By the time Israel achieves its decimation of Gaza — Israel is talking about months of warfare that will continue at least until the end of this year — it will have signed its own death sentence. Its facade of civility, its supposed vaunted respect for the rule of law and democracy, its mythical story of the courageous Israeli military and miraculous birth of the Jewish nation – which it successfully sold to its western audiences – will lie in ash heaps. Israel’s social capital will be spent. It will be revealed as the ugly, repressive, hate-filled apartheid regime it always has been, alienating younger generations of American Jews. Its patron, the United States, as new generations come into power, will distance itself from Israel. Its popular support will come from reactionary Zionists and America’s Christianized fascists who see Israel’s domination of ancient Biblical land as a harbinger of the Second Coming and in its subjugation of Arabs a kindred racism and celebration of white supremacy...
Nations need more than force to survive. They need a mystique. This mystique provides purpose, civility and even nobility to inspire citizens to sacrifice for the nation. The mystique offers hope for the future. It provides meaning. It provides national identity.
When mystiques implode, when they are exposed as lies, a central foundation of state power collapses. I reported on the death of the communist mystiques in 1989 during the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The police and the military decided there was nothing left to defend. Israel’s decay will engender the same lassitude and apathy. It will not be able to recruit Indigenous collaborators, such as Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority — reviled by most Palestinians — to do the bidding of the colonizers.
All Israel has left is escalating savagery, including torture and lethal violence against unarmed civilians, which accelerates the decline. This wholesale violence works in the short term, as it did in the war waged by the French in Algeria, the Dirty War waged by Argentina’s military dictatorship, the British occupation of India, Egypt, Kenya and Northern Ireland and the American occupations of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the long term, it is suicidal.
This is an excerpt from the speech I gave at Craig Murray's campaign event in Blackburn.
Senior editors and contributors at @Truthdig announced a work stoppage to protest unfair labor conditions and the attempt by the publisher to remove the Editor-in-Chief and co-owner of the site Robert Scheer. popularresistance.org/truthdig-emplo…
The publisher is attempting to take control of Truthdig, thus effectively removing Mr. Scheer from the website he co-owns and co-founded. @NatCounterPunch wrote about the situation last December: counterpunch.org/2019/12/20/roa…
Further, "For years, @Truthdig staff has worked under conditions that it feels fall well short of the website’s progressive values. Those include, but are not limited to, employment conditions that very possibly flout California’s labor laws." More here: popularresistance.org/truthdig-emplo…
.@JulianAssange's life is in danger. In violation of his fundamental
human rights, the Ecuadoran government has transformed his asylum in its
London embassy into a form of brutal incarceration.
It has cut off his access to the Internet, thus depriving Julian of the ability to communicate with his supporters or even follow world events.
The transparent aim of this inhuman treatment is to force Julian to leave the Ecuadoran embassy, so that he can be seized by London police, thrown into a British jail, and endure deportation proceedings which will be rigged to ensure a predetermined outcome.
I am very distressed to hear that elements within the Green Party are seeking to remove the party's support for the Nordic model where the trafficking and purchasing of sex is criminalized while girls and women who are being prostituted are treated as victims not criminals...
The commodification of human beings defines neoliberal economics. The decriminalization of the prostitution industry, as we have seen in countries such as Germany, is one more step towards a neoliberal world order where everyone and every act has a price.
Legalizing the prostitution industry does not protect or empower girls and women. It expands and normalizes their exploitation.