Gaza Genocide

Genocide is unfolding in Gaza, with the full endorsement of our Governments. Tell your elected representatives wherever in the world you reside - 'Not in my name'.

I don’t normally write reactionary pieces, preferring instead to take a reflective research based approach. But this is an exception. What’s happening in Gaza is multiple war crimes committed by Israel, with the pathological maniacal complicity of western powers, who’s sense of humanity dissolved when civilisation was created. What is happening in Gaza isn’t something that just suddenly happened overnight. Nor did it happen last year or even decades ago. This is a systemic problem that has its roots in Medieval times. It’s when one tribal entity sees itself as superior to another. That tribe then expands to something bigger. It then discovers the intoxicating potency of power that draws individuals towards it like a narcotic. Before long a system of permanent addiction dominates, yielding chronic power junkies. Tribes then become nations and some nations become empires. Power junkies become narcissistic terrorists, believing their superior will and culture must dominate those deemed inferior, in need of paternal guidance and education.

History is full of empires that rose and fell. They all have the same common denominator. The qualities listed above, leading to decay, debauchery and festering corruption. Inevitably they implode through their inexorable and irreversible rot. That’s what we’re seeing unfold in Israel today. A society in a state of terminal decay. But that’s just the beginning. The west’s complicity in Israel’s habitual crimes is also a reflection of the decay in the wider global order. The violence engulfing Palestine could happen anywhere. There is no place on earth that is unscarred by the mindless pillage of war.

It’s debatable whether humanity has outlived its time on this planet. But as climate change erodes faux superiority and arrogance, it seems like just a matter of time that we all become subjected to a rabid fight for survival. It’s already happening. We know why Israel is defended to the hilt by the west. Israel is a vital strategic ally in the middle east that allows western corporations to plunder the fossil fuel resources that will ultimately lead to our undoing. Nils Melzer, the former UN Special Rapporteur, who investigated the persecution of Julian Assange, who heroically exposed the crimes of the western Mafiosi in Iraq and Afghanistan, summed it up thus:

I have seen lots of horrors and violence and have seen how quickly peaceful countries like Yugoslavia or Rwanda can transform into infernos. At the roots of such developments are always a lack of transparency and unbridled political or economic power combined with the naivete, indifference and malleability of the population. Suddenly, that which always happened to the other – unpunished torture, rape, expulsion and murder – can just as easily happen to us or our children. And nobody will care. I can promise you that.

The Political Persecution of Julian Assange

One thing that the powerful always does is build walls. We see the separation wall in Palestine.

And of course there’s the ongoing 16 year blockade of Gaza, which HAMAS so dramatically breached on the 7 October, a surprise attack that marked the 50th anniversary of another surprise attack on Israel by Arab forces in retaliation to the 1967 incursions by Israel beyond the UN determined green line, set in 1949. That sums it up. Violence begets violence. Suppress and attack a population and you get blowback. Another definition comes from the laws of physics; any reaction has an opposite and equal reaction.

But it’s not just walls in Palestine that’s being built, they are being built everywhere by unhinged racists with an unswerving colonial mentality. Mass murder becomes acceptable if it is administered against sub-humans. Orwell used the expression ‘unpeople’ to describe those whom the Party deemed persona non grata. Amongst normal people, such behaviour would simply be unthinkable and would be subjected to the full force of the law. Caitlin Johnstone writes:

No other aspect of human life works like this. A normal guy isn’t permitted to go on a shooting spree at his wife’s workplace just because she cheated on him with Kyle from marketing. He’s not even allowed to be mean to customers at work or he’ll get fired. The rules don’t stop applying to normal people just because something bad happened to them; only when we’re thinking about the giant power conglomerates known as governments is this sloppy thinking ever taken seriously.

The Insane Idea That Nations Get To Do War Crimes Whenever Something Bad Happens To Them

But those Governments do get away with it, because as Jonathan Cook put it:

Viewers will have none of their preconceived ideas challenged or disrupted – ideas instilled in them by the flood of western propaganda they have been subjected to since childhood. 

The role of that propaganda is to subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, equate Israel with western values and Palestinians with a barbaric primitivism. 

That’s the role of the corporate media, the Governments’ first and most potent line of defence and attack, more powerful than any military force in our imagined democracy. The Media Lens book Propaganda Blitz makes reference to one of the most comprehensive studies of the media approach to Israel, More Bad News From Israel. In particular is the role of the BBC and its highly biased reporting, no doubt fueled, as in the words of a senior BBC editor, ‘We wait in fear for the phone call from the Israelis.’ Behind all this is the powerful Israel lobby, a topic I will cover in some detail in a future article. The bottom line is that reporting is distorted and that creates a systemic misconception with public understanding of the issue.

As I noted before in relation to the Ukraine war, propaganda is such a well established science and art. I took this quotation from Edward Bernays book Propaganda, first published in 1928, which sums up the entire issue perfectly:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. …In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons… who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Ukraine Reloaded Revisited

The corporate media is the pivot for delivering the all important ‘Propaganda Blitz’. To quote a familiar adage: “Whoever controls the narrative, controls the people.” But as Israel’s murderous rampage continues in the besieged Strip, the unthinkable appears to be happening. Some media outlets are doubting Israel’s nonsensical infantile drivel. Following the destruction of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, it seems that Israel’s unhinged lunacy is now too much even for some established news networks. Johnstone once again:

It’s highly unusual to see this degree of skepticism in the western press right off the bat when it goes against the information interests of Israel specifically or the US power alliance more generally. Typically we’ve been seeing the media uncritically report unverified claims about Palestinian militants while expressing rigorous skepticism solely toward any information which might benefit the Palestinian resistance, so there’s clearly something about this particular story which makes mass media reporters remarkably reluctant to push the Israeli narrative.

Mass Media Reporters Aren't Buying Israel's Hospital Bombing Story

Cook elaborates on Israel’s infantile delinquency:

Western politicians and media act as if they are caught in a permanent spell, sympathetically indulging even the most wildly improbable denials from Israel that it has committed war crimes.

As Lenin famously observed: "A lie told often enough becomes the truth".

The almost laughable excuses dreamed up by Israel after the attack include blaming the attack on Palestinian militant group, Islamic Jihad, who apparently fired a Palestinian rocket that fell onto the hospital. But as Cook noted:

Israel’s claim was ridiculous. On a video of the actual strike, you can hear the loud whistling sound of an incoming, high-velocity missile or shell moments before it explodes. Palestinian groups in Gaza have only primitive rockets that lumber through the sky. If one fails, it tumbles at free-fall speed, not at near-supersonic velocity.

When all that fell through they concocted a pathetic video ‘of two Hamas fighters chatting - in the wrong dialect - about whether they or their rivals in Islamic Jihad had fired the stray rocket.’

I could go on. Complete books have been written about Israel’s atrocities. I’ve written several articles. There are reams of evidence of Israel’s numerous war crimes, all covered up by corrupt western politicians and media outlets. How does a normal person rationalise such insanity, when truth and reality are subverted? Erich Fromm writes in The Sane Society:

The insane person has lost contact with the world; he has withdrawn into himself; he cannot experience reality, either physical or human reality as it is, but only as formed and determined by his own inner processes. He either does not react to the world outside, or if he does, reacts not in terms of its reality, but only in terms of his own processes of thought and feeling. Narcissism is the opposite pole to objectivity, reason and love.

The fact that utter failure to relate oneself to the world is insanity, points to the other fact: that some form of relatedness is the condition for any kind of sane living. But among the various forms of relatedness, only the productive one, love, fulfills the condition of allowing one to retain one's freedom and integrity.

Indeed Fromm starts the beginning of the book in asking the question ‘Are we sane?’ referring specifically to western society. He shifts into psychoanalytic mode, outlining a premise of self-deception:

Can we be so sure that we are not deceiving ourselves? Many an inmate of an insane asylum is convinced that everybody else is crazy, except himself. Many a severe neurotic believes that his compulsive rituals or his hysterical outbursts are normal reactions to somewhat abnormal circumstances. What about ourselves?

He makes this statement about war:

In the last one hundred years we, in the Western world, have created a greater material wealth than any other society in the history of the human race. Yet we have managed to kill off millions of our population in an arrangement which we call "war." Aside from smaller wars, we had larger ones in 1870, 1914 and 1939. During these wars, every participant firmly believed that he was fighting in his self-defense, for his honor, or that he was backed up by God. The groups with whom one is at war are, often from one day to the next, looked upon as cruel, irrational fiends, whom one must defeat to save the world from evil. But a few years after the mutual slaughter is over, the enemies of yesterday are our friends, the friends of yesterday our enemies, and again in full seriousness we begin to paint them with appropriate colors of black and white.

Fromm was writing during the 1950’s at the height of the cold war and anti-communist hysteria. He was in a particular period of history where any rational person would question the sanity of a race prepared to use weapons of total mass destruction. Yet here we are 70 years later, no further forward. This consolidates another familiar adage, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results’.

That’s where we are. Our species has been given the self-flattering scientific description of Homo Sapiens - ‘wise man’. Look around you at the alternative universe that has detached us from reality. The media fairy tales we read in newspapers and the relentless permeation of fast and junk news, to use a food analogy. We are what we eat. We also are what we think. If you’ve ever doubted your sanity - think again. The problem isn’t you. As I publish this post it is looking like a ground invasion on Gaza is likely. US warships are stationed off the coast of Gaza, stoically endorsing mass murder and genocide. But there’s nothing new here as I covered in detail here.

Ukraine Reloaded

There is now a total blackout in communications, a perfect situation for ‘Genocide in darkness’ as Cook intimated in a tweet.

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1718058601304956958

But the sight of so many world wide protests despite draconian restrictions in some countries, offers a glimmer of hope. Western hubris is becoming increasingly exposed. Perhaps we will see western leaders in the dock yet for their complicity in mass murder and genocide - if you believe in miracles.