Any income received from this post will be donated to an (as yet unchosen) activist account.
Someone said that I’d been quiet about Palestine and Yemen. Someone else said that our Instagram feed was full of political stuff and wasn’t the pleasant gardening account it used to be.
Well, both are right.
I’ve been choosing where to post and repost stuff about the horrors occuring in the Middle East. Instagram gets far more engagement than our little website and has the bonus that what I post there, Al Gore Rhythm permitting, gets blasted to Facebook, so it’s doubly good.
We've been promoting support for Médecins Sans Frontières, Medical Aid for Palestinians and the Solidarity Apothecary .
But, if you’re interested, here’s my take on our plight.
Note: this was written mostly before the Rafah concentration camp was assaulted.
I say ‘our plight’ because, in my books, this is the big one. A gloves off assault on everything we hold dear that, if we don’t rise up to stop it,will roll on and on, right to your or our front doors. Since I started writing this, the evil empire are bombing Iraq and Syria in an effort to stop ‘Iran-backed militants’ and the ant- islamic propaganda machine is in high gear.
We’re seeing the willing refusal to follow the ruling of the highest court in the world. Not only that, but nations are ramping up their financial and military support.
We’re seeing every social justice or human rights abuse that I can think of, all happening in front of our eyes, live streamed as it happens. Child murder, child abuse, every violation of women and families that can happen all happening live streamed to our devices. Whole cities have been levelled, hospitals and infracture actively targeted in order to serve the stated purpose of eliminating Palestine. As of last night, Israel are actively bombing aid trucks, even after their citizens manually blockaded them. Every atrocity is being beamed straight to us violent, gor, and unsettling.
To support those violations, major economic players (including Australia) have withdrawn funding to the most effective aid organisation in the area (interestingly, that aid organisation does a lot of work in those countries peripheral to the Palestinian outrage and who are ‘coincidentally’ being bombed now).
Then there’s Yemen. A little country, suffering poverty created by the same nations that are supporting Israel. Don’t think this is a new thing, the last 4 US presidents have instigated or supported bombing of that nation. What is their crime this time? It is blockading cargo ships. They have boarded and blockaded ships from several nations, in their own territorial waters. They didn’t step outside their own sovereignty, and critically, they never killed anyone.
I see their punishment as being commensurate with their location. They are one of the countries that control access to that vital trade route, the Suez Canal. One of the stated reasons for the ‘intervention’ of the US is that actions there will produce ‘significant delays in the shipping of goods and products’.
In other words, it’s all about the money. Is Palestine an ideological war too? I doubt it. 5 billion barrels or so of oil under that little location, a trillion cubic metres of natural gas in the area too. Makes you think.
My personal thought is that unfettered access to the Suez Canal trumps all of these other reasons.
But if access to the Suez is blocked, there’s always the Ben Gurion canal project. If you’re not up to date on history, the Ben Gurion canal project was (is) a plan to carve an alternative canal to the Suez, connecting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean (the idea at the time was to use nuclear bombs to dig it). The initial plan seems to have been to circumvent Palestine with but why bother now. Clear the place out and dig away. Of course builders couldn’t use nuclear bombs to do the digging now, it would contaminate all that beautiful oil and gas.
Capitalism, of course is driving it all in it’s new, maskless, gloveless form. Unapologetic exploitation is the new normal for these folks. One of the main reasons given for bombing Yemen is that their actions would cause ‘significant delays to the shipping of goods…’.
Capitalism is no longer an economic theory, it is an unstoppable force that has weaseled its way into every facet of our everyday lives.
And we can see it’s exceesses all around the world. The under-reported genocide and devastation in the Somalia and Congo. Republican states in the US rolling back child labour laws to allow teenagers to work 30 hours a week (in addition to school, of course) but with no breaks. That country has seen the highest number of incidents of child deaths in the workplace for a century. Read that sentence again. And again. And again. By the way, many of those same states are blocking or repealing laws that prevent child marriage too. Probably take the time to read that sentence again too.
America is the go-to place for stories of excess and evil but it’s going to get worse. Trump has promised to be a ‘dictator for one day’ in order to remove all environmental laws that have been holding back fossil fuel companies from complete exploitation of that continent. States are rushing to build their own border walls and if you believe the conspiracy theory, Russia is helping Texas secede.
Meanwhile, in the US, UK, most of Europe and here folks are blaming migrants for our troubles. I heard someone the other day trot out that oldie but baddie, ‘migrants are taking our jobs’ . I’s not the migrants that took your jobs but the government who allowed your employers to employ a migrant because they didn’t want to pay you a living wage, give you good work conditions and most certainly wouldn’t want to hear any talk of unions or rights.
We’ve heard it here too from our government blaming migrants for the housing crisis. Hang on, what about uncapped, unaffordable rents or more than 12 interest rate hikes in as many months?
If you’ve managed to read this far, you’ll see that I’ve woven a thread about an unfettered capitalist expansion throughout the world that is actively encouraging a massive and rapid shift to the political right and a huge attack on civil rights, liberties, freedom (pick the one that best floats your boat). If the perpetrators of the horrors and their supporters succeed, Palestine is the domino that will bring all else down (including us). To mix metaphors, as I love to do, Palestine is the linchpin in the house of cards that is our freedom. Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, Jordan are all pawns in this game to eliminate hindrances to unfettered capitalism and its favourite tool, colonialism. Remember too that Australia is a settler state imposed on the land and culture of an Indigenous people.
All the big players are on board, all the middle sized are clamouring for a seat at the table while the rich eat the corpse of the world (we don’t call it ‘necro-capitalism’ for nothing).
Can the little guys stop it? Well, there are billions more of ‘us’ than ‘them’ but most of us are paralyzed or hypnotized into submission and compliance and of course, that has always been the plan.
The key will be money – sustained economic loss is what the present incarnation of evil fears the most. Can we stop it with gardening or boycotts? Not completely, but it will help. What we have to do is to re-contextualize money. It is how the powerful got powerful but it is an illusion, one that we have been trained to value above all others. Most of it is digital now, so it only an electronic fantasy. How can we render that valueless?
There has to be a massive, rapid and far reaching uprising and soon but will it happen? I hope so and I’m working towards it as are many others but will it be enough or in time?
Personally, I don’t think so. In my heart of hearts, I hope so, but I don’t think so.
