We Need To Talk About...

Ep 09: We Need to Talk About the Fact that Kenneth Roth is Still an Imperialist Warmonger

In which I discuss Kenneth Roth's return to form as a military interventionist who loves the idea of US military involvement as a way of solving problems. Despite everything this implies he still gets treated as a humanitarian hero by the likes of Democracy Now!I stuffed up the video capture so that my face is covering Roth most of the time. I am new to the software and had preview screen showing a very different view. Sorry :-(NB: I do not know why YT won't let me post the links below, but you can find them at my blog: https://ongenocide.com/ The recent DN! segment used is here: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/3/ukraine_russia_trump_vance_putinMy 2014 article on HRW and Amnesty International is here: https://ongenocide.com/2014/06/20/why-blocking-the-revolving-door-wont-fix-human-rights-watch/Here is an older and longer but more hard-hitting piece I posted about Amnesty International and liberal imperialism: https://ongenocide.com/2012/11/21/amnesty-international-and-liberal-imperialism-video-audio-illustrated-hypertext-transcript/ And here is the DN! debate between Keane Bhatt and Reed Brody: https://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/11/debate_is_human_rights_watch_too

Ep 08: We Need to Talk About Fascism Pt 2

In the second of two parts I discuss how contemporary fascism doesn't announce itself; how creeping fascism has come to predominate in the West and other countries; and how once fascism becomes normal normal people become fascists. Eventually society will be one in which the only people who aren't fascist are the conscious antifascists. Liberals and conservatives, for example, are by no means immune from being fascists.

We Need to Talk About Fascism Pt 1

In the first of two parts I discuss how contemporary fascism doesn't announce itself; how creeping fascism has come to predominate in the West and other countries; and how once fascism becomes normal normal people become fascists. Eventually society will be one in which the only people who aren't fascist are the conscious antifascists. Liberals and conservatives, for example, are by no means immune from being fascists.

Gaza: What is Genocide?

[NOTE: This was originally delivered as a speech at a vigil in Wakatū/Nelson but footage of the speech was lost so I re-recorded it and appended text below]
What is genocide? Legally it is described in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which tells us “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The convention does not mention complete extermination, it does not mention Nazis nor gas chambers, and it does not mention special intent. These things are not intrinsic to genocide.
Being focused on criminal acts, the convention reflects the concept of genocide, but it does not describe its nature. This has allowed a vacuum into which people have poured their prejudices in order to demonise those they hate and wash clean the blood from the hands of they support.
The convention defines genocide in legal terms but it does not define it in terms of meaning. This has made the concept and the law vulnerable to political power and manipulation. The way we discuss genocide is fraught with double-standards. People who know nothing about the concept are the keenest to police its usage. They proclaim, as Piers Morgan recently did that it is not “technically” a genocide unless a million people die. Yet we accept as uncontroversial the finding that Australia committed genocide when it took Aboriginal and so-called “mixed-race” children from their families. In contrast it is desperately controversial to suggest that the 76 year-long co-ordinated multifaceted unrelenting and often savagely violent programme by Zionists to cleanse Palestinians from the land of Palestine is genocidal.
So, to understand the law, we need to ask – what is genocide? Raphael Lemkin created the word and the idea. He was a lawyer, but most importantly he was a driven humanitarian. Ethnically Polish and Jewish, he grew up in what is now Western Ukraine. From a young age he developed a deep abhorrence for mass violence against people because of their identity. Pogroms against Jews; historical instances of persecution and massacres of Christians; and the horrors of the Armenian Genocide (which happened when he was 15) all shaped him profoundly.
In 1939 Lemkin was forced into a gruelling and dangerous flight when Germany invaded Poland, leaving behind his life as a prosecutor in Warsaw. When safe, he devoted himself to trying to understand the unprecedented brutality unleashed on the world at that time. He came to realise that violence against people because of their group identity (which he had previously termed “barbarism”) was not in fact distinct from the destruction of the cultural, social and political institutions of that group (which he had previously termed “vandalism”). Combining these two concepts he coined the term “genocide” and said it denoted “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups….”
If there is one sentence that Lemkin wrote that captures best the meaning of genocide it is that genocide is war directed against subjects and civilians not against sovereigns and armies. The key word is war, and Lemkin made clear that he knew that those who commit genocide do so as a form of warfare. He wrote that “the Germans prepared, waged, and continued a war not merely against states and their armies but against peoples. For the German occupying authorities war thus appears to offer the most appropriate occasion for carrying out their policy of genocide.” Genocide can sometimes occur in other forms, but it is almost always portrayed by perpetrators as armed conflict.
Genocide is a policy, it is a strategy. Violent hatred is less a cause of genocide than it is a consequence of it. The dehumanisation and demonisation of the victim group is a top-down process that seeks to shape the minds of the ordinary men and women who carry out acts of violence so that all members of the victim group are seen as a threat, and as a target. The key to getting people to commit acts of genocide is not getting them to hate it is getting them to believe that their genocidal violence is an act of warfare, an act of defence.
IDF soldier Guy Zaken was a bulldozer driver who testified the he had “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.” Why does he call them “terrorists”? In the context, it is not a meaningful descriptive term. These people cruelly mangled (to death or in death) would mostly have been non-combatants if there were truly hundreds. The word “terrorists” has no meaning here at all other than to make the victims sound dangerous and worthy of extermination. Genocide makes even a small child a threat. As an ordinary Zionist recently put it, “By the time they are 6, they are already radicalized! They are the TERRORISTS of the future!”
Genocide is a “coordinated plan” – a process, a strategy, a policy. But really, what is genocide? It is what the victims experience that truly defines what genocide is. Genocide unleashes the violence of murder, rape, and torture; it unleashes the aggression of those who glory in destroying heritage, community, culture, family, and home. More than that, though, it prevents any possibility of appeal to the human traits of mercy, compassion, or even simple empathy. It turns perpetrators into implacable machines; unmoved by the tears of those whose homes are demolished; unconcerned by their own acts of murder; unreachable by the grief of a parent cradling their dead child; inured to the suffering of those shot, crushed or burnt; untouched by the pleas of those who do not want to die; happy to destroy food needed by starving people; callous in the face of inhuman living conditions that spawn disease; indifferent to the terror of a people living under ever-present threats and unending loss; able to look at the people who endure the relentless terror of bombing; missiles, shelling and drones, and call those people terrorists.
What is genocide? There can be no better answer than that it is what is happening now in Gaza.

Episode 06: We Need to Talk About Syria

The fall of the Assad regime has been widely celebrated but there are already signs that it may lead to an even worse future for the people of Syria and the region.
 
The experiences of those who suffered under the Assad regime are real and their pain and loss should be honoured but we should not do so by ignoring the crimes of others. The people who have suffered and those who will suffer at the hands of Islamists, US client forces, and Turkish proxies are just as valid and meaningful as those who suffered and died under the Syrian Ba'ath regime. We who are not personally affected have a duty to be disinterested, a duty to advocate for every person, not to pick a side because Assad was a ruthless dictator or because we support a particular ideology. In this age of "Western values", pinkwashing, greenwashing, femiwashing and now the HTS's "woke-jihadism" we should know already that the Manichean propaganda machine that makes some people into demonic neo-Hitlers is morally arbitrary. The Western media system does not promote true resisters as its anti-Hitler's, it promotes its own loyal torturers and murderers.
 
We cannot in conscience throw up our hands and join the cynics who say nothing, nor can we countenance the repugnant celebration of the fall of the Assad regime that whitewashes the cruel circumstances and the likely cruel future that will come of it. We have to find a way to understand what this means to humanity that is not predicated on childish notions of heroes and villains.
 
In another world the end of the Syrian Ba'ath regime would be cause for joy, but we do not live in that world. The further empowerment of the US empire and its clients Turkiye and Israel will almost certainly cause more death, grief, pain and destruction than the continued existence of the Assad regime would have. Instead on focusing on the specifics of the Balkanisation of Syria and it future of likely instability and subservience to the US, Israel and Turkiye, I take a broader historical view.
 
Using Tipu Sultan as an analogy I show that the nature of a local potentate, good or bad, is less significant in the long term than the fact that they are local. A bad dictator might kill tens of thousands and will forever be known as an epitome of brutality, but imperial powers can murder hundreds of thousands and it will be viewed as simple the cost of "stability".
 
READING:
William Shawcross: Sideshow
John Atkins Hobson – Imperialism
Lenin – Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
Michael Hudson – Superimperialism
Mike Davis – Late Victorian Holocausts

Episode 5: We Need to Talk About Professional Wrestling

In the second part of Part 2 of "We Need to Talk About That F*****g Election that Just Happened" I finally get to the bit about wrestling. World Wrestling Entertainment makes content that is a form of melodramatic theatre centred around partially improvised but largely scripted "wrestling". Over the last few decades, though, the content occurring outside of the ring has become more complex, with ever more convoluted storylines.WWE provided a model for and a lens with which to view modern Western electoral politics. Many of the techniques of professional wrestling have entered the world of politics.In this episode I explore what that can mean.

Episode 4: We Need to Talk About That [Copulating] Election that Just Happened: Part 2: Part 1

In this episode I forget the name of Henry Wallace and tentatively refer to him as George Wallace (who was a famous segregationist Governor of Alabama). Sorry Henry :-(I discuss the fact that the Democrats clearly did not campaign to win the 2024 presidential election, and what circumstances contribute to that behaviour. I talk about the increasingly fraudulent nature of politics at the highest levels and express how much I hate the commentators who base their "analysis" on their evident ability to read the minds of political figures and talk with absolute assurance about what their subjects think and feel.I discuss the way the unrelenting and sophisticated dishonesty of modern politics creates splits in the consciousness of both the individuals and groups of people, essentially making us all a bit mad and highly vulnerable to intellectual and moral degradation.This is the first part of Part 2 of my election analysis. Part 2 was too large to do in one part so I will post Part 2 of Part 2 later. In it I will discuss the role of professional wrestling in the 2024 US Presidential election - which goes far beyond the involvement of Hulk Hogan.

Episode 3: We Need to Talk About That Fucking Election that Just Happened - Part 1

In a different approach to a postmortem of the US 2024 Presidential Election I try to avoid focusing on the campaigning choices of each party and look instead at the systemic constraints that have made US presidential elections into a spectacle - a spectacle almost devoid of actual politics. The history of US presidential politics has been dominated by public sentiments about their policies on issues of war and peace, but the electoral politics have evolved to keep such issues well away from the ballot box.I run through the history from Woodrow Wilson deceptively running as the antiwar candidate in 1916 under the slogan "He Kept Us Out of the War", while already intending to put the US into the War, to Lyndon Johnson running as the antiwar candidate while engineering a massive genocidal onslaught in Indochina.In Part 2 I will explore the way in which US elections are constrained to produce only pro-empire, pro-genocide results and the way in which the system is simultaneously a means of controlling public opinion.

Episode 2: We Need to Talk About ”Them”

In Episode 2 I follow thematically from episode one to explore generalisation and "othering". I continue some focus on antisemitism but shift more to the use of wilful bigotry against Palestinians which serves to paint the victims as being the agents of their own destruction. Links: Indi.ca: "How 'Israel' Is Used To Divide And Conquer The Middle East" https://indi.ca/how-israel-is-used-to-divide-and-conquer-the-middle-east/Me: "Israel's Big Lie of 'Self-defence"" http://ongenocide.com/2023/11/02/israels-big-lie-of-self-defence/"Beyond Stalemate: The Second Indochina War as a Genocidal War System" https://ongenocide.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/beyond-stalemate-revised.pdfGeorge Orwell: "Politics and the English Language" https://archive.org/details/PoliticsAndTheEnglishLanguageCBS Mornings: Ta-Nehisi Coates segment, https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/ta-nehisi-coates-on-the-power-of-stories-new-book-the-message/vi-AA1s2CEE

We Need To Talk About Antisemitism

Antisemitism is on the rise, but so is the misuse of allegations of antisemitism to police political speech. How do we balance these increasingly urgent concerns? How do we distinguish what is and is not antisemitism?