by achrilock
united states
I’ll keep this short, first, because it’s obvious and second because the advocates of colonialism and imperialism love nothing better than for good people to feel things and express their disquiet over the excesses of empire in what seems to them an ineffectual display of naivete and sobbing misguided moralizing.
I’m not here to cry. I’m here to tell you how you’ve fucked up. In challenging even the ICC’s involvement in what any objective observer understands to be willful, intentional ethnic cleansing on the part of the Israelis and their partners in the US and Europe, and crimes of war on the part of Hamas, Biden, and his administration, and the colonial beneficiary vanguard in Europe, are giving away the game.
I was speaking with someone earlier and we were talking about how colonizers and imperial ideologues react when challenged, when even the slightest criticism is leveled against their disregard for the legal and human status of others. You are seeing that in action in the United States, in Europe, and in Israel. Like any fascists, they will lash out, violently if they feel it necessary, for they are simply the arm of fascism that chooses to obscure its daily practice in more palatable rhetoric.
Western civilization is the abomination child of colonialism, racism, and capitalism, which, as history and current events teach us, becomes fascism when practically challenged. Israel is the proxy battlefield, not just for Netanyahu, for his government, for Zionism (itself a supremacist, colonial ideology), but for the entire idea and fundamental foundations of the colonial, supremacist empire spanning the Atlantic. This is ‘the’ proxy war for the idea of the whole system.
But, make no mistake, the historical implications of this are not minor. This decision means that there will be no legal consequences for Russia in its campaign of erasure against Ukraine. There will be no consequences for China and the atrocities it will commit if it invades Taiwan. There will be no consequences for the United States in its next major war, and make no mistake there will be another. And that is precisely the point. The law exists for those who are subservient, not the powerful.
You can see it in real time as they express sympathy with dictatorial Iran after some of its fascists died, as they stop Ukraine from winning its war with Russia as they profiteer off the conflict, as France struggles to hold on to one of its colonies, as they use violence to invade places of learning, as they tighten the borders, including those around Gaza and the West Bank, that protect elites and their functionaries and constituencies from the people they exploit all over the world.
Remember this when they preach nonviolence, when they use the words ‘law and order’ to shame you, when they talk about equality, justice, or morality. These are just words to the elite. They are meaningless. The only rights you will have are those you choose to take and keep by force. The only humanity to be had is in challenging this monstrosity of capitalism that strangles the world, to take any opportunity to strike at the heart of empire.
And remember that neither your life, your so-called rights, your dignity, the quality of your existence, nor indeed the concept of law itself mean anything whatsoever to these so-called leaders and owners. It’s rhetoric meant to preserve the system and destroy those who would challenge it. And each time their rhetoric fails, they resort immediately to violence, in the streets or on the battlefield (which is just someone’s streets). It’s not about justice. It’s not about law. It’s about power.
TL;DR version: placing aside the extensive ethical and consistency considerations already mentioned, and taking the matter simply in tactical sociopolitical terms, you couldn’t have done a bigger favor for the so-called ‘radical’ left had your teleprompter been written by ruthless anti-colonial, anti-capitalist anarchists. You are less, even, than the rulers who came before you, because you aren’t even trying to tell a pretty, holistic lie, anymore. The less the oligarchy pretends, the less we all feel the need to.
And, I mean, they’re really pissed at all of us saying this is a mistake, for sure. Cops beating the shit out of college students, DHS all up everybody’s ass, weird shit going down on socials, the whole thing. Europe’s just as bad, I hear. The truth is, though, that you all can pour all the tax dollars you want into the cult of Zionism and its project of ethnic cleansing, and you’ll get the same shit result as Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the War on Terror. Colonizer always loses. Look it up 🙂
It’s more than 35k. I dunno what the number is. Probable that no one does, because all of the functions of society that could tabulate it have been destroyed, or forced out of the area. And when famine and disease really get going, it’ll skyrocket exponentially. Don’t let ’em pretend that the counter stopped a month ago, because it didn’t. Don’t let ‘em start pretending that this suddenly became some sort of ‘clean’ war. It’s still ethnic cleansing, just with better PR management.
Humanitarian corridor redux 2024, amirite 😃
Israel’s most crucial occupied territories are the US and Europe, and it is these that must be liberated from their control before we can think about really helping Gaza, the West Bank, or occupied Jerusalem. It’s not rabbit hole conspiracy stuff. It is history and, social, geopolitical reality. Israel has spent decades positioning itself as kingmaker, and spreading tendrils of soft power, throughout the western world, making itself both arbiter of and participant in that empire.
And this would be fine were it not for the fact that it was and is all in service to a project of displacement, ethnic cleansing, and carceral imperial rule. And the establishment West is complicit in it, in fact, even eager for it, because Israel’s history and project is their history and project. All of these polities had similar brutal, exploitative births. And their intertwined systems operate in the same ways. Exclusion, fortification, exploitation, extraction, policing, and military shock.
It’s no different than Russia’s project in Eastern Europe and in Africa. Israel’s just more suave in how they operate. More pretty talk and establishing abstract boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, less flamboyant exhibitionism. Israel and the West reserve their overt militarism for the ‘other,’ for marginalized people, usually people of color. White supremacy and colonialism and imperialism never died. They live on, in Israel, in Europe, and in the US. This is the shape of the problem.