Sabrina Carpenter & Gaza

 

When I first got on to Instagram a few years ago, I went to the "search" page and the company already offered me lots of images to look at.  Apparently some people or things are "trending" and they're presented to you even if they're not the sorts of things you post or that you'd have otherwise shown an interest in.

At the time, there were lots of pictures of a WWE female wrestler named Rhea Ripley (who has impressive shoulders) and, also, pictures of a female singer named Doja Cat.  I don't know why Rhea Ripley was trending, but Doja Cat was then currently on tour.

Over the years, along with my searches for cartoonists and friends I notice brief waves of images of various celebrities coming and going.  And, for the past couple of months it's been this young woman named Sabrina Carpenter who has had a big hit with the song "Espresso" which I still haven't listened to.  She appears to be a tiny thing who likes to have a lot of fun and is automatically friends with lots of already established pop-culture celebrity giants.  Some unasked for pop-culture headline on my browser homepage described "Espresso" as enjoyable, meaningless fun.

Good for her.

I like a good time as much as the next person.  We can't spend all our time on doom and gloom.  We don't all have to be saints wearing hair shirts until peace and social justice have been achieved.  So, I personally have nothing against Sabrina Carpenter.  It's just that watching all these pop-culture figures and events going on while Israel is perpetrating a hideous genocide of the Palestinian people, and our own political leaders are providing Israel with diplomatic cover and (especially in the case of the USA, financial and military support without which the genocide couldn't even be carried out) makes me a little nauseous.

We're worse than the Germans in World War II during the Holocaust.  Because they lived in a dictatorship that massively controlled access to information, that restricted all rights and freedoms including freedom of speech and protesting.  And they were in the middle of a war.

I recently read a biography of early-20th Century pioneering physicist Max Planck by the US-American physicist-writer Brandon R. Brown.  Like many an Anglo-American, Brown critiques Planck's concessions to Nazi Germany.  Brown points out the many times that Planck attempted to resist the dictatorship's demands, and to protect those he could from it.  But, the question is asked, did Planck do enough?

I have to say, having watched the US-American Empire engage in long-term atrocities over the decades of my life in all parts of the world, but especially in the Middle East since the 1990's, and having watched the media, the USA's allies [including Canada] go along with these crimes, and especially today, seeing pleasant, "respectable" liberals making their idiotic justifications for Israel's genocidal rampage in Gaza, I find the "enomous condescension of posterity" of post-1945 Anglo-American writers towards the citizens of Germany, Japan, or the Soviet Union, to be a little tiresome.  To his credit, Brown is (when all is said and done) very fair in his treatment of the compromises and other decisions that Planck made.  But I just find most of these Anglo-American judgments betray an ignorance of the same moral failures being perpetrated by liberal and [now "respectable"] conservatives (like Liz Cheney!) New York Times readers.

Well, here we are in a society where, even if shit-heads like university administrations, federal politicians, etc., attempt to make criticism of Israel illegal, they will fail at the Supreme Court and, regardless, they won't be able to simply shoot those who do criticize Israel.  We can go online and see the sufferings in Gaza with our own eyes.  We know about the simultaneous assaults on Palestinians in the West Bank.  And what are we doing about it?  I've written some angry emails to various politicians.  I've attended about five protests.  I do my best to inform family and friends about what's happening.  I've signed about four petitions.

Recently another individual self-immolated himself in protest against the USA's complicity in the genocide of the Palestinians.  Matt Nelson joins Aaron Bushnell and a still-unidentified woman who have courageously made the ultimate sacrifice to demonstrate their horror and anger at the sickness of their society.

Where are the politicians and union leaders speaking out with the anger and the passion that is required for this issue?  And all of these celebrities who have, in the past, made tepid statements in support of the Palestinians?  If you have millions of dollars in the bank and made a few big movies or songs, ... you're going to be okay if it all ends because you speak out against GENOCIDE.  And it might not be a career-ender to do so.  But even if it is, ... you're a millionaire.  You'll be okay.  Is keeping quiet about GENOCIDE the moral cost for your career?

We are an empty-headed, delusional, self-centred, ignorant society/species.  I've had decades to build up scar tissue, watching one crime after another, watching leftists pat themselves on the back for useless, token protests and movements.

Caitlin Johnstone writes about the growing horror at the vapid, disgusting nature of our societies.  She says people are free to steal her work, so I shall cut and paste the entire thing:

The west is a dystopian wasteland of moral degeneracy.

Usually when you hear a white person talk about moral degeneracy it’s some wingnut denouncing LGBTQ rights or women’s reproductive rights or whatever, but that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about real things here.

The real moral decay of our society is illustrated in the way all mainstream political candidates can openly support war crimes currently being inflicted on people in the global south without being immediately removed from power. The way monstrous war criminals of past administrations can endorse a liberal candidate without causing self-proclaimed progressives to recoil from that candidate in horror. The way you can have the two viable candidates for the world’s most powerful elected position both pledge to continue an active genocide without instantly sparking a revolution.

The moral degeneracy of this civilization looks like living lives of relative comfort built on the backs of workers in the global south whose labor and resources are extracted from their nations at profoundly exploitative rates, while raining military explosives on impoverished populations who dare to disobey the dictates of our government, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, and acting like this is all fine and normal.

Being born into western civilization is like waking up in the middle of a massive lynch mob. Something terrible is happening, and everyone’s going along with it and telling you it’s fine and it’s normal, and even if you’re able to figure out that what they’re doing is wrong in all the chaos and confusion you find yourself powerless to stop them, because the whole thing has so much momentum already and there are far too many people blindly caught up in the frenzy of bloodlust for you to make everyone change course. Just continuing to live among them makes you complicit in their actions in many ways, but you have nowhere else to go besides this lynch mob town you were born into. So you just move to the fringes of the mob and share your objections with the few people who will listen to you.

Our civilization is cruel and savage, but we compartmentalize away from its cruelty and savagery and laugh at our sitcoms and vapid comedians and make believe the worst things happening politically in our society are the mainstream culture war wedge issues that pundits and politicians prefer to keep us talking about. We live out our lives sedated by entertainment and social media and food and pharmaceuticals while genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and ecocide unfold all around us, thinking ourselves good and virtuous if we are kind to our pets and hold the correct opinions about racial justice and vaccines.

If we as a society were actually good, none of this would be happening. Moral clarity would find all this intolerable, and would reject it and eject it by any means necessary. Which is why the powerful pour so much energy into keeping us all sedated and confused. A lot of power and wealth rides on our lack of moral clarity.

There is much wealth to be gained by exploiting labor and extracting resources around the world. There is much power to be secured by murdering, starving and terrorizing any population which refuses to bow to the interests of the western empire. This is why the western empire has the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever devised: because so much wealth and power depends on ensuring the west remains in a state of moral degeneracy, and that westerners do not regard the citizenry of the global south as fully human.

I personally reject religion, not because I’m some fedora-wearing wanker who makes fun of people for believing in God, but because I reject all aspects of the profoundly sick culture I was born into. Because I don’t resonate with religion I often feel myself pulling away from religious-sounding jargon framing the actions of the western empire as “demonic” or calling the US “the great Satan” — but at the same time I completely understand it. When I see the inside of a child’s skull for the hundredth time next to video footage of IDF soldiers mockingly dressed in the clothes of dead or displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead or displaced children while western podium pontiffs pretend to believe the military they’re arming has done nothing wrong, I do struggle to find adjectives strong enough to describe what I am looking at. Maybe “demonic” is as close as you can get, even if you don’t believe in actual biblical demons.

That’s what I’m talking about when I say the west is a wasteland of moral degeneracy. The type of civilization which would allow its government to do things like this necessarily has a collective conscience that has been so warped and twisted by propaganda and self-interest that it’s the same as not having a conscience at all. If you can’t regard the vast majority of the population of this planet as fully human and equal to yourself, then morally speaking you’re no better than the perpetrators of slavery and genocide we’ve been taught to judge negatively in history class.

And that’s the norm here. It’s what we were born into. It’s what we spend all our lives being trained to accept as normal.

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