Some War Criminals Are More Equal Than Others

“The American principle that ‘no one is above the law‘ has been affirmed”, uncle Joe solemnly says, standing up there at the podium in front of those beloved stars and stripes, in reference to the historic conviction of ex-president Trump. “This is a cornerstone of America – our justice system!”, he continues, like explaining American Exceptionalism to a toddler.

Which is a beautiful sentiment. Shame though that the same “American Principle” doesn’t apply to Biden’s friends. For only the week prior, after the International Criminal Court sent out a warrant for the genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden called the summons to answer the allegations of war crimes “outrageous“.

I’d list the war crimes that Israel is accused of committing in Gaza since October 7th (ignoring all the crimes committed for the past 70 years before that for brevity’s sake), but I can’t honestly be arsed. There are plenty. Targetting civilians, using starvation as a weapon, making land intentionally uninhabitable, displacing people, murdering children, et al. Just… search for “israel war crimes in gaza” and you’ll get plenty of responses from the UN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and onwards. If you can’t see it; you’re closing your eyes. And though Bibi probably never pulled any triggers himself, or cranked the throttle of tanks to run over children, a country’s commander in chief is effectively responsible for its armed forces’ behaviour.

Bibi belongs in the Haague.

But it comes as little surprise that Biden doesn’t respect the international rule of law. His “American Principle” only applies where he is in control. Outside America’s borders, the US can, will, and should be permitted to act without any principles at all, according to the White House. Biden’s is not the first disdainful behaviour that the US has committed against the international community and the ICC in particular. And woe betide any sorry-ass motherfucker who ever even dares to suggest that US soldiers do evil things in the name of their sacred star-spangled banner while abroad.

All of which leaves us with just one question: What is Joe Biden? Is he simply a man so blinded by ego that he cannot conceive of himself as the villain in any drama, who rules by single-minded hypocritical tribalism without the fragrance of a thought as to right or wrong so long as he and his prevail? Or is uncle Joe quite simply a clueless idiot?

/Sebastian Lindberg 11/6-2024

Skyfall Over Rafah

Yesterday (6th of May), the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) ordered that Rafah, part of southern Gaza, was to be evacuated. This, it was believed, came at the head of another push by the IDF to finalize their invasion of the Palestinian “open-air prison”.

For you to understand just how immaculately insane this order is, you need to understand what Rafah is. Rafah is the last, southern, vestige of the Gaza strip not pulverized by the nuclear war machine of Israel, the last strip of land that Israel hasn’t bombed, bulldozed, and executed their way through.

And any observant observer may just realise the profundity of the natural follow-up question to the IDF order:

Evacuate to where?

There is no more Gaza strip after Rafah. There is no where to go. Israel lets no one out. Egypt lets no one in. There is. No where. To go.

Except Muwasi. A little bedouin town along the coast – a strip of land about the size of four square kilometres – that Israel has declared a “safe zone”, that is supposed to house every Palestinian in Rafah (estimated about 1.7 million people) until… further notice.

That’s how today’s column was supposed to go, carrying on to elucidate on Israel’s cruelty and genocidal intent, explaining the insanity of calling 2,4 square meter per Palestinian a “humanitarian refuge”. But then the bombs started dropping in Rafah, tonight, while we were sleeping. On this day, seven months since October 7, Israel made good on its threat to level Rafah, giving the 1.7 million people there naught but a rough 24 hours to relocate.

This campaign is simple to understand if you look at what’s being done. The Gaza strip is being levelled, at an increasing rate. While Israel is bargaining for off-shore oil drilling contracts under the guise of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s populist extremists are battling the clock as internal political resistance against their murderous regime is on the rise, not to mention international grass-root outrage, and they’re trying to finish up their unsustainable military campaign as quickly as possible – not for the sake of Israeli hostages but in accordance to their Hannibal doctrine. This is the ethnic cleansing of a strip of land, pushing civilians into the sea through maniacal cruelty, to take land and make a buck off of fossil fuels.

There’s no justice to this. There’s no proportional response in anything the IDF has done since October 7th, or before for that matter. This is the text-book definition of ethnic cleansing, no different than the orchestrated famines of Soviet Ukraine or Nazi Germany. This is the labour of eradicating a population from plots of land that you want for either greed or religiously delusional entitlement.

And while all this is being done for the sake of glory and national security, I’m left to wonder… Just what atrocities does a nation state have to commit, and how much cruelty does the international community have to turn a blind eye to, until it justifies vengeance?

/Sebastian Lindberg 7/5-2024

Selective Sacrality

Last week we took a laughing-stock kinda look at the “controversy” of banning TikTok in the US, with a glimpse toward the wail that TikTok, a Chinese Big Corpo software psyops, represented some hallmark First Amendment right for the public.

It is not. There is nothing “free” about a corporate algorithm deciding who is heard where.

But worry not! If you’re concerned about your freedom of speech, or the lack thereof, in the gReAtEsT cOuNtRy On EaRtH, then oh boy do I have somewhere to point your infringed indignation! Just turn your ire over here!

That is what actual transgression of free speech looks like. When students – young people – those of us not yet encumbered with mortgages and compromised integrity – stand up against ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and colonialism, and in turn are censured by their academic institutions. Y’know, the kind of institutions that are SUPPOSED to be ramparts of higher cognition and moral upbringing, of truth and integrity, but instead prove to be cowardly cesspools of corporate dependency.

When universities threaten young people for expressing their democratic rights and political displeasure, THEN you have infringement upon your precious First Amendment privilege. When colleges send in the cavalry – quite fucking literally The Cavalry! – to disperse democratic congregations of protest, THEN your vaunted freedom of speech and expression and gathering is being threatened.

But no. Of course you don’t care about young people’s right to protest a morally corrupt government, not as much as you care about watching a never-ending stream of funny videos and cosmetic tutorials. But that’s not the real reason why you’re not as upset about the martial intervention against university protests as you are about losing your precious ha-ha brain-scramble. The real reason is that thousands and thousands of students all across your gLoRiOuS aMeRiCa don’t have a multi-million dollar ad department backing their message, so you don’t get those precious advertisements telling you what to think about the disruption of democratic discourse and protest. Because how could you ever make up your own mind if instructions weren’t given to you in neat one-minute bursts of custom engineered opinion. It’s not like you could do like these young people and take a stand against a wrong done by your civilization’s hand against another without clear commercial direction.

It says something about the institutions of higher learning in the US, when presidents and deans condemn and extra-judicially prosecute children for speaking up against injustice in an organized fashion. It makes it plain that those great palaces of learning have compromised moral authority for the benefit of political benefactors and corporate sponsors.

As it turns out, those rights of free speech are oh so sacred only for as long as you have nothing worthwhile to say.

/Sebastian Lindberg 30/5-2024

The Fears of a Weak State

Last week, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, voted through a new law permitting the violation of press freedoms of any foreign media network which may pose a “threat to national security”. Warmonger, hatemonger, fascist, and condemned corrupt politician, Benjamin Netanyahu spared no time to declare the Qatari news network Al Jazeera as public enemy number one and “terror channel” for its on-site reporting of Israeli war crimes and unrestricted murder of both civilians and international aid workers in Gaza.

Because a tyrant can never be tolerant of opposition. And since Al Jazeera is just about the only international news media still operating within Gazan borders, even though the Israel Defence Force (IDF) has been targetting journalists and those journalists’ families since long before the war (see, for example, the murder of Shireen Abu Akleh).

Some may be outraged by this new law. Some may get defensive, like zionists are wont to get. And some may be surprised. But the eradication of press freedoms are not news, nor isolated to Israel. Report after report, from organisation after organisation, sing the same tune: The freedom of the press is dwindling, far and wide. From Russia to the US, from Israel to Iran, and even from the “liberal capital” of the world – the European Union – news networks are being diminished. For much the same arguments, no matter where you go. Whether it’s the US presidential office hunting down Assange for exposing US war crimes, Russia targetting dissenting voices, Turkey jailing anyone who disagrees with Erdogan, or the EU trying (and failing) to ban Russia Today and Sputnik news channels, they all argue the same thing: That they’re fighting a war against misinformation.

Naturally, it’s the reigning regime which defines what’s misinformation and not. Which is understandable. Every weak government since the dawn of history has made great efforts to gain a monopoly of the country’s propaganda, from Rome to Nazi Germany, and beyond.

So instead of just decrying Israel as another apartheid rogue state, let us take a look at the very explicable mechanics behind the erosion of press freedoms, the loss of transparency of government, and the diminishing of public access to reliable and fact-checked information:

Let’s begin our journey with an informed public. Such a population is knowledgable of the minutiae of governance, and the implications of foreign policy and relations. Such a public is difficult to control by ruling parties, and hold their government accountable. They are a demanding sort, holding their leaders accountable and responsible, and aren’t easily swayed by ideological red herrings.

But it is difficult to find people who are willing to lead such a public, for people capable of taking responsibility are prone to avoid it. Instead, cowards and opportunists fill the ranks, who absolutely do not want an informed and knowledgable public. How much easier for them would it not be if the public were malleable and easily herded toward whatever new shiny thing that was dangled in front of them.

So as the quality of the leadership inevitably falter, the will to erode the intellectual capacity of its public is conversely increased. And with enough desire to undermine, or at the very least cease the maintenance of, the informed nature of the public, the institutions of upholding that virtue are slowly picked apart. Schools decline, news networks are turned into partisan propaganda machines, and science is being debated by people who never understood the scientific method. And as a result, people are made ignorant.

And though an ignorant public is easier to be herded by its government, it turns out that they’re also easier to be manipulated by other governments.

And once facts and knowledge becomes increasingly subservient to emotion and belief, that control becomes a tug-of-war with other puppeteers. Some of those outside voices may even maintain a modicum of integrity and offer facts and knowledge to the undermined public, but they’re easily rationalized into the same corner as belligerent foreign interests.

And so “national security” replaces “accountability”, and press freedoms are curbed to maintain the slipping control of the failing regime.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

If a government had a public which could tell truth from lies, then misinformation, foreign or otherwise, would be no threat. But which capitalist government could maintain its power with such a public to begin with? And so, the eradication of a free press inevitably follows, not as a sign of foreign threats or a destabilized geopolitical landscape, but as the consequence of domestic corruption of both the public and the elite.

For it is a weak state which fears information.

/Sebastian Lindberg 9/4-2024

The Most Moral Army

”[Our] army is the most moral army in the world”.

The prelude to this “moral army”’s passing is a bombed-out wasteland, a wasteland in which half of the population are children. A wasteland of husks of concrete where civilians are the main targets of genocide and forceful relocation under the guise of hunting terrorists.

And yet, to Netanyahu, his army is the world’s most moral.

An army from a nation which runs ghastly mobile gaming adverts about its indignity, or where influencers and families perform a dancing mockery of the hellish conditions that Palestinians have to try and endure in the waterless and powerless dust of wreck and ruin.

But this is all just and right, according to Netanyahu, and any critics of it “do not have a single drop of morality”.

Not the kind of morality where the moral army aim for the journalists who try to observe the war on the ground. Where Reuters reporters are actively targetted along the Lebanon border, or how journalists and their families are hunted on the ground of the strip.

Remember Shireen Abu Akleh, for she was (according to Netanyahu) shot dead in the head by the most moral army in the world.

I disagree with Netanyahu. Avid readers of these here my Wasted Words know full well the umbrage I take with the apartheid of Zionism. I’m well on record disliking occupation and subjugation on a categorical level. Killing a journalist doing their job is about the most clear draconic sign you can find in a regime, and that’s not even taking into accounts the numerous violations of International Law that Israel makes itself guilty of even in so-called peace time, much more so when at full scale war against a civilian population.

But right this second I disagree with Netanyahu not just on policy or politics, but on a fundamental philosophical level:

There is no moral army. Morality, like truth, is a first casualty in any war. There may be right and wrong, clearly cut, such as in Ukraine’s defence of its sovereign borders, or Europe’s resistance to Nazi Germany’s desire for Lebensraum, but (despite what Peter Sellers said) there’s no space for morality in the war room. Atrocities are endemic to the very idea of war; the industrialized cruelty of political will against another. No matter which side you root for (or against), there is not an armed force upon this earth, past present or likely future, which runs on morality.

If there was, we wouldn’t have need for International Law or the Rules of War.

If there was, the Law of Armed Conflict as part of the United Nations Charter would not be violated on such regular basis as it is.

There may be a moral side to a war every so often. There may even be plenty of moral soldiers in the ranks of either side. But there has never, is not, and will with all likelihood never be, a moral armed force.

And even if I’m wrong, it’s demonstrably not yours, Netanyahu, no matter how loudly you chant.

/Sebastian Lindberg 31/10-2023