Revolutionary Clarity

Zionism, Kneecap, and the Imperialist Logic of Terror

Morning Comrades.

By now everyone is aware that the West Belfast band Kneecap, specifically Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh was charged by the Metropolitan Police for having allegedly displayed a flag in support of proscribed Lebanese organisation Hezbollah at a gig last year. Whilst, at the same time and despite the lip service towards criticism of Netanyahu, and not the entire Zionist project itself mind you, by the same British Ruling Class remains firmly committed to not only materially supporting Israel but are actively involved in the genocide taking place in Gaza, and increasingly in the remaining Palestinian territories. A small example, to be sure, but one that is so glaringly indicative of the manipulating mechanisms at play by said ruling class to drive all us into a frenzy.

You’re not crazy. You’re not overreacting. You’re not "radicalised" because you said genocide is bad. You’re just finally seeing it clearly and that clarity hurts. At first.

It’s one thing to suspect that something is wrong with the way the world works. Most of us grow up with a sense that there’s injustice, that some people have too much power, that war is bad, that governments lie sometimes. But it’s another thing entirely to feel the full weight of that realisation when it crashes into your chest, when you look at what’s happening in Gaza, or what happened to Kneecap, and you finally admit to yourself: They don’t care. The people in charge aren’t just failing to uphold the values they taught us, they never believed them in the first place.

That’s what’s so disorienting. That sick, vertigo-like feeling isn’t confusion. It’s shock. Not because what’s happening is too complicated to understand but because it’s so obvious, and yet they still lie to your face. The Western ruling class tells you that speech is free, then arrests artists for anti-colonial politics, or rather, support of said politics. They say they stand for human rights, then bankroll the slaughter of entire populations. They tell you terrorism is when people kill civilians, except when those civilians are Palestinians, or Congolese, or Yemenis, or Iraqis.

They gaslight us with every speech, every law, every slogan. I don’t use that term lightly, I am absolutely part of the camp that stands firmly against the popularisation of pop-psychology for click bait, but this is the accurate term of what is happening here. They hold press conferences about "democracy" while funding fascists. They teach kids about the Holocaust while defending the people dropping white phosphorus on children today. And when you point it out, when you ask why one form of violence is called “defense” and another “terror,” they act like you’re the extremist. Like you are the problem for noticing the blood on their hands.

This isn’t confusion. This is clarity. What you’re feeling is not a failure to understand the world. It’s the beginning of truly seeing it.

This dispatch is about that moment. The moment where the moral stories start to fall apart. Where the lines between good and evil, law and crime, victim and terrorist, start to reverse. It’s about the realisation that the values we are taught to believe in, freedom, justice, human rights are real only when we fight for them, and fake when they’re handed down from the top.

If you’ve ever felt like you were going mad watching the news, if you’ve ever screamed at your screen while the media calls genocide “self-defense,” this is for you.

You’re not alone. You’re not naive. You’re waking up. And once you see it, you don’t unsee it.