The Shadow Lands’ routine abuses require conspiratorial cover-ups we all participate in

Evidence

This dimness, too, is linked to real conspiracies. Not only are basic working and living conditions painfully difficult, but because they are deliberately kept in the shadows, to preserve the illusions of modernity, they also routinely tip into extreme sadism—the Shadow Lands are places where physical and sexual abuses committed by supervisors and guards and soldiers are routine. These abuses are built in because the lives of the people most affected—poor, undocumented, legally precarious, overwhelmingly Black and Brown—have already been discounted. Abuse thrives in the Shadow Lands because it can. And this, in turn, requires conspiratorial cover-ups to protect the perpetrators and to protect consumers who conspire to keep ourselves ignorant and innocent as we stroll through the more brightly lit parts of the supply chain. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 780

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind’ piece — the structural hiding of violence workers profit from, and to the general theme of implicate citizens in supply chains.