They say the pen is mightier than the sword. Bullshit. I’ve got a pen, and the only thing it’s mightier than is a pencil. The sword will cut you in half. 

Look, I know what they mean. The other side has arms, but we have words, and didn’t the Gutenberg press have more consequences for the world than all the armies put together? Didn’t Karl Marx write revolutions into existence? 

But I remember what Refaat Alareer said before he was blown to bits by an Israeli missile. "I'm an academic… The toughest thing I have at home is an Expo marker. But if the Israelis invade... I'm going to use that marker to throw it at the Israeli soldiers, even if that is the last thing that I would be able to do." Alareer wrote beautiful poems and stories. He gave fascinating lectures and inspired hundreds of students. But his Expo marker was no match for an American-made warhead. 

I’ve run a magazine now for ten years, cranking out writing at a furious pace, refuting bad arguments, exposing shoddy factual claims, advocating humane principles in the most eloquent language I can muster. And my most common feeling is futility. Every day I open the newspaper and there’s an injustice. You write an editorial about the injustice. The injustice persists. I think often of the Kurt Vonnegut quote:

“During the Vietnam War... every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”

I think there’s some dark joke to be made about footnotes and the Israel-Palestine conflict. There are so many books and reports, and the ones which most effectively expose the horrors always have voluminous footnotes, as if we might end the genocide if we just build a large enough mountain of footnotes. When I was working with Noam Chomsky to compile The Myth of American Idealism, we produced 33,000 words of endnotes about all these atrocities the United States had committed. We couldn’t stop a single one of them. 

And if you start to become effective, they can just shoot you. That’s what Stalin did. That’s what Israel does. The writer can write a beautiful, crystal-clear, irrefutable case that it is wrong to shoot people in the neck, and the powers that be can just go and shoot the writer in the neck. In a game of rock-paper-pen-sword, sword beats pen every time (So does rock. Pen beats only paper.) 

I think this depressing reality is worth bearing in mind, because it’s easy for a writer to lapse into the romantic illusion that we can change the world by writing a new world into existence. I suppose non-writers don’t suffer as much from this egotistical self-deception. But if you make your living with words, you hope your words matter, and most of the time, they feel like you’re just throwing them into a deep, dark well. The powerful act, the writers object, the powerful keep acting, because writing is not powerful. It is weak. Good arguments pale next to good machine guns as a means of getting the world to do what you want. 

But wait a second: Is this true? Is the writer so weak? Yes, they killed Refaat Alareer. His Expo marker could not stop a missile. A poem will not end a genocide. But Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” was right: his poems drifted like a kite. They were seen by many thousands of people. They inspired them. They kept them going. And despite immense repression, the pro-Palestine movement is now making headway in moving public opinion.

In fact, the statistics here are remarkable. Among Democrats, there has been a “sea change” in opinion on Israel, a rapid shift in public opinion of the kind that pollsters rarely ever see. Of course, a lot of that is attributable to Israel’s actions themselves. But without those actions being publicized, the public wouldn’t have known about them, and public opinion couldn’t shift. Activists, TikTokers, journalists, organizers. They are steadily moving the needle. It hasn’t yet translated into a policy shift. But it will, if they keep pushing. Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York showed that being firmly pro-Palestine is no longer a political career-killer. Others will take note.

I’ve lumped writers in here with activists when I talk about “the pen,” and that’s not quite fair. We sit behind a desk, while they go out in the streets and set up encampments and go door to door. But I think “the pen” can be used here to refer to a broad category of nonviolent information-transmission work, i.e. telling people things. Much of what activists do is convey information, whether through holding a sign, handing out a pamphlet, reciting a chant, or demonstrating something symbolically. And I do think this information-transmission work is vital. 

Vonnegut, for instance, may have thought his efforts against the Vietnam War were like dropping a custard pie. But I read his books in high school, and they shaped my worldview, and I started this magazine in part because of him. And people read this magazine, and a few of them become activists because of things they’ve read in it, and they go on to make small changes, and those small changes (hopefully) add up. Or look at the vast right-wing propaganda apparatus? Do we really think this is ineffective? The right doesn’t just go around lopping off limbs with swords. They use techniques of persuasion. They use arguments. They’re bad arguments. But they are often very skillfully conveyed, and I think that in their heyday, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro were quite effective at recruiting young men to the right through the things they said and the way they said them. William F. Buckley’s National Review was instrumental in reviving the American right, and he’d founded it in part because he saw important left-wing and liberal magazines had been in crafting the intellectual underpinnings of the New Deal. I also think it is worth refuting such men, because I have talked to many readers who have found our essays exposing their muddled thinking and cruelty to be helpful in coming to see the world differently.

So, all right, I don’t end up thinking that writing is useless and the sword wins every time. I do think, however, that if you don’t pay attention to power, you’re probably going to lose. Not all power is delivered through violence. If students at a school go on strike and refuse to keep paying their tuition until their demands are met, they are exercising power nonviolently. But they’re not trying to persuade. They’re not trying to tell the school administrators to change their minds, they’re telling them to change their behavior, and they’re using a threat (a nonviolent threat) in order to induce that change. Persuasion is real, and we should think about opportunities to persuade. But sometimes you just have to beat the other side. Mamdani did not try to persuade Andrew Cuomo that he is a horrible person who should leave politics behind and go enjoy his retirement and life off his ill-gotten book royalties. But his supporters did try to persuade people who liked Cuomo that they shouldn’t, and enough of them succeeded that it shifted an election. 

The pen struggles against the sword, because it is not mightier, it is weaker, and it has to be used very skilfully if it’s going to defeat the superior force of arms. But since the other side has the swords, and we’re stuck here with our Expo markers, we have no choice but to think creatively about how these pitiful weapons can be made lethally effective.