Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All,
Nov 19, 2012
By Chris Hedges
In the new global landscape, as in Israel’s occupied territories and the
United States’ own imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and
Afghanistan, massacres of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars.
Resistance is called a provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The
rule of law, as well as respect for the most basic civil liberties and the
right of self-determination, is a public relations fiction used to placate the
consciences of those who live in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are
routinely tortured and “disappeared.” The severance of food and medical
supplies is an accepted tactic of control. Lies permeate the airwaves.
Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized. Missiles rain down on
concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed villagers, gunboats pound
refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead, including children, line the
corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and medicine.
The impending collapse of the international economy, the assaults on the
climate, the resulting droughts, flooding, precipitous decline in crop yields
and rising food prices are creating a universe where power is divided between
the narrow elites, who hold in their hands sophisticated instruments of death,
and the enraged masses. The crises are fostering a class war that will dwarf
anything imagined by Karl Marx. They are establishing a world where most will
be hungry and live in fear, while a few will gorge themselves on delicacies in
protected compounds. And more and more people will have to be sacrificed to
keep this imbalance in place.
Because it has the power to do so, Israel—as does the United States—flouts
international law to keep a subject population in misery. The continued
presence of Israeli occupation forces defies nearly a hundred U.N. Security
Council resolutions calling for them to withdraw. The Israeli blockade of Gaza,
established in June 2007, is a brutal form of
collective punishment that violates Article 33 of the Fourth 1949 Geneva
Convention, which set up rules for the “Protection of Civilian Persons in Time
of War.” The blockade has turned Gaza into a sliver of hell, an
Israeli-administered ghetto where thousands have died, including the 1,400
civilians killed in the Israeli incursion of 2008. With 95 percent of factories
shut down, Palestinian industry has virtually ceased functioning. The remaining
5 percent operate at 25 to 50 percent capacity. Even the fishing industry is
moribund. Israel refuses to let fishermen travel more than three miles from the
coastline, and within the fishing zone boats frequently come under Israeli
fire. The Israeli border patrols have seized 35 percent of the agricultural
land in Gaza for a buffer zone. The collapsing infrastructure and Israeli
seizure of aquifers mean that in many refugee camps, such as Khan Yunis, there
is no running water. UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestine Refugees in the Near East) estimates that 80 percent of all Gazans
now rely on food aid. And the claim of Israeli self-defense belies the fact
that it is Israel that maintains an illegal occupation and violates
international law by carrying out collective punishment of Palestinians. It is
Israel that chose to escalate the violence when during an incursion into Gaza
earlier this month its forces fatally shot a 13-year-old boy. As the world breaks
down, this becomes the new paradigm—modern warlords awash in terrifying
technologies and weapons murdering whole peoples. We do the same in
Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Market forces and the military mechanisms that protect these forces are the
sole ideology that governs industrial states and humans’ relationship to the
natural world. It is an ideology that results in millions of dead and millions
more displaced from their homes in the developing world. And the awful algebra
of this ideology means that these forces will eventually be unleashed on us,
too. Those who cannot be of use to market forces are considered expendable.
They have no rights and legitimacy. Their existence, whether in Gaza or
blighted postindustrial cities such as Camden, N.J., is considered a drain on
efficiency and progress. They are viewed as refuse. And as refuse they not only
have no voice and no freedom; they can be and are extinguished or imprisoned at
will. This is a world where only corporate power and profit are sacred. It is a
world of barbarism.
“In disposing of man’s labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose
of the physical, psychological, and moral entity ‘man’ attached to that tag,” Karl Polanyiwrote in “The Great Transformation.” “Robbed of the protective covering of
cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social
exposure; they would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through
vice, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements,
neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety
jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally,
the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate
business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money would prove as
disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society.
Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy.
But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even
for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well
as its business organization was protected against the ravages of this satanic
mill.”
There are 47.1 million Americans who depend on food stamps to eat. The
elites are plotting to take these food stamps away, along with other
“entitlement” programs that keep the poor from destitution. The slashing of
trillions of dollars from Medicare, Medicaid and other social programs, given the
political impasse in Washington and the looming “fiscal cliff,” now seems
certain. There are 50 million people considered to be living below the
poverty line, but because the poverty line is so low—$22,350 for a family of
four—this figure means nothing. Add the tens of millions of Americans who live
in a category called “near poverty,” including all those families attempting to
live on less than $45,000 a year, and you have at least 30 percent of the
country living in poverty. Once these people figure out that there is no
economic recovery, that their standard of living is going to continue to drop,
that they are trapped, that hope in the future is an illusion, they will become
as angry as protesters in Greece and Spain or the militants in Gaza or Afghanistan.
Banks and other financial corporations, handed trillions in interest-free money
from the Federal Reserve, meanwhile hoard $5 trillion, much of it looted from
the U.S. Treasury. The longer this worldwide disparity and inequality is
perpetuated, the more the masses will revolt and the faster we will internally
replicate the Israeli model of domestic control—drones overhead, all dissent
criminalized, SWAT teams busting through doors, deadly force as an acceptable
form of subjugation, food used as a weapon, and constant surveillance.
In Gaza and other blighted parts of the globe we see this new configuration
of power. What is happening in Gaza, like what is happening to people of color
in marginal communities in the United States, is the model. The techniques of
control, whether carried out by the Israelis or militarized police units in our
inner-city drug wars, whether employed by military special forces or
mercenaries in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, are tested first and perfected on
the weak and the powerless. Our callous indifference to the plight of the
Palestinians, and the hundreds of millions of poor packed into urban slums in
Asia or Africa, as well as our own underclass, means that the injustices
visited on them will be visited on us. In failing them we fail ourselves.
As the U.S. empire implodes, the harsher forms
of violence employed on the outer reaches of empire are steadily migrating back
to the homeland. At the same time, the internal systems of
democratic governance have calcified. Centralized authority has devolved into
the hands of an executive branch that slavishly serves global corporate
interests. The press and the government’s judiciary and legislative branches
have become toothless and decorative. The specter of terrorism, as in Israel,
is used by the state to divert gargantuan expenditures to homeland security,
the military and internal surveillance. Privacy is abolished. Dissent is
treason. The military with its mantra of blind obedience and force
characterizes the dark ethic of the wider culture. Beauty and truth are
abolished. Culture is degraded into kitsch. The emotional and intellectual life
of the citizenry is ravaged by spectacle, the tawdry and salacious, as well as
by handfuls of painkillers and narcotics. Blind ambition, a lust for power and
a grotesque personal vanity—exemplified by David Petraeus and his former
mistress—are the engines of advancement. The concept of the common good is no
longer part of the lexicon of power. This, as the novelist J.M. Coetzee
writes, is “the black flower of civilization.” It is Rome under Diocletian. It is us. Empires, in the end, decay into despotic, murderous and corrupt
regimes that finally consume themselves. And we, like Israel, are now coughing
up blood.
Παρακάτω θα
βρείτε μεταφρασμένες στα ελληνικά από τον υπογράφοντα τις τελευταίες φράσεις
του εξαιρετικού αυτού άρθρου.
(Το απόρρητο καταργείται.
Η διαφωνία είναι προδοσία. Ο στρατός με το μάντρα του της τυφλής υπακοής και
της δύναμης που χαρακτηρίζει τη σκοτεινή ηθική του ευρύτερου πολιτισμού. Ομορφιά
και αλήθεια καταργούνται. Ο πολιτισμός υποβαθμίζεται σε κιτς. Η συναισθηματική και
πνευματική ζωή των πολιτών πλήττεται από θέαμα, το φανταχτερό και λάγνο, καθώς
και από χούφτες παυσίπονων και ναρκωτικών. Τυφλή φιλοδοξία, μια δίψα για
εξουσία και μια γκροτέσκα προσωπική ματαιοδοξία - παράδειγμά της αποτελούν ο Ντέιβιντ Πετρέους και η πρώην ερωμένη
του - είναι οι κινητήριες δυνάμεις της προόδου. Η έννοια του κοινού καλού δεν
είναι πλέον μέρος του λεξικού της εξουσίας. Αυτό, όπως γράφει ο μυθιστοριογράφος
JM Coetzee, είναι "το μαύρο λουλούδι του πολιτισμού." Είναι η Ρώμη υπό τον
Διοκλητιανό. Είναι εμείς. Αυτοκρατορίες, στο τέλος, αποσυντίθενται σε δεσποτικά, δολοφονικά και διεφθαρμένα
καθεστώτα που τελικά καταναλώνουν τον εαυτό τους. Και εμείς, όπως
κάνει το Ισραήλ, βήχουμε τώρα φτύνοντας αίμα.
(Για τη μετάφραση
Θόδωρος Μπατρακούλης)
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