Gaza and the kind of world we want

By *Jomo Sanga Thomas

(“Plain Talk” April 12, 2024)

Guest column by Caitlin Johnstone

The main reason I’ve focused so hard on Gaza these last six months isn’t so much because of how evil and horrific Israel’s mass atrocity is in and of itself, but because it’s so intimately intertwined with all our world’s other problems, and with the future of the human species.

In a very real way, the destruction of Gaza appears to be a moment in history where humanity is collectively mulling over whether it wants to keep behaving in a crazy, self-destructive way and continue along its trajectory into dystopia and toward self-inflicted extinction, or abandon this madness and push for something better. Whether it wants to keep buying into the lies and propaganda and tacitly consenting to the psychopathic murderousness of the powerful, or let the light of truth shine in.

A live-streamed genocide happening right out in the open forces a civilization to start asking questions about itself. If something like this can happen in plain view of everyone, and the people in charge not only do nothing but actively facilitate it, then you have to start wondering if everything about your entire nation is deranged, and if everything you’ve been told about the world is a lie.

If something so nakedly evil — undisguised by anything besides a thin veneer of Zionist gaslighting telling us we’re not seeing what we’re seeing — can be allowed to stand by those we’ve entrusted to run things, then it means our entire society is diseased. Our government. Our political systems. Our media. Our education systems. Our worldviews. Our culture. It’s all rotted and corrupted, right down to the core.

The future we are being shown through the window of Gaza is dark. Dark, dark, dark, dark. They’re currently using artificial intelligence to create kill lists and to determine when its targets will be at home with their families to ensure maximum civilian deaths. We used to worry about a dark future where humans send machines to go kill people indiscriminately, but it turns out it’s happening the other way around — we’re programming machines to tell us who to kill. The horror in our present dystopia isn’t so much autonomous murderbots as ethical decisions about killing being outsourced to AI.

We’re being asked to accept this and move forward in this direction into the future. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for our governments to knowingly support an unforgivable act of mass slaughter upon the inhabitants of a giant concentration camp. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for the mass media to lie and distort and misinform the public about a matter of such urgent importance day after day, month after month. We’re being asked to walk into the future holding the assumption that it’s fine and normal for a blatant genocide to take place right in front of our faces, and then move on as though nothing happened.

And right now we’re collectively ruminating on the question of whether we’re going to decide to do those things, or if we’re going to decide to do something else instead.

The Gaza genocide is such a massive thing in and of itself — the injustice, the murder, the loss, the unfathomable suffering. But what’s happening in Gaza is also about so much more than Gaza. It’s a moment in history where humanity is thinking seriously about real revolutionary change, and weighing the options between that and continuing along this tired old blood-soaked path we’ve been travelling on for millennia.

Gaza proves that our entire civilization is cancerous, and that everything we’ve been doing has failed. When you come across information which blows apart your worldview in your personal life, you can either collapse under the weight of cognitive dissonance until you find some way to plug yourself back into the comforting lies, or you can set about the hard work of forming a new way of looking at things. That’s the sort of moment we’re being collectively offered with Gaza. We’ll either accept the invitation, or continue our slide into darkness.

Unforced Errors

An unforced error in tennis is a mistake made by a player that is not the result of a good shot by an opponent and is avoidable. A lack of focus, physical fatigue or mental intensity causes unforced errors. 

Our politicians make lots of unforced errors. They are caused by carelessness, bravado and mostly the lack of consequences – they are not made to pay for their errors. 

Good communicators know when to kill a story. The really good communicator knows when not to give legs to a story. In SVG, lousy communication skills abound.

Why would an aspiring politician offer as his primary motive that it’s time for him to eat ah food? 

Why would a leader of a country unabashedly declare that his sole intent for excessive borrowing is to place a hook in the national gill and dare opponents to try to remove it? 

Why would a politician mourning the death of a lover publicly speak about the affair without regard for his wife and children? 

Why would an opposition politician cluelessly declare ‘get it from where’ when asked if he can secure continued funding for a project if his party were to win elections and take over the governance of the country?

Or why advise your son to take a dignified silence from addressing allegations accusations about an extramarital affair and then speak excessively about the issue?

Why would a sitting prime minister tell citizens that some of them are nobody and they are trying to be somebody by committing violent crimes?

Why would a leader tell citizens that his country is no more than a big stone with good soil?

Why would a leader insult indigenous Garifuna people that their colleagues who survived genocide and exile will return to take their homes, jobs and land?

Too many of our leaders, influencers and plain old Joes suffer from diarrhoea of the mouth. Until people start paying for their mouths, they may continue to dribble on us.

*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former senator and Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

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