Afternoon Comrades.
I need to blow off some steam today and if you are looking for solutions to this vent, be forewarned, they won’t be legal and most likely will not apply to the majority out there. As hard as I try to offer solutions to the surface levels pessimism in regards to what the ruling classes are up to, today will not be that day, well, yes, it will be, but if you have been here for longer than a week you will absolutely know what solutions I have in mind and cannot write about.
I keep coming back to the analogy of the boiling frog. The essence of the boiling frog syndrome is that when our living conditions deteriorate gradually, we adapt to these conditions instead of getting rid of them, until we are no longer strong enough to escape. Historically, this has been the case for well over 10`000 years but seeing that we as a species are unable to look past our own lives, my pot of water has been set to slow boil since 9/11, 23 years of slowly understanding just how depraved, corrupt, violent and wrong everything about our so heavily sedated existence is. I cannot remember how many “masks off” moments there have been since, not for a lack of memory but due to the sheer number of them. Occasionally that is bewildering, akin to waking up from a deep melatonin dream state but as Gramsci so rightly said, the premise of “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will” allows us to navigate their depravity, somehow.
Obviously, I am referring to the ruling of the ICJ in regards to South Africa and the subsequent UNRWA de-funding from our governments. Both are oddly personally related to my past, having done an apprenticeship at the ICJ during the war in Yugoslavia in the mid 90s as well as having done support work for the UNRWA in Jordan- and yes, I too, once, believed that working from within the system was doable and good - in the case of the UNRWA I still believe so, the ICJ absolutely not.
When South Africa, rightly, charged Israel with Genocide in Den Haag, my initial thoughts were very conflicting. The ICJ, similar to the UN, truly has no material power and is nothing but a tool of the western capitalist ruling class to legitimize, moralize even, their greed and desire to rule the world. It is a deeply bourgeois tool of legitimization, nothing but. Nevertheless, and this definitely includes me, I still believe in the need for s global platform on which we reign in this western disease and warmongering. In principle and theory, I absolutely agree with the idea of the UN for example, seeing that peace & justice on a global stage are absolutely desireable and achievable, post-capitalism.
Again, we always have to come back to the above Gramsci quote to navigate this dialectic - in principle it was and remains morally right to charge Isreal even if and when we know that these ruling mean jack shit. Netanyahu and his merry clan of fascist murderers very much and publicly said that they don’t give a rats ass what the ICJ has to say. As horrible as it is, every one of these moments illustrate the very core of political power: might is right, political power comes from the end of a guns barrel and thus negates all ideas of whatever disney version of democracy we are told to believe in. The hundreds of years of communist work is based exactly on that premise: we live in a dictatorship of capital, a totalitarian nightmare of violence for profit that encapsulates the entirety of existence, from the air we breathe to the culture we profess to shape- it’s all theirs and designed to repress you and keep you where you are. Again, pessimism of the intellect and yet, optimism of the will. For what it is worth, I applaud South Africa’s case against Isreal despite knowing it will do nothing to stop the genocide in Palestine. Again, the fight against Capitalism is not a singular, binary line of good/evil, but is fought on millions of fronts and that’s how you beat a giant, with a million little cuts from a million of us.
Obviously though, the capitalist hegemon will not suffer an attack without response. Since we are not dealing with a rational, moral and emphatic entity, the response to the challenge of their right to wipe out a people for money was and is even more vicious. Essentially, the US government, followed by the rest of the NATO / EU governments ( except Ireland and fuck yeah Ireland ) decided to cut all funding to the UNRWA. Now, briefly, without the UNRWA we would have seen a total devastation and genocide of everything Palestine decades ago. That is not to say that Palestine relies solely on this machinery but they do incredibly vital work. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was established as a subsidiary organ of the United Nations General Assembly on 8 December 1949 and became operational on 1 May 1950. It is one of the largest United Nations programmes and is an infrastructural back bone to Palestine. From food supplies, school, hospitals - essentially all the essential care work - is run with this organization.
The United States, Australia, Canada, Italy, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom have halted funding to the agency, whose facilities where displaced Palestinians sought shelter have been repeatedly attacked in Israeli air raids. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said the 27-member bloc would “assess further steps and draw lessons based on the result of the full and comprehensive investigation”.
Why? Well, publicly, because the state of Israel, after the ICJ ruling over the weekend, said that 7 members of the 13`000 strong workforce in Gaza were members of Hamas. Seriously, a “trust me bro”, publicly to Biden and his gangsters here in Europe, in their mind, was all it took for them to say, yeah fuck you all, starve to death and here is a carte blanche to you Netanyahu to continue with your genocide. For the sake of having beach front homes and a permanent US base called Israel in the Middle East. You cannot make this shit up but here we are.
I know, I am just ranting and raving here but how can you not. I wish I could offer some sort of solace & help in how to not make this violence a reality. For what it is worth, the end of Capitalism and all it entails, a total revolution, is at the very least necessary to ensure we put a stop to this violence. We know, in our hearts and minds that it is the right thing to do, despite their indoctrination of passivity and our collective numbing to this through consumption. I know we know and whilst there is no immediate solution on offer here today, and the desire for immediacy is a topic in on itself, maybe it is this. We know. We will win. We serve the revolution.
Yours, warmly,
V.