The most destructive force on Earth

By *Jomo Sanga Thomas

(“Plain Talk” May 17, 2024)

Guest Column by Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone

I don’t spend my time attacking the US war machine because I have any special love for Hamas, Iran, Russia, China, or any other power. I do it because the US empire is quantifiably the most destructive and tyrannical force on this planet, by an extremely massive margin.

No other power has spent the 21st century killing people by the millions and displacing them by the tens of millions. No other power is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases, starving people around the world with blockades and economic sanctions, staging proxy wars, color revolutions and coups all over the earth, and working to destabilize and destroy any nation anywhere on this planet who dares to defy its dictates.

Only the US empire is doing this. No other power comes anywhere remotely close.

That’s as murderous and tyrannical as it gets. Propaganda-addled empire simps sometimes try to act like it’s strange and suspicious that I spend all my time criticising the US war machine, when what’s actually strange and suspicious is that everyone else does not.

The US State Department is justifying continued US support for Israel’s Gaza assault despite its own acknowledgement of evidence of Israeli war crimes, claiming there’s been a ‘substantial increase’ in efforts to get aid into Gaza. It makes this claim days after Israel shut down the most crucial entry point of aid into Gaza, which remains closed.

It’s hilarious how imperial spinmeisters keep trying to convince young people that it will be those who opposed a genocide who will have to worry about their futures. Israel apologists are aggressively hammering this line  ‘If you protest against Israel employers won’t hire you!’ You idiots, young people know they live in a world where opposing a genocide can hurt your job prospects. That’s why they’ve decided to change the world.

Besides October 2023, the all-time month with the most searches for he word ‘Nakba’ is May 2024, when one artist released a song containing the line ‘the Nakba never ended.’ You want to know why the kids are pushing celebrities to oppose the Gaza genocide? That’s why.

I am so done listening to people bitch about Gen Z. After watching what superstars and leaders these kids have been on Gaza these last seven months, we shouldn’t be asking how we can guide them, we should be asking how they can guide us.

One of the many reasons it’s absurd to say a Jewish person from New York has more of a claim to Palestine than the Palestinians because the New Yorker is ‘indigenous’ to the land is that their argument depends on expanses of time that have no relevance to the human lifespan. Claiming you had ancestors there 500 or 1,000 or 2,000 years ago is a moot point, because vast stretches of time like that have no meaningful personal relevance to a species that only lives about eighty years, whereas there are survivors of the Nakba still alive today.

If an event is so far back in history that you don’t personally experience its reverberations and its consequences, then it’s not recent enough to have any personal relevance to you. American descendants of slavery can rightly claim that slavery is personally relevant to them for example, because that population is still experiencing the reverberations and consequences of that historical event. Some white guy in New York who happens to share a religion with people who lived in Palestine a few millennia ago cannot make the same claim.

Ironically if Biden was really the anti-Israel Hamas lover that Republicans claim he is and if Trump was really the pro-Russia isolationist that Democrats claimed he was, we wouldn’t be seeing the horrors in Gaza and Ukraine that we’re seeing today.

When I escaped from an abusive relationship which got very abusive as I was trying to leave, my ex went around telling everyone we knew that his abuse wasn’t what it looked like and it was actually quite complicated. Just like Israel and its apologists are doing right now.

That’s just what abusers do when people start calling their obvious abuse what it is, whether you’re talking about interpersonal or international affairs. You see bloodthirsty swamp monsters like John Bolton using the ‘it’s complicated’ talking point all the time, because if you look at the raw data of the US war machine’s behaviour it’s very clearly an extremely abusive and destructive force.

Imperial narrative managers work hard to make the depravity of the empire sound a lot more complicated than it is so that people will assume it’s best left to the authorised ‘experts.’ And because of how locked down our rulers have the information ecosystem it often works; people look at things like Israel-Palestine and assume it must be very complicated, because if it was as simple as it looks then surely their government and their media would not be so supportive of Israel.

*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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