This reminds me of all the social media comments, many of them likely produced by scripts, in response to posts about Israeli atrocities over the last years. “Just return the prisoners” was used to justify any amount of bombing, bombing hospitals, shooting civilians. This was “war” and was all justified somehow because Hamas had Israeli prisoners. Now there are no prisoners, the killing of Palestinians continues, and those justifications are forgotten.
Israel is escalating its attacks on Palestinians as the so-called yellow line pushes west, expanding the death zone in Gaza; and as Israeli lynch mobs and soldiers enact pogroms in the occupied West Bank with impunity.Israeli warplanes struck a tent sheltering displaced people in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis earlier in the morning on 30 July, according to local reports.
Two Palestinians, one of them a child, and several wounded individuals arrived at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, medical sources told the Wafa news agency.
In a separate strike, Israel killed a child and wounded several others in an attack on a residential apartment in central Gaza. The victims were also transferred to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah.
This is the beginning of a litany, an inventory, of killings. Western media mentions Israelis killing Palestinians and comments about “straining the fragile ceasefire”. There is no ceasefire. Israel continues the genocide. The headline here leaped out at me as being one of the few very clear descriptions of what’s going on. German and US press will not represent anything like truth.
Президент СССР Михаил Горбачёв и президент США Джордж Буш-старший на пресс-конференции в Москве 31 июля 1991 года // REUTERS
On July 31, 1991, in Moscow, the presidents of the Soviet Union and the United States signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I). The historical significance of this event is becoming especially clear now, as we see how quickly a security system can collapse when political will and the capacity for dialogue disappear.
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Returning to dialogue, restoring arms control, and creating a new international security system is not a sign of weakness or a concession by one side to the other. This is the only way to preserve peace in an era when the cost of error has become too high.
Frankly, I don’t think that political awareness is going to prove the best medicine for our current malady. Most people know that financial dictatorship is destroying their life; the problem is knowing what to do about it. It is possible that nothing can be done, that power has become so deeply entrenched in the automatisms regulating daily life, connecting our interchanges, and infiltrating our words, that bio-financial control cannot be undone, or avoided.
So what can be done when nothing can be done?
I think that ironic autonomy is the answer. I mean the contrary of participation, I mean the contrary of responsibility, I mean the contrary of faith. Politicians call on us to take part in their political concerns, economists call on us to be responsible, to work more, to go shopping, to stimulate the market. Priests call on us to have faith. If you follow these inveiglements to participate, to be responsible — you are trapped. Do not take part in the game, do not expect any solution from politics, do not be attached to things, do not hope.
Dystopian irony (dyst-irony) is the language of autonomy. Be sceptical: do not believe your own assumptions and predictions (or mine).
And do not revoke revolution. Revolt against power is necessary even if we may not know how to win.
Do not belong. Distinguish your destiny from the destiny of those who want to belong and to participate and to pay their debt. If they want war, be a deserter. If they are enslaved but want you to suffer like them, do not give in to their blackmail.
If you have to choose between death and slavery, don’t be a slave. You have some chance to survive. If you accept slavery, you will die sooner or later anyway. As a slave.
You will die anyway; it is not particularly important when. What is important is how you live your life.
—Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes, (London: Verso, 2015), 224-225.
Ω Ω Ω
Wir sind die letzte Generation mit Hoffnungen gewesen. Wir hatten die große Hoffnung, daß eine menschlichere Gesellschaft auf der ganzen Welt möglich ist. Ob diese Hoffnung nun berechtigt war oder nicht und ob unser Beitrag der richtige gewesen ist, bleibe mal dahingestellt. Doch diese Hoffnung kann heute niemand mehr haben, der bei klarem Verstand ist und sich auch nur einen Tag lang die Nachrichten anhört.…Es sieht rabenschwarz aus.
Ich meine allerdings: Ob man nun noch einen Hoffnungsschimmer sieht oder nicht, man sollte auf jeden Fall etwas tun. Die Hoffnung auf den Fünfjahresplan, die gibt es nicht mehr. Aber Herrschaft zu bekämpfen, dort wo sie ungerecht oder unerträglich wird, für eine solidarische, menschlichere Welt eintreten, das solltest du zumindest in deiner näheren Umgebung versuchen. Sonst bist du auf jeden Fall verloren.
—Bommi Baumann, 1991 introduction to »Wie alles anfing«, (Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag GmbH, 2007), 7-8.
This is by Corita Kent, 1967. I grew up with a framed print over the sofa in my family’s living room. The War, by which anybody and everybody meant The Vietnam War, was ever a constant. It was there, a fact of life, in the background perhaps half forgotten, brought to the fore when the family car passed a troop convoy on the highway. The War was the peace sign on my jacket, the peace sign graffiti on overpasses, the symbol carved into the desks at school, on silver pendants, earrings. The War was always there.
It occurred to me this morning that the Forever Wars of the US in the 21st Century are similarly always there, background or not. Missing, however, are the peace signs.
During the next few days he realised how isolated he was. It was no one’s fault, he thought. He had simply got what he had asked for.
His friends had become strangely dim and colourless. Not one of them had kept his own outlook, his own world. They had been much more vivid in his memory. He must have over-estimated them in the past.
—Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, (London: Vintage, 2002), 160.
France has ordered Russian journalist Xenia Fedorova to leave the country, the interior ministry said on Wednesday, amid accusations that she has spread Kremlin propaganda through French television and radio ahead of next year’s presidential election.
France has ordered controversial Russian journalist Xenia Fedorova to leave the country, the interior ministry said Wednesday, after accusations that she was churning out Kremlin propaganda on French television and radio.
Disinformation experts have raised the alarm about the influence of the former journalist for Russia’s state-run channel RT, as France heads for a presidential election next year.
French newspaper Liberation cited the expulsion order as accusing her of acting “as a conduit for disinformation campaigns orchestrated by the Russian authorities” with the aim of “destabilising public order” in France.
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She regularly appears on the CNews television channel, Europe 1 radio and writes a column for Le Journal du Dimanche, spreading Kremlin talking points about Ukraine and the West.
There is no clarification here as to what it means, exactly, to “destabilise public order”, or how “spreading talking points” is in any way illegal.
I have never read before that I may expect a response within 60 business days. This is from a unit of the United States Government which “is committed to responding to your message in a timely manner”.
