There comes a time, a moment of clarity, when we each realise that the great question in life is, which side are you on? The propaganda that has woven sheep’s clothing for the wolves of the world is threadbare. Fascism is finally donning the stormtrooper armband that it kept hidden in its sock drawer for 80 years. Those who call themselves libertarians are asking for more cops and more prisons – they actually love state power as long as someone is making a profit from it. The Zionists are buddying up with the neo-Nazis – it turns out that actual antisemitism doesn’t bother them, only criticism of Israel. The Western liberals are sending squads of heavily-armed cops to arrest the “terrorists” whose “terrorism” consists of saying “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action” or simply “from the river to the sea”. From the terfs to the techbros it has never been this obvious since 1945 that there is a fascist formation with a coherent fascist movement. Many people are asleep to this, but more are waking. For those who can see, it is time to rouse the sleepers.
Even with a declared ceasefire with Iran, substantive peace is still certain to elude West Asia. Both the US and Israel have established behaviours of violating ceasefires as a matter of course. In the long term the US will never be content to allow Iran to have a military deterrent sufficient to allow itself to exercise sovereignty over its own petroleum resources. While the US empire exists and while petroleum is still crucial to industrial and military applications any period of “peace” will just be a period hybrid warfare while the US prepares to find the pretext for another deadly assault. As with Israel’s aggressions, lulls of relative inactivity should not blind us to a slow ratcheting up of overt genocidal violence. Having bombed Iran so heavily this time, the US will face less resistance for repeating the same intensity of violence in the future.
In order to achieve these objectives the US has needed to abandon it long practices of theatrical benevolence. The mask is off and it is not simply because Trump cannot be discreet. Trump did not get to his position despite being a narcissistic monster from the worlds of organised crime and reality television, he got to his position because of being a narcissistic monster from the worlds of organised crime and reality television. These are the skill sets he brings to the office of the Presidency of the United States of America. He is what the US empire needs because it cannot sustain itself without the Western world giving either commitment or assent to overt fascism and overt racial chauvinism. They can no longer hide the fact that they work on the basis that most people’s lives are disposable to them, so they must sharply divide a minority of largely white Westerners to become their semi-privileged thugs in a war against humanity. We have to show that another way is possible because otherwise, those who strip the working classes of their security will turn their fears into hatred. The path to a life of material dignity will only be open to those who abase themselves to join a system of mass violence against those deemed less human.
So far, though, the more open their fascism becomes the more the resistance grows. Unfortunately that resistance has not forced change on any government throughout the world. Make no mistake that since the beginning of the Gaza Holocaust the institutions of complicity have been under real pressure, their evasions and prevarications and need to be blatantly dishonest has eroded public trust and they know it. The problem is that if we don’t push things to a tipping point, this all becomes the new normal. Our lost trust fosters lowered expectations, the democratic deficit grows and we become ever more resigned to being ruled by an Epstein class of child-abusing warmongering ecosphere-destroying aristocrats.
In reality we all stand to lose – even the bunker-owning billionaires. Neoliberalism has divided and redivided society into tiny weak units, bestowing the privileges of security and baubles on just enough winners to keep others competing to rise as individuals. But those who don’t live in that delusory world understand that our strength only comes from standing up for others. Every injustice we accept being visited on others will see injustice perpetrated on us. When the semi-privileged see their retirement funds evaporate while Elon Musk revels in being the first trillionaire, they too will come to see. We are all connected now. There are no borders, no identities of religion, race, nationality or gender that really matter to the Epstein empire. An injury to one truly is an injury to all.
And now more than ever we need to grow the struggle. Public sentiment is on our side. If we show them that action has the potential to change politics they will join us. That process starts on Saturday. If you can, come to join us as we take action. One way or another, change is coming, and I’m not going not be a lamb led to slaughter. I will see you in the struggle.
I want to talk today about the growth of fascism and the death of humanity in Israeli society.
With the passage this week of a draconian death penalty law that is effectively designed only to applied to Palestinians, more people around the world than ever are noticing that Israelis are in a very dark place. The scenes from the Knesset following the vote were not of solemnity, nor determination, nor regret. We saw instead scenes of glee, scenes of great pleasure at the prospect of the horrific form of violence. We saw unabashed, unhidden, unafraid displays of joyous sadism. Many of us here will know that this is not new. Shocking words and acts of racial hate have been increasingly easy to find among Israelis in recent decades.
In 2015 a settler called Amiram Ben-Uliel murdered 3 members of the Dawabsheh family. 18 month-old Ali Dawabsheh burned to death, an innocent dying in intense agony and helpless terror. His parents lived for some weeks before each in turn died of the burns they had received. Hussein Dawabsheh, Ali’s grandfather, was taunted by Jewish settlers outside the court proceedings. They chanted in Arabic “Where’s Ali? There’s no Ali. Ali is burned. On the fire. Ali is on the grill”
A settler called Limor Son Har-Melech called the murderer a “saint”. She was also a co-sponsor of this death penalty bill. She has openly said that Palestinians must be executed if they kill Jews but Jews should only be imprisoned for killing Palestinians. When 8 soldiers were indicted for raping a prisoner she said that those who prosecuted Israeli personnel for such acts would themselves be “charged and prosecuted as the lowest of traitors.” In the knesset she angrily berated a doctor for saying that a 4 year-old Palestinian should have pain killers when their arm is amputated. On another occasion, 18 months into the holocaust waged on Gaza, she was angered by mention of starving children, calling it “horrific” to address the issue when Israeli children were killed on October the 7th. There is also a video of Son Har-Melech from 2005 encouraging her then 2-year-old son as he vowed to “kill the Arabs”.
A settler called Itamar Ben Gvir was in court the day his fellow settlers taunted a grieving man of over the cruel murder of his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. Ben Gvir was the defence lawyer for the murderer, whom he still openly supports. Ben Gvir at that time had a portrait of Baruch Goldstein in his living room. Goldstein committed a brutal mass-murder in 1994, killing 29 Muslim Palestinians who were praying during Ramadan, before himself being beaten to death by survivors. His grave is treated by Jewish fascists as a shrine. Ben Gvir is reported to have taken his wife to the graveside on their first date.
People may have seen Itamar Ben Gvir recently pouring champagne to celebrate the passage of the death penalty act. He is Israel’s current minister for National Security. He loves to yell at and bully those he calls “terrorists”. He visited prisoners taken from the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters. He taunted and yelled at these people who had been abducted on the high seas and held illegally, calling them “terrorists” but he himself has criminal convictions for inciting racial hatred and supporting a terrorist organisation.
A settler called Bezalel Smotrich is Ben Gvir’s close political ally. He is the current Minister of Finance, and Minister of Transport, and he is a Junior Minister of Defence. He is the main perpetrator in the ongoing ethnic cleansing and annexation of the West Bank which is a flagrant violation of international law and innumerable resolutions by the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly. He has what he calls a “decisive plan” of flooding the West Bank with settlers. As a journalist wrote “When this happens, the Palestinians are supposed to understand that they have no chance to get a state of their own, and they would have to choose between one of the three options – a life of subjugation under Israeli rule, emigration, or death.” He also supports the genocidal cleansing of Gaza saying in 2024: “There are no half measures … [only] total annihiliation. ‘Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.’ There is no place for them under heaven.”
Smotrich is another vocal supporter of Ali Dawabsheh’s murderer. He refused to call the attack terrorism which he claims can “only be violence carried out by an enemy within the framework of war against us”. He supports a shoot to kill policy for Palestinian stone throwers. When 17 year-old Ahed Tamimi was arrested he tweeted that she “should have gotten a bullet, at least in the kneecap”.
I could also mention Smotrich’s violent and obscene homophobia, or the time Ben Gvir told Beduoins “we will mow you down. We are the landlord here!” I could list evidence of their fascist nature all day, but I will spare you that.
Smotrich and Ben Gvir combined their two parties into one for election purposes so that neither party risked falling below the threshold in their proportional system. This was an idea suggested by Benjamin Netanyahu. Together the parties polled 10%, yet these two junior coalition partners seem at times to almost run the country. It is almost as if the main ruling party and its leader uses their open extremism as a cover and a source of deniability for his own extremism. Not that we could ever relate to that in our own country, right?
Settlers like Limor Son Har-Melech, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir provide this cover for all Israelis. They want to pretend that this is not who they are, but it is. There is a German saying from WWII: “If a Nazi is sitting at the table, and ten others are sitting there chatting with him, you have eleven Nazis at the table.” It is not just the 10% who voted for these extremist parties who support their extremism, it is those who voted for Likud which has openly supported them and for the other parties that are willing to work with them. Their settler extremism is actively supported by every Israeli that is not opposed to the settlements in the occupied territories and every Israeli who believes Palestinian resistance is a form of terrorism. Almost every adult Israeli is at that table, the table that means they are the Nazis.
Jewish Zionists inside and outside of Israel will be very offended to be called Nazis, but my answer to them is that if they are so hurt by being called Nazis then they should stop being Nazis. It is not as if I invented the idea that Zionists are Nazis, David Ben Gurion himself called the revisionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky “Vladimir Hitler”. A little over a decade later, though, Ben Gurion spearheaded the Nakba, doing everything that he had once called Jabotinski a fascist for advocating. Nothing illustrates better than this that the table of Nazis is Zionism itself.
This new law shows the world that behind the racialised and Islamophobic excuses about self-defence, Israel is a society in the grip of racial hatred and now is the time that we must hammer that home to the public so that they ask more of their politicians and more of the media too.
Five things you need to know to have any real idea of what is happening right now
I want to talk about why the U.S. is waging war against Iran at the moment, and I’m going to explain it in five parts. The first part is the problem. What is it that the U.S. is hoping to achieve? Why is it going to war now? And the answer is not that Donald Trump had a brain fart or that Israel made them do it.
Part two is the solution. What are they, how are they going to get the aims, achieve the aims that they want? Part three is Iran on a tightrope, the explaining the situation that Iran finds itself in and the way it needs to respond carefully, but resolutely in order to forestall a much bigger, more destructive onslaught against the country. And part four is the empire on a razor’s edge, talking about the contradictions within the US empire
that mean that it also is an extremely in an extremely precarious situation as it wages this war that could bring the whole thing tumbling down and part five is the epstein class versus the people reminding us that this is not simply an abstract thing and that increasingly this is a
a war run for and by a very narrow extremely sociopathic class of people in a decadent empire who are completely unconcerned with the amount of suffering they cause in pursuit of their own self-interest and self-preservation so To start with the problem,
I’m going to start quite far back at the end of World War II when the US found itself to have nearly 60% of all of the world’s manufacturing capacity. This put it in more of a bind than you might think because it was then going to have a trade surplus, permanent trade surplus going forward.
Now, one of the problems with this is that The increase in material wealth would spread to the working class in the country and would undermine the social hierarchy. This is a process that’s described by Clara Matei in The Capital Order, which she traces back to post-
world war one austerity in italy and great britain and how that paved the way for fascism basically um the system requires the repression of democratic forces and enough wealth accumulating to the enough wealth and economic power going to the proletariat threatens that order So there is that, so this led to de-industrialization in the US,
but it also led to something called military Keynesianism. And military Keynesianism was partly, or certainly sold as being a way of stabilizing the economy, which it is, but the US could stabilize the economy by building a state sector in other areas. Indeed, you know, some of the things that are attributed to Military Keynesianism, like technological development,
actually take place more under programs such as the space program than they do under weapons programs. So, yes, it’s true that military Keynesianism has granted the U.S. a large state sector that stabilizes their economy, provides employment and distribution of funds and so forth. But in a lot of ways, that’s not really its purpose. It’s got two purposes.
One, it creates a mechanism of political control through the military industrial complex, which distributes larges and jobs in a way that actually provides a mechanism of control over congressional representatives. But the other way is that it’s a way of destroying wealth. So the thing is with arms, they are a completely non-productive item. They don’t give anyone anything.
They do the opposite. They will destroy things, which can stimulate economic activity without allowing wealth to accumulate in the lower classes, you see. So this was brought about in 1950 through something called NSC 68. The US promptly went to war in Korea to consolidate the system and has never really looked back.
It’s been using the system to wage war and control its own economy and keep down its own working class. ever since however this worked in conjunction with something else because over time the us had problems with keeping its the us dollar as reserve currency originally
it was backed by gold but with the expenditure in the second china war commonly known as the vietnam war this started to undermine their ability to actually pay in gold for the US dollars. So they needed another system. A system was pitched first in a couple of articles by a guy in Foreign Affairs magazine,
and then he took it to the Bilderberg Foundation. group so that’s an international group of elites and pitched it and this system was petrodollar recycling so petrodollar recycling works by ensuring that everyone has to trade oil in us dollars and in order to make it work they needed to drive up the price of oil
Two of their client states, Saudi Arabia and Iran, at the time under the Shah, decided to restrict oil supply, creating the oil shocks in the 1970s, which allowed them to do this. So fast forward to now, what is the problem? Well, one of the problems is that the U.S. under the system is basically de-developing itself industrially, economically.
So it’s keeping its own population down. And it’s fine for its own functioning in relation to its own client states because we, under the Washington consensus rules of neoliberal economic orthodoxy, we all do the same to our own people. We were all suppressing our own economic development and the welfare of our people
in order to maintain this system of control. But… The system is not in place in China, and China is leaping ahead in economic development, and it shows absolutely no sign of simply going along with what the U.S. wants. So immediately, like, the U.S. has obviously had China in its sights for a long time,
but it’s getting to the crunch point where where it’s hard, I mean, I live here in Aotearoa, it’s very hard for our elites to justify their increasing allegiance to the US when it is against our material interests. And I’m going to return to this,
but this is about the fact that the 1% who are extremely brainwashed are going against their own interests, but at some stage they may wake up and realise that they’re being taken for a right. So there is that problem and there is another problem. So the US controls most of the world’s oil.
It has seized control of Venezuelan oil. This is incredibly crucial. And now it’s got Iran in its sights. One of the problems they’re facing is that this obviously, as I said, the control of oil is a mechanism of global control. Oil is essential to The industrial functioning and just the social functioning,
the economic functioning in general of pretty much every country in the world. And it’s also incredibly important for military power as well. And that’s not going to change with renewables. But what is going to change? is that as renewables grow and the existing infrastructure of extracting oil, refining oil, and transporting oil is already paid for. It’s there.
The capacity is already there. As renewables grow, the demand for petroleum will hit a tipping point where even though the U.S. controls most of the oil producers, the temptation for someone to sell it at a price that people can’t turn down so russia for example could sell oil at a
price that will undercut the market and drive prices down and this tipping point will lead to a race to the bottom in the price It’s just that simple economics of it because they can restrict production. But if that’s undermined by a single large producer, then the kind of people restricting the production would be cutting their own
throats because their price will be driven down at the same time as their volumes will be driven down. So the pressure would be on them to actually keep the production up and try and compete on price, especially those places like in the Middle East that have easier to refine, cheaper oil as opposed to Venezuela or Canada.
So this is a big problem. The solution, the nature of the solution is obviously that this is not the first time the US has gone to war in the Middle East and thus disrupted oil supplies and driven the price up and has given massive windfall profits to its allies and clients and so forth.
So the main beneficiaries are People like Saudi Aramco, but also if people cast their minds back, if you’re old enough to the time of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, it drove prices up so much that suddenly like ExxonMobil was the biggest corporation in world history. You know, this is before the tech giants, obviously.
And so forth. So there is a logic to creating this restriction, even though it is against the interests of the ordinary US people who have to buy petrol and also have the prices of their groceries and stuff driven up by the price of petrol. The ordinary US people are not what the empire is run for.
I mean, I don’t know who would believe that it is for their benefit, but it is definitely not. So we do have to remember that this isn’t about the US as a nation. This is about an empire looking after itself. so the solution is partly to drive prices up donald trump has already said because
he’s quite desperate to get people to come on board with this he’s given the game away to some extent he’s like said well you know this is a comparative advantage for us and it certainly is one thing that would give them an edge over china going forward
Not that they’d be able to use it because their economy is so corrupted. And so the US economy is, the whole economy is a bubble effectively. You know, it’s based on a false valuation of their economic inputs into things that are mainly made in China.
So, you know, the solution though is not just about the driving oil prices up. It’s also about what they want to do to Iran, Iran being obviously a significant oil producer in its own right, a large country with 92 million people who, if they do get to either undercut the oil price or
use oil for their own development either way they provide they become a very big problem for the us and they’re also a source of oil for china so that the us can’t use its relative advantage to to compete against china The solution for the U.S.
is more or less what it’s been doing ever since the invention of the military Keynesianism I told you about, and that is that it doesn’t fight wars as people understand them. It commits genocide. Now, war, or what I call Clausewitzian war, is… The clichéd thing, which is like an army is sent against another army,
is politics continued by other means. Like it’s trying to, one sovereign trying to exert will over another sovereign using force of arms. That is the standard understanding of what war is. genocide in contrast is war against peoples and nations that is how it was defined
when it was term was first coined and if you look at the law surrounding genocide even though there’s a lot of um A lot of impressions that it’s about racial hatred and stuff like that. The actual original genocide convention is completely consistent with that idea.
So it is attacking a people as such rather than trying to attack their government and their army. So, you know, and not that waging war to control another country is legitimate or legal even, but that’s a different area of law and that’s also a different concept. So we are talking about genocide.
And the reason we’re talking about genocide is that the US does have this overwhelming military power. I mean, there’s We’re reaching the age now where they are facing, for the first time, some really, I mean, some important asymmetric limitations to its ability to fight war, which I will talk about a bit further. In the past,
people have looked at guerrilla warfare and said that this shows the limitations of US warfighting. Which is, I mean, sort of true, but not really because those guerrillas could never actually hit the U.S. heartlands. Anything the U.S., you know, because they’re fighting people thousands of kilometers away, there is no ability to really hit their interests successfully.
So the U.S. controls the tempo. It only attacks where it wants to and so forth. So there is a strong limitation to that form of asymmetric warfare. And also the reality is that that form of asymmetric warfare actually played into the U.S.’ ‘s plan of waging a genocide. So if the U.S.
was wanting to go to war with someone, if it was this Klaus Witzian war situation of politics continued by other means, then they would never, more or less, never have to because the other side, knowing the power of the U.S. would always concede to them whatever is legitimately can be conceded in such a circumstance.
And I realize that that might be a bit of a hard concept to get your head around. Just ignoring, just leave that for a second and think about the fact that like constantly the U.S. is through history has worked to ensure that the other enemy can’t negotiate a peaceful solution. So in Korea,
an initial period where they swept up and down the country wreaking havoc, they settled into a static position virtually exactly where the U.S. had divided the country in the first place. And they stayed there for two years while the U.S. completely trashed negotiations that were supposed to happen in be happening, and then used their soft power,
their media dominance, to keep saying that it was communist perfidy that was preventing a negotiated solution. And they kept this going while they completely obliterated the north of the country, killing 10% of its civilian population, driving the entire society underground. and committed a war of attrition against the north korean and chinese forces they
were fighting against inflicting incredible casualties and thus like permanently cut the country in half as we know it’s still still divided today and still technically at war today so it was a long time ago and they’ve created this permanent situation of division and conflict there. And in security.
So this is the sort of thing that happens in Vietnam and Indochina in 1954. They intervened in negotiations in Geneva to kind of leave the door open to further conflict and to prevent unification of the country. They then imposed a client as the ruler of South Vietnam,
who they then provoked into creating conflict with the local Viet Minh that had not gone north and drove the people in the south to take up arms again, which eventually forced the North Vietnamese against their will. has to be said, to join in the conflict. And then after years, like Johnson said, the Vietnamese don’t want to negotiate,
which the Vietnamese responded to by saying, yes, we do. Here are our points of negotiation. And he then turned around and said, he took their points and said, see, they don’t really want to negotiate because they’d asked for things that he didn’t want to give. It was a cheap rhetorical trick.
And then famously in 1968, when they were actually negotiating for peace, Henry Kissinger went to Paris and undermined those negotiations, persuaded their South Vietnamese clients to hold out and refused to negotiate. And you think, well, eventually, of course, they negotiated a peace in 1973, which, of course,
didn’t actually achieve peace because it was only the reunification of the country by force of arms that achieved peace in the end. And Henry Kissinger, the same person who’d undermined the peace process, was given a Nobel Peace Prize for… negotiating a non-end to the war. But the war ended, but not because the U.S.
intended, well, not the U.S. security state, not the deep state part of the U.S. They would not have ended the war. They wanted a forever war there, and their intention was to run what they called a um an enclave strategy which was to withdraw to a few major cities and just keep
fighting war in the country forever and ever and ever so this is the sort of this is what they want to do they want to inflict destruction and suffering and division on countries and you see it where they go again and again and again iraq libya sudan somalia and so forth.
This is the genocidal nature of what they do. In Iran, their maximal aim at the moment would be to go to Iran, assault them, then negotiate A ceasefire where they get concessions out of Iran thus weakening their position after having wreaked death and economic destruction on them.
And then maintain their siege or tighten their siege through sanctions on Iran. And then whenever they feel like it at a later date, repeat the whole process again. So this is the model they would love to pursue. But of course, Iran knows this. This is why Iran is refusing to negotiate.
They understand that the only way that they can get out of this trap is to change the calculation on the ground. So at least Iran has clarity. They know that there is no point in negotiating. I mean, the situation is really structurally very much the equivalent of the
indigenous people in continental United States negotiating treaties with the US government. Those treaties mean nothing because in the East, I mean, I’m talking about in the 19th century, in the You have a government that those, they can fight, the indigenous people can fight in the West and their homes, but they can’t touch this big,
increasingly industrialized society in the East. So there is this untouchable center and they’re in the periphery or the semi-periphery. And Iran is in the same situation. It’s not like they can hit the US at home. Of course, as I’ve discussed, in some ways they don’t have to.
The US is hitting itself at home, but we’ll get to that in a second. The thing is with Iran, though, what they’re facing at the moment is not the full might of the US military. And the US would love to unleash its military in full, and it may yet do so. I mean,
there are signs that it is intending to, knowing that Iran is not going to negotiate that sort of quick solution, they are going to engage in a six-month process of building up forces and then go for a much, much, bigger war. Why they can’t do this at the moment? Because they need, nobody supports the war at all.
So they can do this air campaign, but they have very little support around the world. And, you know, they are liable to lose it pretty easily. For Iran, there is a very big danger in that the U.S. wants to provoke them into doing something that will galvanize people’s opinion such that people are willing to take,
willing to see losses amongst U.S. forces and massive, massive losses of Iranian civilian populations. So because we live in a system where as soon as Iran does something that is considered morally condemnable, every single Western chauvinist newspaper and TV station and politician and business leader and fucking Every one of these fuckers will be screaming for revenge.
So this is part of the problem with Iran. If they do something that crosses a line, then US will be unable to unleash much greater firepower on them. So people have criticized the Trump administration for trumpeting its, so to speak, trumpeting its air superiority in Iran. And that’s the term they use, air superiority.
And people are mixing that up with air supremacy. They do have air superiority in Iran. I mean, there’s no question the air forces are… superior to those of the Iranians. However, they don’t have air supremacy, which is pretty much when you can just fly,
which is what the US has been used to in a lot of situations recently. You can just fly whatever you want and bomb whatever you want. However, if people are willing to sustain losses, then they can start flying bombers over and genuinely carpet bombing Iranian cities.
And we would see destruction on levels that are far beyond what we’ve encountered so far. So Iran has to avoid giving them that pretext. But the US has been trying to goad Iran into doing something like this for a very long time. And, you know, as I said,
the immediate interest would be to negotiate a solution and then go back. But they… working at cross purposes in some sense, because they want to push the hardliners in the hope that they will do something like that. And so in the past, they have obviously tried to spook the Iranians into some sort of preemptive thing
by faking an imminent invasion, going back to like 2008 or so, I think it was, maybe a bit later than that, 2010, when Seymour Hersh leaked a whole bunch of things about imminent invasion of Iran when it was clearly not imminent at the time. But because it came from inside, it seemed to be.
And this sort of pressure has been kept up on Iran for a long time. And the US has done a lot of these very provocative things like killing Soleimani and so forth. And a lot of what they do is to take out, not just with Iran, but in general,
they tend to try and kill the moderates and leave the hardliners there. And on the very first day of the assault, they didn’t just kill Ali Khamenei. They also bombed the elementary school that we all know about. Well, one of the things about that is it’s right near the Straits of Hormuz and a lot of
naval officers had children there. So I think that they deliberately killed those kids so as to try and provoke, as the decision-making gets pushed down, they tried to provoke some sort of reaction, such as a poorly considered attack on an oil tanker or something like that,
that would give them the pretext that they didn’t have in order to start this war. As it is, however, Iran has maintained their discipline and the US are still in a position where they can’t explain what they’re doing. And they can’t explain what they’re doing because nobody would accept the morality of it.
It’s not that there’s no explanation. It’s right there for everyone to see if they want to see it. It’s just that nobody would think that it’s acceptable, an acceptable way of behaving. Having said that, though, I just, as a bit of a side note, and it’s not really what I’m meant to be talking about,
the European response to the US, which is to say, well, that it’s illegal, it’s an act of aggression, but, you know, maybe it’s fine. Maybe we don’t care about that anymore. That is actually fucking chilling, because this is… Clearly, their way of managing their own populations to maneuver themselves into a position
of complete compliance with a future larger conflict. And we should be very frightened by that. But to take a look at the other side, the vulnerabilities that the US is facing, its internal contradictions are almost about, I mean, they are very close to creating a complete collapse in its own system. I mean, we have at the moment,
we’ve got SpaceX trying to launch an IPO for something where its market capitalization is something like 100 times its revenue and its revenue only comes from basically the United States government. This comes from the taxpayer. And they, you know, they think they can value at that high. And at the same time, Tesla, while we’re talking about Musk,
is like the, I think, the 14th biggest car manufacturer in the world, or maybe lower than that. And yet it’s valued at something like six times as high as its nearest competitor, which is Toyota. It’s insane. These things are insane. We have the AI bubble, which is a circular competition.
a circular trading system where the valuations are basically just people sending money to each other, which is a big part of why the US has had economic growth when its economy has actually been floundering. in real terms so the you know the us has got these fake figures that suggest that
didn’t didn’t have a downturn after covert when when in fact it probably in reality probably had a bigger one than most places the system is non-sustainable in and of itself and one of the things that the us faces It’s partly the people in the streets. It is partly that. I’m not going to write them off completely.
And it is partly as well the midterms and what might happen when the Democrats take power because there will be pressure for them. Everyone knows it’s corrupt. Things like this latest insider trading incident. are very on the nose and the pressure to impeach the president and or have trials, start trials against people.
I mean, it’s not the tech giants as well. There’s just been two cases where documents have come out showing that they’d deliberately constructed their platforms in order to do harm to children. I think that this sort of thing actually is quite, is going to rile people up a little bit, let’s say.
And there isn’t much of the US economy that isn’t implicated in this. So all this is happening while they’re waging this war that is creating an international destabilization, economic destabilization. Now, it’s interesting because, you know, this is, I think, 20% of the world’s oil production that’s been interrupted more than that in terms of fertilizers.
However, the impact is far in excess of that. Because of, I think, the inherent instabilities and because we also have price gouging, panic buying and so forth. But also, you know, these are going to be cycles. Once inflation hits, a lot of businesses are going to go under. Consumption is going to suffer. So there will be a…
Stag, well, worse than stagflationary, an economic decline at the same time as inflation, and it’ll be a nasty cycle. So a lot of the 1%. are going to stop being one percenters. They’ll be driven. I mean, they will lose everything, you know. And they are idiots.
I don’t underestimate their capacity for being the, you know, turkeys voting for Christmas. They have a lot of… They’re very brainwashed and they’re very self-satisfied. And, you know, as I said, they’re idiots. But they, even though… are probably going to start going, well, what? Why is this happening? And again,
the fact that there is no real sort of galvanizing pretext for this war, I think, is a massive deficit for the U.S. There’s no, this isn’t like, well, you know, keep calm, carry on, Titan belts, blah, blah, blah. This is, it’s not even, you know, because in those times of, of emergency, you know,
you had command economies that kept the, kept those sorts of people in business and in fact, often quite profitable for them. However, this is not going to be the case here. I don’t see that happening because, again, you know, it threatens the functioning of the whole thing.
I wonder if the people at the top have enough perspicacity and the ability to coordinate something like that once they’ve built this thoroughly corrupt system. I mean, giving the money to Elon Musk is not going to help anyone but Elon Musk. So yeah, that is the razor’s edge on which the empire finds itself balanced.
And I think as well, we’ve got to, I want to recognize here in this last part, the fact that this is an empire run world. Now, not so much by the 1%. It’s an empire run by the Epstein class. And they, you know, they don’t care about ordinary people. I mean, they are aligned with, um,
like neo-Malthusians who want, uh, the vast majority of people on this planet to die. They are aligned with, um, rabid neoliberals like, um, Who, I mean, I guess this is a talk for another time, but ironically, these anti-communists who talk about the gray, nasty socialist society,
what they actually want is to impose that on the work units that they think people are. They want them to be sent to. sent to preschools that make them efficient workers and then, you know, live these grey cubicle lives being production units. And yet they have the gall to accuse communists of wanting that, which is just awful.
Anyway, so they’re aligned with them. They’re aligned with pushing this Christian millenarianism, these people who believe in the end times, because they’re basically the only people who won’t have a a moral qualm about what they’re doing once they realize what’s happening. They’ll do anything because they think it all promotes the end times and they, you know,
and they’re credulous morons and fanatics and sociopaths and all, you know, just a perfect mix for a fascist empire to have in their corner. So this Epstein class, they think that people are disposable. I saw something recently about some of the rich who paid to hunt people to go on
safari in Bosnia when the war was happening so that they could shoot people because that’s what they think is fun. And of course, we know about the sex trafficking and the rape and almost certain murder of And then against this, we have the people and what the people are going through.
And we’ve seen what’s been happening in Gaza. It’s hard to even wrap your head around that. But you know, what’s happening now in Lebanon and Iran, you know, people are dying horribly. People are losing loved ones. People are suffering in so many ways throughout all three places.
And this is in order to inflict on the rest of the world massive economic instability that comes with this rise in oil prices that is essential to it, that is going to see a lot of people on the scrap heap. They will have no jobs, but at the same time, food prices will be spiking.
Throughout the world, people are going to starve to death because of this. So, I mean, our only hope is that Iran defeats them. So that’s all I have to say. I hope you get something useful out of this and I hope it clarifies. I realize I’ve laid out a lot here, but you know,
people are talking in very simplistic terms about something that’s a massive historical process. It’s not something that just arose out of nothing. This is going to change the world. Okay. Well, good luck to us all. And, uh, Stand in solidarity with each other because it’s us against the Epstein class.
The NZ Govt has been stupid, abysmal, spineless, callous, racist, traitorous, sycophantic, hypocritical, deceitful and shameful in their response to the attack on Iran – like all Western leaders.
Epstein’s sex crimes and his power politics are inextricable. Sexual violence in general, and child sexual assault in particular, are crimes heavily influenced by status and by a sense of othering the victims. Not only was Epstein’s power network clearly based in large part around his sex trafficking and subsequent tacit or explicit blackmail, but the psychology of those who view and wield power in that manner is itself abusive. We are stupid to think that the people who will burn babies to death with incendiaries for financial and political gain would scruple to commit acts of extreme violence on them for personal gratification.
Tomorrow, on Saturday the 31st of January 2026, there is a global day of solidarity that is part of the red ribbons campaign to bring home Palestinian hostages. Over 9,100 Palestinians are held captive by Israel and they must all be released.
I want to begin my remarks by stating something that we should always remember when we think about the Gaza Holocaust: that is that it was perfectly legal for Palestinian resistance fighters to enter Israel on October 7th 2023 and carry out acts of armed resistance. That does not mean that no crimes were committed by Palestinians on that day, and it does not mean that anyone has to agree morally or strategically with the actions taken on that day.
Regardless of our personal feelings on whether the attack was right or wrong we must insist that the operation itself was legitimate and legal. To do otherwise is to treat Palestinians as having less rights than other human beings simply because they have been denied sovereign statehood. In contrast, when Ukraine carries out an attack on Russian soil none would dare call it terrorism.
I start with this point because the world is topsy-turvy. By being bullied into collectively condemning Hamas, we have legitimated Israel’s completely illegal response. Israelis cannot exercise any right to self-defence while they practice an illegal occupation. Once the resistance forces had ended operations and were returning to Gaza the legal grounds for using armed force on them ended.
We live in a time when lies are not stated, but are universally accepted without needing to be spoken aloud. It just seems natural that when accused of crimes Israeli personnel are given all of the civilised benefits of due process, while a mere accusation against a Palestinian justifies not only the use of deadly force against the suspect but conveys a collective guilt that can be used to enact deadly violence against an entire group. Simply holding or having held an official post with Hamas has been treated as grounds for summary execution. When captured anyone accused of being part any resistance group is treated with the utmost brutality, whether themselves accused of crimes or not.
In Cambodia one can visit the notorious Tuol Sleng prison where enemies of the Khmer Rouge regime were held in inhuman conditions. Forbidden from moving or speaking, their lives were made into a form of living death in which everything of life was abolished except for pain, fear and loneliness. We rightly feel the horror as we imagine this existence, but it seems that most people don’t feel such empathy unless they are given official permission to feel, unless the place in question is designated as a canonical site of atrocity. Israel’s Channel 14 broadcast footage of detained suspected militants forced to endure cruel conditions very similar to the conditions at Tuol Sleng. Officials bragged about the suffering they were inflicting on their prisoners. Far from awakening empathy the spectacle only served to further demonise the victims. Like the prisoners sent by the US to the CECOT torture camp in El Salvador, the victims suffering itself is exploited to make them seem less than fully human.
Empires and colonialists always seek to delegitimise resistors, the history here in Aotearoa has shown on several occasions. International Humanitarian Law requires that prisoners of war be treated humanely and be accorded certain rights. IRA prisoners were treated by the Brits as common criminals. They engaged in extreme acts of protest to establish their legal combatant status. This included the hunger strike in which 10 prisoners, including Bobby Sands, gave their lives. Palestinians accused of armed militant action are not even treated as criminals.
The treatment of prisoners from Gaza has clearly been modelled on the US designation of prisoners as “unlawful combatants”. Do not be fooled by the fact that some of these prisoners, a tiny minority, eventually had legal procedures. This only occurred when the captors allowed it to. From the moment of capture to the moment of death or release most of these prisners had no rights.
“Unlawful combatant” status was and is the denial of legal personhood. Such prisoners h suffer inhumane conditions and are tortured as a matter of routine. If prisoners die under torture or are murdered in other ways, there are no consequences.
The US held its “unlawful combatants” in military bases such as Bagram and Guantanamo, in prisons like Abu Ghraib, and in black sites. These were areas where no law applied. These places operated on the model established by the Germans at Dachau. Dachau was not a death camp. It was a place of torture and brutality designed to show that the raw force of the state could be applied brutally, arbitrarily and without limits. It was open for nearly a decade before the first gas chambers were used, yet the dehumanisation of Dachau was crucial to the evolution the apparatus of mass death. It is clear that the worst of the Israeli prisons are equally horrifying. One is literally subterranean, an underground prison whose inmates may only experience 5 minutes of sunlight every two days.
Doctor Adnan al-Bursh, who had been head of orthopaedics at al-Shifa hospital, died in Sde Teman prison in April of 2024. To the best of our knowledge he had been tortured by being raped with an object or objects inserted into his anus. He died a slow, lonely, and painful death from internal injuries due to the torture. This was a man of considerable status. Medical personnel have specific protections under international law. Doctors, if they are not Palestinian, are treated almost universally in Western culture as heroes until proven otherwise. I say this because we all know that if they can do this to Adnan al-Bursh with no consequence they can do it to anyone. Like Dachau or Abu Ghraib, a prisoner can be tortured or killed arbitrarily. They have lost legal personhood. They are unpeople.
The same twisted logic that uses the violence of October 7 to assert that resistance is criminal terrorism has been weaponised against those who are clearly not armed militants. In the months following October 7 thousands of people from the West Bank and East Jerusalem were abducted because of social media posts allegedly expressing support for the operation.
We are getting an increasingly horrific picture of the treatment of all Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody, but perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects has been the growing wave of testimony pointing to systematic and widespread rape.
Israel is trying to criminalise all forms of resistance. It uses atrocity propaganda, almost all based fictitious claims, to create a hyperbolic emotional reaction against October 7th and other acts of armed resistance.
Resisting the criminal occupation and resisting the criminal ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territories is terrorism. Being a journalist is terrorism. Distributing food is terrorism. Being a doctor or nurse is terrorism. Crossing an invisible line is terrorism. When two young boys, Fadi and Jumaa Abu Asi, crossed an invisible line Israelis murdered them. Instead of claiming they made a mistake Israel said the boys activities as they looked for firewood seemed threatening and thus “The air force eliminated the suspects to remove the threat.”
It is something beyond hypocrisy that Israel and the US will not treat armed resisters as combatants but will readily assign combatant status to unarmed civilians in order to further genocidal ends. They have long worked to erase the difference between combatants and non-combatants and this is not new. Every genocide in the modern era is a war according to its perpetrators. Every perpetrator of genocide claims that they are fighting a war.
In Iraq US personnel would create unmarked “traffic control points”. If people crossed an invisible line they would be killed. Technically there was supposed to be an escalation of force, but if someone starts shooting at your car engine the normal reaction is not to pull over and ask them politely why they are trying to kill you. If the driver’s instinct was to stop and reverse they might live, if their instinct was to accelerate they and their passengers would die. The reaction from soldiers, who in some instances had murdered children, was always to blame the victims. Psychologically they protected themselves by getting angry at their own murder-victims for putting them in the situation of becoming murderers.
In the wake of a massacre of journalists and other civilians in Baghdad documented in footage released by wikileaks (under the title “collateral murder”) one of the helicopter crew says “Well its their fault for bringing kids into a battle.” This is a process of reifying a fantasy. There was no battle. They had deliberately been pretending that they thought a journalists camera was an RPG. Even if it had been an RPG, it was never brandished nor could it possibly have been a threat to the distant armoured helicopter gunship. Like the Israelis in Gaza, the US military had declared journalists to be a form of combatant. The videos spread online by insurgents of IED attacks gave the pretext that people with cameras or even cellphones could be considered terror suspects by US personnel. They killed more journalists in Iraq than the number killed in Gaza, and they were much more successful at hiding what was happening as a result.
The idea that a driver who happened upon a massacre in a suburb of Baghdad had entered a zone of “battle” is reminiscent of the free-fire zones in Viet Nam where leaflet drops often preceded mass-murder. The victims are made out to be the agents of their own destruction. It is their own fault. They choose this fate.
In Gaza at the height of the Holocaust, the Israelis had various systems of designating safe zones, often in very complex detail. The zones would change whenever they wanted and they would send SMS and recorded phone messages that may have been even less useful than the notoriously ambiguous leaflets used in Viet Nam. The result seems to have been more akin to a horror movie than any form of legitimate warfare, but rabid Zionists will claim that it proves that there can be no genocidal intent. Netanyahu has often cited leafleting and phone warnings to prove the morality and legality of Israel’s supposed war on Hamas.
These exercises are all about controlling meaning. They seek to make a reality out of a twisted fantasy where the forces of death are the bringers of cleansing light. They project their own aggressive brutality onto their real and imagined enemies. This is the psychosis of fascism. It is the same psychosis that calls Alex Pretti an assassin who died on the cusp of massacring helpless law-enforcement officers. Fascists do not keep their mental illness to themselves, they seek to inscribe it on the world, to create a history from their own mad delusions.
There is a novel about this process of fascist historiography. It is called After Dachau and was written by Daniel Quinn. The book is set in a world where the Nazis won and over time rewrote history so that Dachau was not a concentration camp but a battle, just like the site of the Collateral Murder massacre in Baghdad. In the book the Battle of Dachau was a great victory over an enemy army. Every perpetrator of genocide claims that they are fighting a war.
Most people accept the notion that Palestinians take hostages while the Israelis hold prisoners. Is this really any different from calling Dachau a battle? We treat the victims of genocide as guilty until proven innocent, and accept genocidal violence as legitimate military action, if perhaps excessive in some details.
The fascist imaginary creates a world in which the criminal is the policeman and the judge punishes those found guilty of being the victim. The whole system is one in which the concepts of legality and the legitimate exercise of sovereign power are turned into a form of pantomime used to create a system of criminality far beyond the wildest dreams of Al Capone or El Chapo. They don uniforms to cosplay as agents of order while seeking to unleash brute lawless force. If this sounds uncomfortably like it applies equally to the streets of Minneapolis, that is because it is the same thing unleashed by the same people. This is also true of the UK’s repressive actions against Palestine Action and thousands of their supporters. If our news media continuously make it seem that Palestinians are the aggressors and Israelis are acting in response, then it is really no great leap to the point where we all face charges of antisemitic hate speech.
What happens to Palestinians affects us all. We need to let people know that the Palestinians held be Israel genuinely are hostages. Few will ever have a day in court, and very few have ever committed an actual criminal act. Just because Israel has uniforms and handcuffs and cells and prisons and chains of custody and paperwork, it does not mean that they have legitimacy. It is a giant fraud.
As you read the novel After Dachau a slow horrifying realisation creeps over you. The story is not actually set in the future of an alternate Earth where the Germans won World War II, it is set in this world’s possible future: a future in which the Nazis do eventually win. As everyone here should know by now, we have not defeated the Nazis yet. We fight for Palestinian freedom, but we also fight to live in reality. We fight to live in a world where opposing genocide is not terrorism nor antisemitism, it is common humanity. We fight for a world where we can call the people abducted by a criminal genocidal state what they are. They are hostages.
I speak here off the cuff about the centrality and culpability of the US in the Gaza Holocaust. I start by explaining why I use “Gaza Holocaust” as terminology. The US is not merely supporting Israel’s genocidal slaughter in Gaza, it is a direct participant. In this video I depart from my usual format and the result is much briefer. “Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.” ― Aldous Huxley.
Even in the midst of great slaughter and suffering, Israel’s attempts at ethnic cleansing face insurmountable challenges. What may seem to be brazen acts fuelled by total impunity are actually desperate and deranged acts in a colonial genocide that has become dysfunctional. Bloodlust and fanaticism have come to over-ride cold strategic calculation. Ultimately Israel has no way of achieving the ethnic cleansing of Palestine and it cannot withhold rights from its Palestinian subjects forever.
I write this article in response to a passage that shocked me in the epilogue to Pankaj Mishra’s book The World After Gaza (2025):
As the climate crisis brings forth a world of barbed-wire borders, walls and apartheid, and cruelty in the name of self-preservation receives singularly wide sanction, most recently in Donald Trump’s electoral triumph, Israel will most likely succeed in ethnic-cleansing Gaza, and the West Bank as well.
There is already too much evidence that the arc of the moral universe does not bend towards justice, powerful men have always made their massacres seem necessary and righteous. It’s not at all difficult to imagine a triumphant conclusion to the Israeli onslaught, or its retrospective sanitizing by historians and journalists as well as politicians.
My dismay comes in no little part from how good the rest of Mishra’s The World After Gaza is. These words felt like a betrayal that hit me as an unexpected gut-punch. This is not because of my belief in the cause of Palestinian freedom. I am not letting my heart blind me to reality, in fact I believe the inverse to be true. Mishra is evincing a privileged form of defeatism. At the end of a wonderfully sober book Mishra for some reason surrendered to sentimentality. It is the inverse of baseless optimism, but it is no less self-indulgent for the fact that it makes him feel bad.
I am not a Pollyanna. I do not think that humanity is continually becoming less violent through some law of Whiggish progress. In the abstract I do not deny that what Mishra claims is possible or even probable in other circumstances. It is not hard to recall other times when horrific genocides have been turned into triumphs, and then even spawned genres of historical fiction in which the victims become the villains. From stories of Richard the Lionheart, to John Wayne Westerns, to American Sniper, this shit does keep happening. But Mishra uses the absolute term “always” far too blithely. Hitler was a “powerful” man by any normal measure but he did not manage to leave legacy in which history judges his massacres as “necessary and righteous”.
Like the Israelis, Hitler believed he could write a grand story through mass violence in the manner that had served so well in British and US colonial genocides. He was wrong. The Zionists are wrong. The world was not the same in 1939. It was not the same in 1947. It was not the same in 2023.
Colonial genocides work by destroying indigenous histories. Israel has spent decades slowly destroying the physical manifestations of historical Palestinian presence but still has come nowhere near the sort of erasure seen in the US, Canada, Aotearoa and Australia. Now they are engaged in the most futile acts of memoricide imaginable. They destroy mosques, churches, libraries and universities, but it is documented by a million Palestinian cameras and even uploaded injudiciously by their own genocidal personnel. They are not destroying Palestinian identity, they are making Palestinians one of the most recognisable groups on the planet.
Timing is everything. Aimé Césaire claimed that Nazism was only colonialism practised at home. “They tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them… because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.” Perhaps there is some truth here, but what might the world have looked like had Britain and France not declared war during the invasion of Poland? What would the world have looked like if Germany’s leader were a patient imperialist more like his Anglo role models? What if Germany had spent decades of playing divide-and-conquer, signing and breaking treaties then always blaming their own perfidy on the innate violence of the barbaric slavs? They might easily have replicated the success of Anglo settler-colonies.
Césaire might be right about the racist hypocrisy of Europeans, but the German-led Axis powers killed 26 million Slavs and 6 million Jews in the space of less than 6 years. No other racial slaughter in history matches this intensity. The public response in the Axis home countries was roughly no more nor less contended than that shown by British people in response to the violence of the slaughter at Ombdurman in 1898 or the brutality meted out in suppressing the Indian Mutiny.
The reason Germany could not repeat the genocidal successes of other European powers was circumstantial and seemed to be completely independent of the skin colour of the victims. The scale of the slaughter was too large and the war was not confined to the intended victim groups. Most importantly, though, they lost the war.
After 1945 things would become even more difficult for would-be settler colonials. In the wake of World War II a more determined ethos of universality took hold of the world than had occurred in the wake of World War I. Human rights were for all humans. Notably absent were the racist notions of the need for “tutelage” that allowed European powers to grab more territory as “League Mandates” after WWI.
The UN Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and various conventions and treaties all pointed to a non-racist world order – on paper at least. This did not end imperialist genocides, nor the cruel depredations of neocolonialism, but it set the scene for the end of most direct colonial regimes and it made new settler colonial projects legally and morally anathema. The Shoah gave some validation of Zionist arguments for the need for a Jewish homeland and they were backed by duplicitous manoeuvrings by the UK and the US. Thus a partial blind eye was turned to this particular settler-colonial project on the basis of pretending that a “just and lasting settlement” would come at some future date. This contingent approval for a clearly insupportable injustice always needed the concealment of a mask of temporary expedient. Even as generations were born and died Israel’s existence is only regularised by a fig-leaf of future just resolutions for Palestinian refugees and occupied populations.
In 1947 the UN General Assembly proposed a partition plan in Palestine. The British knew that Zionist paramilitary leaders would not accept this and they knew that the paramilitary forces (Haganah, Irgun and Lehi) would be able to take the entirety of Palestine. Britain gave a green light to Jordan to invade and occupy the West Bank. Her Majesty’s Government was sufficiently in favour of this move that they defied a UN arms embargo to supply necessary weapons. The reason that the British did this was to further their ends of power projection into the oil-rich Arab-populated lands of the region. They wanted Israel to be insecure – a bleeding sore and a permanent source of conflict with Arabs.
This was the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. Had Israel taken the entirety of Mandate Palestine the remaining Palestinian population would have been large, if not a majority. The sort of ethnic cleansing required to change that would have destroyed the Zionist pretext of fighting a war, especially in the absence of an “invasion” by neighbouring Arab countries. Likewise, a partition of Palestine would have been a huge injustice in itself, and yet would have left Palestinians in a far better position in future years and decades. A Palestinian state could have sought redress as a wronged peer with a theoretically equal voice in international fora. These are simplified counterfactuals, but I hope they illustrate that the end result of losing 78% of mandate Palestine was calculated (if only incidentally) to leave Palestinians in the weakest and least secure position possible. They were effectively pawns in game of world domination.
The US inheritors of British imperial designs achieved that world domination, and control of Middle Eastern oil was arguably the keystone of the architecture.
While we are on the subject of deranged schemes it is worth recalling that wilful Zionist fantasies of a land without a people for a people without a land were never sustainable. Even the most hardline “realist” revisionist forms of Zionism were and still are deluded. To cleanse enough of the Palestinian population to make a stable “democratic” Jewish state would take either the expulsion or mass murder of millions. Killing that many would immediately create a pariah state. On the other hand, expelling them does not erase them, their identity, nor their legal rights. People whose great-grandparents were expelled from Palestine in the Nakba still have a legal claim to the right to return. People being slowly forced out of the West Bank and Jerusalem have a right of return and if things continue as they currently are will have a clear case to be considered refugees rather than migrants. Israel cannot write the story they want no matter how much Palestinian blood they use.
What path does Mishra see by which Israel will now be able follow to achieve what it could not over eight decades of trying? How would this happen?
There is clearly a crisis in the US empire and in global capitalism. I think that this is why the Gaza Holocaust is happening. Israel could have stopped its current onslaught at any time before now, leaving a battered Gaza to suffer until it finds the next pretext for “mowing the lawn”. Instead it is relentless. It has also conducted unprecedented operations in Syria and the West Bank, and is trying hard to end the power of Hezbollah entirely. No one should mistake the fact that there is an urgency in these actions. Supporters around the world are also acting as if impelled, burning up political capital furiously to provide diplomatic and discursive cover for the most documented atrocities in human existence.
History is written by the winners, but how practically can Israel “win” in terms of full ethnic cleansing? If Egypt (for example) agrees to take the entire population of Gaza tomorrow there will still need to be a forced expulsion. It would be just the first difficult step in a long process that would cause a massive popular and institutional backlash.
The winners are always those who can write the history. By the same token, no victory will ever be complete until the story of the victory is believed. Who will ever believe in the triumph of Israel over the baby-beheading rapist terrorists with what we have seen? Even the biased Western media can’t spin everything, and Israel’s genocidal machinery is writing an indelible story of obscene criminality.
There is a global reservoir of digitally-enhanced folk-memory that will keep intruding into the mainstream, even reaching the confused victims of Western news media. Around the globe there is shared a language of chants and sayings such as “every Zionist accusation is a confession”. We know of unforgettable crimes that are seared into our hearts. We know names of the dead. We can inform people about Refaat Alareer, Hind Rajab, and Hossam Shabat. We have poetry. We have music. We have statistics; photographs; running jokes; books; documentaries, dedicated news outlets, websites, logos, a brand of cola, and a massive podcast ecosystem.
Palestine solidarity activists have, by pure circumstance, developed a durable shared identity. We have the gravity of the weight of all of the tears we have shed. That will stay for our lifetimes and when the contention dies it is our stories that will inform our friends, family and neighbours about what really happened. Israel cannot silence the voices of Palestinians with all its weapons and prisons, and it has no way of extinguishing the global voices of solidarity. We cannot be forced to stop and we have no reason to stop until Palestine is free.
Israel killed journalist Fatima Hassouna just the day after it was announced that a documentary about her was accepted to be shown at Cannes this year. It is hard to believe that this is a coincidence, and what they have done is to create another enduring symbol. What impact will that documentary have now? Can it be imagined that the people who watch it will ever be able to accept future Zionist lies? Assuming it was a deliberate act, the killing of this young woman is surely meant to demoralise. It is surely meant to be a brazen display of impunity. It is surely meant to force the flak-wary leaders and organisers of the Western world to commit further to the fictions of hasbara, trapping them in a web of absurdity. But they are skinning the sheep that their forefathers have profitably shorn for decades.
Israelis are destroying the myths that have sustained 80 years of slow genocide. The frontline troops that have let their chauvinist self-belief and hatred of Palestinians lead them to make unwise advertisements of their own criminality, and the highest leaders seem to think that showing the world a face limitless brutality will create assent and compliance. How could anyone think that they will succeed this way?
The resistance is inextinguishable. That is why it is only a matter of time before Palestine is free.
Only a matter of time.
Only.
But time is not trivial. People are suffering and dying. This week we saw children incinerated in their tents. Their dying agonies should reach the world, should move the world, should shake the world like a thunderclap, but they are just another irreplaceable loss, their agonies another irreversible obscenity. Each day brings more. Perhaps that is the thing that made me feel the greatest sense of hurt when reading Pankaj Mishra’s assertion that Israel will can easily succeed in its genocide. By doing this Mishra endorses the delusion that keeps the violence going.
When I say that Palestinian liberation is inevitable it is not from optimism. It is not comfortable nor comforting because it means that each new day’s suffering is as futile and arbitrary as it is inhuman. What I mean to convey is that the more we do to end this, the fewer people will suffer. That is all.
This genocide no longer serves a purpose, not for Israel, not for the US. The US empire is retrenching, but like the cruel colonial powers of the past it is flailing destructively as it withdraws, its leaders believing they will never face justice. Maybe they are correct. Israel, on the other hand, cannot win this fight and with each passing day of violence they inflict future harm on their children and grandchildren. They inflict harm on their own future selves.
Others will pay a price too. Israel needs an international support structure to continue this Holocaust. Currently Western and many other leaders around the world are siding with power against what is right. We need to make them know that a time will come when they will pay. Their names will be dirt. Some may face prosecution. Everything is recorded. Everything is known. If they want to keep their careers they had better be in the vanguard of those who one day (as Omar Akkad says) will always have been against this.
In this episode I build on and take a different approach to things that I have written and spoke about in the past. Our vision of Nazis as the ultimate expression of political evil is not wrong in that Nazism is morally unsupportable, but exceptionalist views of Nazism blind us to dangers of Nazism returning. Obviously as a particular movement of a particular time it is unlikely (though unfortunately not impossible) that an overt self-identified “National Socialist” movement will become the ruling party in any contemporary state. That being understood, it is clear that all of the important and dangerous aspects that went into making Nazism what it was are on the rise in world politics, particularly the US and Europe.
Soon after Trump’s 2016 election I wrote of the “straw Nazis”, the street thugs, whose alarming presence was useful but ultimately expendable (https://ongenocide.com/2016/12/15/trumps-straw-nazis-a-horror-story/). I won’t say I was brilliant to predict that things would become more fascistic under Trump – anyone could see that. Looking back though I wrote a segment on how fascism would also have deepened had Clinton won with a less street-thuggish and more war-crimesy tone. I think Biden’s term in office bore out that point.
The truth is that Nazism was significant, but the individual Nazis weren’t any different than the other shitty people around the world. As Nazi ideas take hold more and more people become Nazis until it is just you random run-of-the-mill hairdresser or barista. It isn’t even about what these people believe either, it is about what they consent to be part of.
As long as we keep looking for straw Nazis we will be looking the wrong way when the actual Nazis take over.
On Genocide 