Where the Axe Is Buried

by Ray Nayler

“In Byzantium, they would blind the fallen emperors, strand them on an island, exile them to a monastery. They would do everything they could to stop short of regicide. But it was never enough. Their very existence nagged. The strangling cord is the only way the tyrant can live in peace, then or now. This state grew within Byzantium’s mold. The President cannot let me live. It is not in his nature.”

Her work was unfinished, yes. But in the end all work was unfinished.

“All I see are allegories everywhere for human behavior. I want to stop comparing the plants and animals to us, but I can’t. And those comparisons are not fair to them.

That was what history was like everywhere he traveled: someone had sanded the splinters down.

A good lie could always be punctured, with enough work. No, Krotov had said—all they needed was implausible deniability. A lie the population would see through immediately but would have to pretend they believed. Even to themselves.

Cynicism was the only healthy response to the world, but he could not manage it.

This thing in front of Nikolai called “Krotov” was nothing but a poisonous mushroom pushed up from the forest floor, born of the mycelium of violence woven through the dirt.

He remembered his father taping plastic sheeting over the windows. He remembered his mother’s shaking hands. On the television, images of the radioactive cloud drifting over continental Europe. Inching its way toward the channel. Then the mass arrests in the Paris banlieues. The trials, the pogroms against immigrant communities all over Europe. In London, council housing apartment blocks burned.

And that’s how we end up with nostalgia even for the awful things. That’s childhood.”

The bombing was an inside job. The work of radical right-wing elements so intent on sowing fear that they were willing to destroy their own cities and murder their own people to do it.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe the problem wasn’t the PMs—maybe it was the material fed into them to begin with. Maybe our lifeways are shit, Palmer thought, and feeding our shitty ideas into some new kind of intelligence was never going to turn them into anything but reprocessed shit.

From that moment, we understood that the state was everywhere. The state did not need to anticipate us: it was always with us. It shaped the mistakes we would make, and it was there to take us into its prisons when we made them.

When a brown hare senses a fox stalking it, it does not run. It stands tall and faces its pursuer. The slower fox then knows it now has no chance of catching the faster hare and breaks off the pursuit. This saves both of them the danger of a pointless chase. In the animal world, cooperation can even exist between predator and prey. Here in our human world, the predator will pursue its prey until both are destroyed in fury.

We cannot wait. We must act immediately, and take the consequences. We must debate their results, and act again. Action cannot be the product of a final conclusion. Action and argument must be bound up together, driving one another forward, each correcting the other’s course. Action and argument together form an experiment, and nothing but constant experimentation will get us where we need to be. The system that contains us is not threatened by what we think of it. It is threatened by what we do about it. And the time for doing is always now.

In the years that followed, they would come to understand the truth—that the days when protests worked, and authoritarian regimes dissolved before the determined voices of freedom or melted away against the inundations of resistance, were gone.

Once the regimes had been emptied of ideology—once power became about power alone—there was no breaking them. They had no morality. They did not become disgusted with themselves and turn away from killing. Their will did not break, no matter how many protesters they had to arrest, beat, or kill. They had no conscience, and so they were not stung by guilt.

The regimes had learned, from watching how other autocratic systems were toppled, that compromise was death. They made no reforms. They promised nothing. They simply jailed, beat, harassed, and killed as many people as was necessary.

Their resistance to power was purely symbolic. It demonstrated to others that the human will could not be broken. It gave hope to those not yet locked into authoritarian systems.

When their identity cards came, Elmira and her mother found out they had not been granted asylum. They were given nothing more than an opportunity for “paid residence.” The authorities had decided that their returning to their own country presented no “immediate threat to their safety.” There was no appeal. “I waited for years for them to listen to us,” Elmira’s mother said. “And finally I figured out they weren’t interested in listening. They were interested in what they could get from us. Cheap labor on the gray market, for nothing in return.”

“Would it bother you,” the man who found her asked, “to work your whole life, to do terrible things, but never know if any of it made a difference?” he asked.

Who would take the time to do such a thing? This little piece of kindness, like a gap torn in the net of injustice.

“Their system isn’t for us,” her mother said. “We were left out of their calculations from the start.” “The PMs are supposed to promote human flourishing.” “The question is who gets to be a human. That has always been the question.

From that moment, we understood that the state was everywhere. The state did not need to anticipate us: it was always with us. It shaped the mistakes we would make, and it was there to take us into its prisons when we made them.

It was not only the security apparatus, watching us with eyes electronic and otherwise. It was also the way the state was built into us, containing our actions from the very beginning, defining the horizons of what we could think and be—and even of what we could see.

“Everything I do is a death sentence,” Taisiya said. “I may as well read what I feel like reading.”

“Do you know how much has been invested in that moment of decision? How many programs are tracking your eyes, your body movements, your posture, your gestures, the dilation of the capillaries in your skin when you are about to make a purchase? All the power of private industry is invested in dissecting and manipulating those seconds of decision-making. You are never more vulnerable than when you are about to buy something.”

“Inaction is an action. How do you kill a million people? Do nothing.

You are upset. Splash your face with water, Nikolai. Take a walk. The world is ending—but we still have work to do.”

“I think that for some of us, the end of the world comes at exactly the right time.”

Imagine what you would be without resistance. Everyone complicit in your plans, or helpless in the face of them. Every desire that flickered in your brain fulfilled. Every person obedient to you. Imagine how, as day followed day and everything was granted to you, your desires would metastasize. There is no cancer like the will, unopposed. What we need most is opposition. It keeps us not only honest, but human. Without it, any one of us is a monster. Where there is complacency, every human power becomes monstrous. Togetherness is not agreement: it is the collective act of resisting one another.

Real evil is nothing more than a curious person inventing new monsters because they can, without a thought for the consequences.”

All over the world, right at this moment, people are losing their homes to authoritarianism in its many forms. The methods of loss are varied: from outright bombing to oppressive surveillance, from imprisonment for expressing religious, cultural, or personal beliefs to the slow chiseling away of the right to make meaningful political choices.