It just occurred to me that the collective response to the horrifying images of the results of Israel's genocidal starvation policy in Gaza sums up our society's probable response to Global Warming. In both of these subjects we have known for a long time what is going on. We have protested to no great effect while our elites have done everything to perpetuate these crimes. We have continued to allow them to get away with it and then we get surprised that a point of no return has been reached.
With Gaza, it's been pretty clear that this was going to happen. The Israelis have been very clear that they want to the total expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine. They have said straight out that they can either stay and be killed or they can leave. The latter option is problematic because none of the neighbouring Arab states will take them and neither will Israel's Western allies. [Witness, for instance, the glacial pace with which Canada processes refugee applications from Gaza.] But the refusal of other countries to take the Palestinians isn't seen as a problem for the Israelis. That's something the Palestinians will have to figure out as the Israelis continue to kill them.
And, of course, our oligarchs, our politicians, our media, our decision-makers, are all enabling this slaughter. Our businesses sell the Israelis the weapons of genocide. Our politicians violate our laws to allow these weapon sales. They provide cover for the Israelis. They try to change to subject to "antisemitism." As does our media. It's probably written more about antisemitism than it has about genocide. Our university presidents, our police, and others, do their part to intimidate and suppress those who would protest this genocide and our support for it. The bogus charge of antisemitism is raised against them. Even when the protesters are Jewish.
These vermin are all guilty of enabling a GENOCIDE. Ian Welsh wrote about this the other day:
The last official death toll number from the Gaza Ministry of Health was 59,866. Multiply that by ten, and you have a death toll of 600K, and that’s a conservative estimate, and is before the worst of the famine hit.
This is genocide. It is entirely deliberate and being done with the aid of most of the Western world. We now know that our leaders, had they been Germans in the 30s and 40s, would have gone along with the Holocaust and in many cases, enthusiastically participated. We also know that most of our journalists would have provided cover, along with most of our pundits. (Yglesias is a good example as is almost everyone at the New York Times, BBC, Washington Post and so on.) Britain, Germany and America in particular have gone after anti-genocide activists hard.
Out entire elite class is not just OK with genocide, they’re onside and actively helping it.
If you think they wouldn’t do it to you, you’re in lalaland. They’ve proved they are OK with mass murder, and even if you’re white, don’t think it would save you. Look at Trump’s massive health care and food cuts, or Labour’s Starmer taking away aid from disabled people and cutting off heating for old folks, not to mention both being completely callous towards the exploding number of homeless people. In America far more homes are empty than there are homeless people, yet all the vast majority of politicians do is criminalize homelessness more and more.
And, hopefully, somehow, as a society, Canada WILL be able to purge itself of this racist, murderous filth.
But, in the meantime, I have been struck by the compacency and the intellectual laziness of the Left. If you see someone punching the shit out of a helpless elderly person, ... perhaps you first yell at them to stop. Then you dial 911. Then you try to intervene. You DON'T stand there and tell them in a quiet voice that what they're doing is wrong, over and over again hoping to appeal to their better nature.
Your strategy and tactics should be suited to the crisis at hand. And the pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide Left has, instead, been doing the same stupid shit they've been doing for decades. Pointless peaceful marches. The same marching that has failed to stop stephen harper's serial abuses of our pseudo-democracy. The same marching that has failed to stop the rise of grotesque levels of social inequality. The same marching that did nothing to get us out of Afghanistan. [In that case, the Taliban kept fighting and dying, and the government our money was wasted and that our soldiers were killing and dying for continued to be horribly corrupt and unpopular.]
I've proposed campaigns in the past that were based on different methods. One was to bring down stephen harper and the other was to defend public healthcare. Neither went anywhere because none of the intellectual titans with paying gigs to advance progressive causes felt anything wrong with the continued failure and futility of their traditional methods.
On Phazebuck I've seen stories about German teenagers who defied Hitler's Reich and how they nobly faced their executions when they were convicted by that insane regime. But no matter how noble they were, they still ended up dead. Whether their protests had more than zero impact on the duration of Hitler's regime is doubtful. I totally understand the wish to avoid physical abuse, incarceration, unemployment, when it comes to deciding whether to protest something. Especially if your protests are ineffective.
That is why it is IMPERATIVE that we come up with campaigns and strategies and tactics that could actually accomplish what we're after. And, if chanting peacefully every weekend isn't doing it, then we should think about trying something else.
If your numbers are small you should try to grow them. If you're not going to make the attempt to grow your numbers then you have to make your small group more effective in their protests. This might involve illegal actions. And if that's the case, then you have to be extremely focused in your actions so that the results are worthy of the risks.
But the better option, obviously, is to grow your numbers. And you do this by having a POSITIVE message. You have CLEAR GOALS that you want to accomplish and you have a COHERENT PLAN to achive those goals. So that when you approach people, ordinary, sane, decent people, ... THE MAJORITY, about whether they'd like to stop a genocide or save the planet from global warming, you have a greater chance of enlisting them in your cause than if you're just stupidly continuing to chant empty slogans for an hour or two on the weekend.
Because, as we see, on both those issue, "protest as usual" has utterly failed to stop the genocide in Gaza and has utterly failed to force our governments and businesses to reverse course on global warming. And, at some point, reality intrudes upon our complacency. People can only survive so long without food and water and shelter and medicine. At some point, the physical realities of starvation reach a tipping point and people start to die in larger and larger numbers. And then the moronic blowhards shouting idiotic nonsense about "revolution" and "no justice no peace" have nothing left to defend.
And it's the same thing with global warming. At some point (perhaps it's already happened) tipping points are passed and environmental/atmospheric/climate forces are set in motion and there is no coming back from things. No matter how many articles you post online. No matter how often you and the usual suspects have your peaceful, performative "actions."
Lastly, I want to mention that someone on my phazebuck feed posted a cartoon of the United Nations personified as a flying super-hero, touching ground in Gaza and posing heroically and saying that he condemned the genocide and then flying away without doing anything to stop it. I said the same thing could be said about the protesters in the West, given the uselessness of their tactics. The poster of the cartoon replied that it wasn't the same thing. He mentioned some guy who stood in front of some US government building every day during the Vietnam War with a sign signalling his opposition to it. He didn't have an impact he knew. But he said: "I don't expect to change my country. But I want to show that it hasn't change me."
I thought to myself that the point of protesting genocide was more to try to stop the genocide and not to just feel good about yourself. But if it was the latter, then congratulations. Mission accomplished.
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