Edward Said say : “Silence is not a neutral position; it is a political choice that keeps harm in place.”
By Afaf Aniba
What did the Palestinian thinker Edward Said say?
“Silence is not a neutral position; it is a political choice that keeps harm in place.”
In a time when neutrality has become morally unacceptable, we find ourselves afflicted with a category of silent individuals whose silence fuels evil and intensifies the flames of war, as if they will never pay the price for their silence—sooner or later. I have previously discussed the harms of silence and neutrality, but this time I approach it from a different angle: **What lies behind silence?**
Is it weakness? Submission? Acceptance of an overpowering reality? Indifference? A sense of withdrawal? Or helplessness?
And what is taking place within the psyche of the silent or the neutral side?
The wars and acts of genocide taking place today leave no one truly untouched, yet there are the silent ones; people suspended between an imposed reality and another shaped by their illusions or their dreams. As for believing they are not concerned—this is impossible. Whether we like it or not, **we are concerned, and concerned above all.**
So what lies behind this silence?
Is it a moral exhaustion that has frozen within us the living heart and the living conscience?
Is it a reaction to the feeling that events have overtaken us at a frantic pace we can no longer follow?
Or does silence mean something entirely different—some form of tacit approval of what is unfolding? Or, on the contrary: “Do not drag me into a situation I did not create”?
We have produced silence through our own lack of agency, until we have granted others the space to appear with their most sinister faces. And there still remains a vast field to explore, in an attempt to understand what lies behind silence…
