece,
but by government decree,
is it really illegal!

If the world is burnt to cinders,
but the privileged castles stay intact,
is the world really burning!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“Faith can be unholy,
science can be inhuman,
none depends on the tool,
all depends on the person.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Neurosonnets: The Naskar Art of Neuroscience

“Anyone who has dragged a relative out from under the wreckage of a bombed building, who has held a friend bleeding to death in the street while the officer who pulled the trigger looks on, who has watched their water poisoned, their land burned, their communities starved, is intimately well versed in love. But in the eyes of the empire such a thing can never be called love, because the directive was never in the first place, Love, but rather, Love me. In spite of it all, love me.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

“It's not surprising, I don't think, that in the midst of this indiscriminate killing, many of the Westerners doing the most active work in opposing genocide are Jews. Here is love born of pain, if the past century's most horrific crime, love of one's own spread outward into love of another. Whatever the empire is, it has no idea what to do with this kind of love, which adheres neither to the empire’s own central principle of self-interest nor to the adjoining principle that solidarity is only with one’s own, that love for one’s people may never become love for another.”
― Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This