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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-triumph-of-the-apocalyptics/

The Triumph of the Apocalyptics

In the course of almost four years, and really dating back a decade and a half, I’ve managed to read most of the writings of the intellectuals, titans of industry, and government officials who constructed the strange reality of 2020 and after. They wanted to conduct a science experiment on the human population. Because infectious disease knows no borders, they knew for sure it would have to be a global one. 

They had every detail worked out in their models. They knew how far apart people would need to stand. They knew that the best way to stop any common virus from spreading would be total isolation of the whole human population insofar as that was possible. Families could not do that of course but they figured that they could live in different rooms or simply stay six feet apart. If they couldn’t do that, they could mask up. 

It goes without saying – but they said it anyway because their models told them so – that indoor and outdoor venues where people gathered had to be closed (those were the exact words issued by the White House on March 16, 2020). The scheme was deployed first in China, then Northern Italy, then the United States, and the rest of the world fell in line, all but a handful of nations including Sweden, which faced many months of brutal criticism for allowing freedom for its citizens. 

It’s truly hard to imagine what the architects of this barbaric policy believed would happen next. Is it as simple (and ridiculous) as believing that a respiratory virus would just disappear? Or that a potion would show up in time to inoculate the whole population even though no one has ever successfully come up with something like that before? Is that what they believed? 

Maybe. Or maybe it was just fun or otherwise remuneratively advantageous to try out a grand and global experiment on the human population. Certainly it was profitable for many, even if it wrecked the social, cultural, economic, and political lives of billions of people. Even as I write those words, it’s hard to believe they are not out of some dystopian fiction. And yet this is what happened. 

Almost immediately, the idea of human rights took a back seat. Obviously so. So did the idea of equal freedom: that was immediately on the chopping block. By edict, the human population was divided into categories. It began with essential and nonessential, distinctions drawn from military protocols that suddenly pertained to the whole of the civilian world. 

That was only the beginning of the stark divisions. The stigmatization of the sick began immediately too. Were they sick because they were insufficiently compliant? Did they disobey the protocols? In a hundred years of public health, we’ve not seen this level and scale of demarcation. Some of this was attempted during the AIDS crisis (pushed by none other than Anthony Fauci) but not this aggressively or comprehensively. 

In those days, you could feel the concern for basic rights and freedom slipping, and with it the moral conscience of the public mind. From the beginning, it felt like martial law and the population was being divided: sick vs. well, compliant vs. noncompliant, essential vs non-essential, elective surgeries vs. emergencies needing medical services. And so on. 

And this expanded dramatically over the coming months. When face coverings came along, it was masked vs unmasked. When some states started opening, it became red vs. blue. Us vs. them. 

When the vaccine came along, the ultimate division hit, piling upon and swamping all the others: vaccinated vs. unvaccinated. The mandates massively disrupted the labor force. The public accommodations of whole cities were shut off to the unvaccinated, so that noncompliant citizens could not go to restaurants, bars, libraries, theaters, or other public places. Even houses of worship went along even though they didn’t have to, breaking their congregations into two parts. 

Behind all of this was a political motive that traces to a text that every high expert still celebrates as a prescient and decisive refutation of liberal values: Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political from 1932. This essay is utterly dismissive of human rights on grounds that such notions do not sustain robust states. He was of course a Nazi jurist and his thought laid the groundwork for the demonization of the Jews and the march of the totalitarian state. 

In Schmitt’s mind, the friend/enemy distinction is the best method of rallying the people around a grand cause that gives life meaning. This impulse is what gives strength to the state. He goes further: the friend/enemy distinction is best ignited in the reality of bloodshed:

“The state as the decisive political entity possesses an enormous power: the possibility of waging war and thereby publicly disposing of the lives of men. The jus belli contains such a disposition. It implies a double possibility: the right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies.”

If for years, you have asked the question “Where does this end?” we now have our answer, which seems inevitable in retrospect: war. We are looking at the deaths of innocents and probably this as just the beginning. The lockdowns broke not only the old moral codes and agreed-upon limits to state power. It broke the human personality and spirit the whole world over. It gave rise to a bloodlust that was barely beneath the surface. 

States went crazy in bullying and dividing their citizens. It happened nearly everywhere but Israel was a leading case in point, as Brownstone has pointed out repeatedly. The citizenry has never been more divided and the state never more distracted from security concerns. The delicate peace was shattered in shocking ways on October 8, 2023 in a ghastly attack that revealed the worst security failure in the vulnerable state in its history. 

That incident then encouraged and further unleashed the apocalyptics, whole peoples determined to take the next step in the dehumanization of the population and the use of appalling means of doing the unthinkable: extermination, a word now thrown around as if it is fine and normal to speak this way. This conflict has now reached further into the politics of every country and down to every civic association, communities of intellectuals, and personal friendship. As Schmitt might have loved – and what Bret Weinstein calls Goliath (the unity of administrative state, media, corporate power, and elite tech platforms) surely celebrates – everyone is being turned into the category of friend and enemy. 

We are reminded at last of how incredibly fragile civilization – and the peace and freedom that gives rise to it – truly is. We should worry that in the drama of the moment, the history recounted above will be discarded from human memory. The plans for virus eradication failed so badly that many of its perpetrators are desperate for a dramatic change of subject so that they can avoid responsibility. Again, this is the desire, and it might even be the plan. 

This simply cannot be allowed to happen. Those of us with memories of civilized life, including universal rights and freedoms, cannot stay silent or get emotionally drawn in to the point that we are willing to forget what was done to us, the damage it inflicted on public culture, and the moral conduct a civilized people expect. 

Every war is preceded by a period of demoralization (I don’t matter), demotivation (there is nothing I can do), and dehumanization (those people are not worth saving). From there it is a simple matter of flipping the switch. 

Brownstone was founded in light of the above history to shine a light on higher ideals, not a Schmittian war between friends and enemies but societies of compassion, dignity, freedom, rights, and the exercise of human volition against all threats and uses of violence public and private. This is our guiding light now and always. Apocalypticism builds nothing; it only destroys. It’s the instantiation of the philosophy of The Joker. No nation and no community can survive it. 

Few of us knew or fully understood the depth of depravity just beneath the thin veneer of civilization that had previously dominated the large expanse of our lives. It was the maniacal experiment in disease control only a few years ago that triggered this bout of man’s inhumanity to man. There is a burning need to know how this came about and why, and take measures, now desperate ones, to put back into the Pandora’s box all that was released. 

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/10/15/its-not-the-israel-hamas-war-its-the-israel-gaza-massacre/

It’s Not The ‘Israel-Hamas War’, It’s The Israel-Gaza Massacre

Stop calling it the “Israel-Hamas war”. It’s the Israel-Gaza massacre. Calling it the Israel-Hamas war creates the false impression that this is a war that is directed exclusively at Hamas when it’s really an ethnic purge that’s directed at all Palestinians in Gaza. 

The child body count alone makes it clear that this isn’t a war against Hamas; I saw an anonymous account point out on Twitter that the number of children killed in this onslaught after one week already exceeds the total number of children killed after a year and a half of fighting in Ukraine, per the United Nations.

Laying complete siege to a civilian population and bombing anything that stands would be an extraordinary abomination in any war. And this is not a war, it’s an enclosed shooting range with military explosives and human targets.

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Americans should probably worry about the rapid legitimization of this idea that civilians who have a government that kills people are all legitimate targets.

According to the logic of collective punishment we’re seeing circulated with regard to Gazans and Hamas, all American civilians deserve to die horribly because they permit themselves to be ruled by a regime which is orders of magnitude more violent and destructive than Hamas.

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Hamas is responsible for Hamas’ decisions, Israel is responsible for Israel’s decisions. Hamas is responsible for the Hamas attack, Israel is responsible for provoking that attack via apartheid abuses and for bombing civilians in retaliation for it. It’s not actually complicated.

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Israel has been struggling with a rapidly worsening PR crisis ever since Palestinians started getting internet access and smartphones with video cameras and exposing Israeli apartheid abuses. So if you’re wondering why they cut off Gaza’s internet and electricity, that’s why. 

Israel was 100% aware that cutting off power and internet to Gaza would prevent Palestinians from recording and publishing footage of its coming war crimes. They struck a fatal blow to citizen journalism in Gaza, thereby blinding the whole world to what’s happening there.

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The mass media asked you to believe the Hamas attack was “unprovoked”. Then they asked you to believe blatant babies-on-bayonets atrocity propaganda. Now they’re asking you to believe Jewish kids were in school before dawn on a Saturday morning in Israel. Western journalism, folks.

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The only reason so many Israel apologists scrambled to circulate unverified stories about beheaded babies and mass rapes instead of waiting for evidence was to make the real atrocities Israel is perpetrating and will continue to perpetrate in Gaza look reasonable and appropriate.

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After this current crisis is over I’m probably going to think a lot about the fact that MSNBC suspended three Muslim reporters during Israel’s Gaza assault because it didn’t want Muslims reporting on it.

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I used to think all genocidal massacres are bad but then some really smart Israel apologists explained to me that this genocidal massacre is completely different because this genocidal massacre’s perpetrators believe they are doing the right thing for a good reason.

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If there were two million Jewish people trapped by Christians in a giant open-air prison and placed under total siege, being told that half of them had 24 hours to relocate into the other half or be killed, nobody would have any confusion about what they were witnessing.

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Everyone’s got a serious case of 9/11 brain right now.

You know about 9/11 brain, kids? It’s when something scary happens and everyone goes insane and starts believing a bunch of lies and consenting to power-serving agendas that do exponentially more damage than the initial trauma.

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I keep getting people acting like it’s controversial or even outlandish to say that Israel is an apartheid state. It’s not. The leading mainstream western human rights groups say it’s apartheid, as does the top human rights group in Israel.

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They said we need more censorship because of Covid. They said we need more censorship because of Russia. They said we need more censorship because of January 6. Now they say we need more censorship because of the Hamas attack.

Maybe they just want more censorship?

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Before engaging an Israel apologist in a debate about the ongoing Gaza purge, it’s probably a good idea to ask them to clarify whether there’s any amount of death and destruction Israel could inflict there that would cause them to stop supporting what Israel is doing. Is there a death count that they’d consider too much? How many dead Palestinian civilians are they willing to tolerate in this current operation? Tell them to give you a number.

If they can’t give you a number and place a limit on how much human butchery they’re willing to accept from Israel, that tells you they’re not actually defending Israel for reasons that have anything to do with humanitarian concerns or valuing human life. They’re saying they’ll defend Israel no matter what it does and no matter how many atrocities it commits, because their support for Israel is entirely based on ideology and/or religion. In which case there’s no reason to continue the debate, because you can’t debate someone out of their Christian fundamentalism or Zionism or Islamophobia or whatever it is that’s driving their support. They’re not arguing with you out of any interest in morality or justice or truth or facts, they’re arguing with you solely to advance an agenda.

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The greatest trick white anti-semites ever pulled was getting Jews to leave western society in droves and move to a far away country to spend their lives beating up Muslims.

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https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2023-10-13/gaza-britain-israel-crimes/

Lawless in Gaza: Why Britain and the West back Israel’s crimes

More than a decade ago, Israel started to understand that its occupation of Gaza through siege could be to its advantage. It began transforming the tiny coastal enclave from an albatross around its neck into a valuable portfolio in the trading game of international power politics.

The first benefit for Israel, and its Western allies, is more discussed than the second.

The tiny strip of land hugging the eastern Mediterranean coast was turned into a mix of testing ground and shop window.

Israel could use Gaza to develop all sorts of new technologies and strategies associated with the homeland security industries burgeoning across the West, as officials there grew increasingly worried about domestic unrest, sometimes referred to as populism.

The siege of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians, imposed by Israel in 2007 following the election of Hamas to rule the enclave, allowed for all sorts of experiments. 

How could the population best be contained? What restrictions could be placed on their diet and lifestyle? How were networks of informers and collaborators to be recruited from afar? What effect did the population’s entrapment and repeated bombardment have on social and political relations? 

And ultimately how were Gaza’s inhabitants to be kept subjugated and an uprising prevented?

The answers to those questions were made available to Western allies through Israel’s shopping portal. Items available included interception rocket systems, electronic sensors, surveillance systems, drones, facial recognition, automated gun towers, and much more. All tested in real-life situations in Gaza. 

Israel’s standing took a severe dent from the fact that Palestinians managed to bypass this infrastructure of confinement last weekend – at least for a few days – with a rusty bulldozer, some hang-gliders and a sense of nothing-to-lose. 

Which is part of the reason why Israel now needs to go back into Gaza with ground troops to show it still has the means to keep the Palestinians crushed.

Collective punishment

Which brings us to the second purpose served by Gaza.

As Western states have grown increasingly unnerved by signs of popular unrest at home, they have started to think more carefully about how to sidestep the restrictions placed on them by international law.

The term refers to a body of laws that were formalised in the aftermath of the second world war, when both sides treated civilians on the other side of the battle lines as little more than pawns on a chessboard.

The aim of those drafting international law was to make it unconscionable for there to be a repeat of Nazi atrocities in Europe, as well as other crimes such as Britain’s fire bombing of German cities like Dresden or the United States’ dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

One of the fundamentals of international law – at the heart of the Geneva Conventions – is a prohibition on collective punishment: that is, retaliating against the enemy’s civilian population, making them pay the price for the acts of their leaders and armies.

Very obviously, Gaza is about as flagrant a violation of this prohibition as can be found. Even in “quiet” times, its inhabitants – one million of them children – are denied the most basic freedoms, such as the right to movement; access to proper health care because medicines and equipment cannot be brought in; access to drinkable water; and the use of electricity for much of the day because Israel keeps bombing Gaza’s power station.

Israel has never made any bones of the fact that it is punishing the people of Gaza for being ruled by Hamas, which rejects Israel’s right to have dispossessed the Palestinians of their homeland in 1948 and imprisoned them in overcrowded ghettos like Gaza.

What Israel is doing to Gaza is the very definition of collective punishment. It is a war crime: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks of every year, for 16 years.

And yet no one in the so-called international community seems to have noticed.

Rules of war rewritten

But the trickiest legal situation – for Israel and the West – is when Israel bombs Gaza, as it is doing now, or sends in soldiers, as it soon will do.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu highlighted the problem when he told the people of Gaza: “Leave now.” But, as he and Western leaders know, Gaza’s inhabitants have nowhere to go, nowhere to escape the bombs. So any Israeli attack is, by definition, on the civilian population too. It is the modern equivalent of the Dresden fire bombings.

Israel has been working on strategies to overcome this difficulty since its first major bombardment of Gaza in late 2008, after the siege was introduced.

A unit in its attorney general’s office was charged with finding ways to rewrite the rules of war in Israel’s favour.

At the time, the unit was concerned that Israel would be criticised for blowing up a police graduation ceremony in Gaza, killing many young cadets. Police are civilians in international law, not soldiers, and therefore not a legitimate target. Israeli lawyers were also worried that Israel had destroyed government offices, the infrastructure of Gaza’s civilian administration.

Israel’s concerns seem quaint now – a sign of how far it has already shifted the dial on international law. For some time, anyone connected with Hamas, however tangentially, is considered a legitimate target, not just by Israel but by every Western government.

Western officials have joined Israel in treating Hamas as simply a terrorist organisation, ignoring that it is also a government with people doing humdrum tasks like making sure bins are collected and schools kept open.

Or as Orna Ben-Naftali, a law faculty dean, told the Haaretz newspaper back in 2009: “A situation is created in which the majority of the adult men in Gaza and the majority of the buildings can be treated as legitimate targets. The law has actually been stood on its head.”

Back at that time, David Reisner, who had previously headed the unit, explained Israel’s philosophy to Haaretz: “What we are seeing now is a revision of international law. If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it.

“The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries.”

In fact, Israel’s meddling to change international law goes back many decades.

Referring to Israel’s attack on Iraq’s fledgling nuclear reactor in 1981, an act of war condemned by the UN Security Council, Reisner said: “The atmosphere was that Israel had committed a crime. Today everyone says it was preventive self-defence. International law progresses through violations.”

He added that his team had travelled to the US four times in 2001 to persuade US officials of Israel’s ever-more flexible interpretation of international law towards subjugating Palestinians.

“Had it not been for those four planes [journeys to the US], I am not sure we would have been able to develop the thesis of the war against terrorism on the present scale,” he said.

Those redefinitions of the rules of war proved invaluable when the US chose to invade and occupy Afghanistan and Iraq.

‘Human animals’

In recent years, Israel has continued to “evolve” international law. It has introduced the concept of “prior warning” – sometimes giving a few minutes’ notice of a building or neighbourhood’s destruction. Vulnerable civilians still in the area, like the elderly, children and the disabled, are then recast as legitimate targets for failing to leave in time.

And it is using the current assault on Gaza to change the rules still further.

The 2009 Haaretz article includes references by law officials to Yoav Gallant, who was then the military commander in charge of Gaza. He was described as a “wild man”, a “cowboy” with no time for legal niceties.

Gallant is now defence minister and the man responsible for instituting this week a “complete siege” of Gaza: “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed.” In language that blurred any distinction between Hamas and Gaza’s civilians, he described Palestinians as “human animals”.

That takes collective punishment into a whole different realm. In terms of international law, it skirts into the territory of genocide, both rhetorically and substantively.

But the dial has shifted so completely that even centrist Western politicians are cheering Israel on – often not even calling for “restraint” or “proportionality”, the weasel terms they usually use to obscure their support for law breaking.

Britain has been leading the way in helping Israel to rewrite the rulebook on international law.

Listen to Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour opposition and the man almost certain to be Britain’s next prime minister. This week he supported the “complete siege” of Gaza, a crime against humanity, refashioning it as Israel’s “right to defend itself”.

Starmer has not failed to grasp the legal implications of Israel’s actions, even if he seems personally immune to the moral implications. He is trained as a human rights lawyer.

His approach even appears to be taking aback journalists not known for being sympathetic to the Palestinian case. When asked by Kay Burley of Sky News if he had any sympathy for the civilians in Gaza being treated like “human animals”, Starmer could not find a single thing to say in support.

Instead, he deflected to an outright deception: blaming Hamas for sabotaging a “peace process” that Israel both practically and declaratively buried years ago.

Confirming that the Labour party now condones war crimes by Israel, his shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, has been sticking to the same script. On BBC’s Newsnight, she evaded questions about whether cutting off power and supplies to Gaza is in line with international law.

It is no coincidence that Starmer’s position contrasts so dramatically with that of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn. The latter was driven out of office by a sustained campaign of antisemitism smears fomented by Israel’s most fervent supporters in the UK.

Starmer does not dare to be seen on the wrong side of this issue. And that is exactly the outcome Israeli officials wanted and expected.

Israeli flag on No 10

Starmer is, of course, far from alone. Grant Shapps, Britain’s defence secretary, has also expressed trenchant support for Israel’s policy of starving two million Palestinians in Gaza.

Rishi Sunak, the UK prime minister, has emblazoned the Israeli flag on the front of his official residence, 10 Downing Street, apparently unconcerned at how he is giving visual form to what would normally be considered an antisemitic trope: that Israel controls the UK’s foreign policy.

Starmer, not wishing to be outdone, has called for Wembley stadium’s arch to be adorned with the colours of the Israeli flag. 

However much this schoolboy cheerleading of Israel is sold as an act of solidarity following Hamas’ slaughter of Israeli civilians at the weekend, the subtext is unmistakeable: Britain has Israel’s back as it starts its retributive campaign of war crimes in Gaza.

That is also the purpose of home secretary Suella Braverman’s advice to the police to treat the waving of Palestinian flags and chants for Palestine’s liberation at protests in support of Gaza as criminal acts.

The media is playing its part, dependably as ever. A Channel 4 TV crew pursued Corbyn through London’s streets this week, demanding he “condemn” Hamas. They insinuated through the framing of those demands that anything less fulsome – such as Corbyn’s additional concerns for the welfare of Gaza’s civilians – was confirmation of the former Labour leader’s antisemitism. 

The clear implication from politicians and the establishment media is that any support for Palestinian rights, any demurral from Israel’s “unquestionable right” to commit war crimes, equates to antisemitism.

Europe’s hypocrisy

This double approach, of cheering on genocidal Israeli policies towards Gaza while stifling any dissent, or characterising it as antisemitism, is not confined to the UK.

Across Europe, from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, to the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Bulgarian parliament, official buildings have been lit up with the Israeli flag.

Europe’s top official, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, celebrated the Israeli flag smothering the EU parliament this week.

She has repeatedly stated that “Europe stands with Israel”, even as Israeli war crimes start to mount.

The Israeli air force boasted on Thursday it had dropped some 6,000 bombs on Gaza. At the same time, human rights groups reported Israel was firing the incendiary chemical weapon white phosphorus into Gaza, a war crime when used in urban areas. And Defence for Children International noted that more than 500 Palestinian children had been killed so far by Israeli bombs.

It was left to Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied territories, to point out that Von Der Leyen was applying the principles of international law entirely inconsistently. 

Almost exactly a year ago, the European Commission president denounced Russia’s strikes on civilian infrastructure in Ukraine as war crimes. “Cutting off men, women, children of water, electricity and heating with winter coming – these are acts of pure terror,” she wrote. “And we have to call it as such.”

Albanese noted Von der Leyen had said nothing equivalent about Israel’s even worse attacks on Palestinian infrastructure.

Sending in the heavies

Meanwhile, France has already started breaking up and banning demonstrations against the bombing of Gaza. Its justice minister has echoed Braverman in suggesting solidarity with Palestinians risks offending Jewish communities and should be treated as “hate speech”.

Naturally, Washington is unwavering in its support for whatever Israel decides to do to Gaza, as secretary of state Anthony Blinken made clear during his visit this week. 

President Joe Biden has promised weapons and funding, and sent in the military equivalent of “the heavies” to make sure no one disturbs Israel as it carries out those war crimes. An aircraft carrier has been dispatched to the region to ensure quiet from Israel’s neighbours as the ground invasion is launched. 

Even those officials whose chief role is to promote international law, such as Antonio Gutteres, secretary general of the UN, have started to move with the shifting ground.

Like most Western officials, he has emphasised Gaza’s “humanitarian needs” above the rules of war Israel is obliged to honour.

This is Israel’s success. The language of international law that should apply to Gaza – of rules and norms Israel must obey – has given way to, at best, the principles of humanitarianism: acts of international charity to patch up the suffering of those whose rights are being systematically trampled on, and those whose lives are being obliterated.

Western officials are more than happy with the direction of travel. Not just for Israel’s sake but for their own too. Because one day in the future, their own populations may be as much trouble to them as Palestinians in Gaza are to Israel right now. 

Supporting Israel’s right to defend itself is their downpayment.