Pearls and Irritations

The courage it takes to “know”, to “realise”, to “comprehend” when “trusted” global powers act against humanity is a profoundly personal effort. Your success will only ever be relative. Yet your choices will and do affect the collective (society). They also affect your identity: where and how you feel alliances, where and how you draw a sense of belonging. Or suffer the dangers of exclusion.

That’s no small thing. It could be argued that it’s “everything” when feelings run deep. How you make any shift in your “knowing” will depend on the intersection of a number of contexts, among them what else is going on in your individual life (what other stress, illness, grief, trauma you already bear), as well as what is spoken of or denied in those precious circles of family, work, community, perhaps faith, on which every one of us depend.

There are also unconscious forces at work in all of us that may make us subject to constantly reinforced propaganda, and the losses of perspective and clarity that propaganda trades upon.

Whatever the information that comes to us from external sources, it is in most instances mediated through the biased, self-serving filters exercised by public or mainstream media. We turn on the news. We open a newspaper. Or read one online. We subscribe to “serious” journals. We listen to the radio and podcasts. We do our best.

Adding complexity to the already-mediated commentary we consciously and unconsciously absorb, it is inarguable that we receive that content through an individual mind (consciousness) that is “conditioned” by the time and culture in which we live. Your mind, or mine, may be “open” (again, relatively so), including to new information. It may also be ideologically or religiously brainwashed/colonised, not because we are stupid or gullible, on the contrary, but through the efficacy of how a particular religious or political culture interprets the times we live in, what has gone before, what lies ahead, and how that impacts not just “us” but the people most “like us” and unlike – so we believe – the feared or despised or dismissed “others”.

These complex states of mind significantly affect what questions we become capable of asking – both out of the limits of our own experiences and the limits of what we have been exposed to, or have chosen to expose ourselves to, over a lifetime.

“I can’t be what I’m not. I can’t say something I don’t believe. As you well know, I’ve never been willing to use the term ‘West Bank’. There is no such thing. I speak of Judea and Samaria. I tell people there is no ‘occupation.’ It is a land that is ‘occupied’ by the people who have had a rightful deed to the place for 3,500 years, since the time of Abraham [my italics].”

Mike Huckabee, proposed US Ambassador to Israel under the Trump administration, speaking on 17 November 2024

The very idea of a wholly “rational” or disinterested human being is a fallacy. We are creatures of passion as well as opinions and instincts. I have spent a lifetime working in what is loosely called mental health. inextricable from spiritual health, both individual and collective.

A person’s “truths” may be impenetrable and therefore unmoved by “facts” because for any one of us to shift our perspective in a decisive way on what has firmed up into an “I am” belief may demand a shift that risks unharnessing us from our solid ground within: the inner edifice of belief, hope, trust that goes beyond identity to one’s very sense of self.

 “Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)

Does that mean I‘m suggesting it’s understandable or inevitable, forgivable even, that the most ideologically colonised among us can justify their wrongdoing because they sincerely believe it to be right doing? No. What I and millions of others see, however, is that Huckabee and his many kin are given a free pass to pursue their pseudo-religious inhumane fanaticism because it suits the Western powers that they do so – including the Western legacy billionaire media, the unchecked murderous military-industrial so-called complex, the anti-environmentalists who wish to pillage the oil and gas off Northern Gaza and control the sources of water as well as oil over much of the Middle East and most particularly in the territories to which they lay “Divinely ordained” claim. Those territories that were called, “A land without people for a people without land,” as Palestinians were driven from them.

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism)

This is POLITICAL immorality, greed, evil at their most blatant. Wrapping it up in religious fundamentalist language gives cover to intentions that are as abhorrent to fair-minded thinking as anything we have encountered this century. And that are repeated ad nauseam on our daily news “services”.

With breath-taking wilful ingenuousness, the BBC reported just days ago:

“What approach Trump will take to the Israel-Gaza war is still unclear. But the right wing of Israeli politics has welcomed the president-elect’s appointment of Huckabee, seeing it as predicting another term of American policy highly favourable to their longstanding aims of holding on to territory in the West Bank and expanding settlements. The appointment was greeted with joy by two far-right ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. On the social media platform X, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich messaged his congratulations to “a consistent and loyal friend”, while Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister, wrote “Mike Huckabee” with heart emojis [my italics].”

I could fill your screen with quotes from Smotrich and Ben-Gvir saturated in race hatred and threats to every Palestinian still alive. But those two debased human beings and their many supporters keep Netanyahu in power…keep the Western media fictions alive…keep the Israeli hostages imprisoned… ensure that bombs keep falling… that the children of Palestine, occupied Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, but especially Gaza, are herded, dispossessed, maimed, starved, orphaned, slaughtered. And CAN DO SO because Western “powers” supply the means. And Western media provide the cover.

Should a small on-line journal such as this one be as engaged as it is with events happening far away? Except they are not Far Away. Into our living rooms, ears and eyes pour the excuses; the evidence of futile handwringing; the fake assurances that a cease-fire can be achieved while untold billions are spent on weapons and the imprisoned population on whom they are “tried out” must depend for their most basic aid on the very governments intent on or complicit in destroying them. Journalists, health and humanitarian aid workers, and children are killed in record numbers, according to Amnesty International. Red lines are cynically defined then inevitably crossed; all run with blood.

Please, do not take my words for any of this. Maybe not even the words of Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt. How can you be sure that I am not a propagandist threatening the safety of what some still call “the only democracy in the Middle East”? Please, instead hear Professor Ori Goldberg @ori_goldberg who writes most days from his home in Israel, seeking to convey the utter despair that many wholly humane Jewish Israelis, just like him, feel at what their country has descended to. And how this travesty has been used/manipulated by the US primarily for their brazen hegemonic reasons, with the explicit support also of the “West”, including Australia. And note, as you read, how little of this lived reality is anywhere near your “everyday” media – never mind the extent of the horrors the US/Israel/UK/Germany axis is inflicting or supporting through arms or calculated propaganda on our watch.

18 November 2024. 5.20pm.

1/ Time doesn’t pass in Gaza anymore. That is another one of Israel’s innovations in the field of genocide. Nothing matters in Gaza. There is nothing to keep, nothing for which to strive. Everyone is a casualty. Even survival is no longer a goal. You do, or you don’t. —>

2/ Israel’s genocide prides itself on its inefficiency. After all, we say, had we wanted to kill them all we would have just killed them all. But don’t even pretend anymore. We don’t cite “Hamas acitivists” as the reason for destroying whole families. We have at it. —>

3/ It doesn’t matter. We kill 50, 60, 70 Palestinians a day. Sometimes more. It doesn’t matter. They are already dead. They were never truly alive. Their deaths are a known outcome of our lives. We don’t want to stop. We think we can’t. We’ve come this far, right? —>

4/ But we don’t know where we’re going. To be more accurate, we’re not going anywhere. We are here and now. Everywhere we are is here and now. We have no past. We certainly have no future. All we have is the always-growing wreaking of destruction and death. Here and now. —>

5/ This is the mark we leave on humanity, the lesson to be learned. Nothing is more criminal than the willful detachment from any and all context. We denied time to embrace death. Nothing is more murderous than solipsism.

A day later, 19 November 2024, 9.52 pm

1/ I’ve been accused of being overly gloomy because I have cancer [Prof Goldberg has colon cancer]. I don’t think that’s true, because having cancer is a full-time job so there’s no time for gloom. But I’ll concede so I can try and think what may be worth fighting for in the collective heart of darkness. —>

2/ I am thinking of the world more than of Israel. Israel must be chastened. It must pay for its actions. It must alter itself radically, build itself anew on justice and equality. But what of the world? What world can prevent a new, improved genocide? —>

3/ The first order of the day is clarity. I disagree with the Netanyahus of the world (Trump, Urban, Wilders) on every aspect of any policy they have ever articulated. I am their enemy to the death because obfuscation strikes me as their means and their end. —>

4/ Aside from a commitment to dehumanization, all of them make a tremendous amount of noise specifically meant to sow confusion and generate mistrust. We had one such episode a few days ago. A junior Netanyahu aide has been arrested for leaking to the foreign press. —>

5/ Obviously, he didn’t do it alone. That’s not the point. Sources close to the PM’s office claimed the aide had been moved to solitary suicide watch. The reasons? He had been put into a cell with “security prisoners” (Palestinians) and a noose had been found in the cell. —>

6/ The retraction came an hour later – no Palestinians, no noose, no suicide. Just noise meant to stir up confusion, expand the lack of faith in the authorities and generally disable any semblance of orderly life. Clarity is the enemy of any aspiring authoritarian. —>

7/ I would like to say that clarity is not necessarily partisan, but I think it is. Clarity is a prerogative of the left. The left needs to reject any attempts to structure politics built on obfuscation. The left needs to articulate the clarity of life. —>

8/ Clarity is not simplicity. Life is not simple. It incorporates solidarity, identity, needs and commitments. But life is the opposite of death. Those who espouse death cannot appropriate life as their cause. The distinction is as clear as day. —>

9/ Those who ground their lives in the death of others are guilty of both obfuscation and denial of life. That is also quite clear. Dehumanization is a denial of life. Those who practice it choose and generate death. Gaza provides a self-explanatory example. —>

10/ Clarity trumps unity. Clarity breeds solidarity, which is the sine qua non of sustainable society at every level. It is clear, not simple, that life is sacred. We fight for a world that values clarity as its basic political virtue.

*Twitter under its new owner is a correctly despised medium. It is also where you can find first-hand reports unavailable through most mainstream media. Two informed if cautious ABC journalists/writers: John Lyons @TheLyonsDen, Eric Tlozek @EricTlozek . You can discover the Jewish Council of Australia @jewishcouncilAU that opposes “antisemitism & racism and [supports] Palestinian freedom & justice”. Additionally, there is on-the-ground reporting from Mondoweiss via BlueSky https://bsky.app/profile/mondoweiss.net (as well as X), also Middle East Eye @middleeasteye-rss.bsky.social, William Dalrymple @willdalrymple.bsky.social, and from Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, back to X: @FranceskAlbs.

We must survive. Through clarity and resistance to propaganda, we can survive. Through solidarity and meaningful mutual support, we may flourish. These are choices that honour our shared, indivisible humanity.