In the Land of the Killers

Wandering through a wasteland created by genocidal furies

Shrinking Palestine — Link

I originally wanted to title this brief essay on October 7, “In the Land of the Genocidaires,” but felt that this French-derived word tends to overly separate Americans and other English-speakers from the terrible reality it signifies, the violence and soul-rending spectacle of mass slaughter.

“Killers” is a much more Germanic, more Anglo-Saxon word, direct and concrete. I “KILL” you vs. I “genocide” you. Biden, Blinken, Harris, Austin, nearly all members of Congress of both parties… these are “genocidaries.” They are killers.

The Online Etymology Dictionary describes the word KILL’s descent through the centuries:

c. 1200, "to strike, hit, beat, knock;" c. 1300, "to deprive of life, put to death;" perhaps from an unrecorded variant of Old English cwellan "to kill, murder, execute," from Proto-Germanic *kwaljanan (source also of Old English cwelan "to die," cwalu "violent death;" Old Saxon quellian "to torture, kill;" Old Norse kvelja "to torment;" Middle Dutch quelen "to vex, tease, torment;" Old High German quellan "to suffer pain," German quälen "to torment, torture"), from PIE root *gwele- "to throw, reach," with extended sense "to pierce." Related: Killed; killing.

The reality of mass slaughter, the mind-tearing awfulness of a population possessed with bloodlust and destruction of other human beings, the existence of societal annihilation at the hands of supposedly moral beings is beyond my ability to describe.

The Land of the Killers is America. It is also Israel. But it could be any land that arms, justifies and prosecutes genocide.

I’m surrounded by the apologists of killing. Are they brainwashed? Are they insensate? Are they vicious and unfeeling and void of empathy as the killers who rise from their midst? The ones who incinerated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The ones who dropped anthrax and plague on China and North Korea. The pilots that carpet-bombed Laos and Cambodia and Vietnam. The dungeon keepers of Con Son prison. The “shock and awe” killers of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

A person on television tells me that it’s “horrible” what is happening in Palestine, but maybe the Arabs will have to be expelled after all, “because they do not listen”! A friend angrily tells me off when I dare bring up the sufferings of the Palestinians over the years. We have not spoken to each other in nearly a year, and I suppose never will again.

I find I can’t have conversations with many people anymore, for fear I will explode in anger and indignation at the ignorance and lack of compassion of so many people. I worry I won’t be able to modulate my response, dangling on the edge of surreal atrocities. Or maybe I fear that my neighbors will attack me. So many stay silent, I feel, for the same reasons. It is like insanity, but it is real.

I try to reason with people (though not die-hard Zionists). I must still hope to change some minds. But mostly I fear what genocidal trends lie beneath the surface of the world I inhabit. The killings have happened — are happening! — too often. There is something fatal in humanity.

Perhaps many are simply overwhelmed by events. Perhaps they, too, understand that the unfolding Mideast War, fueled by Israel’s genocidal bombings and murders, threatens them, and they choose to bury their heads in the sand like human ostriches.

The sun is shining very brightly today. The birds are singing obliviously. The lime tree I planted is thirsty for water. Its leaves curl up and twist with agonizing thirst. I cannot move.

October 7. What was a breakout day against Zionist oppression, a desperate attempt to wrest the impunity of genocide from the hands of the Occupier and Giant Prison Warden and make them FEEL the taste of rebellion, is portrayed in the West as itself a genocidal thrust against Israel’s Jews, or even potentially all Jews. Did not the world try and kill off all the Jews only a few generations back? The Zionists throw that in the face of their opponents, sure that they can leverage the blood of the Nazis’ victims to justify war crimes today. Not every Holocaust survivor agrees!

This Zionist-Western narrative turns history on its head. Did some “innocent” people die on October 7? I think they did. Did innocent people die in the multitudinous attacks by Israel on the Palestinian people over the past 75+ years? You know they did — in the many tens of thousands! One can read about how Israel heartlessly killed many of its own citizens on October 7 as part of something called the Hannibal directive, but the calculus of the killing isn’t what’s ultimately at stake here. Even if Israel had not used the Hannibal directive, the October 7 uprising was politically defensible as a revolt against intolerable repression. (Whether it was militarily sensible is another question, one I don’t feel capable of assessing.)

The propaganda drumbeat is incessant. Its favorite tom-tom is “terrorism.” But the word has no meaning, really. The violence of “terrorism” is always portrayed as a crime of the “Other.” What everyone means is the use of violence to achieve ends. The oppressed have the right to use violence as a means to end their oppression.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.” The oppression of the Palestinians has proven to be unresponsive to the “rule of law.” That’s why October 7 was “a last resort” of a persecuted people.

The outlines of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict are painfully clear. In the aftermath of centuries of pogroms and discrimination, of murder and false accusations, a small section of European Jewry, mainly drawn from its upper-middle class, created the ideology of Zionism. The British Empire beguiled the Zionist Jews with promises, believing it could use the Jews as part of the divide-and-conquer strategy it prosecuted so successfully across the world, from India to Kenya to Jamaica, in pre-Colonial North America, too.

The genocide of the Jews during World War II accelerated the Zionist colonial project. It’s worth remembering the Jews weren’t the only genocidal object of European fascism. The Roma and Sinti were also targets. So were the Russians and other Slavs.

“Second only to the Jews, Soviet prisoners of war were the largest group of victims of Nazi racial policy,” says the Holocaust Encyclopedia. Over three million Soviet POWS were KILLED by the Nazis. This is practically unknown in the United States, a land thoroughly drenched in genocide denial, which has made a religion out of killing “others”: the indigenous people of North America, the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Koreans, Chinese, Africans, Latin Americans, and, oh yes, Russians, too. Just last week I wrote about the millions of “unnecessary deaths” consequent upon the U.S.-backed and administered destruction of socialism in the Soviet Union.

Link

The Zionists embraced the deadly mathematics of messianic nationalism: the “Others” had to be removed because they stood in the way of the People’s divine rights to a hereditary land. The “Others” were Palestinians. In 1947-48, the Zionists murdered and poisoned and threatened and tortured and drove three-quarters of a million people from their ancestral lands. The Nabka never really ended. The Zionists took over Palestinian houses. They bulldozed their orchards. They shot their children and raped their women.

The Zionists were not averse to terrorism. They terrorized. In the mandate days, they bombed even the temporizing British, who stood in the way of Zionist aims. From the standpoint of the larger world, the new state of Israel was backed (except in the Arab world) by a majority of nations. Even the Soviet Union at first backed the UN partition of Palestine, partly because they wanted to see an end to the British Mandate, and partly because they assessed that “a dual Arab-Jewish state with equal rights for Jews and Arabs” didn’t appear feasible under the circumstances. In truth, that is the only way the current conflict can be settled, by the establishment of such a single multi-ethnic state. But after 1948, the Soviet support of the UN partition plan backfired against them, as Israel would evolve into a U.S. asset in the Middle East, armed to the teeth by U.S. weapons.

Meanwhile, there was the slow motion ongoing dispossession of the Palestinians, greatly accelerated after the 1967 war, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza. East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. Much has happened since 1967, but I don’t wish to recount all the history here. It’s out there to read and study and strategize thereby.

I can’t bring myself to look at newspapers or blog posts today. I know that the psychological warfare experts in the U.S., UK and Israel will be rolling out the propaganda non-stop. The lies never really end. It’s no wonder that the people who surround me are so seemingly ignorant and say the most outrageous things about Palestine, Gaza and Lebanon.

In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the eponymous Captain Gulliver is lectured by one of the Houyhnhnms — a race of intelligent horses who rule over the animal-like human “yahoos” — about the evils of lying and the seeding of false beliefs:

And I remember, in frequent discourses with my master concerning the nature of manhood in other parts of the world, having occasion to talk of lying and false representation, it was with much difficulty that he comprehended what I meant, although he had otherwise a most acute judgment. For he argued thus: “that the use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information of facts; now, if any one said the thing which was not, these ends were defeated, because I cannot properly be said to understand him; and I am so far from receiving information, that he leaves me worse than in ignorance; for I am led to believe a thing black, when it is white, and short, when it is long.” And these were all the notions he had concerning that faculty of lying, so perfectly well understood, and so universally practised, among human creatures.

The lies about Israel’s killing has made people believe the exact opposite of what is true. How does one combat that? And yet, I read that the lies are working less and less. Maybe things will change, but the killings seem ever more intense!

I turn to art and literature and music and science to escape this madness. Unfortunately I live far away from the cities and towns where major protests take place. I am old now. I feel like the end of days is upon us. I have felt this way before and been wrong. But I have not been wrong about the inhumanity and crimes undertaken by the rulers of the country I live in. I have not been wrong about the suffering of imperialism’s victims, the intolerable, ceaseless organizing of the U.S. and its allies for war and mass destruction. The killing.

Suddenly I am disturbed more immediately. My neighbor is playing his bass too loudly. I wonder if he is constructing a sound cocoon to seal himself off from experiencing the suffering of a planet that exists off endless exploitation, where snuffing out of existence those who oppose you is considered acceptable behavior, especially if done in mass quantities. I think, “I am probably projecting.” Yet I cannot forget Chaplin’s reminder that “Numbers sanctify.”

I know there are many out there who oppose the current genocide, its killing, its murders, its obliteration of precious portions of human civilization. I have seen the heroic protests of U.S. college students. Arab-Americans are protesting, too, even as “anti-Arab hate and sentiment have been on the rise in the U.S. since the start of the war in Gaza.” But opposition aside, the blowback of Israel’s genocide creates the destruction of civilizational norms, and the undoing of societies that undertake such violence.

I am witnessing the frenzy of destruction and self-destruction. I see the videos posted by courageous Palestinian journalists. But who has not noticed as the media strangles Palestinian support via its engines of censorship and falsehood? Where will it all end?

What of those being bombed right now? As I type these words, each character is an analogue bullet. Each sentence is a bomb-strewn hospital or nursery. Each paragraph and metaphor is a cenotaph for the bodies piling up in Gaza, in Beruit, in Tulkarm refugee camp. The children and grandchildren of the Holocaust cannot seem to stop themselves.

There is also the awful guilt of Jews who could not cohere an identity in Christian capitalist America. They found in Zionism a creed that matched the internal dislocation of their souls, and now they are playing it out with bombs and bullets supplied by the country they fled so they could embrace a racist dream of colonial conquest. If the U.S. frontier still existed, they might have found themselves battling the indigenous people of North America. But that genocide already happened, or is in its final stages.

What is it about human beings that some of them seek out the killing of others? What is left of humanity if the killing is rendered “necessary”? Is there really anything left that we can still call by the name “humanity”? Only the empty shell of forms long since passed into nothingness.

The Zionists, and perhaps even more, their Western accomplices, have cast us all into the abyss.