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

If Only, Vol. 1

These columns have been severely lacking for positivity as of late.

And when even I can feel that lack, you know it’s gotten bad. But what’s a chronicler to do when the world is so full of care and every headline screams despair; and all is rape, starvation, war, and life seems vile?

Maybe this is how old beat cops feel – so worn down by the sheer tragedy of it all that the only recourse for their worn out neanderthal brains is to go home and beat on the wife or strangle a black kid. But y’know what! There’s a better way. There’s got to be. So for the benefit of our sanity, let’s make like a Canadian bank and go loonie, shall we?

So let us indulge in some wish fulfilment instead!

Putin’s dead. He died in his marble bunker during an autoerotic asphyxiation-accident while watching the Teletubbies on repeat. And although the Kremlin is in turmoil of where to extort this year’s Christmas Party’s funding, federated states across the nation break away into self-governance – which has turned out a surprisingly unbloody affair, seeing as the vast majority of local government officials proved vacant from their posts in favour of their Cyprus villas.

In solidarity, or perhaps fearing for his own health, Xi Jinping brokered a deal with Tibet to be allowed into a life-affirming, non-masturbatory monastery, spelling the end of Chinese occupation of the mountainous country. Analysts believe this will usher in a wave of declarations of independence, citing Commie the Pooh’s exit from public life as a sign of a swift turn for the region’s imperial nation.

Meanwhile, in India, the nationalist driving his country to ethnic cleansing, Narendra Modi, has, for the first time in recorded history, faltered in spreading hate on camera when his son came out of the closet on live television while converting to Islam. As the RSS reels from the unexpected reveal, both Hindus and Muslims across the country rejoice at the, perhaps, most honest moment in Modi’s aggressive political media campaign yet, and rally around the hope that this will affect a benevolent turn in the old bigot’s soul.

On the other side of the world, Elon finally left on his rocket. America sighs a sigh of relief as the mogul finalized his bid to take his vision of “the best and brightest” to the stars. Post-launch, prosecutors find Mar-A-Lago empty, Hollywood quiet, and most of the federal and corporate government devoid of shareholders. Although this will no doubt spell economic woes in the years ahead, the Pentagon has promised to unlock Fort Knox, and the launch engineers of the departed “Space Force Super-One!!!” generational space ark reassure us that they have included a Voyager-style gold plate on the tip of the craft apologizing most sincerely and profusely to any and all intelligences that the travellers may encounter and please ask them not to judge us leftovers by what they may find aboard the spacefaring phallus.

In closing, a convoy of a million children were observed marching out of Ashkelon and crossing over into northern Gaza, carrying with them everything from clean water and first aid supplies to Cheeto’s and mommy’s Valium, taking the besieging IDF forces by surprise. In public statements, recorded and released across multiple platforms at the time of the first border crossings, the children proclaim that they refuse to let the sins of their parents become their own and elect instead to stand with the oppressed. The confusion of IDF soldiers only increased as startled marksmen are accused of anti-Semitism for no longer being able to tell Jewish and Palestinian children apart. A public condemnation and resolution against further ethnic cleansing in Gaza or any remaining Palestinian territory was signed during an emergency meeting at the UN Security Council after the initial hour of the march, suspected only to have passed because the US secretary to the Security Council is believed to be currently drinking Mai Tai’s on Elon’s rocket.

If only the world was sane, eh…

/Sebastian Lindberg 16/5-2024

Not All Human Rights Abuses Are Equal

In other news, the US impose sanctions on Zimbabwe’s president Emmerson Mnangagwa, along with the president’s wife, and a gaggle of other top officials and companies.

The reason stated being to curb Mnangagwa’s looting of state resources, primarily the smuggling of gold and diamonds for personal enrichment:

“We are focusing our sanctions on clear and specific targets: President Mnangagwa’s criminal network of government officials and businesspeople who are most responsible for corruption or human rights abuses against the people of Zimbabwe”, the US Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo said in a statement to the press.

So once more, the US takes on the role of world police. Though, in the case of Mnangagwa’s Zimbabweian government it might be valid, as shown by independent reports. And let it not be said that the international community should turn a blind eye to human rights abuses, or that if you’re one of the world’s leading economies you shouldn’t wield that position to push back against corruption and atrocities.

The effort pales though, don’t it, in the face of other, current, atrocities being performed by other corrupt, criminal governments, that the US world police is turning a blind eye to. It somehow… takes the zest out of the moral outrage of the dubious leader of the western world. Whataboutism is a dangerous habit, and one blind eye turned does not take away from one well-advised stand, but even so… Even so…

It seems like it is very easy to sanction and oppose such things as corruption and tribalism and ethnic cleansing when it’s perpetuated by neo-colonial African countries, doesn’t it. There’s no end to the high horses available to sit on when adjudicating how some countries should mind their business. But others – oh! others – well they simply seem completely above reproach, there’s no amount of genocide or ethnic cleansing or debauchery that they can commit that would ever make you raise your voice in objection, is there?

It’s the juxtaposition that make the Zimbabwe sanctions taste so bitter to me. No doubt they’re useful and warranted, but at this specific time they only serve to illustrate one very damning point: It’s not the ethnic cleansing that matters. It’s not the corruption that matters. It’s not the criminal government that matters. That’s all just excuses, smoke and mirrors.

/Sebastian Lindberg 5/3-2024

Bringing the Fire Home

The west is clever (or perhaps lucky) to have exported its warfare for the past eighty years. It is easy to tell yourselves that war is the proper way of the world, the proper way to defend your way of life, when you send that war off to foreign parts so that you do not have to see how the protection of your way of life obliterates another.

Distance makes it easy to convince yourself that this is the sane way that the a world works.

Maybe it’s that disconnection that makes war such an easy sell to voters. Because they do not have to see it. They do not have to clean up the bodies of family members from the rubble of their homes. They do not have to watch a husband or wife or child go from individual to meat in the blink of an eye.

They do not have to smell how flesh bubbles and fat boils. I guess that stench doesn’t carry across an ocean.

Perhaps that’s the way to make them stop sending war abroad? To make them smell it. To make them see it.

It is disingenuous to assume the rationale of the wilful dead. I won’t, unlike corpo media, try to rationalize U.S. Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell’s demonstration in any other language than his own; “I will no longer be complicit in genocide”. I won’t belittle him like corpo media or emergency services are wont to do by implying mental health issues to extremism. Bushnell explained his actions in the only way he himself saw fit.

He killed himself in a self-made inferno, wanting a ‘free Palestine’, while a cop pointed a gun at him so that he would “lay down on the ground”. That makes the same kind of sense that genocide does, whether exported or imported.

It obviously made sense to him to light himself on fire in front of the Israel embassy in Washington D.C.. He was only 25-years old, and yet this was the moral course of action in an immoral world. He took what “our ruling class has decided to be normal” out of the abstract and illustrated the grim reality of it. He thought it was important enough to push you out of your comfortable deniability so that you could wake up to the same smell that the victims of your elected officials’ policies do every day.

It’s hard to say whether it’ll do any difference. Thich Quang Duc’s famous self-immolation on the streets of Saigon didn’t end the Vietnam war. When another protester did the same in Atlanta back in December it sure didn’t stop Israel’s genocide. Abstraction is a powerful tool. So too is dehumanization. Not even the smell of napalm in the morning might be capable of breaking those delusions.

But by Odin does the sacrifice of self, the likes of Bushnell’s send a loud message!

It’s just a shame that to deaf people, it doesn’t matter how loud your message is…

/Sebastian Lindberg 27/2-2024