I’m still so numb. Waiting to wake up from my cyronic stupification. I can’t write, can hardly get a spoon to my mouth. This world is just so full of death and vile action. All the while people are going to yoga lessons and dreaming of 7 slice toasters while Rome burns.
What am I going on about?
It’s maddening that any human being can justify at all, the wholesale slaughter in Gaza. But so many do. The histeronics is hilarious. Tens of thousands of children have needlessly died, yet in the name of race, religion, justice, geopolitics or whatever label - it is casually deemed to be “necessary”. Forget all the categories, we are all just lumps of flesh, equal in value and no violence is right. I don’t care how you justify it. You are wrong.
Yet Rome burns. The barbarians send their missles of hate to kill and kill and kill again. The business of war wins - how else we gonna pay for those toasters?
What’s even more sickening is that this has been going on for a looooooong time. I’m a student of the Holocaust. I’ve dedicated a large chunk of my life to this subject. I know genocide when I see it. And it has been going on for decades.
You see - the largest part of the genocide of Jews wasn’t them getting gassed or shot. It was the decades prior of Germany displacing and exiling so many from their historical lands in Europe, as European citizenry. Millions of Jews left Europe and Germany prior to the second world war. Millions abandoned their religion and become Christian.
This was the wholesale, telltale sign and design of the genocide known as the Shoah or Holocaust, to displace and replace the Jewish communities in Europe through terror, legal injustice, a rigged game, discrimination etc … . War came on and then there was an excuse to use murder and violence but that was just one piece of this continuing plan.
The same with Gaza. The same with the Nakbah - a similar genocidal catastrophy. Israel isn’t commiting genocide just NOW. It has been going on before our eyes and noses and minds for decades. Palestinians being displaced and pushed out into exile. The Jews should know a thing or three or four about exile … Look at this film, Scenes From Under Occupation In Gaza. This was 60 years ago - it’s the same old theme song. Displace and replace.
Currently, little is being told, about how many Palestinians are leaving, desperately leaving Gaza and the West Bank. But also have been doing so for decades. There houses are demolished, they live in despair and without any prospects. The policy of Israel is to displace and then replace. And when war flares — of course, kill. But that’s just one aspect of the genocidal design.
Dr. Ilan Pappe calls it “incrimental genocide”. As a historian he’s well aware of the process.
So don’t let anyone tell you this is a momentary flare up and crisis. No - it is pure genocide that has been slowly strangling a people, a culture.
And just like the Nazis, we take our eye off the ball by focusing on the killing, murders alone. As vile and criminal is the ideology that wants to “get them out” and exile a people from their home. In history, there is a long list of this type of drip, drip genocide … Tartars, Kurds, Rohyinga, Armenians, the Tigray … I could go on almost forever.
The buck should stop here, now. Or let’s not keep using the word “civilized” and just bannish it from our dictionaries. I even feel ashamed that I’m repeating myself here, over and over … it is like nobody hears a damn thing.
I wrote this about the Holocaust. But it applies to Gaza. The poor don’t stand a chance against those with Zyklon B, Trident missles and hands that turn on the ovens.
Food For Thought
Uncle Jacob
Forty years kneading dough
After the war,
Told me he had found only
Two ways of making bread;
The slow bake of philosophy
the luxury of the rich or high minded,
for the rest, the quick snatch of wonder
between the long steady strokes of the whip.
Then sternly, his strong hand on my shoulder
He said,
“Son, always be on the other end of the whip,
for there they eat not bread but cake.
Living is an affair for those who turn on the ovens.
Incrimental Genocide