4 Notes On The Post-Orwellian Genocide — And Implications For Journalism And Story
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
Orwellian speech and Orwellian silence at the British Broadcasting Corporation, and throughout capitalist media, are used to deny the reality of the American-Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, even though the gruesome and maniacal reality is totally obvious despite the nonstop official lies.
Though Orwell’s novel 1984 was seen as a critique of the official enemy of capitalism, the Soviet Union, all of the Orwellian newspeak that Orwell coined, documented, and dramatized in 1984 was based on the standard propaganda techniques of the BBC and all state-capitalist media during World War Two (continuing through today), techniques and practices that Orwell necessarily participated in and saw firsthand as a BBC employee during that time, and led to his resignation in the middle of the war to write for a left-wing magazine.
Karyn Elizabeth notes how the genocidal legacy media continues unchanged today:
The BBC has worked even harder to avoid mentioning the genocidal statements of Israeli leaders. Despite overwhelming number of such statements — there are entire archives devoted to documenting them — the BBC has mentioned them precisely zero times. This, as far as I can ascertain, would also seem to be the approach of most other Western media outlets. Of course the BBC would no doubt argue that if such genocidal statements were given any airtime Israeli leaders look worse than Hamas leaders. This would, once again, make the BBC look ‘partial’ because, as all good Westerners know, Hamas is the very incarnation of evil so Israel cannot possibly be as bad as them.
Caitlin Johnstone and other great independent journalists and organizations like Drop Site News clarify relentlessly that the obvious is the obvious:
Liberal Israelis are slowly beginning to join the rest of the world in admitting that what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide — a fact that has been clear to anyone with eyes and a basic sense of morality from the very beginning of this nightmare.
It was obvious in October 2023 that Israel intended to eliminate all Palestinians in Gaza, in part because you would never treat a population that way if you intended to leave survivors on your border. Because you’d know they’d seek revenge later on.
Call it the Inigo Montoya problem — if you kill someone’s father right in front of him, it’s a safe bet that he’s going to spend the rest of his life trying to kill you. If you intend to act in monstrous ways that fill young children with thoughts of revenge, then you need to get rid of the children, and you need to get rid of the women who will give birth to them. Otherwise you’re just creating a problem for your own children and grandchildren down the road.
The Nazis understood this. Heinrich Himmler famously said, “I did not feel I had a right to exterminate the men — i.e. kill them or have them killed — while allowing the children to grow up and take revenge upon our sons and grandsons. We had to reach the difficult decision of making this nation vanish from the face of the earth.”
The savagery of Israel’s post-October 7 onslaught was so horrific right off the bat that it was clear they didn’t intend to leave anyone alive in Gaza.
Karyn Elizabeth incidentally indicates why all the cries for more “shades of grey” in our imaginative stories are so out of step with the times — not to mention with the reality of world history and humankind in general.
Fake claims of fairness versus partiality like fake ideals of moral grayness versus moral reality are the big lies of both establishment media and establishment literature that are a poison constantly pushed, for obvious reasons.
Apolitical types leap for it. “Apolitical” is a word that apparently wasn’t even conceived of until the middle of last century, as American empire peaked. One source claims the coining of “apolitical” at the time of the rise of the “public relations” industry, as I noted in a previous post, while other sources show the word not first appearing until a few decades later, in 1952, not long after the launch of the Cold War at the height of American might.
There’s nothing wrong with the morally gray in fiction as long as it’s contextualized within the morally stark. It’s not accurate to say that the American-Israeli genocide of the Palestinians has been hidden — all lying official rhetoric to the contrary. The genocide has been livestreamed and effectively flaunted — often explicitly — by American and Israeli officials and forces who want the world to see the genocidal vengeance, the gleeful insanity, the torturous mass murder and be cowed.
The Nazis mainly tried to hide their genocide from the world, but times have changed. The Palestinians from the start — in fact going back at least three quarters of a century by now, and not least of late — have been maniacally assaulted and purposefully made an open example of. Don’t cross Empire — America and Israel are here to show you — this is what you get. There is zero moral gray here or there, as intended.
Our writing in all forms should reflect this open monstrosity of American and Israeli culture and politics, and daily life. Much of the so-called civilized world, the plutocracy, imposes this berserk barbarism at the point of a gun. This is the real world that the most vulnerable people, and countless other creatures, remain trapped in, and it’s not morally gray, despite the many shades of gray that run within it, not of it.
In the new internet age of 24/7 global livestream, the constant lies of Empire no longer hide anything. The continuous lies of the plutocrat establishment are garbage fig leaves, junk shibboleths, pious fictions, empty platitudes, Imperial lies, CYA illusions, perverse polite fictions, and otherwise deranged official pronouncements. The real and the imagined stories that we the People tell should always reflect that:
It’s an evil so all-encompassing, so total, that if a novelist or a screenwriter came up with it prior to it happening in real life I’m pretty sure they would have been told it was too extreme — that the villains were just too villainous, the events were just too hellish. After all, you can’t reduce the world to a simple binary of good and evil — that’s simply not believable and it doesn’t make for good drama. There should be shades of grey even in our fictionalised worlds.
Believable or not, however, it is happening. Incomprehensible or not we have to somehow wrap our heads around it. But for those of us in the West it’s almost impossible to do this because we live in a narrative bubble where allies of the West (like Israel) are the ‘good guys’ and only our enemies (‘terrorists’ like Hamas and ‘barbarians’ like the Russians) do evil things; a bubble where ‘people like us’ are most often the heroes, occasionally the victims, but never the villains.
Except it’s all out in the open now and degraded farther than ever before. Overt viciousness, and the endlessly degenerate, has been normalized in the American Presidency and everywhere else. Yet what remains no less disturbing — and far more dangerous — are the even more lethal and far more common masks of professionalized viciousness still dressed up as “polite” society, in official talk, presentation, action.
Bernie Sanders and everyone else should refer to the American-Israeli slaughter of Palestinians as legally and generally what it is, genocide, mass murder, sadistic torture, and the most depraved thing in the world.
This is every bit as much America’s genocide, mass murder of Palestinians as it is Israel’s, given how much America funds and arms and supports and protects and enables Israel, which is basically an overseas state of America, the 51st.
Israel slaughtering the Palestinians in Gaza would be equivalent numerically to Ohio slaughtering the people of its capital and largest city, Columbus, with the full support and assistance of the federal American government. In either case, whether Israel or Ohio — America would be fundamentally responsible, and directly responsible for the genocide, the starvation, the colossal destruction, and horrific mass murder — whether it’s the people of Columbus, or the people of Gaza. Such holocaust could not happen and does not happen without American support and facilitation and direct American participation and ultimate underlying responsibility. The American Empire has long since taken over for and from the Nazis to very literally conquer and control much of the world by purposeful and unrelenting gun and dollar assault. Nothing has been more thoroughly documented — outside of official establishment circles of the plutocracy, and even largely within. And now it’s daily livestreamed.
The genocide of Palestinians is America’s genocide fundamentally. Israel does as it’s told and as it’s allowed to do by its puppet master, America — its funder, its enabler and armorer, its protector, its creator. Israel is most visibly engaged in the genocide and depravity, but America is most realistically and fundamentally responsible and driving all of it. This is the American Empire working the bloody throttle as it has for the past 250 years. It’s an official culture of depravity — of delirious demented predation. Go back through each of 25 decades and ask the massacred peoples around the globe, those slain and held captive by gun and dollar, not least on the continent of North America itself.
Much lies, deceit, and rhetorical flourishes to the contrary.
Johnstone:
I’m having trouble finding the words to talk about the people who are scurrying around lying and manipulating to excuse the deliberate starvation of civilians in Gaza today. “Evil” doesn’t cut it. “Monster” and “psychopath” are too kind.
How do these people live with themselves? They have to live each and every moment of their lives inside the sort of brain that would produce this kind of behavior. I sincerely cannot imagine living life in that way, for even one day.
Israel supporters are so shockingly, venomously evil that it makes you stop and re-evaluate everything you think you know about humanity. Every spiritual, philosophical and psychological insight you’ve arrived at over the course of your life will struggle to make sense of the freakish, gratuitous sadism you’ll witness in Israel’s apologists describing their own thoughts in their own words. It actually makes you question your entire worldview.
I’m out of words. I write words for a living, and I have no words. There is nothing I can say.
Everything can be said, and must be. It’s not morally gray. The American-Israeli genocide of Palestinians is utter abomination denied by meaningless official veneers. Genocide and the doomsday final cataclysms of ecocide and omnicide are consuming all Earth, and will terminate everything, unless resisted and reversed.
POST VIA LIBERATION LIT
A Practical Policy 