One death cannot be compared to another. Every life is unique. One life is not equal to another. They killed us and we killed them is the logic of the repetition of violence. Vazha-Pshavela and his character Aluda Ketelauri knew this. Aluda’s cannibalistic dream directly describes a situation where one life can be exchanged for another life. “I was eating, but it hurt my / Man’s hands and feet are bony”, says Aluda. “I was eating, but it hurt me” is exactly the mechanism we live in when we symbolically exchange one life, one crime for another, or write it off. It indeed hurts us, but still, we continue to eat man.
This metaphorical cannibalism is the condition we live in when we justify killing even by relativizing it. If Aluda Ketelauri had lived according to the logic of our Whatabout*, he should have calmly continued to kill his enemies and cut their rights. It is not difficult to justify violence. One always finds an argument for one’s violence, killing or oppressing others. The stomach was always guilty, it “damaged” the chattels, in other cases, the victim might have “cursed the mother”, might have annoyed the abuser by “wearing a short dress” and so on. The reason can be any, and the person standing above says to the person below, “Why are you pouring water on me?” As soon as we justify violence, violence, and death, we enter the space of cannibalism.