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https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2023/11/20/conquerors-self-defense/

Conqueror’s Self Defense

On October 7th, Israel suffered a violent attack by the military arm of Hamas, the governing body of the Palestinians of Gaza. Israel responded with as devastating a bit of Shock and Awe—a flip American neologism—as the world has seen since the pulverizing of Baghdad. A shaken Netanyahu justified this blitz on the basis of Israel’s right to defend itself. in so doing, he invoked a principle that, while not legally included in the code of war, has nonetheless a long and exercised history.

Wars come in many varieties, at times between unequal forces, resulting in conquest of the weaker party and an end of fighting. Usually… but not necessarily. It is sometimes the case that, in spite of total victory and occupation of the vanquished, a serious level of organized resistance continues. Depending on its threat to the victor, it may just be policed and suppressed, or it may require more drastic measures, and even the renewal of war.

Empires which, by definition, live and grow by conquest, may confront this sort of challenge. Rome often had the disagreeable experience, having conquered a state, of suffering depredations of rebellious elements. There are many examples, but Carthage will serve. Having twice defeated her, Rome was annoyed to find that rebel units refused to behave as conquered, and persisted in resistance, so that it became necessary to re-capture the city, kill most of its people, sell off the rest, and raze it and burn it to the ground, asserting a conqueror’s right of self defense.

Centuries later, groups of Europeans invaded and colonized what they termed newly discovered America. These colonists did not officially represent a nation, nor was there one comprehensive war. Groups simply appropriated an area, declared it their property, and defended it as such. The fact that the land was occupied by indigenous people was deemed irrelevant. When native people reacted by attacking the colonists, they argued the right to self-defense, using all violent means to retain possession, and destroyed the former residents piecemeal.

This pattern was followed in the taking and occupation of all the aboriginal homelands across the continent. When the people of the many tribes that had lived for centuries on land that became the United States fought expropriation, they were systematically obliterated until only scattered remnants survived. The term “Terrorists” had not come into use yet, and Indians who fought expulsion, starvation, and extermination were called bloodthirsty savages. This particular colonial process, which had no formal name and was only much later designated genocide—the violent annihilation of a people—was legendarily portrayed as valiant and justifiable by the right of the conqueror to self defense.

In the era of the great, international wars, appalled by redundant mechanical butchery, men presumed to make laws to govern war, though war is, by definition, abandonment of law. In the 20th century, as millions were killed in mad orgies of bloodletting, the Masters of War began to make a distinction between soldiers and others, and issue directives against wanton murder of civilians. Their intent was good. These political naifs had raw consciences and noble motivation in laying down their laws and establishing permissible boundaries to military murder. That it never worked should have been foreseeable for there was no mechanism of enforcement. Butchery of civilians increased, gross and extreme, and always in self defense.

There were many examples of it in World War II. A couple that were notable were the Rape of Nanjing by the Japanese and the Lidice Massacre by the Nazis. In Nanjing, the jury is hung as to its cause, whether it was a case of Japanese troops having been provoked by civilian disrespect or simple race hatred that did it, but these victors massacred about a quarter million Chinese civilians in their self defense. In the Lidice incident, the Nazis had proof, they said, that a village man assassinated the Reichsfuhrer, and so acted well within the proper bounds of self defense in slaughtering its entire manhood and sending its women and children to Chelmno concentration camp to be gassed to death.

Americans have cherished the fantasy that they were incapable of such atrocities, but that is precisely what it is: a fantasy. To take one incident of many, in Vietnam two Infantry companies raped and murdered five hundred unarmed civilians before they felt sufficiently self defended. Only one hillbilly officer took the rap for it, presumably, pour encourager les autres.

By the time of the American Empire’s Afghanistan and Iraq obscenities the self-defense con for inflicting mass murder on civilians had been seriously vitiated. Fallujah made it a sick joke. Paradoxically, though it was exposed as a punctured cliche for giving patchy cover to military murder, it continues to be used by stupid high brass and fogged heads of state content to be known universally as psychopathic liars and criminally insane.

So when, after “the old surprise visit” to Nazi Israel that bloody dawn, Netanyahu mounted his genocide on Gaza and explained it to a stunned world as self-defense, his hustle didn’t capture opinion as he had hoped. For the observing nations, recognition of genocide is like recognition of pornography: they know it when they see it. And they are seeing it, daily, raw, unfiltered, even with the frantic efforts of the Israeli regime, our government, and our debauched, whoring press, to deny and conceal it.

Zionist Israel has shown the world its criminal heart, and it can no longer hide behind the discredited bleating of the anti-Semitism trope. Zionism is not Judaism. Zionist Israel is the betrayer of ethical Judaism, and its heretical enemy. Conscientious Jews are denouncing Israel and divorcing themselves from its inhumanity. The arc of the universe, as MLK said, is long, but it bends toward justice. In the attempt to destroy Palestinians, Israel has blindly triggered the Samson Option, and it will inevitably destroy itself.

Comments to article:

" On July 12, 2006, Israel attacked and flattened Lebanon because two Israeli soldiers went missing in Lebanon. Israel attacked Egypt in 1967 for no reason whatsoever as their generals have stated. In 1948 the Israelis promoted a holocaust upon the Palestinians displacing and killing over 1 million because they thought it was a good idea. In 1946 Rham Immanuel’s father introduced terrorism to the Middle East when he bombed the King David hotel killing several people. (Rham Immanuel and his brother were prominent members of both the Obama and Biden administrations) This Israeli genocide story upon its neighbors is too long for listing here the current attack upon children is just another one of the Jewish holocausts against humanity. The point is that Palestine is being occupied by a group of white Jewish genocidal maniacs who murder any time they please; they enjoy it. At this time Israel is probably bombing Syria, Ariel Sharon (butcher of the middle east) bragged that he had murdered 750 Palestinians with one blow. The law is very explicit saying that Hamas has every legal right to fight for its homeland and the white Jews have no rights for anything in the land they are illegally occupying. The so called “God’s chosen” must be removed from Palestine any way possible."

" “Triggering the Samson Option,” does Edwards know what that is? The Zionists have well over 400 nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Israel has threatened that if anything threatens to end the Zionist enterprise, they will unleash nuclear war on Europe. The Zionists have threatened to “bring down the temple” — that is the Samson Option. Zionism and Israel, with the full support and complicity of the West, are a virulent cancer that has destroyed the Palestinian people and eventually the whole world if they are not stopped. "

" I do know. The point of the phrase is that Israel has the power to choose to destroy itself with all its enemies in case of impending catastrophe. I believe its ruling clique has no idea how threatened it is now, and that the Gaza genocide will trigger its downfall, perhaps its destruction, and quite possibly that of its enemies as well. The risk is horrifying."

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/17/patrick-lawrence-the-banality-of-propaganda/

The Banality of Propaganda

The annals of the awful art — Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, Japan’s and America’s during World War II — show that it does not have to be sophisticated. The Israeli president’s display of Mein Kampf just proved that again.  

I watched a video clip Sunday of Isaac Herzog that takes all cakes in the way of silliness that also manages to be pernicious. In it the Israeli president holds a copy of Mein Kampf, translated into Arabic.

The video was made one day after an immense demonstration in London in behalf of a ceasefire in Gaza and the freeing of Palestinians from Israel’s long, violent repression. Here is part of what Herzog had to say:

“I want to show you something exclusive. This is Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf. It’s the book that led to the Holocaust, and the book that led to World War II. This is the book that led … to the worst atrocity of humankind, which the British fought against. 

This book was found just a few days ago in northern Gaza, in a children’s living room which was turned into a military operations base of Hamas, on the body of one of the terrorists and murderers of Hamas, and he even makes notes, he marked, and learned again and again of Hitler’s ideology of killing the Jews, of burning the Jews, of slaughtering the Jews. 

This is the real war we are at. So all those who demonstrated yesterday — I am not saying all of them support Hitler. But all I’m saying is by omitting to understand what Hamas ideology is all about they are basically supporting this ideology. ”

You can view a one–minute, 22–second version of this video clip here, or a longer, BBC version here. In both, we watch the Israeli head of state play the Holocaust card, the Hitler card, the Jewish victim card and the Hamas-as-murdering-burning-slaughtering-monsters card all at once.

I cannot identify the television network that showed the shorter version of Herzog, and I am astonished that the BBC took it seriously enough to broadcast it, but this is the Beeb these days — always on for the trans–Atlantic cause. 

How remarkably flimsy propaganda is in most cases, I thought after watching Herzog and taking my notes. This is true in many, many cases in the annals of the awful art — Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, Japan’s and America’s during World War II. As you look at it now, none of it is very sophisticated for the simple reason it does not have to be. 

Propaganda is about forceful impact, subtlety the last thing on the propagandist’s mind. The banal will always do. The Japanese during the Pacific war were “Japs” or “Nips,” and in the plentitude of American propaganda images they had buck teeth and pencil mustaches and wore round glasses over their evil Asiatic eyes. 

After watching the Herzog video I went in search of footage from London the previous day. There have been many demonstrations against Israel’s savage military campaign in Gaza since hostilities erupted Oct. 7, and may there be many more, but London last Saturday looks like the biggest to date. 

“Free Gaza,” “Ceasefire Now,” “Not in Our Names” — these were among the things shouted and scribbled on placards as the protest wound slowly through Central London from Hyde Park to the U.S. Embassy several miles away. The police estimated the number of protesters at 300,000. From the footage—all I have to go by—I would put it nearer half a million.

If you watch enough propaganda, contemporary or historical, you find that it does not matter even if the scripts and images betray the crudity and indignity of those producing the propaganda. The intent is solely to capture the thoughts and feelings of the unthinking majority however this needs to be done. 

Israeli Propaganda Department Is Desperate

But this project is more difficult now, in the age of digital media and an increasingly influential independent press. So it seems to me. People can see more and see it more clearly and immediately now, providing they choose to look. And more and more people are so choosing.

If the idiotic Herzog clip told us anything, it is that the Israeli propaganda department is in a desperate state, having already lost the public-relations war as the Israeli Defense Forces dig the hole deeper by the day.

After watching the Herzog video and then the London footage, I thought of a memorable passage in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism:

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” 

Arendt was looking back to the Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union when she wrote her celebrated 1951 treatise. But the thought seems never to have been thereafter far from her mind. 

In a conversation with a French, free-speech activist not long before her death in 1975, Arendt had yet blunter words as to what eventually comes of circumstances such as ours. “If everybody always lies to you,” she said to Roger Errera, “the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”

Half a century before Herzog made his video and demonstrators filled the streets of London, Arendt called last weekend perfectly.

It is a fine thing that fewer and fewer people are taken in by the psyops and propaganda blitzes of the national security state, the corporate media, and ruthless — indeed Hitleresque, I shall say it — regimes such as Israel’s.

But to live in a world in which one believes nothing of what is said is its own kind of misery. It is effectively a surrender of all public discourse and public space altogether to the malign, the indecent, the inhumane, the degraded and degrading. The truth, and along with it logical thinking and plain decency, become “alternative.” 

Is there a way to build beyond our debased circumstances? Or are we to wander indefinitely in a state of negativity, of not believing, of alienation from our own polities?  

My answer is yes to the first question, no to the second: There is always a way to build a different future — this as a matter of general principle. In this case the project must begin with the reclamation of language. Rejecting the official language of those in power, as so many people now do, is a start. We must then learn again to speak the language that is not spoken, the language wherein truth resides.

In large part because of how I have spent my professional years, I am especially sensitive to the power of language as it is used in the cause either of clarity and understanding or of obfuscation and ignorance.

The language of institutions, the language of power, is made of obscuring euphemisms — “global leadership,” “collateral damage,” “regime change,” “the intelligence community,” “the rules-based order,” and so on through the bureaucratic lexicon — and of bold falsifications such as Isaac Herzog offered us last Sunday. 

Orwell described how the language of ideologues and bureaucratic mandarins devastates our ability to think clearly — precisely its purpose — in “Politics and the English Language.” Since he published his essay in Horizon in April 1946, the problem as we have it is seven decades’ worth of worse. 

This use of language has disarmed language itself, depriving it of its assertive power such that speech or writing outside the orthodoxy can be dismissed as a site of serious discourse. Language is rendered impotent as a medium of creative thought or as a prompt to new, imaginative action.

The preposterous, insulting use of “anti–Semitism” that now besets us is a case in point. The obvious intent is to impose a vast silence to obscure the crimes of apartheid Israel.  

 The task before us is one of restoration. It is to take language back, to renew its life, to wrest it from the deadening influence of institutions, bureaucracies, and corporate media — these having deformed language into an instrument for the enforcement of conformity. This is why every shout and placard heard or seen in London or many other cities these days is important, an act of significance and worth. 

Clear language is an instrument — unadorned, written and spoken plainly, colloquial in the best sense of this term but perfectly capable of subtlety and complexity. It is the language of history, not myth.

This language is spoken not in the cause of empire but always in the human cause. “Free Palestine,” “From the river to the sea”: These are two-word and six-word examples of the language I describe.   

This is the language necessary to confront power rather than accommodate it. It is language that presumes the utility of intelligence and critical thought. It is meant for the posing of many worthy questions. It is unreservedly dedicated to enlarging what is sayable in hostile response to “the great unsayable,” as I call it. 

By way of this language a more vibrant, fulfilling public discourse awaits us. By way of this language the Isaac Herzogs, Antony Blinkens and Ursula von der Leyens who pollute our public space can be reduced to what they are — liars and propagandists. The power of the language I describe will deprive the language they speak of all power.

Let us speak it, let us write it, let us scribble it on walls and sheets of cardboard. Let us know it as the most powerful tool available to those who refuse the silence Isaac Herzog sought to impose upon all those Londoners last weekend.

Comment to article:

"  Once again Patrick you speak truth to power! You are a credit to authentic journalism and “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted” the essence of your craft. You reduce language to truth while the likes of Biden, Nuland, Blinken, Herzog, Sunak, Trudeau et al reveal Arendt’s banality of evil as they call evil good and good evil. Concise, clear, truth is our only hope in the face of these liars. "