A Slaughter of Superlatives
Why Israel’s and the West’s Gaza Genocide is “Unique”
Dear Readers,
Today I am posting the first paragraphs of a longer text that I have published on the New Global Poilits site. Please find the full version (free of charge) there.
I am also opening the chat function (here, on my Substack, and I am very curious to hear your comments.
Many thanks in advance.
Although we have never been good enough to consistently act in accordance with this insight, in our better moments we know that all human beings are fundamentally equal. Therefore, the victims of mass murderers who are motivated by the will to destroy – “in whole or in part” – specific ethnic groups are also equal. Hence, we must not establish (or tolerate) hierarchies between genocides by singling one of them out as “unique.” Because to do so is to imply that the victims of other genocides were – and are, and, sadly, will be (the way we are going) – in some important manner, impinging on our shared humanity, lesser. And that, for one thing, would be a perverse obverse of the very “logic” genocide perpetrators practice.
In a more concrete sense, a genocide can, of course, have its own special, even unique features: For instance, in terms of the murderers’ motivation (imperialist disdain for the starving “natives” combined with Social Darwinism and a fanatical devotion to “self-regulating markets” in British cases; a fascist ideology centered on racialized antisemitism, in the Nazi German case; a fascist ideology centered on imperialist supremacism and a settler-colonialist land grab in the Zionist Israeli case, and so on). Genocides also diverge regarding the means employed, such as, in alphabetical order, bombing, bullets, creating conditions for epidemics, gas chambers, lethal displacement, machetes, overwork, and starvation. Genocides, finally, differ in terms of size and the chances of survival among their victims. Since, contrary to widespread misunderstandings, genocide is not defined by large numbers and even less by “success” in entirely exterminating a targeted group, but, most of all, by the intention of the mass murderers, survival chances can vary substantially.
The Israeli genocide of the Palestinians that the world is currently witnessing has several such special, concretely unique (at least for now) features. Some of them even qualify as a particular type of superlative, achieving inverted peaks of depravity.
Take the means of the killing: Not the only one, but the most immediate and prominent one has been massive bombing. While often misleadingly described as “indiscriminate,” that term is correct only in a strictly technical sense: According to Gaza’s authorities, two thirds of the bombs Israel has dropped on its Palestinian victims have been “dumb,” i.e. unguided. Even an official assessment from the U.S., complicit in Israel’s genocide, counts nearly half of them as dumb, which, as the former UN war crimes investigator Marc Garlasco has commented, “completely undercuts” any Israeli claims of “minimizing civilian harm.”
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Please find the full version of this text here.
Again, thanks so much for the whole article and your combination of precision and passion, it is enlighten and inspirational. What we are living today is so overwhelming, so far beyond imagination and nightmarish, that words seems poor tools not only to describe, but to "touch" another person trying to comunicate the ignominy.... It is a multidimensional perversion. The bombs and snipes are there, devastating our brothers and sisters in Gaza (increasingly in the West Bank too), but the blast of the concrete bombs expand to the whole world, erasing the weakened remaining moral and empathy of so big swaths of people lost in the virtuality of the MSM and the lazzyness to continuing going on in a misserable and destroyed "normality", following the narratives, accepting the orders and illegal laws to restrict dissent, trying poorly to defend a system who betrayed every one, imposing aberrations as the common thing in daily life, imposing a callous indiference to the suffering of others, reducing the perception of war crimes to numbers (another expression of the globalist maniacal digitization of life itself). Just a couple of years ago we were trying to elucidate a silent global pharma-militar genocide (whose blast is still going on) did in a secretive way under a brain-washing campaign to immerse the global population in a fictional "new reality", estigmatizing dissent as well, with the same strategy to confuse the language (the same "nazi", "conspiracy", "dissinformation", "anti-vax", that we suffer now as with the "anti-semitic", "holocaust deniers", "terrorist supporters", and so on), to immerse us in an sturming ocean of emotions without the chance to use the language to establish a secure minimal land for our conscience and to comunicate our experiences.
The depravity and corruption of the (miss) leaders is astonishing. And, if we obey and consent their directives, our stupidity is astonishing as well.
Gaza Holocaust is not only a boot in our faces: it can be too a beacon of rebellion, to enlight our consciousness, to guide us to go ahead for our dignity and rights who are intertwinned with them there.
Today we are all palestinians.
I don’t know that it’s unique. It’s just MORE. More destructive, more unashamed, more self-obsessed. What’s depressing is that when I wade into that sewer which is my X feed, is not that the accounts that make excuses and justifications for Israel are mendacious and manipulative, it’s that they genuinely believe that never again is now and that though they knowingly lie their actions are righteous.