We Need To Talk About...

Ep12: We Need to Talk About Iraq

Everything happening in Gaza is linked to what was done by the US and UK to Iraq. Technologies and techniques of urban warfare, of occupation, of psychological warfare, of oppression, of destruction, of torture and of propaganda were developed and shared between Israeli and the Coalition forces occupying Iraq. Each was used as a training ground and laboratory for the other.Like Gaza the nature of the violence in Iraq was genocidal. The people were the target. Educators and schools were targeted. Doctors and clinics and ambulances were targeted. Local officials were targeted. The fabric of society was targeted.Nothing that happened was the byproduct of different acts aimed at only the regime or its military force. Like the Israeli government of today the US lied and deceived so it could wipe out whole families; they schemed so they could destroy water infrastructure and spread disease, and they fought tooth and nail for years to ensure that thousands upon thousands of children would slowly die of easily preventable causes. Iraq and Palestine are linked through thousands of years of history, and sorrowfully linked as targets for the same imperial project. Of late people who want to highlight the suffering happening now in Gaza have sought to suppress or misrepresent what happened in Iraq. They want to increase the sense of urgency by making the Gaza Holocaust seem unprecedented, as if the human suffering is not enough in itself. This can only harm the cause of the Palestinian people and others. Isolating the current events from the broader sweep of imperialist history (and the absolute necessity of genocide in modern imperialism) plays into the hands of those who are already trying to control the narrative of the Gaza Holocaust.People like Piers Morgan are trying to co-opt anti-genocide sentiment to their own abominable political project. They openly say that the problem is one of excess, not of fundamental injustice. They believe that Israel has the right to kill innocent people, they just think they have crossed the line in terms of numbers. Likewise Bernie Sanders and innumerable others of his ilk are trying to frame this orgy of genocidal slaughter and the slow starvation of a captive population as the product of the right-wing regime in Israel, when in reality it is the product of a global system that is absolutely reliant on the willing participation of many millions, not least people like Bernie Sanders who vote to send arms to Israel.Palestinians will never be safe if we cannot accurately understand why such monstrous violence is visited on them. Genocide is a strategy and the Palestinian people are the target. If we accept any analysis that frames the genocide as provoked by hatred or excessive zeal in prosecuting a war then we are dooming the Palestinians to suffer further genocidal violence either through slow strangulation or the swift brutality that arrives after Israel finds the next pretext for "defending" itself.We need to lift the scales from our eyes about the US empire, its practice of genocide, and its relationship to Israel. The victims of genocide in different times and places are only separate in our minds because it suits the purposes of the perpetrators. We have no choice but to develop a sense of solidarity as an ethos, as a powerful emotion, and as an intellectual conviction. We are not separate. That is not just sentiment, it is the key to understanding the worst violence of the modern world.Imperial genocides are just as pervasive as class antagonisms, and even more likely to be misrepresented as discrete unrelated phenomena. In reality these events often feature the same personnel (maybe decades apart in time and thousands of kilometres removed in space) committing the same forms of violence and destruction against the same parts of society, but each time with a completely different story of why,Iraq always had too much potential for strength and development. Its light oil provides far higher profit margins than heavier oil such as that found in Venezuela. Moreover Iraq's potential for nationalistic sentiment is 7000 years deep. The Iraqis were first targeted to exploit their oil, but then were targeted to control how they could use and profit from their own oil. The US would bait Saddam Hussein into two destructive deadly wars leading to hundreds of thousand of lost lives, then impose sanctions killing hundreds of thousands more, then invade causing around a million or more deaths. Most died directly at the hands of the US-led Coalition, but many would die from a civil war that the occupation unleashed. The true losses to Iraq and Iraqis are incalculable because there is no baseline to work from. There is not time when Iraq was left alone to its own affairs to make use of its own wealth. The past can not be undone. We must look to the future and that begins with refusing to lie about the past and refusing to turn away.

Ep 11: We Need To Talk About the US Role in the Gaza Holocaust

I speak here off the cuff about the centrality and culpability of the US in the Gaza Holocaust. I start by explaining why I use "Gaza Holocaust" as terminology. The US is not merely supporting Israel's genocidal slaughter in Gaza, it is a direct participant. In this video I depart from my usual format and the result is much briefer. "Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." ― Aldous Huxley.

Ep 10 We Need to Talk About Nazis

In this episode I build on and take a different approach to things that I have written and spoke about in the past. Our vision of Nazis as the ultimate expression of political evil is not wrong in that Nazism is morally unsupportable, but exceptionalist views of Nazism blind us to dangers of Nazism returning. Obviously as a particular movement of a particular time it is unlikely (though unfortunately not impossible) that an overt self-identified "National Socialist" movement will become the ruling party in any contemporary state. That being understood, it is clear that all of the important and dangerous aspects that went into making Nazism what it was are on the rise in world politics, particularly the US and Europe.Soon after Trump's 2016 election I wrote of the "straw Nazis", the street thugs, whose alarming presence was useful but ultimately expendable (https://ongenocide.com/2016/12/15/trumps-straw-nazis-a-horror-story/). I won't say I was brilliant to predict that things would become more fascistic under Trump - anyone could see that. Looking back though I wrote a segment on how fascism would also have deepened had Clinton won with a less street-thuggish and more war-crimesy tone. I think Biden's term in office bore out that point.The truth is that Nazism was significant, but the individual Nazis weren't any different than the other shitty people around the world. As Nazi ideas take hold more and more people become Nazis until it is just you random run-of-the-mill hairdresser or barista. It isn't even about what these people believe either, it is about what they consent to be part of. As long as we keep looking for straw Nazis we will be looking the wrong way when the actual Nazis take over.

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.