January 21, 2024
An astonishing thing has happened in
America that has never occurred in the lifetime of anyone now living. No, it’s not the crushing win of Trump in
Iowa, nor the absurd determination of Democrats to run the senile ninny who has
made a joke of our Presidency for another term.
These, in their way astonishing, are mere trivialities in this time of
universal lunacy and deceit.
I mean an honest to god paradigm
shift everyone can see that official wise men with public platforms and
megaphones have not announced, or perhaps even noticed. I’m talking about the first clear, undeniable
instance of the failure of the American Empire’s Propaganda Machine.
It has been clear for decades,
generations, that the American political elite has no regard for, and no sense
of responsibility to, the actual needs
and desires of the ignorant, disorganized public. It has always dealt with their inchoate hopes
by indoctrination, by arousing and enlisting their imbecile enthusiasms in a
mythology of tawdry, tribal patriotism based on the premise that they are a
glorious, superior people whose leaders courageously embody and implement their
magnificence all over the world.
The techniques of propaganda are
refined, but their effect is entirely due to grotesque pandering to the worst
susceptibilities of the human ego: the desire to assert one’s superlative worth
as a member of a powerful, violent,
conquering nation. The force of that
tactic, endlessly repeated, rendered American citizenry, with rare exceptions,
one solid, deluded, unthinking mass, devoted to whatever vicious, imperial ends
the political elite intended.
Their trained mass response, sure as
that of performing seals, has, for the first time ever, failed in regard to the
Gaza genocide.
Both parties in Congress are solidly
behind their putative leaders in full support of whatever violence Nazi Zionist
Israel inflicts on the Palestinian people.
This is true across the spectrum, from the pathetic halfwits and
defectives in the MAGA sump to mock-noble, self-declared moral poseurs such as
Bernie and AOL. Tlaib is the one outcast
who has dared to affirm the humanity of Palestinians, while the rest join
solemnly to prevent a ceasefire, which would, they say, balk the Zionist’s
“right of self-defence”.
With this level of unanimity, solid
from the addled, babbling, derelict President down, presented forcefully,
continually, to the nation from every organ in the Propaganda Machine, the
certain positive response was confidently awaited. It has not come.
In spite of all our corrupt,
Zionist-owned government has done to enlist its support for the wholesale
murder of a people, the American public has not bought it, and is not coming
around. By an overwhelming majority
Americans reject the message of the Machine, and adamantly disapprove of the
Israeli genocide.
Try to recall a single moment when
the diktat of the Machine was not ingested and regurgitated by the whole
American public. It took years and
thousands of body bags to sour them on the Viet Nam horror. The whole country was galvanized behind the
lies that led to wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and its nonexistent WMDs, and it
embraced the obscene “War on Terror” with all its follies.
Recall the wildly dishonest
demonization of Qaddafi, Assad and Iran that Americans swallowed. When Putin was Hitlerized for exposing U.S.
treachery in expanding NATO to Russia’s borders, and defending ethnic Russian
Ukrainians from attacks by rabid Ukronazi Banderites, Americans ate it up and
roared approval.
Xi of China is the next candidate
for diabolization, but this first failure of the Machine will create doubt as
to the ability of our rotten government to manage its victim people. The question now is whether The Empire’s iron
grip on their minds has been permanently impaired by its total, and totally
despicable, support for the criminal brutality of an evil and illegitimate
state.
It will be a delicious irony if the
billionaire Zionists who bought our Congress find that the felon state it has
supported against American interests has destroyed itself, and broken the death
grip its money has exerted in subverting and betraying us all.
Depending on the endgame of the
Zionist genocide—chiefly, on whether their murderous barbarity results in a
deadly regional war—the effect on The Empire will be either crippling
international infamy, or perilous, punishing engagement in a war that has the
potential to utterly destroy many nations, including ours.
The American Empire has not
represented the interests of its people for decades, if it ever did, and has
only kept them in a kind of mental and emotional lockdown through controlling
their perception of reality. Nothing has
been done for the generality of Americans since the last great threat to
Capitalism in the Great Depression, which resulted in Social Security and
Medicare.
It is intriguing to wonder what
grand advancements might come for The
People if the state were to be run for their benefit. That, of course, will never happen under
Imperial Capitalism which will fight to the end for its absolute rule by any
means possible until it self destructs from massive and insoluble financial
fraud, or is hammered and obliterated in an intentionally provoked war.
T.S. Elliot predicted long ago that
the world would not end “in a bang, but a whimper”. This seems unlikely now when the likely ends
are implosion or explosion. How
profoundly sad it will be if the American people have thrown off the terrible
strait jacket of imperial mind control just when it doesn’t matter any more.
Guardian’s ‘Hamas Mass
Rape’ Story Doesn’t Add Up
The Guardian has just published the
latest in the Western media’s endless cycle of stories claiming Hamas committed
“systematic, mass rape” on Oct. 7.
Its article is headlined: “Evidence
points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October
attacks.”
The biggest problem with these
stories isn’t just the continuing absence of any meaningful evidence for
“systematic” rape; or Israel’s long track record of lying to justify state
terrorism; or Israel’s refusal to cooperate with independent investigators; or
the racist, anti-Arab tropes that pass for sophisticated analysis in western
circles.
It is simply the outrageous
improbability of so many of the evidence-poor rape stories being advanced.
The Guardian recycles a supposed
eyewitness account of a group of Hamas fighters taking turns to rape a woman at
the Nova festival on Oct. 7, then cutting off her breast to play a
football-like game with it at the side of the road.
We are supposed to believe this
happened when we also know – from facts provided by the Israeli media – that
Hamas stumbled on to the Nova festival totally unprepared and on their way to
what they assumed would be a major confrontation with the Israeli military at a
nearby army base; that its fighters were quickly confronted by paramilitary
Israeli police who engaged them in gun battles; and that Israeli Apache
helicopters, with little intelligence to work on, were firing Hellfire missiles
at anything that moved, based on the “Hannibal directive” to prevent
hostage-taking at all costs.
Does any of that add up? Did Hamas’
most disciplined elite fighters – training for years and knowing that this
might be their their only, brief moment to take on the Israeli army in a
near-fair fight or drag hostages back to Gaza for a prisoner swap before the
Israeli military used its air power to overwhelm them – really take time out to
indulge in a sick game involving a woman’s breast?
How is it that no one – The Guardian
reporter, her section editors, the paper’s editors – stopped for a moment and
thought “Is this really plausible?” and “Am I being played to advance a
nefarious agenda?” — in this case, genocide.
Or did they simply recite in their
minds — as Israel knew they would — “Believe women!”, especially if they are
confirming a racist assumption that Arab men are blood-thirsty, sex-obsessed
primitives.
Sourcing
In fact, the Zaka volunteers who are
being heavily relied on in this Guardian “report” are Jewish religious
extremist men, also with a proven record of lying: they came up with the
complete fabrication of “40 beheaded babies” when no babies were beheaded. Two
infants are recorded dying that day.
The woman leading the “Hamas mass
rape” campaign — now an academic – is a former spokesperson for the Israeli
military. Their job, as any honest reporter will tell you, is to lie to
journalists to excuse Israel’s incessant war crimes.
What we now know — from multiple
credible Israeli sources – is that Israel killed lots of its own civilians on
Oct. 7.
Ynet, Israel’s biggest media outlet,
has just published an investigation in Hebrew showing that Hamas successfully
took out Israel’s all-seeing drone “eyes” over Gaza that day, leaving the
Israeli military blind about what was happening.
Panicked, Israeli commanders invoked
the Hannibal directive, allowing those in the field to order tanks and
helicopters to fire at anything that moved.
It was Israel that incinerated the
hundreds of cars trying to flee the Nova festival, killing potentially hundreds
of the 1,140 Israeli civilians that died that day, as well as Hamas fighters.
It was an Israeli tank that
incinerated 13 Israeli civilians, and 40 Hamas fighters, holed up in a house in
Kibbutz Be’eri by blasting a shell through its front wall.
Israel, of course, wants no one,
least of all the Western media, talking about any of that. What it needs
instead is anything that will help to distract from its crimes against its
citizens and justify its committing of genocide against the people of Gaza.
So it has every reason to serve up
the “Hamas mass rape” story, feeding what it rightly assumes are the
Islamophobic prejudices of most Israeli Jews and Western reporters.
Journalists at The Guardian, the BBC
and the rest of the establishment media are paid to play their role in
regurgitating these lies to advance Western foreign policy goals. You are not.
So please hold on to your humanity — and refuse to play along with Israel and
the media’s racist disinformation campaign.
Remembering John
Pilger, a Friend to Palestinians and All Oppressed Nations
His death, especially during these
difficult times, is a major loss for humanity, but I know that, deep down, John
must have known that things would eventually get better.
The first and the last time I met
John Pilger in person was in 2018.
I was invited to deliver a speech at
the New South Wales Parliament in Sydney, Australia. Among the large crowd were
many that I knew and respected—a former foreign minister, socially
conscientious members of parliament, morally driven intellectuals and activists,
and so on.
As I stood at the podium, glancing
at the crowd, I saw John Pilger. He had a big smile on his face, as if he was
in great anticipation to hear me talk.
The reality was entirely different.
I would have rather listened to John than to lecture before him.
As I expressed my many “Thank yous,”
I made a point of emphasizing that I have modeled my journalism around that of
John Pilger.
The painful truth is that, growing
up in a refugee camp in Gaza, we rarely affiliated Western media, intellect, or
journalists with truth-telling, in general. Though, with time, I realized that
this wholesale assumption was hardly fair, associating bias with everything
Western had its own justification, if not logic.
Aside from the typical corporate
biased media narrative on Palestine, the Middle East, the Arab and Muslim
world—in fact, the entirety of the Global South—there were those who were
identified as part of the “left.”
We were told that those supposed
leftist are the exception to the norm. But experience has taught me that, aside
from ideological nuances, even the so-called left still saw the non-Western
world based on a different set of unique biases. They perceived the rest of the
world through judgmental eyes, as if they, and they alone, had access to a
moral code according to which the rest of us must be filtered.
Those “leftists” are only against
certain kinds of wars, especially if they perceive military interventions to be
channeled by imperialist agendas. For them, so-called humanitarian intervention
is morally justified, although there is no evidence that Western interventions
of that kind ever bode well for any country.
Ultimately, that reasoning tends to
have little impact on the outcome of international conflicts. Worse, some
leftists often find themselves siding with the very imperialist powers they
supposedly loathe, whenever it is convenient.
And then, there are the John Pilgers
of this world: Principled to the core, and able to understand, dissect, and
convey the political, cultural, and historical complexities of conflicts to
millions of people around the world.
“We are beckoned to see the world
through a one-way mirror, as if we are threatened and innocent and the rest of
humanity is threatening, or wretched, or expendable,” Pilger said at his Sydney
Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2009.
For the Australian-born journalist,
whose impact on our understanding of major global conflicts is arguably
unparalleled in modern history, these were not mere words but principles to
which he adhered to throughout his life, until his passing on December 30.
In his book and documentaryThe New
Rulers of the World, Pilger brilliantly connects the dots of major global
issues—social injustice, inequality, the so-called war on terror, and
more—demonstrating the powerful maxim that “injustice everywhere is a threat to
justice everywhere.”
Pilger’s enemies were never a
certain race, a nation, or even an ideology. He simply served as the sharp
critic and, at times, the mobilizer against all sorts of
government-orchestrated injustices, whether within national boundaries or
internationally.
He challenged imperialism in all of
its forms, colonialism wherever it may be. This put him on a crash course with
Washington, Canberra, London, and other Western capitals.
His dedication to the causes of
Indigenous people, from Australia to Palestine to Indonesia, were all reflected
in great volumes and documentaries, such as Utopia, Palestine is Still the
Issue, and The New Rulers of the World.
Pilger’s powerful texts as an
academic, an author, and a journalist must not distract from his equally
powerful and hard-hitting documentaries as a filmmaker. More important than the
many awards he had achieved as a filmmaker, starting with The Quiet Mutiny, was
the impact of these films on the way that millions of people around the world
perceived issues, conflicts, and wars that had only been communicated through
non-critical eyes.
“Many journalists now are no more
than channelers and echoers of what George Orwell called the ‘official truth.’
They simply cipher and transmit lies,” he said during an interview with David
Barsamian in 2007.
Though, at times, some intellectuals
of Pilger’s caliber may have deviated from their commitment to the
uncompromising moral code of principled journalism and intellect, Pilger’s
legacy suggests otherwise.
He stood firmly on the side of
oppressed people, spoke strongly against the injustices meted out by the
powerful, and uncompromisingly defended free speech whenever it was threatened.
Indeed, Pilger was one of the most
stalwart supporters of Julian Assange in his war against censorship in all of
its forms.
“This is not about the survival of a
free press. There is no longer a free press... The paramount issue is justice
and our most precious human right: to be free,” Pilger wrote in an article in
July 2023.
Before our meeting, I exchanged many
messages with John. The first time he responded to my request for an
endorsement of a book, I was truly thrilled. I was also moved by his kind
response to a young author who was merely starting his own quest for a just
world.
Many messages and years later, we
finally met in person. I quickly made my way to him through the crowd to thank
him for all that he has done for Palestine and for all the oppressed people of
this world.
His death, especially during these
difficult times, is a major loss for humanity. But I know that, deep down, John
must have known that things would eventually get better. He did his part, and
much more.
Namibia, Victim of
Germany’s 1904 Genocide, Lambastes Berlin for Denying Israel’s atrocities
against Palestinians
Countries of the global South are
most often denied a voice in Europe and North America. Our cable news brings on
often corrupt former generals to explain countries such as Iraq and Yemen, but
no Iraqi-American or Yemeni-American professors or journalists who actually
know what they are talking about.
This imbalance in who is visible
on television, in the press, and even often in academia is one of the things
that makes the South African genocide case against Israel at the UN’s
International Court of Justice so riveting.
Narratives of European history
are consumed by the two world wars, the Holocaust, the Soviet menace, and are
remarkably inward-looking. From Europe Israel appears as the nation that can do
no wrong because it was formed and populated by Holocaust survivors, and it
would be churlish for countries like Germany, which committed the Holocaust,
and France, Italy and Poland, which were implicated in it, to criticize the
state into which they chased those of Europe’s Jews whom they did not simply
murder.
Germany thus ranged itself
against South Africa, declaring a position in support of Israel and denying
that Tel Aviv is committing genocide, despite the daily video available to
anyone who wants to see it of the mind-boggling daily Israeli atrocities in Gaza.
Germany might seem distant from South Africa, but in fact it was once a
neighbor, as I will explain. And its lack of sympathy with the mass murder of
non-Europeans is embarrassing it because of its brutal colonial past.
The small southwest African
country of Namibia (population 2.3 million) responded sharply to this German
claim. You see, the Germans had genocided Namibians, so they are sore about
this issue, and seeing Berlin whitewashing the killing of tens of thousands of
brown people a little over a century later.
Windhoek’s Allgemeine Zeitung
wrote in German last week,
“The Namibian president, Hage Geingob, was extremely angry
at the weekend about Germany, which had sided with Israel at the International
Court of Justice in The Hague. South Africa’s complaint aimed at stopping
Israel’s ongoing warfare in the Gaza Strip and also at broaching the question
of whether President Netanyahu and the rest of Israel’s leadership should be
held responsible for a genocide.
Numerous politicians in Namibia reacted angrily and the
otherwise reserved First Lady, Monica Geingos, wrote on X: ‘The build up to the
Herero-Nama genocide in Namibia, perpetrated by Germany started on 12 January
1904. The absurdity of Germany, on 12 January 2024, rejecting genocide charges
against Israel and warning about the “political instrumentalisation of the
charge” is not lost on us.’
Geingob had warned in his New Year’s message: ‘No
peace-loving person can ignore the massacre of the Palestinians in Gaza.’
The Windhoek Observer reported,
“Leader of the official opposition party Popular Democratic Movement, McHenry
Venaani, echoed the President’s sentiments. Venaani emphasized the
inconsistency in Germany’s moral stance, criticising the nation for expressing
commitment to the United Nations Genocide Convention while simultaneously
supporting what he called the ‘equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.’
. . . ‘We agree with the president’s statement and Germany is misbehaving. They
want to turn a blind eye. Israel cannot do a global punishment because they
have lost a thousand people, yes we agree and are not disputing that but what
they are is against the law. So what Germany is doing is psychological guilt,’
said Venaani.”
Ironically, Belgium, which
committed an earlier genocide in the Congo, has taken the side of South Africa
in this dispute.
By 1800, Europe had conquered 35%
of the world. Despite the fairy tales they told themselves about their
benevolence and their spreading of progress, these conquests were brutal.
Philip Hoffman has argued that they depended heavily on advancements in gunpowder
technology, which tells you everything you need to know about the character of
European advances. By 1914 the Europeans ruled 80% of the world. Gunpowder did
not become less important, i.e. the pile of dead bodies only got bigger. Of
course colonialism was a complicated system that also required getting buy-ins
of various sorts from the colonized, but ultimately it involved keeping guns
aimed at the locals and being willing to use them.
The Dutch war on Aceh in what is
now Indonesia, 1873–1904, involved killing 60,000 locals by military force or
exposure and disease. The US in the Philippines killed at least 20,000 directly
and some 200,000 – 400,000 died from exposure and disease.
The historians of the colonial
powers have written the history, so that the colonial era is often depicted as
a civilizational triumph. It is British railways in India or French road
building in Senegal that is celebrated. The pile of dead bodies is mentioned in
passing, surrounded by embarrassed silence, when it isn’t suppressed entirely.
The history of enslavement and forced labor has often been downplayed. In the
second half of the twentieth century, sometimes historians of the metropoles
have dropped the colonial dimension entirely from the national narrative,
obscuring it. François Furet at one point wrote that he would omit mention of
Bonaparte’s conquest of Egypt since the episode occurred beyond French soil. (I
fixed that.) Edward Said pointed out in Culture and Imperialism that a lot of
Victorian literature is incomprehensible today unless we remember that Britain
was an empire at the time and not a small nation-state. Since people in the
North Atlantic world don’t much read historians based in the global South,
these histories have become invisible.
In 1904, the Herero people
rebelled against German colonialism in southwest Africa, and the German
government responded in 1904-1908 by committing the twentieth century’s first
genocide against them. So writes Hamilton Wende.
Germany was awarded Namibia at
the 1884 Berlin conference as part of what historians have characterized as the
“scramble for Africa.” Since the Africans were just going about their lives,
the “scramble” was by predatory Europeans. Some 5,000 Germans flooded into
Namibia and lorded it over a quarter million local Bantus. To this day, whites,
including persons of German descent, own 70% of the land there.
After a Herero attack on
colonists that killed over 100 in early 1904, the German Schutztruppe or
colonial military replied with Maxim machine guns and artillery (Professor
Hoffman might note the prominence of gunpowder). Military commander Lothar von
Trotha called for the extermination of the Herero and Nama peoples. As many as
60,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama were mowed down just at the beginning of the
punitive German campaign.
Germany grudgingly recognized the
genocide in 2021, with the foreign minister saying “If you want to call it a
genocide, you can.” Germany’s position is that it took place before the 1948
Genocide Convention, however, and so cannot be the basis for any lawsuit or
formal reparations. Berlin did pledge $1.4 billion in aid for Namibia, to be
paid over 30 years, but without admitting legal liability. At the same time,
German officials have often reprimanded Namibians, saying that they cannot
compare their experience to the Holocaust, as though extermination of Europeans
is forever more significant than the extermination of Africans, millions of
whom were killed by Europeans in the 19th century.
Namibians have complained that
the sum offered in aid is not enough to compensate for the damage done or for
the ancestral lands lost, which people want restored to them. President Geingob
says that Namibia is not done with Berlin, and plans a further lawsuit.
So, for a traumatized Namibian
population, to have Germany now engage in genocide denial when it comes to
Palestinians just brings back the nightmare all over again.
And at the International Court of
Justice, Namibia has a voice, even though it still won’t have access to CNN’s
air waves or receive much attention in the North Atlantic newspapers of record.
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