A Choice
Civilization has reached a terrible, momentous
crossroads. The most powerful country,
the United States, is openly conducting genocide, in concert with Israel, for
whom it is supplying the weapons. I say “openly”
because we can see it on our telecommunicated devices, actual images and
testimonies. Verification has occurred from
a large number of well-respected press and governmental sources. Moreover, experts on genocide, such as Omar
Bartov at Brown University, and also Israeli human rights groups, have declared that
what is happening to the people of Gaza is genocide (1).
It is irrelevant and disturbing, at best, that the USA and
Israel vehemently deny what is happening.
Hitler called the Holocaust good.
The angry, orwellian denunciation and its propaganda arm, deployed by both
Trump (USA) and Netanyahu (Israel), aligns so well with previous genocidists
that it can be adduced as a legitimate point against both of them.
There are many smoke-and-mirror arguments meant to hide and
deflect from what is happening. One tactic is to
accuse anyone who calls out the horror as being “antisemitic.” Given that the mass slaughter and torture is so
obvious--and here let me mention the title of a book that went viral on the internet,
“One day everyone will have always been against this”--such accusations are plainly
vile and shamelessly bankrupt.
It is vivid and necessary to underscore the horror in order
to break through the common propensity to wear phlegmatic blinders; so, for emphasis: We are talking about children starved to
death. Children shot to death. Children in Gaza buried alive under rubble. As well all the rest of the Gazans.
Genocidists often commit the most disgusting, mangled sorts of
murder. The twisted, broken bodies reflect
the twisted, broken souls of those who hate them.
Another trick of propaganda, much aided by the mainstream
media in the USA, is to frame the ‘debate’ as a bifurcation in which someone
has to be either “Pro-Israel” or “Pro-Palestinian.”
First, and for emphasis, it is impossible to reasonable
debate what is happening--as if it could be acceptable in any way, shape or form
for two million people to be confined to the rubble of a bombed-out homeland, now a wasteland, denied
food, potable water, medical help, or any basic decencies at all, while more
starve to death or get shot by the IDF every day.
Why are they shot and starved? “Who knows” is the best answer. Wanton cruelty and hate, based on the evinced
attitudes and behaviors, the raw animosity, of the perpetrators. An early indicator was Netanyahu’s rancorous rallying
cry, an invocation of the “Amalekites,” a Biblical reference to total annihilation,
the wiping out of the last trace of a people, their land, and their culture.
Those that dwell in darkness revile justice and light. Six journalists were recently killed,
blatantly, in their Gaza press tent by the IDF.
The Gazans are shot daily while forced to participate in de
facto Hunger Games: a trek to try and
get food from sites sanctioned by the IDF.
I say “try” because the food is never enough. The scenes are heartbreaking. Any scuffle by the exhausted, battered
homeless Gazans--hounded, tormented, wounded, displaced, killed since 2023, now desperate
to feed their families as they seek a sack of flour, serves as an excuse for some of
them to be shot. Some seem to be shot for
no reason, not even a paltry excuse. The
trek to get food is a gauntlet of fear, torment and mockery, in which the
threat of a bullet is ever present. In
the manufactured chaos, one that turns humans into desperate, starving beasts, there
seems no accountability for the shooters.
When someone says, “Are you Pro-Palestinian or Pro-Israel?” the searing answer is “I am pro-human rights
and against the genocide taking place.”
One could add, “It is abhorrent and heartbreaking to watch, at least for
those of us who choose not to hide behind invidious questions that set up a
false bifurcation.”
Media sources, especially those prone to propaganda, are drawn to questions that set up an either/or. A succinct response is, “You framed that question in the form of a lie.”
In WWII, the United States fought against and helped defeat
Hitler. Images and filmed scenes of the Holocaust
spread across the world. In the
aftermath, the world vowed “Never Again.”
For a good while, at least in terms of a human lifespan, democracy
surged, along with hopes for true equality and progress. It is fair to say that, in the aftermath of
WWII, the human civilization's level of ethics technology increased.
However, we must now reckon with the unreckonable. The USA is committing genocide, and alongside
it Israel. How can the country that
championed democracy now be sliding into pure Darkness? How can Jews, who suffered the Holocaust, now
inflict that enormous monstrosity of Evil on others?
It is unthinkable.
And yet, we must dare to think. We cannot simply shut down out of grief. Why? Because the answer, although dismal, also
gives us a thin ray of hope:
We can get sucked into Evil, subsumed by it; but we humans can also find the
path of the Good.
The human brain has a vast amount of dendritic
plasticity. Culture, too, because it
supervenes on a dynamic of persons--social interplays of groups and movements--has
a vast amount of plasticity. Brain
plasticity. Cultural plasticity. We can go many directions.
One huge breakthrough for the Good was when women fought and
won the right to vote, attaining Universal Suffrage in 1920. This overturned thousands of years of
ignorance. It was said, for thousands of
years, that women would never have equal say.
Machiavelli highlighted fear and compassion. If fear takes over, it creates a form of government based on fear, ignorance and greed. The powerful, who are greedy, use fear and ignorance (‘big lies’) to create divisions in society. These divisions allow them to hog a grossly disproportionate amount of the wealth. Meanwhile, everyone else is trapped, pitted against each other in a caste-like hierarchy, where they struggle for scraps, prizes, and prestige.
This is classic FGI: a fear/greed/ignorance-based system.
After WWII, the US because super-wealthy, the greedy sought more and more, and it led, over decades, to the situation the US is in right now. Today, 0.1 percent of the population owns 70% of the wealth of the country. Some sources say 90%. Through the carefully managed demagoguery of right-wing think tanks, boosted over the last decade by the charismatic appeal of the fascist Donald Trump, society has ossified along fault lines of racism, sexism and homophobia, with immigrants being a particularly scapegoated group, at least at the moment. Masked police have fanned across the country and are violently deporting them, stuffing them into recently erected concentration camps.
(I have no illusions that I myself am not in danger. At some point, if Trump continues on his
fascist vector, so called ‘elites’ such as myself, that is, people with a
college degree who speak out against him, will become full enemies of the
state, subject to arrest. This is what
Hitler did. And it is what Trump’s behavior
indicates is coming, if the American institutions and people don’t resist. So
far, resistance has been feeble.)
(After immigrants, Trump will likely go after people of certain
ethnicities and religions. Then people
of certain races and LGBTQ. At some point, where exactly
I don’t know, he will come after White males like me, who are “elites” and “traitors").
In the USA, for now at least, fear has won out over
compassion. Democracy is based on compassion--equality,
respect, mutually beneficial relationships, and human rights. These forces of Good and Light did push change in the country, for a period of over half a century. Women’s
rights advanced and so did civil rights. Gay marriage
was made legal in the US in 2015. It
remains to be seen if these advances can withstand the fascist backlash now in
progress.
Darkness is rising. I have already written that 11/5 (November 5th, 2024, the day Trump won the election) was one of the worst days in human history. He tilted the world toward fascism, which increases the likelihood of nuclear war, which will be the end of us.
Darkness is rising.
What should you do? You have to
answer that question for yourself. And,
one way or another, you will be held accountable for it, by some sort of karma. I myself am trying to align myself with Light
and Goodness. It may mean I suffer
greatly in a concentration camp. And yet
… for now, and hopefully onward, I choose the Light. I explain my reasons more fully in
another blog entry (2).
It is possible for humanity to escape FGI (fear-greed-ignorance). FGI governance is relatively easy to set up. This is why Machiavelli chose fear over compassion as a way to govern. FGI exploits key weaknesses in the human mind and
obvious physical weaknesses in our bodies.
Simply keeping people afraid for lack of food or shelter is enough to lead the majority to work jobs that they find meaningless for their whole lives.
Rulers can and have relied on this cruelty for thousands of
years. I haven't yet mentioned the threats
of torture, exile, ‘disappearance, or just public condemnation. Public
condemnation can and has led to lynch parties. Might-makes-right is "awesome" in the most dread-inspiring sense of the word.
Humanity, yes, has taken steps toward true democracy. Human rights. Equal justice under law. A fair and dignified playing field, when it comes to work, including a social safety net. Not only is this sort of government possible, it has already been implemented in some countries.
This is the path of Light. Our brain- and cultural-plasticity allow us to find it and walk it. To progress toward the social construction of Good societies.
Note well: Forcing people to work meaningless jobs all their lives is successful only in low ethics-tech cultures, where fear is the basis of governance. Someday people might live in a compassion-based world, when ethics tech is higher than it is now. You and I have no idea what that would be like. You and I, and every person in civilization since the Agricultural Revolution, has lived in a fear-based system of government. We are trapped by an intergenerational acculturation, a program that starts to cripple our brain plasticity in infancy--a longstanding, branching, adaptive program that I refer to as the Ignorance Vortex (2).
Sadly, FGI has had thousands of years to entrench and refine its acculturative techniques. Sexism is the oldest 'big lie' of Ignorance, a technique that keeps over half the population down for the material and temporal benefit of the other.
Fascism is an evolved version of FGI. It combines the powers of a monarch with the charisma of a cult leader. Totalitarian systems will only become better at controlling minds and bodies, as technology provides more power to do so. Subliminal advertising, for instance, already plies our subconscious with prowess, thanks to the disrespect for the consumer built into our greed-based economy. All-encompassing surveillance or robotic enforcement will soon be an option. It is only a matter of time before the human brain itself can be interfaced with computer chips. It's already happening:
https://ca.yahoo.com/news/18-months-becoming-first-human-090000432.html
The ‘latest, greatest’ technologies are hailed for their
tangible benefits, such as medical cures (see yahoo link), which greases the way for more research. What isn’t mentioned is that these technologies will also
be used to make weapons and to police us.
AI. Robots. Nanotech.
Whether they are used for Evil depends on who is in charge.
Technology,
more than ever before, will be able to crystallize our self-fulfilling
prophecies. It will give reality to the projections
of our collective unconscious. Are we ready to handle this power maturely?
It is possible for humans to have a high level of emotional competence. Many people already have such competence. And yet the large majority of males suffer from “normative male alexithymia.” Males pay a price to be macho, which is the type of masculinity promoted by a fear/greed/ignorance-based system.
Humanity will go down one of two paths. The path of Compassion has been
initiated in rudimentary and nonperfect forms in some countries. Fear, on the other hand, has been the norm
for thousands of years.
Maybe Compassion has come to the party too late. Probably so.
But … maybe not.
Which will you choose?
Fear. Compassion. Acquiescence?
It could make all the difference.
Good night and good luck.
====================
Update
8/22/25
New York Times
Gaza City and Surrounding Areas Are Officially Under Famine, Monitors Say
At least half a million people in the enclave were facing the most severe conditions measured by U.N.-backed international experts: starvation, acute malnutrition and death.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/22/world/middleeast/famine-gaza-city-israel.html
Footnotes
(1)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/world/middleeast/israel-genocide-gaza-rights-groups.html
https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/05/draft-intro-of-my-book-better-angels.html
=========================
8/28/25 ... added paragraph that starts "Note Well..."
8/23/25 ... eds...
8/22/25 ... eds
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