THEORY: Words against Genocide

Words, words, words; they seem weak, futile, in the face of the violence. What can words do? But even the words have failed to do what they normally do, what they are expected to do, today, they have failed to condemn the most heinous crimes, war crimes, genocide. We are in a new period, post Gaza. Hemingway said something somewhere about bourgeois liberals waking up surprised to find that they were Nazis. This happened recently. Many of our western leaders are now war criminals, complicit in genocide. We are supposed to vote for these people, as if nothing has happened, as if business as usual. Frankly, it is gobsmacking, flabbergasting, and exhausting in the way it causes our stupefaction.

But perhaps they have not yet had the surprise, they are too hypnotized to notice even this, so they have not really woken up. They are sleepwalking through this crisis, helped, instigated, defended, by their media. All of which support the imperialist strategies of the US, which sees Israel as one of its important appendages for policing the Middle East, near the oil fields and the Suez Canal.

And all those humanist humanitarian institutions, built up after WWII and the Holocaust are powerless, or even worse, enable these bourgeois classes to feign as if they care, along with their press, who employ every trick in the book to ensure that the killing of Palestinian children, for instance, can pass by as registered, but not identified with as truly human suffering.

How is it that we can see all this, amongst all this sleight of hand and evasion? It all happened too suddenly, they did not prepare us enough, only now are the forces of the far right being gathered in the land of politics, a bit late to the party, but that is how it goes, unevenly, chaotically.  

Do we have to say that genocide is wrong? Yes! Today it is necessary! - The worst genocide in history was against the Jews in Germany in the middle of Europe. Today’s genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza is not at that scale, but proportionally it is just as atrocious.  If we look at it historically, we see a similar evasion from the western powers about what the German fascists were doing to the Jews, a similar fudging of the morals, a kind of tactical selective blindness to the horrors which left millions of Jews dead, abandoned.

What is happening today is a consequence of those events. Today is essentially a continuation of the friction that caused it, of the antisemitism and racism and the economic crisis that begat these horrors, - we have rampant inflation yet again. It might seem strange, ironic, perverse even, that it is Israel, the Jewish State, that is perpetrating this genocide, or at least which is the vehicle for it, in the hands of US imperialists. But it makes an awful logic.

When the western nations who had won their victory in WWII against the Nazis did not want to accept displaced Jews, when their antisemitism continued, and they pushed Jews towards Palestine, this was just the same war continuing in a different way. The ruling classes saw the Jews as a useful future tool for white western imperialism in the Middle East, and so Palestinians would now be the new victims of European economic contradictions.

The original meaning of the term antisemitism referred to racism against people from that region, Arabs or Jews or Bedouin etc, not specifically Jewish people, this is a modern inflection. The original meaning is far more useful and correct.  So called Islamophobia, and anti-Judaism, are both antisemitism, and nobody is immune to being an antisemite, or a racist, just by virtue of their skin, nationality, or history.

It remains sadly true that to kill people en masse, in a conflict, it helps if your soldiers regard the enemy as less than human. The enemy of imperialist conquest today is the Palestinian people. Israel needs to expand because its capital needs to expand, and its capital needs to expand because western capital seeks to expand, and this seeks to expand because US capital seeks expansion.

The legitimate resistance of the Palestinians to Israeli colonialism exists, but has it assisted the imperialist project by being terrorist? In the west we have our own ideas of legitimate freedom fighters, these ideas have universal aspects but are also different depending on the context. The Middle East has been deliberately fought over in a brutal way, in a way that rarely holds back from the most heinous massacres. This was started by British colonialism in the Mandate period, supporting Zionism for its own interests, and is being continued by western colonialism today. Why this extreme brutality? Because it diminishes the political maturity of the entire region, leaving its ruling classes susceptible to interference, to bribes and corruption, weakening their states. So, on this altar is to be sacrificed Palestinian children. Tomorrow it will be other peoples’ children.