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There is only one way to end the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It is not through bilateral negotiations. Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire. The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the U.S. to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.
The arguments against a boycott of the two ruling parties are familiar: It will ensure the election of Donald Trump. Kamala Harris has rhetorically shown more compassion than Joe Biden. There are not enough of us to have an impact. We can work within the Democratic Party. The Israel lobby, especially the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which owns most members of Congress, is too powerful. Negotiations will eventually achieve a cessation of the slaughter.
In short, we are impotent and must surrender our agency to sustain a project of mass killing. We must accept as normal governance the shipment of hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to an apartheid state, the use of vetoes at the U.N. Security Council to protect Israel and the active obstruction of international efforts to end mass murder. We have no choice.
Genocide, the internationally recognized crime of crimes, is not a policy issue. It cannot be equated with trade deals, infrastructure bills, charter schools or immigration. It is a moral issue. It is about the eradication of a people. Any surrender to genocide condemns us as a nation and as a species. It plunges the global society one step closer to barbarity. It eviscerates the rule of law and mocks every fundamental value we claim to honor. It is in a category by itself. And to not, with every fiber of our being, combat genocide is to be complicit in what Hannah Arendt defines as “radical evil,” the evil where human beings, as human beings, are rendered superfluous.
The plethora of Holocaust studies should have made this indelible point. But Holocaust studies were hijacked by Zionists. They insist that the Holocaust is unique, that it is somehow set apart from human nature and human history. Jews are deified as eternal victims of anti-Semitism. Nazis are endowed with a special kind of inhumanity. Israel, as the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington concludes, is the solution. The Holocaust was one of several genocides carried out in the 19th and 20th centuries. But historical context is ignored and with it our understanding of the dynamics of mass extermination.
The fundamental lesson of the Holocaust, which writers such as Primo Levi stress, is that we can all become willing executioners. It takes very little. We can all become complicit, if only through indifference and apathy, in evil.
“Monsters exist,” Levi, who survived Auschwitz, writes, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
To confront evil — even if there is no chance of success — keeps alive our humanity and dignity. It allows us, as Vaclav Havel writes in “The Power of the Powerless,” to live in truth, a truth the powerful do not want spoken and seek to suppress. It provides a guiding light to those who come after us. It tells the victims they are not alone. It is “humanity’s revolt against an enforced position” and an “attempt to regain control over one’s sense of responsibility.”
What does it say about us if we accept a world where we arm and fund a nation that kills and wounds hundreds of innocents a day?
What does it say about us if we support an orchestrated famine and the poisoning of the water supply where the polio virus has been detected, meaning tens of thousands will get sick and many will die?
What does it say about us if we permit for 10 months the bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, villages and cities to wipe out families and force survivors to camp out in the open or find shelter in crude tents?
What does it say about us when we accept the murder of 16,456 children, although this is surely an undercount?
What does it say about us when we watch Israel escalate attacks on United Nations facilities, schools — including the Al-Tabaeen school in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians were killed while performing the Fajr, or dawn prayers — and other emergency shelters?
What does it say about us when we permit Israel to use Palestinians as human shields by forcing handcuffed civilians, including children and the elderly, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings in advance of Israeli troops, at times dressed in Israeli military uniforms?
What does it say about us when we support politicians and soldiers who defend the rape and torture of prisoners?
Are these the kinds of allies we want to empower? Is this behavior we want to embrace? What message does this send to the rest of the world?
If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible. Protestors outside the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago demand an end to the genocide and U.S. aid to Israel, but inside we are fed a sickening conformity. Hope lies in the streets.
A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief.
“But what of the price of peace?” the radical Catholic priest Daniel Berrigan, who was sent to federal prison for burning draft records during the war in Vietnam, asks in his book “No Bars to Manhood:”
I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for the peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans — that five-year plan of studies, that ten-year plan of professional status, that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. “Of course, let us have the peace,” we cry, “but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.” And because we must encompass this and protect that, and because at all costs — at all costs — our hopes must march on schedule, and because it is unheard of that in the name of peace a sword should fall, disjoining that fine and cunning web that our lives have woven, because it is unheard of that good men should suffer injustice or families be sundered or good repute be lost — because of this we cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace. There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
The question is not whether resistance is practical. It is whether resistance is right. We are enjoined to love our neighbor, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious. We are called to defy — through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance — the laws of the state, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law. We must stand, no matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers.
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I’ve said this 100 times. All those politicians who gave Netanyahu a standing ovation are no different from the guards at Treblinka or Auschwitz. They all ought to be brought before the Hague and hanged.
Hey Israel,
You can’t and you won’t exterminate a whole race of people. It is not possible with weapons of war. The good news is that you are instilling a hatred in a group of people that will never die. So long as one of the Palestinians draw breath, they will be consumed by an antipathy for you and your children. There will never be peace between you.
That the US has willingly contributed to the attempt to eliminate a race of people from the planet is a stain that will last FOREVER. Land of the free, home of the complicit, karma is building a toilet which will consume the human excrement that has allowed this, enabled this. promoted this. The God of the universe that created all things will also repay all things. Vengeance. Eternal torment. Good riddance.
Thou Shalt Not Commit Race Replacement.
I agree with your sentiments and the majority of your analysis, however here are a couple of things to consider:
I don’t know what happened during the Holocaust, but with so much Black Propaganda how can you be sure that the common narrative is accurate? The careful historical revisionists make very good points and we now know that many things that were taught to us were simply lies; such as, captives being executed by electrical floors and other strange methods, and the Germans making soap from the fat of Jewish prisoners, shrunken heads, and products out of human skin and hair—all of which mainstream historians have acknowledged were fabricated lies. How do you know that the gas chamber narrative is not very highly exaggerated and simply another example of Black Propaganda? How do we know that the majority of camp inmates didn’t die due to typhus and starvation due to disruption of the supply chains from allied bombing? The images they presented to use in grade school all showed emaciated bodies that look as if they had died of starvation not gassing.
The two are inseparable. To care for one’s tribe to a reasonable degree is necessary to protect them so that one can live in a society that protects its neighbors and has respect for, and cooperates with, other tribes of goodwill. A tribe is simply another name for a people. A tribe should be treated like a family, just because you have a family doesn’t mean you hate other families—quite the opposite, you want the best for other familles and to live in harmony with
them—but you also must protect your family and its unity for it to persist and not be subverted or destroyed by others who do not care for their neighbors but only themselves.
The problem with Zionism and Jewish Supremacy is that it is the unreasonably, hyper ethnocentric and that it is psychopathic to other peoples and believes itself to be better than other peoples and that it deserves special considerations. It is the practice of psychopathic moral particularism and seeing all others as enemies or as means of to profit that is the issue.
Nature is what it is, peoples are bounded together by ethnicity, and perceived as representing their ethnic group by other peoples, even if they don’t want to be an ethnic tribe other peoples will treat them as such and if those peoples have low moral character they will exploit or destroy them. Having a good tribe and sustaining its health is necessity to prevent evil persons of another tribe from destroying you and your goodness, and your ability to uphold a culture that loves its neighbors.
“The Holocaust was one of several genocides carried out in the 19th and 20th centuries.”
No, it wasn’t. I stopped reading at that point – at best, the writer hasn’t done his research, doesn’t understand how bad things are and is a jewish lies amplifier. Ewww.
Actually, Holohoax studies were invented by the Zionists to justify Zionism ex-post facto.
Also: although I, too, am definitely opposed to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, I am even more alarmed by the White-genocide unfolding in the West, since that affects us even more directly.
Of course, both parties support and enable that, too, so I guess there’s another reason not to vote there.
Again, the same old (SAME OLD) essay from the brilliantly articulate Chris Hedges.
From Wikipedia:
“A platitude is a statement that is seen as trite, meaningless, or prosaic, aimed at quelling social, emotional, or cognitive unease. The statement may be true, but its meaning has been lost due to its excessive use as a thought-terminating cliché.”
Also from Wikipedia, as linked above:
“A thought-terminating cliché (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or cliché thinking) is a form of loaded language, often passing as folk wisdom, intended to end an argument and quell cognitive dissonance.[1][2] Its function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, ending the debate with a cliché rather than a point”.
I urge all to follow the links included in the passages quoted above if you are not familiar with the meaning of these terms.
I am hereby coining a new term that I think can prove very useful, over time, in advancing our discussions of our ‘problem’ toward the discovery of the ‘solution’ to same. As I’ve long complained, far too may of us, Chris Hedges included, seem content to simply endlessly describe ‘the problem’, without ever making any meaningful headway toward discovering ‘the solution’.
The new term is “Hedgian Platitude”. Its meaning lies in ‘motive’. If a “platitude” is a “thought-terminating cliche”, what is the motive of any person who habitually repeats such platitudes as if they have some sort of deep meaning?
What is(are) Mr. Hedges’ motive(s) for bleating out this SAME essay over and over again, quite literally for decades on end?
What are Chris Hedges’ motives for publishing the SAME essay, (only very slightly revised each time), for decades on end, which contains, every dang time, the same ‘platitudinous’ suggestions for solving ‘the problem’. He uses his magnificently brilliant gift with the language to describe ‘the problem’ so well, so powerfully, so poignantly… But his simplistic suggestion(s) of ‘the solution’ is always so simple-minded that it makes one wonder what this brilliantly intelligent man’s true motives could possibly be.
How many times does Mr. Hedges plan to write and publish this SAME essay, whose ‘platitudinous’ generalities, when the time comes to suggest ‘the solution’, only lead us to ‘nowhere’, (or worse)? These ‘Hedgian Platitudes’ not only do NOT lead us anywhere, but even MUCH worse, they only serve to ‘terminate thought’, (see link from Wikipedia above).
Why would anyone want to “terminate thought” in his readers’ minds?
Are those of us who follow Mr. Hedges down this path-to-nowhere, are those of us who ‘celebrate’ him, (as a Woke Cult left ‘celebrity’), for his magnificent skill with the language, for his brilliance in describing ‘the problem’, any different, in any substantive way, (other than in our own self-righteous conceits), than the ‘apathetic masses’ about whom Mr. Hedges has complained in this SAME essay that he has been publishing for decades on end?
A ‘Hedgian Platitude’ is a platitude that is motivated to ‘terminate thought” by deliberately fooling masses of people into accepting brilliantly expressed inanities as wisdom.
“Hope lies in the streets”, he writes again, as he has so many times before, for all these decades on end…
Does it?… Are mob riots sources of “hope”?… Did people find “hope” when the heavy blade fell, over and over again, as the mob cheered and the sewers ran red?
Many things ‘lie in the streets’. Hope may very well lie there, somewhere in the mire, but finding it will be a complex process about which poor Mr. Hedges has little of substance to say.
Does our best ‘hope’ lie in mob rule, Mr. Hedges? Shall we, acting as a mindless mob, recruiting the courts and judges as mob henchmen, imprison more police for simply doing their jobs, as we so proudly did to Chauvin, (and STILL gloat over having done)?
“We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak. The good is always embodied in action”, he writes, yet AGAIN, just exactly as he has so many times before.
Does the bad not also draw to it the bad, Mr. Hedges?
Are you so stupid, despite all your brilliance, that you think that the word ‘action’ itself and alone defines ‘the good’?
Is ‘the bad’ not also “always embodied in action”?
Aren’t your words here carefully coded, (the term ‘dog whistle’ comes to mind), to appeal to the Blackshirt Antifa Goons, the Democratic Party’s blatantly fascist political militia, who are inspired by the same spirit as Hitler’s notorious ‘Brownshirts’?
Cue the religious imagery from ‘Father Hedges’:
“We must stand, no matter the cost, with the crucified of the earth. If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarized police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers”.
Nicely done, Mr Hedges. Gotta hand it to ya, dude… So cleverly do you demonize our fellow American citizens, our fellow ‘working people’, to whom we assign the impossible job of policing mass social insanity in a heavily armed society. They get a final kiss from worried wives or husbands, a last hug from adoring daughters and/or sons, before they punch the clock to face the enraged, and heavily-armed masses. The “First Rule of Law Enforcement”, (according to the archetypical Irish Cop, Malone), is “go home from your shift alive”.
Mr. Hedges’ demonizes these people that just want to see their kids play soccer on Saturday, as equatable to the morally depraved monsters perpetrating mass murder in Gaza.
“To the barricades, comrades!!” Is that your simple-minded ‘plan’, Father Hedges? “Ready the Molotov cocktails. To the streets!! Burn! Pillage! Destroy! The police are your Enemy!!!…”
And when the orange glow grows ever closer in the night sky, when the flames themselves lick over the near-horizon rooftops, the frightened people will not just tolerate ‘martial law’, they will DEMAND it!
The term “Hedgian Platitudes” will be defined by motives. If I were a cunning ‘operative’ for some nefarious agency, and if unleashing ‘martial law’ was that agency’s priority, I might be motivated to say EXACTLY what Mr. Hedges is saying.
Eh??…
I’m NOT accusing him of being a ‘paid operative’…. I do NOT think he is… I think this poor confused Woke Cult member means well… I’m only recognizing that the primary function of his own ‘action’, (as a Woke Cult ‘keyboard warrior’), fully supports the highest priority of the Elite Tyrants that rule over our nation.
The Democratic Party is an evil, subordinate organization that is an intrinsic part of our brilliantly designed political system, whose objective is to manipulate the population into obedience, as is the Trump-dominated Republican Party as well… Mr. Hedges knows this perfectly well…
When Father Hedges calls his faithful minions ‘to the streets’, which of these opposing factional mobs is he addressing? Is it not apparent that he is appealing to the twisted ideology of the Woke Cult Faction?
Whichever one it might be, even if he were addressing the MAGA Faction, would he not still be serving the priorities of those that finance and control BOTH factions?
If ‘they’ can successfully goad a frightened population into violent mob chaos, that will BEST serve their priority.
“To the streets!!!”, cries this poor duped Mr. Hedges, seeking to energize the mindless mob, offering no more developed complexity than demonizing ‘the police’, whose job, as clocked-in paid employees, will be to meet them there, to meet the mindless mob, there ‘in the streets’.
From an engineering and logistical standpoint, NONE of the claims made by holocaust™ “survivors” and promoters is possible.
–Killing jews with “bug spray” (Zyklon B™) is not only impossible, but is laughable on its face.
–Transporting jews to “camps”, utilizing scarce energy sources, transportation and logistical difficulties only to kill them is not only problematic but impossible as well.
–Tattooing camp inmates only to kill them is also problematic.
–If the “camps” were truly “death camps” why would medical facilities, recreational facilities, brothels, movie theaters, and other amenities be needed?
—“Gas chambers” with non-sealed wooden doors and the lack of ventilation systems for such facilities, once again, disproves the claims made by holocaust™ promoters. Doors that “swing the wrong way” would make retrieval of the bodies impossible. Ordinary light fixtures, rather than explosion proof lighting fixtures are claimed to have been the norm.
–Claims by holocaust™ promoters that gassed bodies were blue or green (rather than bright red) from poisoning are totally false.
–Claims by “gas chamber operators” that they retrieved the bodies as soon as the “gassing” was complete are false. Decontamination which takes hours is never mentioned. Retrieving the bodies without decontamination would have killed the “gas chamber” operators.
–Claims that the inmates could tell when jews were being cremated by the color of smoke emitted from the crematoria chimneys are patently foolish and false.
–Let’s not forget “lampshades, wallets, soap and shrunken heads” made from jews is also laughable,
–Crematoria running 24 hours a day, without “downtime” for maintenance on the muffles and flames “visible out of the crematoria stacks” are also impossibilities. Crematoria are designed to burn “clean” with no visible smoke and definitely no flames outside the stacks would be possible. Not only that, the claims that thousands of bodies were cremated daily are a statistical impossibility as it takes approximately 1.5 hours to cremate a human body. If cremation were used on “6 million” jews, the cremation process would have been operating into the 1950s.
–The lack of depositories for bodies and ashes is more proof that the “camps” were not “death camps” but rather “work camps” for the German war effort.
—Anne Frank’s “diary” partially written with a ball-point pen (by her father) which was not invented till the 1950s. Time travel, anyone? Lol
—Anne Frank’s father, Otto Frank was treated in a camp hospital and survived the war. What the hell is a hospital for residents doing in a “death camp”?
Germans were (and still are) excellent engineers and could not have engineered the grievous errors that are claimed by holocaust™ promoters.
Follow the shekels…
Nice summary. Thanks.
All good examples of problems with the typical narrative. Thank you for taking the time to type it up.