J.M. Coetzee commenced a speech he gave at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid with a thought experiment. As an animal’s rights advocate, Coetzee invited the audience to imagine an abattoir that was not somewhere remote and hidden from view. Instead, the abattoir would be built in the very heart of the city. All the passersby would not only be able to listen to what was happening inside: the walls of the abattoir would also be made of glass. With everyone being able to see the horror in plain sight, he wondered if this would be enough for people to change their mind regarding the consumption of meat.
What if it didn’t?
Let’s take it much further: what if someone made of someone else’s home a crystal killing house? What if there were millions of human beings inside, subjected to unimaginable humiliation and suffering? What if among them were children, and mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters? What if the victims were crying relentlessly for help – but what if governments and corporations were perverse enough they found a way to turn all the blood and tears and pain into gold?
What if that gold was spent? What if that gold paid the newspapers to explain the paradox of such a thing, its inevitability, its inexorable tragedy, even as it was planned, edified, constructed before our very eyes?
What if the horror does not stop, but in fact the opposite happens: what if the political, rhetorical, and financial support for the atrocities increases? What if it were treated as a foundation, a cornerstone?
What if it were perfected? What if its knives were the object of science and innovation? What if they were taught and researched in universities? What if its glass walls were polished to the degree that they could showcase the most intimate details of the cruelty?
And if all this had happened before in history, and now happens yet again, and again, and again, every single day?
And if there were those who lit themselves on fire to protest the construction of this place, who faced prison charges, who were accused of terrorism without having hurt a soul, who put their futures at stake for standing against it, who were rendered unemployable for saying the killing was wrong, who were beaten and slandered by the very people getting obscenely rich from an industry of mass assassination?
What if those who stood against it were dragged inside?
And what of the passersby who chose a different street to go about their lives? And if this crystal killing house were called a temple? And if it were deemed holy, the work and will of a god? And worshipers of all kinds knelt at its steps?
What of those who denied it even existed, or made of the horror a spectacle, or just gathered to observe?
Would that not render those crystal walls a mirror?