Sad Comparisons

 

I'd been thinking about this subject before I read Caitlin Johnstone's great essay: "Gaza Is Exposing Western Liberals For The Frauds They Are."

Everything that mainstream liberals claim to oppose is on full display in Israel’s actions in Gaza. Racism. Fascism. Tyranny. Injustice. Genocide. Yet they must necessarily avoid throwing themselves into opposing these things there at all cost, because it would mean acknowledging that their own political allegiances are inseparably interwoven with them. 

It would mean turning against Biden during an election year. It would mean admitting that their entire political posture against Trump all these years has been a phony performance, because they’re tacitly endorsing all the things they claimed to hate about him. It would mean admitting their entire worldview is a lie, and that all their critics to their left have been correct.

The western liberal is therefore in the year 2024 engaged in an exhausting regimen of nonstop mental gymnastics to avoid having an authentic relationship with the reality of what’s happening Gaza. They squirm this way and that, twisting their gaze toward empty nonsense like Barbie movie Oscar snubs and Trump’s latest instance of verbal diarrhea to avoid looking at what’s happening. On those odd occasions when they are forced to confront the reality of Gaza they start spouting gibberish about how “complicated” and “heartbreaking” it is and how they hope there can be peace as soon as possible, while frenetically avoiding saying precisely how that “peace” should be brought about.

Gaza exposes the mainstream western liberal ideology for the kayfabe performance it always has been. The job of the so-called liberal “moderate” has never been to oppose racism, fascism, tyranny, injustice or genocide, their job is to perpetually give the thumbs-up to one head of the two-headed monster that is the murderous western empire. Their job is to help put a positive spin on a globe-spanning power structure that is fueled by human blood. To help elect Bidens and Starmers and Trudeaus and Albaneses who will ensure that the gears of the empire keep on turning completely unhindered while paying lip service to human rights and social justice.

For me, it was watching all my fellow Torontonians out Christmas shopping as this atrocity in Gaza was continuing as it had from October 7th onward.  I wondered to myself how many of these people had gone an entire day without thinking about this deliberate mass-murder campaign going on with Canada's support.

For my part, I'd been trying to find a group that would keep me informed of actions going on in Toronto that I could participate in.  But I found it surprisingly difficult.  Someone on my Fazebuck newsfeed would post notices for rallies on the day they were happening.   When I already had something like an appointment planned or a volunteering thing scheduled.  I joined a Fazebuck group purportedly about "Toronto Against Genocide In Gaza" but all they did was post memes that other people had made.  My post asking for notification of upcoming actions was "held" until something about me could be "verified" and after three days of seeing memes, some of which I'd seen elsewhere, while my post still wasn't visible, I quit in disgust.

There was a Muslim-led group way out in Mississaugua that a Google search found for me but nothing on their website informed me of anything that I could do.  I have since found a coalition of Jewish human-rights groups that will allow me to participate as a "supporter."  I recently attended a march from the Royal Ontario Museum to the Israeli Consulate at Yonge and Bloor.  (Before that I wrote an email letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly asking that Canada do the right thing and call for a ceasefire.)

But getting back to those Christmas shoppers; How many of them had thought about the genocide in Gaza during a 24-hour period?  How many had ever thought that they should do something about it?

And then, one morning, I found out that they'd awarded the Oscars.  And apparently some people got "snubbed" by The Academy and didn't win an award or didn't even get nominated (I don't know) and I thought, how grotesque that we're even talking about this when 30,000 people have been deliberately slaughtered and half-a-million more are being deliberately starved while they're forced to live in rubble exposed to the elements without clean drinking water or sanitation.  And then, with Caitlin Johnstone's post, I decided to write about something that has been in my thoughts in recent days.

In a comparison between ourselves and the German people in the 1940's, how do we hold up?  

In Europe in the 1940's there was a hideously enormous amount of antisemitism.  The majority population was much more religiously Christian than it is today and so there was all the animosity against non-believers as well as the specifics of the delusional opinions many Christians then had about the role of the Jews.  But there were also stereotypes about the Jewish character that the majority population believed which made many of them unsympathetic or even hostile to the Jews.

Today, there is an enormous amount of Islamophobia.  Both the [often] right-wing "Christian" variety and the liberal-secular variety.  Muslims are seen as believers in a degenerate religion, a "death-cult" that seeks to impose its Medieval values on everyone else.  (Israeli zionists believe this even more strongly, but I'm going to focus on Canada/North America.)  There is a widespread belief that Muslims are more prone to "terrorism" than other people.  They are irrational people who refuse to live peacefully with other cultures.  They're always going on a "Jihad" against other peoples to try to forcibly convert them to their archaic, intolerant ways.  (Sometimes this stereotype is thought of as being only peculiar to Arabs [which is what the Palestinians are] and other times being a Muslim Arab is considered to be a "double whammy" of violence and fanaticism.)

How many Canadians do you think have some stupid notion in their heads that, while the murder of thousands of children is always bad, the problem with Gazans is that they "support Hamas" which is an intolerant, terrorist, antisemitic group.  If they'd only have "risen up" and overthrown Hamas none of this would have happened.  And therefore, while very few such Canadians would clearly articulate this, they probably have some lazy, incoherent notion that the murder of these thousands of children, while "regrettable" is also somewhat "understandable."

What did the Germans know about The Holocaust?  With regards to the slaughter in the east (in Poland and the captured lands of the Soviet Union) it appears that there was some effort to suppress knowledge of what was going on.  There doesn't appear to have been any attempts to publicize it and broadcast it to the world as a great victory.  But soldiers returning home on leave, or, perhaps, in letters home, doubtlessly spoke of what they'd seen and this would have filtered out to the wider German society as stories or at least rumours.  Words that were often received third-hand, so to speak.

For the German Jews and those from Western and Central Europe, the offical lie was that they were being relocated.  The same way that Canadians and US-Americans were mostly supportive or apathetic about how the ethnic Japanese in our countries were dispossessed of their property and herded into prison-camps in the interior, many Germans believed the same thing was happening to the Jews.  Maybe people living near the camps could figure out what was going on.  Maybe some of them couldn't.  There were no news reels playing in the theatres about the death camps.  There were no radio broadcasts about them.  There were no newspaper articles by investigative journalists outlining the horrors.  

In short, whatever the Germans (who were not soldiers or SS) knew was what they had been told, often at third-hand, about the crimes of their government.

Whereas with us, ... well, we have been actually watching the slaughter on our screens.  Cameras show us the carnage.  We've seen the image of the dead civilians.  We've heard immediately about children undergoing amputations without anaesthetics.  We know RIGHT NOW that Gaza is being denied food and water.

Apparently Adolph Hitler had a prodigious memory for facts and details.  It's said that he was able to overawe even his generals with his knowledge of the military facts of given situations in order to get them to submit to his arguments.  He also had supreme self-confidence in his semi-coherent view of the world.  This being a "fascist" view of the world, which, as I've argued elsewhere, consists of a hodgepodge of any society's "traditional" (which really just means "long-held") beliefs.  Authority is good.  Crime is bad.  Homosexuals are vile.  Patriarchy is awesome.  Poverty is self-inflicted.  Whatever.  In mid-20th Century Germany, we could add that the military is great, defeat in World War I was caused by liberals, socialists and Jews, and (relatedly) that the Jews are the enemy within.

This is my roundabout way of saying, that in many ways, Hitler was something of a major idiot.  Despite the fact that HE invaded Poland when both Britain and France had clearly stated that that line was the one line that he shouldn't cross, and despite the fact that HE invaded the Soviet Union when Stalin was still adhering to the Germany-USSR non-aggression pact, nonetheless Hitler would blather about how it was the Jews who had started these wars and that therefore it was the Jews who were going to be punished.

In the same way, despite the fact that Israel was founded on the violent dispossesion of Arab lands in the Nakba of 1948, and despite the fact that by the 1990's Oslo Accords the Palestinians had resigned themselves to the West Bank and Gaza, Israel continues to see itself as the victim.  Despite its continued violations of the Oslo Accords and its continued theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank, it believes that it is the Palestinians who are attacking them without reason.  Despite the fact that Hamas was supported in its early days by Israel to divide the Palestinians and weaken the Palestine Liberation Organization, and despite the fact that Hamas only rose in popularity due to Palestinian Authority's acquiesence to Israeli violations and abuses, Israeli extremists continue to bray about the violence and intolerance of Hamas.  They portray the Hamas attack on October 7th as this completely out-of-nowhere atrocity.  In so doing, the Netanyahu government shows itself to be of the same cloth as the Nazis.

Ordinary Germans in World War Two had to think about getting through their own lives.  As do we.  Some of them were no doubt enthusiastic antisemites and supporters of the nazi dictatorship.  But many were not.  Just like us, many were "progressive" and probably more were apolitical.  But they all had to make a living.  There was a war on.  Some families had fathers, sons or brothers at the fighting fronts.  Some people were homeless from Allied bombing raids and were thinking about finding a place to live.  Some people were trying to get ration cards to feed their families.  Some were looking for work as their original workplaces had been destroyed by bombs.  Towards the end of the war, when the Holocaust of the Western European Jews accelerated, these ordinary Germans were often traumatized, hungry, uprooted themselves.  And, obviously, there was the fact that Germany was a fascist dictatorship.  What would have happened to anyone who wrote letters to the state condemning the treatment of the Jews (or any of the other minorities targetted by the Nazis)?  Imagine what would have happened to a protest rally!

Whereas us?  Well, thanks to the failures of late-capitalism to provide economic stability for the majority, many of us are genuinely stressed about the cost-of-living.  Many of us are overwhelmed by the seeming unstoppability of global warming.  Many of us are having nitwit debates about COVID-19 and "plandemics."  A lot of brainwashed people are terrified that Russia, China and Iran want to kill us (for no reason whatsoever).  But, on the other hand, we certainly don't have to worry about being arrested and sent to a concentration camp for speaking our mind.  A LOT of us are doing okay.  A LOT of us can find the time to worry about the Oscars that "The Barbie Movie" didn't win.  A LOT of us are doing the same stupid things that we always do without giving a second thought to the vile, murderous, racist, abominable, cruel, indefensible mass-murder GENOCIDE of the Palestinians by Israeli nazis.

And there's no excuse for that.