Gazing Toward Gaza
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“America and Israel have become purveyors of dystopia”
Is democracy, a political system modelled around the myth of putative participation in governance, disappearing into a maze of high-tech accretions that essentially serve the interests of covert and overt bureaucracies? Has high-tech become a witches brew of threat and innuendo in the hands of unscrupulous ideologues who would lead their people into vainglorious crusades in the name of a God or Generalissimo Zino? Did Israel’s recent inhumane attack on Gaza do anything more than reinforce the community’s feeling of ontological insecurity and drive them ever more deeply into the labyrinths of their nuclear ghetto?
What appears to alienate the citizen voter from the very process that initially engages them, is the fact that an understanding of what might constitute security becomes the sole property of the experts within the state when responsibility is delegated to them. The principle of the one man one vote accord appears to suffer emasculation when passed into the hands of the those who would interpret security on our behalf.
Reality at the local level is co-opted into mythology by power elites who manage the day-to-day goings-on of the top echelons by securing an ever greater hold on power by propagating narratives that purport to serve the interests of the community.
To witness the recent spectacle of Israeli state terrorism pounding the Gaza enclave with all the might American munitions could bring to that conflagration, was to observe the moral bankruptcy and corruption currently infecting the very ‘soul’ of the Western alliance. Recently we witnessed the western world remain virtually mute before the spectacle of America the Mighty condoning the rapacious attack by Israel on Gaza, leaving ‘we’ of a less colonial stripe to groan and moan at the sheer barbarity of it all.
Image credit: Luis Astudillo C. / Andes
That democracy has replaced morality as the lodestone in civic society, is painfully evident when we consider the part mainstream media played in reporting that recent brutal onslaught on the civilians in Gaza. Witness ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’, Zionist Israel, project a vision of permanent war against the Palestinians as a necessary means of holding the status quo together. Israel has succeeded in piggybacking American World War II military triumphalism to project its own version of colonial creep into Palestine. The American-Israel quickstep has become a danse macabre, oblivious to the subtleties of international law.
It is as if we in the ‘West’ have become inured to other people’s suffering. Western leaders, like the populations they speak for, have come to regard the tragedy of Gaza as a mere abstraction…just another event that required us to rearrange the beads on the abacus so that we can record the tally of woes resulting from inter-strategic chaos for a brief moment, before consigning all awareness of the carnage to the trash can of oblivion.
We have become data savvy; something has occurred somewhere, but the reality of it is held in check by our own innate feelings of alienation…the pain of the other cannot penetrate our numbness… their tragedy cannot be fully understood…and besides, cultural pluralism is not what being a superpower is about.
But notwithstanding the ferocity of the one-wayness of the blitzkrieg into Gaza, the valour of the young men of Hamas in defending what was the remaining portion of their homeland is commendable. A brave people, long resisting the Zionist crematorium that unrelentingly incinerates all traces of Palestinian history while continuing to concertina those who remain behind in that evermore squeezed-in-little-place in the sun, beneath that ever shrinking arc of sky…Gaza!
“And that inverted Bowl we call The Sky,
Where under crawling coop’t we live and die,
Lift not the hands to it for help–For it
Rolls impotently on as Thou or I.’
Omar Khayyam……The Rubaiyat
Image credit: Luis Astudillo C. / Andes
American and Israel delight in the fact that there is no daylight between them. They have co-opted each other in what is basically a hermitically sealed union, something approximating to Alexander Pushkin’s somewhat cynical impression of coupling as in “marriage is the union of two weak minds”. Their union is rife with blandishments of the aggressive kind as they pursue ever more vigorously their delusions of grandeur.
Both bring to the union a thirst for blood. Each is committed to having their way by means most foul, women and children becoming mere grist for the mill in the fabricated narrative that manufactures ‘the war on terror’…terrorise your opponents, but first make sure you have your PR team transform them into something sub-human.
America and Israel in neo-con lockstep embrace mythologies in ways that marry text to emotion. Theirs is an aberration and abomination we all should abhor as their actions are carefully crafted programmes to disempower others under the rubric of bringing democracy to the world. If we pause a moment to check facts on the ground however, the Made-In-America-Mess that is the modern Middle East is nothing less than catastrophic.
The drama that is being played out in the many theatres of war across the world in the name of spreading freedom and democracy is based on naked opportunism. America and Israel have become purveyors of dystopia; the Israeli watering his Florida-green lawn via co-opted aquifer resources, is immune to the suffering of the Palestinians sheltering among the dusty shards of glass and concrete in Gaza. To the Israelis, who want all of Palestine…’splat’ has become the name of the game…strategy is everything and Jewish morality is the sound of Jews being coy with what is permissible to non-Jews when judging the actions of Israeli Jews.
Likewise, America and its allies are as one when it comes to the mess that they created in the Middle East. The justification and explanation for the mess, we are told, is the fault of the victims. Americans reflecting on the Middle East while watering seedlings in their high-rise window boxes might discombobulate to the point where they could conclude that it would be better to nuke them over there before they come over here to nuke us. The Americans have enough munitions to blow the Middle East to kingdom come…and have done just that in the name of procuring their oil!
So what is required of us in order to free ourselves from the emotional paucity that is so obviously part and parcel of the marketed public relations monstrosity that we identify as our political system? The answer may well be to acknowledge the dehumanization that has come about by being party to this corrupt system…for starters!
Sooner or later we will have to wake up. The instrumentalities that have hijacked the American spirit will have to be brought to account. The warmongering dilettantes who run the scare campaigns that run the munitions rackets that ruin societies, will have to be brought to account.
Image credit: Luis Astudillo C. / Andes
Where do you imagine the tonnage upon tonnage of munitions that rendered Gaza dystopian, came from? At what point did the people of Gaza cease to become our brothers and sisters? Have we begun wondering yet how these people get by, or if they have shelter or the medicines they need?
Albert Einstein is on record as saying…and obviously he was no stranger to emotional wellbeing,
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, he who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed”.
Are our eyes closed? Do we wonder where the children in Gaza might sleep tonight? Do we wonder if their dreams become nightmares as memories of this most recent outrage percolate through their fractured innocence?
Has the West become a Mafioso style entity with America as the Godfather and Israel as Godchild and both in league to establish a manufactured rentier state dependency project as their end game? America and its allies, purveyors of something called free enterprise capitalism, are hell bent on whipping up their own idea of the ‘vision splendid’ in ways that conflate military power with security for the purpose of achieving ever more leverage in the affairs of other countries.
We slaughter honourable people with impunity because we want something of theirs…how black can our souls get?…and do we in the West now imagine that it is fate that ‘Rolls impotently on as Thou or I’… that explains what we mean by the end of history…a callow superpower ineluctably spreading its power across the Middle East and beyond?
Meanwhile, the spotlight shifts away from the 2,100 Palestinians slaughtered in Gaza, the great majority of whom were women and children…’innocent until proven Muslim’…to Iraq and ISIS, thus allowing for the war economies of America and Israel and their expert tacticians to give us the ‘I told you so’ line …again!
Denis A. Conroy is a retired journalist and a voracious follower of matters political outside of the mainstream arena.
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