In his introduction to this Masterworks edition of The Word for World is Forest, Ursula Le Guin’s classic novel of indigenous resistance, Ken Macleod observes that “the author’s sympathy is entirely with the enemy”, and that Le Guin gives us herein the side of the coin less seen:

“[T]hat oppression corrupts the oppressors is well enough known. That resistance to oppression can profoundly change those resisting, and for the worse, is less widely recognised—particularly among those who give that resistance their sympathy and solidarity.”

Throughout this tumultuous summer [review written in 2015], Macleod’s point has stuck with me. The absence he indicates is everywhere: it can be found in hand-wringing “hot takes” on the Ferguson riots and the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the United States, just as it was found in the aftermath of the London riots of 2011; it rippled through the public discourse around the Greek debt bail-out; and it lurks beneath the surface of the refugee crisis to which Europe is belatedly waking up.

In all of these situations we observe what seems to be some sort of systematic oppression, and tend to sympathise with the oppressed. That sympathy seems for the most part to vanish, however, once the oppressed group takes actions which we ourselves would not countenance, as can be seen in the bourgeois response to pretty much every riot there’s ever been: we get that they’re poor and that cops can be assholes and all, but why then steal from and set fire to your own neighbourhood?

We like our victims to stay victim-y, passive; that way we can feel good about choosing to recapitulate the role of the Good Samaritan. We like it much less when victims have their own ideas about the appropriate response to their victimhood, or when they are so bold as to ask directly for the sort of help they want, rather than waiting patiently for the sort of help we believe they need. The victim-with-agency is not a legible category; indeed, it is anathema, if not pariah. We’d rather cure the symptoms than the disease, thankyouverymuch.

I get a sense from Le Guin’s introduction that she feels—or at least felt—that the specificity of the book’s concern (namely the conflict in Vietnam) undermines its allegorical role: that it was an artefact of its time, and that its moral clarity is not portable to other contexts. From the perspective of 1976, with that conflict still fresh in the collective imagination, it may well have seemed inconceivable that the West could ever find itself in the same bind. Four decades later, however, and it looks rather like the West never learned how to do anything else—although there has been a significant shift in marketing strategy, with resource colonialism and the imposition of global commodity markets deftly repackaged as liberation, globalisation, or the dissemination of the capitalist-democratic memeplex.

And if war is the continuation of policy by other means, then the international development industry is surely the continuation of war by other means. While the enslavement of the Athsheans in Le Guin’s novel may not be very reminiscent of recent Western adventures in the Levant (well, so long as you overlook that whole Abu Ghraib business, as we have been encouraged to do), it nonetheless looks remarkably similar to the more economic colonialisms playing out all across the global South: indentured peasants tending vast monoculture estates on land that until recently belonged to them (or, rather, to which they belonged), for the enrichment of far-distant shareholders.

What I’m trying to get at here is that, despite a number of high-profile Panglossian claims to the contrary (yes, Steven Pinker, I’m talking to you), violence is not in decline. On the contrary: violence is a far broader and more subtle category than the gory-glory spectacle of war movies would have us believe. There is the violence of assumptions upended, of freedoms curtailed; the violence of fences and checkpoints and identity papers; the violence of the profit margin and the cost-benefit analysis. There is the violence of being separated from one’s land, from one’s language, from one’s culture; there is the violence of having a new language or culture imposed upon you; the violence of new maps imposed on ancient territories. There is the violence of being put in the box labelled ‘victim’, and being expected to stay there, peacefully, passively, in perpetuity.

These are the violences we do unto others with, in many cases, the best of intentions. These are the violences with which we fill the gap of understanding highlighted by Macleod, the violences with which we punish the victims of more obvious violences, for failing to perform their victimhood in the properly sanctioned manner. The results are all over the headlines as I type: a world full of our victims, turning to us in great extremity for the compassion we claim to have had for them all along. I suspect they will be less surprised to encounter our hypocrisy than we ourselves turn out to be. Our victims have no need of novels to sustain a narrative of our perfidy; that story is scratched and burned into the land itself.

In her introduction, Le Guin regrets the “moralising aspects” of her story, “but [does] not disclaim them either”, arguing that the work must “stand or fall on whatever elements it preserved of the yearning that underlies all specific outrage and protest, whatever tentative outreaching it made, amidst anger and despair, toward justice, or wit, or grace, or liberty.” If the presence of those preserved elements might be correlated with the ease with which The Word for World is Forest mirrors the common aspects of conflicts and occupations far more recent than Vietnam, then I would say it stands—and I wonder whether, at the risk of gainsaying Le Guin, it isn’t in fact its moralising aspects that leave it standing where so many others have fallen. The master’s tools may never dismantle the master’s house, but they can still leave lasting gouges in the walls.