#372

Man, not to be a downer or inflammatory, but like, it has to be said. Yeah, Israel's doing a genocide, and that's pretty difficult to swallow. Nobody likes that. Nobody wants it to be true. But that's what's happening.

Sure the main dude says it's not a genocide, and sure, the people carrying out the genocide in real time say it's not a genocide. But that's true of every genocide. Even the Nazis didn't do a press conference being all "hey, we've decided once and for all to wipe out every last Jew we can get our hands on. Our goal is the extinction of their race." No. There was a whole process. There's always the justification, and guess what: the justification is always that we have to protect ourselves because these people are a threat to us, and that threat is in the form of their very existence. 

The subject of genocide has fascinated me since I was a little kid, and how could it not. The concept of genocide flies in the face of every idea we espouse in order to justify our existence as a species, yet genocides happen all the fucking time, quiet ones and loud one, little ones and big ones. The death toll of  genocide has little to do with how big and loud it is, incidentally. The genocide happening right now in Pakistan is big and loud because of the players and particulars, not the death count or the methodology.

Typically for me when I'm fascinated by something, I read everything I can find about it. The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang, is the case study par excellence in my opinion, a book so complete and unsparing that its production destroyed its author. Ordinary Men, A Long Way Gone, Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Long Death, The River of Lost Footsteps, Not on Our Watch, A Human Being Died That Night, Carnage and Culture, The Femicide Machine, First They Killed My Father, Blood and Soil, and Howard Ball's Genocide are the other actual books I have around or have checked out on the subject. It's a pretty grim set of titles. But they've given me as much to think about as whole other shelves of less grim books combined.

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The thing to remember locally is that the average person thinks there's been like, three big, or "real" genocides. Really, just one (which a lot of people say is fake? I dunno, it's getting longer and longer ago, too), and a small group of others that float around the consciousness, and stuff that shouldn't reallly count, like the kinds of genocides enacted on First Nations and other precolonial American civilizations, or Aboriginal Australians, or the Ainu, or on Māori people, or the African diaspora. I mean, how else was I supposed to have a correct life? Live with these other fuckers? I think not.

The character of a lot of early warfare was genocidal the way chimp bands are genocidal in their warfare. The wiping out of bloodlines is coded deep in our behavioral ancestry. And all warfare is inherently at risk of taking on a genocidal character at outset, no matter how virtuous and noble the principles involved might seem.

So without getting bogged down in stuff like soft or chronic or collateral genocide, let us concentrate on genocide as a corollary to warfare. We begin with the distinction between total war, which is the strategy employed by the Israeli Armed Forces at the moment, and other forms, such as hybrid warfare as employed by the Russian state, and indeed, by Hamas and similar groups. Total warfare has proved a bad matchup against hybrid warfare for the past thirty years, and there are really two main reasons it is still around: because the hardware to wage it exists and the manufacture of that hardware is a massive force in the global economy, and because you don't give much of a fuck what happens to your enemy or the ground they stand on; because all collateral is acceptable on the path to total and unconditional surrender or whatever economic or proxy issue the war was actually fought for, if not over. Military strategists will tell you that they are employing total warfare tactics with the intent of preserving innocent life in the process; this is a lie they are comfortable in telling because it salves their humanity. It is a lie, though. They will say that it ends conflicts before they can escalate; a lie. They will say that their tactical deployments minimize risk for civilians and their own personnell; a half-truth that bites like a lie. 

If you wanted to actually do that, you would employ counter-soft power tactics, make a point of visible and provably resultant humanitarian amelioration and civilian protection, and engage in precision attacks on as many hardpoints and nerve centers as you can by training a large amount of small, efficient, well-equipped surgical strike teams and providing them with next-generation up-to-the-minute communications, adaptive reconnaissance, and tactical analysis.

That would work on every axis that I can think of. That's not what the Israeli government wants, because if it wanted it that it would completely have that plus drone support and god knows what stealth shit I don't even have a clue about. I mean, that's what you'd be seeing. They have the money and the experts. Maybe I know jack-all, but that's my position.

You drop bombs because you want to fuck shit up. Because you've got them and you want to use them. Because you want to show these fuckers that they are fucked if they don't fall in line. And you do it for weeks and months because you want everyone to know that this is how shit is and can't nobody stop you.

Call me a liar.

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As for the fact that they suffered an attack, as for the hostage component--genocide is all about overwhelming, seismic reactions to grievances invented or legitimate. The operations in Afghanistan and throughout the Middle East under the banner of the so-called War on Terror after the 9/11 attacks is an excellent example. The amount of people killed in those attacks and all coalition forces over the course twenty years of war in the Middle East compared to the direct and indirect civilian casualties suffered by the populations on the ground--not to mention the material results of the conflicts vis a vis establishing stability in the region or whatever you wanted people to think you were doing out there--tells you everything you need to know about legitimately aggrieved warfare as it is waged in the modern age.

Sure, the state of Israel has excuses ready to hand, and their state history places them in a unique position re: genocide and ideas about responses to the perpetrations of genocide. The idea that this history makes them immune to genocidal ideations and genocidal intents, that any nation or people's history protects them from becoming genocidal, is nonsense. Countless nations and civilizations have risen and fallen in response to tyrannical regimes or genocidal attempts. Human cultures all around the world have flourished in soil watered with the blood of those killed and exiled. More recently, a modern nation which defined its independence from its mother empire as based on the principles of freedom and humanism enslaved human beings and and did genocide constantly, legally. It's still happening!

What we say, where we came from--it's fucking nothing. What is it that we do?

That's the key bit.

--JL