Tag Archives: War

The Iran War Explained

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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.

Ep 09: We Need to Talk About the Fact that Kenneth Roth is and Imperialist Warmonger

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In which I discuss Kenneth Roth’s return to form as a military interventionist who loves the idea of US military involvement as a way of solving problems. Despite everything this implies he still gets treated as a humanitarian hero by the likes of Democracy Now!

I fucked up the video capture so that my face is covering Roth most of the time. I am new to the software and had preview screen showing a very different view. Sorry :-(

The recent DN! segment used is here: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/3/ukraine_russia_trump_vance_putin

My 2014 article on HRW and Amnesty International is here:https://ongenocide.com/2014/06/20/why-blocking-the-revolving-door-wont-fix-human-rights-watch/

Here is an older and longer but more hard-hitting piece I posted about Amnesty International and liberal imperialism: https://ongenocide.com/2012/11/21/amnesty-international-and-liberal-imperialism-video-audio-illustrated-hypertext-transcript/

And here is the DN! debate between Keane Bhatt and Reed Brody: https://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/11/deb.

Gaza’s “Safe Zone” is a Concentration Camp

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Al-Haq, the oldest and most established Palestinian human rights organisation, released an important report about genocide in Gaza, but it should not be important at all. Everyone should already understand that genocide is an established fact. Al Haq should not feel any need to further state that obvious fact. The report should be a matter of academic interest, detailing a grotesque aspect of the deadly campaign in Gaza. There should be no official or scholarly doubt over the gravity, lethality, unjustifiability, and criminality of Israel’s acts in Gaza; and above all there should be no denying their intrinsically genocidal nature. Instead there is yet another powerful and heartrending report trying to break through the wall of equivocation that our media, politicians, scholars and civil society create. (By “equivocation” I mean the practice of portraying the most unambiguous issue of our time as being a quagmire of uncertainty and controversy.)

Al-Haq’s report details a practice of displacement and concentration. It is important to note here that 20th century history revealed the crucial and baleful role that population concentration plays in oppression and mass violence. This was recognised by theorists like Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, but also by Raphäel Lemkin. Lemkin invented the term “genocide” and later explicitly linked the idea to “concentration camps”, but he did not mean the term in the rigid sense of institutions that were explicitly labelled as such by the states that created them. He wrote, for example, of “concentration camps” used in the genocide against Plains Indians in 19th century USA. The name itself is not important, it is the concentration of a population in areas without the normal collective autonomy and social functions that is important, whether they be named “camps”, “reservations”, “ghettos”, “strategic hamlets”, or “safe zones”.

These concentration zones are always extreme and intense sites of structural violence. Normal structural violence is described by Dr Paul Farmer as “social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way…. The arrangements are structural because they are embedded in the political and economic organization of our social world; they are violent because they cause injury to people….” In concentration zones structural violence is intensified by the destruction of normal social arrangements that allow for mutual aid and collective self-defence. Victims in concentration zones are stripped naked of all but the most primitive protection and reduced to a status akin to that of livestock unable to resist being herded or separated or ultimately culled.

All structural violence is created and maintained through acts and threats of physical violence, but in a concentration zone these acts are far more frequent and they are by nature omnipresent. It could be towers, wires and guards; or it could be drones, airstrikes, snipers, and threatening texts. The people within the zone cannot escape the heavy weight of potential death that is laid upon them. With or without barbed-wire the result is an entire population confined to a place where ordinary life is abolished. Mimicking the situation of displacement camps, concentration zones make the temporary vulnerability and loss of autonomy of refugees into a permanent twilight of contingent life. Left to their own devices people in refugee camps will reconstitute a way of living (however immiserated) but these concentration zones are kept in hellish condition of dysfunction. Concentration zones are a product and producer of dehumanisation, making extermination ever more thinkable, ever more practical, and ever more proximate.

The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide prohibits both “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” and “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Clearly these are outcomes intrinsic to the creation of concentration zones. By nature such acts of concentration are genocidal on the surface, but can it be merely an allowable expedient of war? In short, no. It can never be justified as “unintentional” (though you would think otherwise from the way our legal, political, journalistic, and scholarly institutions have repeatedly and reliably whitewashed Western genocides). As I will explain, the logic of concentrating a given racial, ethnic, national or religious group as such en masse (i.e. on the basis of their belonging to the group) is genocidal and justifications of military necessity do not and can not withstand scrutiny.

Mao Zedong said that “The guerilla must move among the people as a fish moves in the sea”. He was only saying what imperialist counterinsurgency leaders have believed for a long time. The first acknowledged “concentration camps” were those arising from the Spanish “reconcentration” programme. The stated aim could validly be put in terms of drying the sea in which the guerillas swam. Equally validly, though, it can be seen as an aggression against the people themselves, an expression of animus from a hostile military overlord.i Needless to say these first concentration camps imposed cruel imprisonment conditions that led to mass deaths from starvation and disease. Soon afterwards the British replicated the process, the counterinsurgency rationale, the unspoken animus, and the cruelty, deprivation and mass death. The Germans used concentration camps in both its West African and East African colonies with the same horrific outcomes with the added atrocity that celebrated Nobel Laureate Robert Koch murdered thousands in medical experiments.

Ignoring the peculiar (but also illuminatingii) example of concentration camps in the German Third Reich, there is a clear pattern established here. These early examples alone serve to elucidate the current case in Gaza. Clearly concentration practices cause harms constitutive of genocide as outlined above. Intent is baked into the practice because the harms are intrinsic and it is not possible to undertake coordinated actions such as building camps, violently forcing unwilling masses into those camps, and manning those camps without clear intent. If the concentrated group is a protected categoryiii (assuming this is not merely a short-term displacement), then the acts are therefore genocidal. The Al Haq report details many ways in which, without actually constructing a camp in the “safe zone”, Israel has taken equivalent and even more elaborate measures to concentrate the people into an area where normal life is abolished in every practicable way.

The claim throughout history is always one of military necessity, but it must be made very clear that the existence of a military rationale does not preclude genocidal intent. Quite apart from the fact that these practices have a long history of being militarily counterproductive, even if there were military benefits the genocidal nature is undeniable. The intent is to take actions that cause harm to the protected group, therefore the harm is intentional. The analogy sometimes used is that if I shoot someone dead in the street I cannot then claim that I did not have intent to murder because I didn’t specifically want them dead (e.g. I wanted their sneakers and the expedient I chose was to shoot them in order to facilitate the acquisition). If the act is wilful then motive is immaterial to the criminal intent of the act. If proscribed harms are being done to a protected group in order to achieve a counterinsurgency goal the acts are still genocidal even if the military goal is furthered by those acts. It is actually worth taking a second to think about the moral bankruptcy of those people who suggest that it is okay to commit these acts and they are not genocidal by reason of having a military motive.

Concentration is inherently genocidal and I think there is an illuminating parallel here with the use of economic sanctions that target entire populations. Like many genocidal practices, such sanctions are normalised to the point where anyone suggesting that they constitute the crime of genocide has traditionally been treated like a lunatic, but the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s changed that to some extent. In reaction the US and its minions such as the UK have of late been very careful to stress the “targeted” nature of contemporary sanctions. In the past, however, it was openly stated that “pain” was to be inflicted on national populations in order to induce them to act against their governments. This “pain” translates to serious suffering, premature deaths and sometimes mass deaths amongst individuals who suffer this purely because of their membership of the national group. Only a despicable racist would think it acceptable that the US government and its Western cronies could inflict such suffering for their own ends. And only a despicable racist would lend any credence to the galling arrogant claims made in these circumstances that the suffering is inflicted in the best interests of the victim group. This sham of benevolent intent towards the victims is a ghoulish habit seen often in genocides, where even the desire to exterminate may be couched in terms of humane euthanasia.

The Al-Haq report contains many chilling and sickening details of the humanitarian pretences adopted by Israel during repeated acts of forcible displacement. The report links these to ongoing genocidal acts, but for me the fact of continued concentration is in and of itself a clear indication of genocide. It almost becomes a problem that there are too many ways in which Israel’s action in Gaza have been clearly genocidal since October 2023. The Gaza Holocaust should be understood in similar terms to that of the Nazi Holocaust. Even though the scale is much less, they are both overdetermined as genocides. Genocide is manifold by nature, but current actions far exceed the norms of genocide. It must be understood that there is no “Gaza Genocide”, there is a Holocaust arising from an ongoing Palestinian Genocide.

The Palestinian Genocide itself has happening for 76 years at a minimum. It is easy to infer the existence of genocide from the circumstances which make the Palestinians enemies of Israel by dint of their mere existence. If Israel wanted to end the genocide it would have to seek a political solution that returned sovereign autonomy to all Palestinians and settled legitimate grievances. That would mean complying with, among other things, the part of UNGA resolution 194 which reads “refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.” The only way that would leave a “Jewish State” would be with massive compromise and expense. (Massive, that is, except by comparison to the endless billions that have been poured into the genocide by Israel’s international sponsors who clearly do not want an end to the genocide. The US and UK seek to dominate the Middle East by using Israel to permanently destabilise the region and have done since the Balfour Declaration).

Without according rights owed to all Palestinians, actions taken by Israel to control Palestinians in 1948 borders (recognised Israeli territory), 1967 (occupied territories), or diaspora settings (such as Lebanon) are unavoidably inclined to be genocidal. Legally Palestinians have considerable leeway to take action in self-defence and against occupation. This includes armed attacks against Israeli forces even in recognised Israeli territory. By nature Israel’s responses are certain to cause serious harm to Palestinians as such because ultimately it is the continued existence of Palestinians as such that is the source of the problem for Israel. Zionist leaders have always claimed that Palestinians have a choice to act a certain way that would end Israeli violence, but that was never the case and the growth of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory in the last 20 years makes even the pretence a transparent mockery. Apart from leaving their homeland, there is nothing conceivable that Palestinians can do to end Israeli violence against them, so the violence of the occupation itself is intrinsically and inescapably genocidal.

Concentration such as we have seen in Gaza is an act of genocide, one of numerous instances. Of late there have been some who say that “genocidal acts” may somehow exist as a technical truth that does not justify saying that “a genocide” is occurring. I cannot think of a more evil twisting of thought. The basis of this perversion is that the victims cannot possibly be considered worthy of being labelled victims of “a genocide”, so if the law literally enumerates multiple ways that they are victims of genocidal acts, it all must in some manner be a less meaningful, less condemnable thing – something (not coincidentally) that our leaders do not feel obliged to act forcefully to stop.

The Gaza Holocaust is an extreme and overdetermined instance of genocidal acts occurring in the circumstance of a long extant and historical genocide. Concentration in the “safe zone” is just one of the many acts in this Holocaust that we should recognise immediately as being genocidal. Al Haq’s report almost seems redundant, yet we need to break through. We need to support those who write such unambiguous works and do not undermine them with qualifications, equivocations or false equivalences. Sadly this is not just about our ongoing unsuccessful attempts to end the slaughter in Gaza. When a ceasefire comes that will not end the suffering and death. We must realise that we are also fighting for the lives of the survivors and to prevent future victims of the next onslaught in Gaza, or in the West Bank, or in southern Lebanon, or ultimately perhaps anywhere in the world.

Notes:

i I want to be very clear that animus is not a requisite of genocidal intent. You do not need to harbour a personal hatred of a group to commit genocide against that group. Hitler himself would affect a dispassionate view of the “Jewish race” in order to fit genocide into the faux-ethics of social Darwinism. Notwithstanding this there is a very important misunderstood role for animus in genocide. Genocide is generally a product of militarism. In all empires, in times of armed conflict, and in times where an internal enemy is portrayed as a military threat (circumstances which cover the vast majority of genocides) decision-making often devolves to racist, chauvinistic, or otherwise hateful military leaders. Even under norms of civil control once the military is involved in state action it is military leaders that make decisions over whether people live or die. They decide what is militarily expedient even if there is civil control over strategy and those tactical practices may be the most deadly part of a genocide. We have been widely remiss in our failure to incorporate into analyses the psychological tendencies of military commanders who, (by selection and through the reinforcement of culture) are aggressive, domineering, authoritarian, and ideologically chauvinistic regarding nation, branch, regiment etc. (I would be very surprised if there were not also a bias towards racial, religious, ethnic, political and cultural chauvinism that is significantly more pronounced than among the general population).

The importance of military decision-making is that it feeds into a dynamic that inclines towards genocide. Even if we ignore, for the moment, considerations of genocide there are other serious matters of illegality and immorality. Tactics of concentration or other military responses that either displace risk onto non-combatants (e.g. use of human shields or disproportionate use of firepower as under the US “force protection” doctrine) or inflict collective punishment, are all morally and legally invalid. The only legal and moral way to deal with an insurgency (assuming it enjoys some level of popular political support) is a political and policing approach. This does not necessarily preclude the involvement of military personnel, but history has shown repeatedly that the normal military response to insurgency is to treat the associated civilian population as the enemy.

The dynamic that needs to be understood very clearly is that treating civilians as hostile is predictably and inevitably counterproductive in counterinsurgency (Malayan Emergency notwithstanding) and blended political/military approaches (such as the US employs) tend only to produce an illegitimate and hated collaborator class. On the other hand the typical military approach to counterinsurgency is very functional in committing genocide. Thus, when such things stretch on for years and even decades the genocidal intentionality is writ large.

ii It is fascinating that the Nazi regime instituted a prison camp system for those considered political and social enemies of the Reich and from the first (Dachau) referred to these camps as “concentration camps”. It is one of many facts demonstrating that Nazi ideology was overtly based on prior imperial practices, but adapted for a greater totality. In the long run the concentration camp system would actually function in much the same manner as its imperial forebears (though admittedly at a larger scale and within an extensive complex of ghettos, labour camps, death camps, POW camps and death squads). The Nazi innovation of rounding up the internal enemy in concentration camps wasn’t entirely unprecedented (e.g. the Tsarist and Soviet use of penal colonies for political dissidents, or equally the British and French use of penal colonies for political crimes and class repression), but the clear identification with the imperialist practice was new. Equally this innovation did not die with the Third Reich. During the Cold War US client states would also use camps for internal enemies, especially immediately after right-wing coups, and authoritarian socialist regimes (especially China) have used comparable camps in different forms and times.

The Nazi concept of the Konzentrationslager was that of a zone of lawlessness and naked power. They saw the innately genocidal aspects of concentration camps (whose harms stem like night follows day from the radical disempowerment of individual and society) and decided to harness that mode of oppression for wider purposes. A lesson that must not be ignored is that this mode immediately began expanding and permeating society.

iii In contrast political groups are not under the supposed “protection” of the genocide convention. Politicide, however, is not a lesser evil. The evil of these practices is in how much suffering they cause. The crucial thing to bear in mind is that neither is ever never morally justifiable. To inflict harm on someone because of their intrinsic group identity or because of the political beliefs they hold is always wrong and condemnable. You might want to think of that next time you come across people justifying lethal action because the person was a “communist” or “Hamas” or even “terrorist” without some realistic indication that they were an actual combatant.

Episode 6: We Need to Talk About Syria

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The fall of the Assad regime has been widely celebrated but there are already signs that it may lead to an even worse future for the people of Syria and the region. The experiences of those who suffered under the Assad regime are real and their pain and loss should be honoured but we should not do so by ignoring the crimes of others. The people who have suffered and those who will suffer at the hands of Islamists, US client forces, and Turkish proxies are just as valid and meaningful as those who suffered and died under the Syrian Ba’ath regime.

We who are not personally affected have a duty to be disinterested, a duty to advocate for every person, not to pick a side because Assad was a ruthless dictator or because we support a particular ideology. In this age of “Western values”, pinkwashing, greenwashing, femiwashing and now the HTS’s “woke-jihadism” we should know already that the Manichean propaganda machine that makes some people into demonic neo-Hitlers is morally arbitrary.

The Western media system does not promote true resisters as its anti-Hitler’s, it promotes its own loyal torturers and murderers. We cannot in conscience throw up our hands and join the cynics who say nothing, nor can we countenance the repugnant celebration of the fall of the Assad regime that whitewashes the cruel circumstances and the likely cruel future that will come of it. We have to find a way to understand what this means to humanity that is not predicated on childish notions of heroes and villains.

In another world the end of the Syrian Ba’ath regime would be cause for joy, but we do not live in that world. The further empowerment of the US empire and its clients Turkiye and Israel will almost certainly cause more death, grief, pain and destruction than the continued existence of the Assad regime would have. Instead on focusing on the specifics of the Balkanisation of Syria and it future of likely instability and subservience to the US, Israel and Turkiye,

I take a broader historical view. Using Tipu Sultan as an analogy I show that the nature of a local potentate, good or bad, is less significant in the long term than the fact that they are local. A bad dictator might kill tens of thousands and will forever be known as an epitome of brutality, but imperial powers can murder hundreds of thousands and it will be viewed as simple the cost of “stability”.

READING:

William Shawcross: SIdeshow

John Atkins Hobson – Imperialism

Lenin – Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

Michael Hudson – Superimperialism

Mike Davis – Late Victorian Holocausts

Podcast Ep04: “We Need to Talk About that Fucking Election that Just Happened: Part 2: Part 1”

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In this episode I forget the name of Henry Wallace and tentatively refer to him as George Wallace (who was a famous segregationist Governor of Alabama). Sorry Henry :-(

I discuss the fact that the Democrats clearly did not campaign to win the 2024 presidential election, and what circumstances contribute to that behaviour. I talk about the increasingly fraudulent nature of politics at the highest levels and express how much I hate the commentators who base their “analysis” on their evident ability to read the minds of political figures and talk with absolute assurance about what their subjects think and feel.

I discuss the way the unrelenting and sophisticated dishonesty of modern politics creates splits in the consciousness of both the individuals and groups of people, essentially making us all a bit mad and highly vulnerable to intellectual and moral degradation.

This is the first part of Part 2 of my election analysis. Part 2 was too large to do in one part so I will post Part 2 of Part 2 later. In it I will discuss the role of professional wrestling in the 2024 US Presidential election – which goes far beyond the involvement of Hulk Hogan.

READING MATTERS:
The Mold of Yancy – Philip K. Dick, 1955

The Assassination of Julius Caesar – Michael Parenti

History as Mystery – Michael Parenti

The Korean War: A History – Bruce Cumings

Doppelganger – Naomi Klein

The Gulf War did not Take Place – Jean Baudrillard

The Authoritarians – Bob Altemeyer

Episode 3: We Need to Talk About That Fucking Election that Just Happened – Part 1

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In a different approach to a postmortem of the US 2024 Presidential Election I try to avoid focusing on the campaigning choices of each party and look instead at the systemic constraints that have made US presidential elections into a spectacle – a spectacle almost devoid of actual politics. The history of US presidential politics has been dominated by public sentiments about their policies on issues of war and peace, but the electoral politics have evolved to keep such issues well away from the ballot box.
I run through the history from Woodrow Wilson deceptively running as the antiwar candidate in 1916 under the slogan “He Kept Us Out of the War”, while already intending to put the US into the War, to Lyndon Johnson running as the antiwar candidate while engineering a massive genocidal onslaught in Indochina.
In Part 2 I will explore the way in which US elections are constrained to produce only pro-empire, pro-genocide results and the way in which the system is simultaneously a means of controlling public opinion.

Israel’s War Against Morale and Morality: Learned Helplessness, Elite Capture, Managed Fascism, and How to Fight Back.

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To begin I cried every day,

then every day,

then every day.

No shock, only churning

yearning helpless sadness.

A living emotion

that has grown tough and bitter:

A wiry weed

hugging dark cracks so that

tears are hard to reach.

Part of me has died.

A percentage is now rubble.

Last week a heartbreaking message was delivered on twitter: “This will be the last post we share here. We believe there is no point in telling our human stories anymore; everyone has grown accustomed to seeing us killed. It’s no longer worth the risk to send our voice out to a world that is content with mere solidarity. Even many of our human stories no longer interest people (even our voice is being ignored). It’s time to stop waiting for a savior and to help ourselves survive. Please try to keep us in your prayers.” 

These words came from @GazaMartyrs, an account dedicated to naming and humanising people killed by Israel’s genocidal violence in Gaza. The decision to end these activities came after another post that read: “Nothing has ever shaken or broken me before like Mohamed did today during our filming. There is nothing in this world that justifies killing a man’s children, mother, and wife all at once. He went from being the happiest man because of his children to being completely shattered in a single moment. This is the reality for all of us here in this hell. We are being killed here, losing our dearest loved ones and friends, and all we have met with is abandonment and silence.”

That earlier post came in response to a particularly cruel story. Readers may be familiar with the tragic details. Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan left his wife, mother-in-law and newborn twins to obtain birth certificates for his babies. Social media posts show how happy Muhammad and his wife were with their beautiful and beloved new arrivals. An Israeli strike hit precisely the 5th storey apartment where the proud new mother, Dr Jumana Abu al-Qumsan, was standing at the window trying to get an internet signal. 

Given what we know of the timing and precision of the strike it seems very likely that Israel deliberately timed the murders so as to leave the father bereft. This is an act of psychological warfare. It may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that Israel would deliberately leave a survivor whose tragic loss becomes a global news story, but, as the reaction of @GazaMartyrs shows, such actions can be very demoralising. Thankfully @GazaMartyrs have resumed their work, but the source of their despair is ongoing. Israel is selectively using ostentatious atrocities to make Palestinians feel powerless and isolated while also creating a divide between the global Palestine solidarity activist population and less engaged majority populations in Western countries. 

We cannot know for certain that this or any particular act of murder was also a macabre form of psychological operation, but if it’s not true in this case it is certainly true in others. The killing of Hind Rajab and the paramedics sent to her aid took place over many hours, took great coordination, and was clearly intentional and purposive. Equally in the initial months of the assault on Gaza an IDF run Telegramsocial media account shared many explicit posts by IDF personnel showing themselves committing clear war crimes. There are many other instances where Israeli officials and personnel have gone out of their way to show cruelty, viciousness and illegality. There is no real dispute that this is happening, but it seems natural to assume that this action is counterproductive to Israeli strategy and it is a product of dysregulated ideological fervour. This is by no means a safe or sound assumption. There are clear benefits for Israel in ostentatiously promulgating terrible crimes, beginning with the effect of terrorising people in Gaza and demoralising Palestinians and their allies throughout the world.

Israel is using its acts of brutality to wage psychological war on Palestinians and those who oppose the violence and oppression visited upon them. These acts work on different levels and it is clear to see that currently Israel seeks to avoid publicising its acts in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, but allows acts perpetrated in Gaza and on Palestinians taken from Gaza to be seen widely. In doing so they show how little they fear losing support among the international general public. They do this all knowing that a significant minority of Westerners, mostly due to racist views about Palestinians, will never waver in their support for Israeli violence even at its most inhumane and extreme. 


Powerlessness

Many people reading this will bear emotional scars from these months of slaughter and suffering and fear and grief. We have witnessed so much of the violence in graphic and often intimate detail. How can any activist, doing whatever they can to bring an end to the horror, not feel a sense of impotence? There seems to be no avenue to make our voices heard, to exert our will. We are constantly reminded that our efforts seem to change nothing. Each new obscenity feels like another gut-punch meant to teach us again and again that there are no limits. There is no red line.

There is a reason for the feeling of helplessness in that it is the product of design. Israel is using its ability to act with impunity to create that sense of impotence and futility.  At the same time the parade of atrocities we see, whether by accident or design, also serves to distance activists from our compatriots. Even though most people in the general public favour peace in Gaza, they are woefully misinformed about the nature of the violence there. Those people are led to believe it is a military conflict, in which civilian deaths are collateral damage. They do not understand what genocide means and they think that activists who use the term are either exaggerating for rhetorical reasons or are deranged fanatics. If you try to explain by using illustrations of what is going on each day in Gaza, they will think you a wide-eyed partisan and are highly unlikely to believe you. They will make the reasonable seeming inference that if what you are claiming were true then it would be talked about on the news and our political leaders would behave much more assertively in reaction to these atrocious crimes.

At times it has seemed that each atrocity by Israel is concealed and effaced by the next, like a deadly form of Gish-galloping. (Gish-galloping is a bad faith rhetorical technique, used often by Zionists, where instead of explaining a position cogently you simply overload people with a stream of arguments, many or all of which may be indefensible individually). As well as doing that on our screen, it feels as if Zionists are also enacting this as a violent psychological warfare technique. We are being deliberately overwhelmed by a relentless grinding tempo of massacre upon massacre. Events such as the Superbowl final are exploited for their distracting power, but more prominent acts of Israeli violence are themselves used as camouflage for further murder, such as when the IDF used the aftermath of the Flour Massacre to kill many aid workers. 

When it suits them, Israeli officials know that they can lower the rate of death so that, having themselves set a bar of what is newsworthy violence, they know with certainty that news media will ignore or bury this increasingly banal mass killing. They have completely corrupted the news media through manipulation of their established practices – the “news values” that guide them on what is and is not worthy of passing on to the masses. This works alongside practices of direct control, covert control, lobbying, and flak to create a system in which the critical reporting of Israeli violence is disproportionately infrequent and is always blunted leaving the talking points of apologists unchallenged. For the general public this means that the deaths and mutilations they see become a form of background noise because the root causes seem disputable and the complicity of our own governments is made to seem at least excusable if not tactically merited in the apparently confusing and contended circumstances. Israel does not seek to win public support for its genocide, it seeks to control the nature of public disapprobation by ensuring that the stark one-sided nature of its genocidal onslaught is hidden.

Every military action of the IDF has a propaganda dimension. This is the culmination of a long history of violent psychological operations developed by the US in the last seventy years. From Edward Lansdale hanging the bodies of exsanguinated rebels from trees in the Philippines after WWII, to the hybrid military/psychological/political onslaught of “Shock and Awe” unleashed on Iraq in 2003, the distinction between warfare and propaganda has become non-existent. Clearly the main approach for the IDF is to maximise the power of indirect violence through hunger, exposure, deprivation and disease. The violent agonies of displacement and famine have never been understood by the general public, and the situation in Gaza has few parallels because of its sustained and inescapable nature. Yet while they exploit the media habit of silence on this form of violence to assuage the general public, they also use targeted dissemination of more shocking violence that they know will reach only those who already oppose their oppression. For example, there is the aforementioned Telegramchannel that an IDF psychological warfare unit created to disseminate images of graphic violence, destruction and overt war crimes. Their material reached the activist population of the West through social media, and may have featured in news of non-Western countries, but did not reach the general Western public.

The invisible violence of diseases, homelessness, fear, dislocation, constant exposure to discomfort, lives arrested and deprived of aspiration and meaning is as nothing to the Western public. At the same time the more shocking graphic images of violence are also absent from their lives. But while the opiated masses live in the smog of manufactured acquiescence, activists are bombarded with a surfeit of graphic imagery that may also serve to dull the emotions. Israel can choose to attack the morale of the activist population by creating messages through acts that we can read but the general public cannot, acts that we know are true but can never prove. They can sadistically terrorise, hunt and murder Refaat Alareer. They can take their time massacring Hind Rajab, her family, and her rescuers. They can deliberately leave Muhammad Abu al-Qumsan alive to spread the sense of terror and helplessness. All or most of it must be deliberate, but we cannot demonstrate this let alone prove it to such a degree that people who assume that such things can never happen will change their worldview.

Israel uses its impunity to display its impunity. The sadism is functional. The Palestinians in Gaza become like mice cornered by a cruel cat while we watch in horror unable to intervene, unable to reach, unable even to comfort. In Gaza the people are subject to every imaginable attack. True to the nature of genocide the onslaught occurs at once on many levels, each multiplying the damage of the others. Outside of Gaza, though, we are all subject to a psychological attack. They are using the techniques of “learned helplessness” on us all.

Absurdities and Epistemic Bifurcation

There is a saying derived from Voltaire that has been honed over a few centuries to: “Those who can persuade us to believe absurdities can make us commit atrocities.” Our society produces absurdity by controlling what is and what is not speakable. This is a self-perpetuating system as each incident that is interpreted in that restricted light is another data point proving that the sort of event that is excluded from consideration must never happen because there are no examples of it happening. Certain historical analyses that are plausible according to the specifically pertinent facts are considered inadmissible because they contravene a predetermined framework of the way the world works. Most commonly we see such contentions labelled as “conspiracy theories” (CT).

I do not want to alienate those who struggle against the right-wing CT community, but the term itself is toxic. What is and is not labelled “conspiracy theory” has nothing to do with whether or not something involves a conspiracy, nor is it valid to criticise a theory on the grounds that it posits a conspiracy. Those people who use the term seem to have no idea of the weight of the anti-intellectual shackles that they are helping to fetter humanity with. That which is and is not considered CT is determined by naked power. For example, in a thousand years historians will look at the invasion and occupation of Iraq and will probably take it as read that the war occurred due to the quantity and high quality oil in Iraqi territory. Tony Blair, however, successfully argued that “the oil conspiracy is honestly one of the most absurd when you analyse it.” So instead of a banal imperial reality that is in total accord with overt US foreign policy doctrine (the “Carter doctrine”), the news media gave far more credence to the elaborate tales of intelligence sources such as “Curveball”, tales of mobile weapons labs, yellowcake lies, the “dodgy dossier”, fever-dreams of missiles hitting “British soil”, and so forth. The banal and historically normal explanation was a “conspiracy theory”, but the elaborate and unrealistic tissue of complex fabrications was acceptable even though each contention involved a high number of conspiracies. So much for “conspiracy theory”.

Thus there is a growing two-way credibility gap. There is an epistemic bifurcation that is part of a wider atomisation that is creating a world of mutually exclusive realities. The empire has taken the Roman principle of divide et impera and worked out how to send it through our eyes and into our brains on an individual level. I have long remarked on the fact that US actions are often clearly meant to be read in two ways – one message to the imperial masses, and a very different one to those who resist. To the disempowered masses of the  “Arab street”, for example, they are often sending the message that they are a ruthless, savage, mass-murdering genocidal power. The very same acts used to send that message, though, are often framed in the West as being acts against the barbaric violence of the people they are killing. Nor do they have any scruples about re-imagining themselves as victims. Their prolific expansive use of unmatched military violence against much weaker people becomes something they have had forced upon them by their unwitting well-intentioned entanglement with the dark quagmire of non-Western incivility. And then, as per Frankie Boyle’s famous quip, “they’ll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers sad.” That heart-of-darkness shit just keeps happening to the poor bastards, and somehow they never learn. The Panglossian optimism of the “Whig theory of history” has been replaced with the whingeing narcissism of the “Shitlib theory of history” where the perpetrators are always the victims (and Trump was, would be, and always will be 100 times worse). 

The absurdity of the mainstream worldview does not come from any individual incident, it comes from the cumulative effect of excluding certain possibilities from consideration over and over again. This feeds the vulgar empiricism of those who always insist that positive proof is necessary for some interpretations, but not for others. Such people do not like any suggestion that a pattern might be discerned, or even sought to be discerned, among events which share common characteristics. Ironically (but not really ironically) right-wing activists who oppose the “mainstream” will sometimes exploit these behaviours to create bad faith attacks on the bad faith orthodoxy. For example, some anti-vaccination activists question the viral origins of AIDS and SARSCov2 on the basis of a vulgar empiricist claim that ignores all of the statistical links as being insufficient as they are not direct demonstrations of a laboratory infection leading to the attributed disease. These people are ridiculous, but effectively this is what orthodox scholars in some fields do all the time. The thing that makes this apparent right-wing dissent ironically unironic is that these dissident activists are largely controlled by a bunch of astroturfing billionaires and their toadies. I would go so far as to say that I have a theory that there is a conspiracy among some very wealthy people to control public policy by creating flak for governments through loud and over-resourced fake activists. 

Now that I have accidentally outed myself as a proud conspiracy theorist, I feel empowered to say that sometimes we should consider that things may be as they first appear rather than insisting that things must be explained in a certain way. There is always an assumption that “civilised” governments and their military arms will not do certain things like killing their own civilians or committing genocidal violence against others. No number of proven historical cases of US, UK or Israel doing such things will be taken into account. In reality, governments in general are well demonstrated to frequently exceed the bounds of behaviour that any normal person would consider tolerable. The Zionist 3 (US, UK, Israel) even more regularly exceed the violent inhumanity of most contemporary societies. I am not going to list proven crimes here, but if I did so it would show that no action of these governments should be judged on the basis that they would not cross certain lines or that they are constrained in any way by morality. No doubt there are people and institutions that limit some atrocities, but what is limited is determined by pragmatic considerations of power. The moral calculus is complex and contended, but the most important fact to remember is that there is no ultimate red line. If the stars align the right way for the worst amongst them, they will begin implementing a “final solution” for the Palestinian people and we are already well along the road to that horrific destination.

In April, a World Central Kitchen team of 7 aid workers was slaughtered with thorough and deliberate overkill in the “deconflicted zone” of Deir al-Balah. Orders passed through multiple channels to achieve this. Israel’s non-explanation was that they thought that armed militants had taken one of the vehicles. They initially mentioned a possible kidnapping, but that was not part of the later report possibly because outside of Israel it is not considered normal to respond to a suspected kidnapping by killing the victims. The Israeli report claims that they mistook a guard for a militant and thought that one of the aid workers was another militant because someone allegedly thought that a bag was a gun. At no stage was there a suggestion that the imaginary militants posed any immediate threat to anyone. That would suggest that they were not looking for people they needed to target, nor people they should target, but rather the people they could get away with targeting and killing. Command gave permission to engage the vehicle with the suspected militants. After attacking that one vehicle Israel claims that two soldiers went against procedure by attacking the other two without permission. According to Israel it was all done in error. It was a very thorough mistake to take the lives of every one of the seven aid workers in the convoy.

This all happened at a time when the Israeli government was fighting diplomatically to be allowed to block aid entering Gaza altogether and many Israelis have shown a violent antagonism against humanitarian aid and to aid workers. The IDF report begs so many questions that even if taken at face value it does not preclude premeditated murder. It is not an exoneration of criminal intent it is a narrative framework provided for those who already assume that these deaths cannot have been purposive. Yet it was such a very comprehensive attack and Israelis have no lack of motive at a collective or individual level. Whether seen as a military strategy to deny supplies to armed militants, or an intrinsic part of the genocidal war against the Palestinian people, or a product of anger and hatred towards those who seek to give succour to the enemies of Israel, there are clear reasons why someone might deliberately use a pretext to kill an entire aid team. 

We don’t know for sure that Israeli individuals at some level in the chain of command decided to kill an entire aid team, but the circumstances and results certainly lend themselves to that possibility. These killings led to a result that the Israeli government desired. Some aid organisations halted operations meaning that aid was further restricted, as was the number of outsiders coming into Gaza to help and (perhaps more crucially) to bear witness. Like the 2010 killings of 9 activists trying to deliver aid to Gaza by sea, the WCK killings sent a message. These deaths set a precedent and as we have seen in the case of recent attacks on aid vehicles in Gaza, Israel can attack without consequence any time it wants and aid organisations have no choice but to suspend operations.

Many of you reading this may be feeling uneasy that I am suggesting that in all probability someone with some level of authority in Israel decided to kill an entire aid team. The conventional wisdom is that, as Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Absent some genuine scientific or statistical expectation, though, this is the fallacy of conservatism – the idea that of two or more interpretations of events one is to be preferred as being more mundane. In political matters the weight of conservatism is usually purely ideological and has nothing to do with any scientific criteria.

Is it shocking to think that some Israelis actually intended all of the WCK workers to be killed? Perhaps it is shocking, but it is anything but extraordinary. Some might object that they wouldn’t risk it because they could not necessarily get away with it. But they can get way with it, and they know it. As long as Israel itself investigates and exonerates itself of intent in the short-term it doesn’t matter if later investigations bring that into question. Our leaders in politics and media do not ask for truth, they ask for fig leaves. Once they have the fig leaf, they add it as a page to the Encyclopedia of Official Truth. Thus, the lie that a possible thing is not possible, becomes the absurdity of claiming that these perfectly plausible things can never happen. 

All of this is made even more sickening and alienating by the overt way that Israel can systematically kill Palestinian aid workers. The absurdity of the Encyclopedia of Official Truth is deepened in these cases, not by the insufficiency, but by complete silence. Israelis can openly share footage of themselves committing atrocities and other war crimes, but despite the unimpeachable source, it is not considered newsworthy. The victims are not considered newsworthy. The violence of the genocide in Gaza has become unremarkable, as has the violence of settlers and security forces in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is not news, they may say, but there is a bit of a catch here. The existence of passenger aircraft is not news either, but news media do not act as if they don’t exist. When discussing Palestine the media are like people who try to explain air disasters without ever admitting that aeroplanes exist. That is because, on the one hand, the ongoing systematic violence against Palestinians is too banal and well-understood to bear reporting on but on the other hand the systematic genocidal nature of violence, which is the key context, is politically controversial. Therefore, the thing that is too well known in one sense must become a complete unknown when reporting on related events. Just how did the lifeless bodies of these 83 people end up scattered here amidst this metallic debris less than an hour after departing from an airport? What could explain the event? Is it because they were being used as human shields, or might a stray Hamas rocket have killed them?



Elite Capture and the Bonds of Shame

On The Daily Show Rob Corddry responded to the Abu Ghraib scandal by satirising the collective US position, “…the Arab world has to realize that the US shouldn’t be judged on the actions of a … well, we shouldn’t be judged on actions. It’s our principles that matter, our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember: just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.” The political leaders of the Western world and most other countries went along with exactly that contention, and they continually reaffirm it to this day. They do exactly the same with regard to Israel, but the results are far more grotesque. Israel doesn’t have the soft-power of the US and its image as a liberal Western nation doesn’t have as much sway in convincing us to ignore reality. 

It is increasingly hard for people to believe the narrative of plucky little Israel, living at the outer edge of civilisation withstanding the onslaughts of the barbarian hordes that surround it. Some people have clearly internalised a racist blind hatred of Palestinians as such, but for those who haven’t the pretextual nature of Israel’s “security” narrative is wearing thin as they continue relentless violence and unconcealed dispossession of Palestinians. Even the average regular Western consumer of “Islamist terrorist” content is likely to find the generic conventions weakened if not violated by the glimpses and hints that slip through to them of house demolitions, land theft and infrastructure destruction. A glimpse of a road being destroyed as shown above may not immediately cause a rethink, but it will sow the seeds of dissonance and the Zionist “security” narrative will seem stretched thinner and thinner until one day it just snaps, and that person is lost forever to the Zionist cause. Meanwhile the Israelis themselves are finding it hard to maintain the façade of civilised morality as the culture of fanatical racial hatred deepens. Their public relations on social media now feature gleefully captioned images of the bloody bodies of slain enemies. They are speaking more and more to a narrow group of fanatics who have no interest in outdated imagery of liberal Israel as the bulwark against extremism. They are speaking to a racist core that want a fascistic militaristic muscular Israel standing against the barbarian Asiatic hordes like the 300 at Thermopylae.

Our beloved leaders in the Western political, media, business and academic world largely speak as the racist Zionists do, but without the foaming mouths and spray of spittle. They are not enthusiasts. They are not ideologues. They are measured and pragmatic. They are not ideological fanatics, rather they are fanatical Panzaists who believe this to be the most banal of all possible worlds.i If a giant were to suddenly appear and swipe them with a massive spiked club, their last words as they lay mangled and dying would be a warning about the dangers of windmills. They know that Israel is a bastion of Western civilisation and embodies the values of the West. Historical reality notwithstanding, Western values include the knowledge that all of the horrific violence they commit is only ever because they had really good reasons and ultimately had no real choice in the matter. In fact not doing the violence would be a complete dereliction of Western values. To eschew righteous killing would be insulting to the memory of those who died in far jungles to protect our freedoms. It would be like wiping your arse with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen, the Magna Carta, and the screenplay to the beloved M*A*S*H finale “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen” .

Western atrocities are always undertaken to prevent something that we are assured will be worse, not just for “interests” but generally speaking for the people that will be shelled, bombed, shot, displaced, and starved. When the West kills people it is really in those people’s interests if they could but see it. As an unnamed US Army Major told Peter Arnett in 1968, “It became necessary to destroy the town [Bến Tre] to save it.” Scaled up the Western attitude could accurately be parodied as, “the only thing worse than committing genocide is not committing genocide”.ii

Little that has come after October 7 2023 really supports Israel’s counterterrorism discourse, but each day brings more evidence that belies it. The numbers of dead are bad. The optics are bad. The logic is bad. The sheer duration is bad. The reports from third parties are bad. The diplomacy is bad. The court cases are bad. The polls are bad. The context is screaming in the ears of our leaders: “THIS IS GENOCIDE!” Despite this, they still live in a world where it is very costly to call the genocide a genocide, and there is no cost at all for outright genocide denial. Yet as “Israel’s right to defend itself” becomes ever more self-evidently detached from reality, none of these people are shifting their opinions, in fact many are hardening.

If the world worked the way it is meant to work, world leaders should fear the consequences of supporting a genocide. It is a crime to support genocide, whereas there is no crime of being insufficiently helpful to Israel (they just act like there is). In political reality (which influences realms beyond politics) the formal and theoretical situation is reversed. Some people, such as the leader from a small leftist party or a lecturer in Middle Eastern history, can say “genocide”, but those with the authority to speak as part of the establishment must prevaricate or make an outright denial using the aforementioned fallacy of conservatism. As typically seen in the academic world (for example) to speak certain truths you must declare yourself to be partisan or “critical” and banish yourself to the fenced-off free-speech zone where dangerous truths are quarantined in containment. In contrast, those who speak for power (such as those with administrative positions) must privilege power over evidence as a source of truth.

As the distance between the evidence and the official “truth” grows ever starker, you might expect that people’s positions might change, but we can see that this is not happening. Leaders will not change unless they are pushed with extreme force. They are trapped, you see. The worse things get the more they are psychologically and politically tied to being genocide enablers. At high levels of any hierarchy there is always a survivorship bias in favour of expediency. Those who act inexpediently do not keep climbing the rungs of the power ladder. Expediency is the water in which our fishy leaders swim, breathe and defecate, but even they must morally rationalise to tell themselves that their self-interested actions are for the greater good. For most (apart from a few sociopaths and outright neofeudalists) their careers are built on the foundation that they must advance themselves in order to advance humanity. Once they have decided on the righteousness of their position they have access to all of the human arts of evading, ignoring, or explaining away undesirable evidence.

As the visible evidence of terrible suffering grows, those who support the causes of that suffering become morally tied to the position. From what may have been a relatively mild support, as time and body count grows it becomes ever more necessary to believe in the value of the cause while the atrocious cost skyrockets. Those who keep acting in support of the violence become de facto members of a baby-killer club. Like those in clubs whose initiations involve social transgressions, such as humiliation or violence or unusual shared sexual behaviour, they become tied by bonds of shame that are also potential bonds of blackmail. The leaders are detached from the herd of the naive public – the masses that do not and cannot ever understand the sordid but unavoidable realities of real power and true politics. This is wonderful news for Imperialists and Zionists. The Zionist 3 cannot maintain a legitimacy that will convince a rational person to support the genocide, so they want to trap an elite class in an irrational state that is isolated from democratic influences.

In far more basic practical terms it is also impossible for leaders, especially those directly involved in politics, to change position on something that is so significant and has such a naked moral dimension. The reality of our politics is that any admission of, well, anything at all is a weakness to be exploited. That is even more so if one chooses to betray the cause of Israel and the US empire. In the media world, for example (though equally in other areas) the flak machinery in the “propaganda model” theorised by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent is now reinforced by what appears to be a fascist 5th column within leadership roles who exploit any weakness as an occasion for oppressive over-reaction. Thus, any number of people can complain about media bias against Palestinians and it will be greeted at best with empty gestures but in contrast any accusations that criticism of Israel is “antisemitism” may be bring serious consequence even when completely without merit. Some of this is due to the work that has been done (for example with the IHRA definition of “antisemitism”) to create an institutional bias, but it seems equally clear that ideologues or corrupt agents will seize on any pretext to purge the heretic.

The more absurd the elite position the more defensive and hostile to questioning they become. The Marie Antoinette vibes are getting stronger and stronger as they do everything to isolate themselves from the wrong voices or the wrong questions. Some of us masochistically geek-out to footage of Mark Miller and similar creatures contorting words into unrecognisable abstract sculpture, but we are a small minority of connoisseurs of political bollocks. We are, to coin a term, wank wonks.iii By contrast, normal people only experience the political speech of proper leaders, not spokespeople. None of the reporters who push Miller into verbal nonsense by being direct and persistent will ever be allowed to ask such questions of Biden, Trump or Harris. No Western leader will be pressed with hard factual details on the realities of the genocide, and we all know it. So, presumably, do any political reporters who value the “access” that lets them earn a living.

The walls of allowable thought become ever thicker and opaque to those ensconced within, but equally they are brittle. The organisers of the Democratic National Convention did not even allow a pro-Harris Palestinian-American delegate to deliver a vetted speech because even letting her humanity be seen is a political cost to them, regardless of her co-opted words. Things are so delicate that they could not accord a reminder of the plight of millions of Palestinians be seen as valid in the same sense that the plight of 100 Israeli hostages is seen as valid. Violent societies often employ selective sentimentality to erase the humanity of the enemy, even to the point of total hypocrisy.


Our Fascist Reality and How to Fight Back

People are tired. People are demoralised. Yet people are persisting. There seems to be no diminution of anti-genocide activism despite the hollow feeling of impotence that pervades. Stopping now seems unthinkable, despite having so little to show for extraordinary amounts of time, energy, imagination, tears and anger. One of the problems is that a lot that we do is premised on the idea of changing public opinion. This is difficult when access to the eyes and ears of the public is dominated by bad faith equivocation and outright lies, but it is essential. It is essential, but unfortunately it is by no means sufficient.

If we were a democratic civilisation then winning over the public would be the end-game, but it isn’t. Even if we can’t persuade a majority in the West that the genocide is a genocide, they have at least come to understand that an attack on Hamas does not justify the death and destruction that is happening. Unfortunately the public doesn’t have any say in government policy in general and international relations in particular. The traditional view is that we inhabit “distorted polyarchies” which are pluralistic but in which political power is highly skewed in favour of those with wealth and status. Part of this system has long been the manipulation of the public through indoctrination and censorship. Great figures in what liberals stupidly refer to as “democratic” theory such as Walter Lippmann openly despised the intellects of the vulgar masses and believed that “democracy” required the “manufacture of consent” (hence the title of the Herman/Chomsky classic). Sheldon Wolin referred “managed democracy” leading to a resultant “inverted totalitarianism” where a demoralised confused public is dominated by corporate power. In the 20 years since Wolin wrote that, however, we have seen the rise of a global fascist movement that exists in the same structure of inverted totalitarianism. “Managed democracy” has become “managed fascism”.

In managed fascism anomie pervades the dispirited and/or precarious masses. The resulting discontent is increasingly harnessed by the very people causing discontent, harnessed and used to create a force of reactionary ideologues empowered to crush any who threaten to enact reform or revolt. These new brownshirts are not just in the streets. There are keyboard brownshirts, thinktank brownshirts and boardroom brownshirts. They belong to no single party, but they tend to follow their leaders with such fervent myopia that they might not notice the core of reactionary patriarchal racial-supremacy that they are signing up for. The fascist ideology of our age may not have a single Führer, but it has a single essence that is cohering rapidly.

The good news is that the steps we must follow to force our own countries to fight against genocide in Gaza will also serve to weaken inverted totalitarianism and to combat the burgeoning fascism of our age. We must work to infiltrate actual democracy into our political institutions, we must work to make leaders fear the public, and we must force reason and intellect back into the public political discourse in place of dishonesty and bullying. An awful lot of groundwork has been laid by the posting and postering and protesting of the last year. Possibilities are opening, though the road ahead is not short nor easy.

The first thing that needs to be understood is that any ceasefire will not be a ceasefire. The past has show that when Israel raises the bar on its levels of slaughter that bar is never subsequently lowered. Permanent violent assault is the future of the entirety of the occupied Palestinian territories. Ever deeper immiseration, ever deeper control, and ever deeper humiliation. Israel has gone all in and there is no real going back, only further charades and chicanery. For this reason we can safely commit to the long haul rather than succumb to the sense of immediate need. If public opinion is reset by a pretense of peace, we need to show people that there is no peace and continue from that point. One thing should now be clear to most activists – something that has been true from the start but has been well hidden – the genocide will not end until Palestine is free. That can only mean one democratic state from the river to the sea. If some of the citizens refer to that state as Israel then let them as long as others can call it Palestine and all the people that belong there can call it home.

People will need patience and diligence more than anything. The long haul means knowing that you will just keep coming back to the work when you can. It means thinking of angles and approaches when you can. It means cultivating yourself and others when you can. It means switching from thinking of goals to thinking of processes.

The long haul approach means approaching the heights of power by building power, not arriving as a petitioner with doffed cap asking for justice from the lord. What I mean by that is using the force of democracy to change things at the attainable level and building upwards from there. A successful model in the past has been to bring activism to local bodies, even if only for symbolic resolutions. It works because the core of activists are not a “vanguard” or in any way analogous to the brownshirts mentioned above. It works because activists represent the public sentiment and, at the local level, you can face down politicians who can’t spin their way out of the fact.

People have been building connections within unions and associations, places that hold vestiges of democratic power in our pluralistic fascist societies. Once these bodies are forced to take an anti-genocide stance there is much that can be achieved. For example, if medical unions are made to engage in the issues they can issue statements over hospital attacks or murders of health workers and agitate for the media to cover the issues in a manner that focuses on the Israel’s intentional targeting of medical personnel.

All aspects of activism aim at the same thing, exerting moral, intellectual and democratic power in polities governed by people to whom these are all alien concepts. In these times of dire democratic deficit the power of the people is more or less the same as it is under a dictatorship, but that power is not to be despised. If the masses speak with one voice they have all the power – well sort of. An important caveat is that they have to speak with one predominant voice and that voice must be issuing a demand. It is not sufficient that the majority of the public oppose the genocide, it must be that a clear self-conscious and confident majority makes it known to the government that they will not tolerate continued collaboration with genocide. This is a blunt instrument. The public cannot demand specific policies as easily as it can veto broad flavours of policy.

Public intolerance of government complicity in genocide does not necessarily entail specific disruptions such as riots or strikes or direct action. All that is needed is that a norm against genocide denial is established in the collective consciousness. We already know that this works because such a norm already exist regarding the Holocaust. Mainstream public figures cannot support genocide denial in that instance and it must be extended to this genocide. The key is that people at all levels know that their complicity will be visible such that a politician dare not deny the genocide because the journalist would not dare normalise their denial nor fail to mention it. To create that new political reality is going to take a broad-front approach. All avenues of intellectual resistance must be pursued at all times until the war is won. There can be no half-measures because we know beyond all reasonable doubt that half-measures or compromises are merely false hopes, rest stops on the long road to defeat. Ending the genocide means ending the genocide, and that means ending the occupation.

The fight for Palestinian freedom is the fight for our own freedom. This creeping managed fascism is no joke. The 1930s showed that once fascism got its jackboots under the table, though it may have been a fringe belief to begin, its values grew within the wider society. The same is happening now. In the US and the UK particularly we have seen increased activity of right-wing racist mobs. While there has been a selectively firm and rapid response against some of the rank-and-file racist rioters in the UK, the leading provocateurs are unmolested. Meanwhile peaceful direct action on the left is punished far more severely while terrorism laws are being used to oppress selected individuals for opposing genocide. Over time fascist politics create fascist populations. There can be no better illustration of this fact than what has happened to the minds of Israelis in the past few decades.

The reason that what is happening is fascistic rather than simply plutocratic and authoritarian is because of the power that old and new media to create cadres of hateful fanatics – useful cadres. The logic is the same as that which led Stalin to become such an enthusiastic exponent of Russian nationalism despite a lifetime devoted to an internationalist ideology and despite not even being Russian. Nationalism was a tool of power that had been lying around. The aspect of fascism that is relevant here is the epistemic ideology of combat and enmity that followers take on. They become anti-intellectual self-programming robots who do not build an episteme from observed facts, but rather populate their own and each other’s mind with “facts” created from the predetermined worldview. The manipulation of old media by people like Rupert Murdoch has fed this, but we also need to bear in mind the harmful effects of the ideological isolation present in the online world. Each person’s phone becomes a pocket beer hall where thousands of impassioned preachers of hate can be watched holding forth on the need for action, the need to violently punish the malefactors who (in their fevered heads) have wronged them.

Israel has effectively lost its battle to colonise Palestine. The only future for the project would be an ethnic cleansing and annexation of all the occupied territories, which the world cannot tolerate if it claim to respect law and rights. The only path for Zionist victory is through an international regime of fascism – a world where the most powerful countries reject the rule of law and in which the only reality the masses ever experience is that which the rich wish them to see. So, you may ask, what’s new? What is new is the matter of degree that will be required. Israel must now defeat the growing legion of institutions that, after decades of bending over backwards to create a Palestine exception, have been forced by the hard work of grassroots activists to accept the humanity of Palestinians and the inadmissibility of denying otherwise universal rights on the basis of statelessness (and/or the special pleading of the “Jewish” state).

I am not suggesting that increasing fascism will be forced on the entire Western world just to support Zionism. If anything I feel it works the other way around. Support for Israel is more useful as a pretext for suppressing political dissent than the inverse. At the same time the utterly unmoving steadfast support shown by the US regime for Israel shows how important this is to the empire. When US officials cite US “interests” we need to pay very close heed. In 1986 Joe Biden said would have to “invent an Israel to protect US interests in the region” if Israel didn’t exist. Nearly four decades later he reiterated, “If there were not an Israel, we’d have to invent one.” We should also recall that we are in the third decade of what some US officials referred to as the “Long War”, a war they predicted was going to take 30 years. The scope of the Long War was global, but of the known prominent targets all have been targeted with hybrid or outright warfare and all suffer ongoing violence. The “War on Terror” was the pretext for the Long War, but as the history of Africom shows, the war has a tendency to start before the terror. (The same can be said of the Iraq insurgency which was in response to the depredations of “counterinsurgency” and the NLF insurgency in late 50s South Viet Nam which was prompted by the suppression supposedly meant to quell it).

I cannot even imagine what the ultimate aim of the Long War is, if such a thing exists. All I can say is that this seems like a very dangerous period in terms of a possible overt World War, and Palestine seems to be at the centre. The end of a 30 year Long War also roughly coincides with the believed 2000 year anniversary of the crucifixion of Christ. Many millenarian Christians feel that this time the end really is nigh. As frightening as the prospect of an apocalyptic war is, we cannot assuage or mollify the aggressors because they are beyond such measures. We can only constrain them by defeating them and if there is a risk of wider war it only grows with the diplomatic and military empowerment of Israel’s genocide.

This is our fight, and by “our” I mean everyone who is sane. Will enough people realise this? I don’t know, but I will end this article with an observation made by TikTok and Twitter user @highlyvibey: “anyone who’s okay with slaughtering children for their political ambitions is okay with killing you too”.


If this article was not too noxious for you, please consider giving some money to me via https://ko-fi.com/krkelly

iWith apologies to Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote), Voltaire(Candide), and Robert Sheckley (Mindswap).

iiFurther apologies, this time to Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray).

iiiApologies, in this instance, are owed directly to the reader.

Israel’s Big Lie of “Self-Defence”

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An occupier does not have the right to use arms in “self-defence”.

Is the mass slaughter of civilians self-defence? Every person has the right to life and to self-defence, but Israel’s “right to self-defence” is constantly being used to obfuscate the non-defensive nature of it’s military violence in Palestinian territory. Israel’s self-defence is a lie, not just because their actions are not defensive but because Israel cannot legally use its military in self-defence against Palestinians. Let me repeat that, Israel cannot legally use its military against Palestinians in self-defence. That is the big lie at the heart of the current horrors

There are four reasons why Israel cannot cite a legal right to self defence in response to Palestinian violence. First and foremost is that the ability of a very strong military power to achieve anything defensive by the attrition of a much weaker military power is spurious and leads into the genocidal logic of attempting to deprive a people of all capacity for violence.

The second reason is that Israel is actively contravening UN Security Council resolutions and the UN Charter is very clear on the fact that the right to self-defence exists “until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” A state that works to thwart UNSC measures to maintain peace and security cannot logically be extended the unimpaired right to self defence.

On the third count Israel is an occupying power and the occupied have a legal right to armed resistance. It would be nonsensical to accord a legal right to use arms to defend against another’s legal resistance. Fourthly, it would be equally paradoxical to allow each party to act in self-defence against each other’s acts of self defence. Thus one of the parties must be the aggressor. On several counts, not least its defiance of UNSC resolutions, Israel must be considered the aggressor.

Israel’s only legitimate way of defending itself begins with ending its occupation. Israelis have a right to life and they deserve peace and security as we all do, but they have no right to kill Palestinians and claim that they are pursuing those things.

Before tackling the specifics we should question the general validity of military violence as a form of self-defence. At this time hundreds of people are killed by Israel every day under the pretext of seeking to render Hamas 100% ineffective. This is a tacit claim of self-defence linked to the notion that Hamas is an ongoing source of potential violence to Israelis. However it is hard to reconcile this rationale with the actualities when one sees a parade of children’s corpses. One body after another with the increasingly familiar pall of concrete dust on their lifeless faces. Thinking of all of that pain, fear and suffering should make it impossible to somehow see killing those children as an act of self-defence. The human instinct to reject this monstrosity is not mere sentimentality. It would be impossible to make a sound detailed argument to show how the killing of any one of these children contributed materially to the increased security of Israelis. In truth it is far easier to argue that each dead Palestinian child makes Israeli people less secure.

Israel relies on broad and vague notions of “self-defence” to enact mass violence that does nothing to make any person safer and, in fact, is certain to cost the lives of many Israel personnel and any number of hostages. Military violence can only achieve so much as no amount of attrition will deprive a people of all ability to commit violence in return short of extermination. Beyond a point violence becomes waged “not merely against states and their armies but against peoples.” These were the words that Raphäel Lemkin when he first described the concept of genocide. Military violence can be used in ways that can only be called “self-defence” through the logic of genocide that situates the threat within the people and their intrinsic capacity for violence (also known as resistance). This is not legitimate self-defence, yet it is clearly part of the racist thinking of some Israelis and their apologists elsewhere.

It is actually normal that the logic of genocide presents itself as self-defence. Consider this quote by Arnon Soffer, the pre-eminent alarmist in Israel over the “demographic” threat of Palestinians:

“When 2.5 million people live in a closed-off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today … The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day … the only thing that concerns me is how to ensure the boys and men who are going to have to do the killing will be able to return home to their families and be normal human beings.” This is the reasoning of someone who has no concern for military power, who will never accept Israel’s overwhelming military might and nuclear deterrent as a sufficient lever ensure that Israel can be secure in a time of peace. These words are shockingly Himmleresque in labelling a people animals; in stating that mass killing is neither choice nor desire, but necessity; and in the sickening concern that mass killing might cause psychological harm to Israeli personnel. Adolf Eichmann and others at the Wannsee Conference shared Himmler’s fear of the effect of killing on the murderers and it was a major consideration in their adoption of the “Final Solution” which industrialised the mass-murder of Jews.

Soffer later explained: “I didn’t recommend that we kill Palestinians. I said we’ll have to kill them. I was right about mounting demographic pressures. I am also entitled to defend myself and my country.” It is difficult to imagine any Israeli getting closer to Nazi rhetoric than this, but it says something that his ideas were not immediately denounced by everyone in Israel for what they are. This is the essence of genocide. Though referencing the circumstances in Gaza, he is openly saying that Palestinians must be killed because they are Palestinians.

In contrast to genocidal notions, the theory behind using military power in self-defence draws on the idea that warfare is a contestation of belligerents using violence in a manner, as Clausewitz suggested, of wrestlers: “Each strives by physical force to compel the other to submit to his will….” This begins from the presupposition that each belligerent has diametrically opposed aims, which might have sufficed in the 19th Century, but does not suit our more complex polities today.

In reality, war is not a chess game and killing babies is not in any way the same as taking a pawn from the board, yet the use of aerial and ground artillery on populated areas implies that this brutal madness makes sense. We are tricked by the notion that the “self-defence” of nations is truly analogous to the self-defence of an individual using a weapon to counter an assailant. That analogy breaks down in an era of high-tech weaponry and in circumstances of asymmetry where the strong are killing the weak. Leaders and pundits often twist the notion of asymmetry itself to suggest that the strong are more vulnerable to the weak and are thus the real victims, but this is just one of those lies that are repeated so constantly that it becomes a commonplace.

Despite the clear disproportionate asymmetry of violence and the ever-growing numbers of people killed by Israel the media discourse enforces a framework that decontextualises Israeli violence, presenting it as a reaction to the violence of Hamas. Pro-Palestinian and pro-peace interviewees on Western media cannot speak without first making pronouncements affirming that they condemn Hamas’ “terrorist” violence and affirming Israel’s “right to defend itself”. These statements function as “thought-terminating clichés”, though in such instances they might be more aptly called “thought-terminating pieties”. Pieties go beyond mere clichés to invoke moralistic religious, patriotic, or other emotive ideological beliefs that create both a dominant sentiment as well as a constrictive framework of discourse. They close off certain avenues of speech, so that those who speak for Palestinians must begin by stating that Israel has a legal and moral right to kill Palestinians, and then take the stance of a supplicant begging for moderation, clemency, or mercy.

Of late Palestinians and others have pushed back against the pressure to commence their testimony and commentary with a condemnation of Hamas. They are trying to evade a narrative in which events commence with a condemnable act by Hamas and thus Israel’s massive surge of killing and destruction is framed as a reaction to Palestinian violence. This framework decontextualises events from the occupation and oppression including the ongoing acts of killing and destruction which Israeli personnel enact every single day in Palestine.

The “self-defence” argument is even more insidious than the attempt to frame all Israeli military violence as being in reaction to “terrorism”. It relies on a persistent but unrecognised one-sidedness. One cannot deny the right for Israelis to defend their lives, but nor can one deny the right of Palestinians to defend their lives. If Israel can kill Palestinian civilians in “self-defence” and present its own reasons to explain why such killings are necessary, then logic dictates that Hamas can do the exactly the same. Thus it may seem that if applied even-handedly “self-defence” becomes totally meaningless.

It may surprise people to know that in legal terms the problem of self-defence is not tricky nor intractable. Israel very clearly does not have the right to use military violence and claim self-defence on several grounds. Firstly, an occupied people has the right to resistance, including armed resistance, “in or outside their own territory”. Obviously it would be illogical to accord a legal right to armed resistance and then accord a legal right to collective self-defence against that legal resistance.

Thankfully the United Nations Charter has a way out of the paradoxes of allowing two belligerents the right to self-defence against each other’s self-defence and that of allowing self-defence against legal acts of resistance. Chapter VII of Article 51 states “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” Clearly “peace and security” has not been established but the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has passed many resolutions on Palestine. Israel is currently violating a very large number of these resolutions ranging at least as far back as UNSCR 242 in 1967 through to UNSCR 2334 in 2016. These violations are occurring despite the fact that the US constantly vetoes UNSC resolutions that it deems detrimental to Israel. Logically cannot claim a legal right to self-defence if it violates the UNSC resolutions designed to bring “peace and security” thus its real path to legitimate self-defence lies first and foremost in complying with all relevant resolutions. In simple terms Israel must end its occupation as the very first of any acts of self-defence. Thus it does have the right to self defence but it must cease its own belligerency first.

I want to complicate this further here, but in a way that will lead to greater elegance and certainty, by explaining the onus on the aggressor. In 1946 the International Military Tribunal described waging a war of aggression as “the supreme international crime” that “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Placing the onus on the aggressor (which is the government of the state not its people) in this way does not exonerate those who commit crimes in self-defence, but it means that the aggressor is also guilty. It is only thus that we can preserve the principle that all people have the right to life. Without the aggressor being morally and legally culpable it would mean not only that the military personnel of the aggressor belligerent have no right to life, but also that civilians of that state have no right to life if they should become legitimate collateral damage in legal military operations by the defending belligerent. This emphasis on the culpability of the aggressor is very satisfying because it closes these loopholes and also satisfies our moral instinct that a sovereign that wages aggressive war, knowingly sacrificing the lives of their own people, is guilty of the murder of those killed.

We need to pause here to reflect on our habitual callousness towards death in times of conflict. Death in wartime is so inevitable that we become inured to to its nature. Deaths caused by armed conflict tend to be terrifying, agonising, lonely, and brutally untimely. The grief of needless loss over those who usually have health and life to spare is not lessened because death becomes so statistical when the machinery of killing is unleashed. War is an abomination and every person who is currently working to prevent a ceasefire in Gaza is a criminal.

As things currently stand Israel has such a grip on the framing of the Western media coverage that it can get away with claiming its murders in Gaza are all part of a campaign to eradicate Hamas and that this is a legitimate act of self-defence. Of course, anyone who goes beyond the Western media (Al Jazeera being the easiest outlet to escape the censored narrative) will know that Israel is targeting civilians, hospitals, churches, ambulances, and so forth. For those who see only the Western media they must deal with the cognitive dissonance of seeing the death, destruction, and suffering and being told that it is arguably some form of self-defence. The trick with the Western media is not to state outright that Israel’s self-defence claims are true, but to avoid all facts or basic reasoning that gives lie to that claim.

Once those who support peace and humanity learn to counter Israel’s claims to the right to use violence in “self-defence” it will be another foundation of the propaganda narrative removed. Brave individuals are challenging the demand to begin all media interviews by condemning Hamas and refusing to accept timelines that always assert that cycles of violence begin with Palestinian actions. They need to add to that by rejecting Israel’s right to use arms in self-defence.

The way to counter the distortions of the Western media is to attack the borders of the narrative where they are thinnest and most strained. Some ideas are the sledgehammers that break through walls of cognitive dissonance, forcing people to unite what their eyes see and what their emotional and moral senses tell them with their intellectual framework – the story that they force facts and feelings into. When people see bombing, missiles and siege warfare against a powerless people the imagery does not naturally lend itself to a conclusion of violence waged for defensive purposes. To break the argument we need to attack the very validity of Israel’s claims.

An occupier cannot use arms in self-defence until they cease being the occupier.

The aggressor cannot be the defender.

Genocide is never justified. The violence of those who see others as a threat because of their membership in a “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” is the defining character of genocide. It is always framed as self-defence.