What Our Ruling Class Has Decided Will Be Normal

P1

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Reported death tolls from the hell in Gaza number more than 30,000 people; they are absolutely higher, very likely triple or quadruple this number at an absolute minimum.² As you read this, entire family trees are being systematically erased from stem to tree to root. Children executed like criminals, lifeless bodies tossed ragdoll into ditches. Grandparents walking home at dusk with their hands up, hoping the clown waving an assault rifle in their face is in a cheerful enough mood to allow them safe passage. Family homes, delicate heirloom history cradled generation to generation, lit up by machine guns, ransacked by hand, then obliterated by drone operator for good measure. Miles and miles of land, orchards delicately sculpted into gardens by thousands of years of uninterrupted labor reduced to permanent ash. And this continues daily. Parents bury their children. Children bury their parents. The sun ignores the tragedy and rises again and again.

But you already know that; these images have trickled into your awareness to varying degrees at a fairly consistent rate over the past 200 days. Despite your natural resistance to holding these horrors in your head, you’ve certainly done so at one point or another. It’s a surprisingly easy thing to do - passively consuming the nightmares of others, briefly rotating them in your mind, and then putting them away. A slightly more difficult thing to do is to live with the daily fact that if you’ve ever paid taxes in the United States of America each of these individual tragedies is being perpetrated with your express written consent.

At time of writing, alongside a larger agreement for the sale of $18 billion worth of aerial death the US is authorizing for nearly 2,000 2,000-pound bombs and nearly 500 500-pound bombs to transfer to the IDF. It’s worth noting that both weapon categories are unguided, free-fall devices designed to maximize carnage wherever they’re slung. It’s obvious that these transactions wouldn’t take on some moral dimension if they were instead trades for guided munitions; I point this out because I want you to think about this situation and then look again at the number of bombs and their explosive weights and the fact that the ultimate point of these things is to maximize the number of lives they can end. These are the budgetary and logistics allocation decisions of someone who doesn’t give a shit about what they do, and doesn’t expect for you to give a shit about it either. It’s crude, careless evil perpetrated under the full letter of the law and with your signed initials. This is passive, bored hate gloved in the terminology of a rules-based international order. And, importantly, it has everything to do with you. You have everything to do with it. Any person attempting to convince you otherwise is insulting your intelligence or thinks you’re easily deceived.

Recent lines circulating on social media from a number of Zionist mouth-pieces and swathes of our own beloved establishment libs tend to go as follows: acts such as Aaron Bushnell’s heroic self-sacrifice, the Elbit systems sabotage in Cambridge, Mass., the recent organized highway and airport blockades, and the ongoing bravery of students staging encampments and facing expulsion, tazing, assault, and arrest at Universities across the United States are at best the misguided undertakings of folks who Just Don’t Get The Hard Geopolitical Truths Of The World and at worst a kind of mass formation mental illness fomented by social media and ‘divisive times’. Implicitly any political statement drawing attention to and accurately naming this as the deepest tragedy unfolding under the sky somehow enters the realm of derangement once it leaves the space of the purely gestural and starts impacting people’s daily routines. The running frame here is that these things are actually bizarre acts of alignment with an alien people who hold us in contempt.³ Why should anyone care this much?

As a rhetorical pivot this reads as a sweaty panic. It seems to be mostly a reaction to the late sea change in Western, particularly American, public perception of our obnoxious junior partner in settler-colonialism. The status quo ante (and so, the expectation) has been that things like an Israeli Superbowl commercial can air simulcast with sadistic air strikes on literal tent cities without a single disapproving note from those underwriting the murder. But too many images and videos of these crimes (as well as the proud glee of the criminals perpetrating them) are flowing into the hands of too many people, too fast and untended by talking heads. And after nearly a century of running interference and reputation laundering for the freakshow horror between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, US media now has the leeway to relatively candidly report on things like the assassination of Western aid-workers, and occasionally describe the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The Overton window has palpably shifted, if only by a fraction of an inch.⁴

Despite only netting a slight shift in discursive attitudes, this scares the hell out of local powerbrokers in Tel Aviv and Haifa and their US three-letter agency backchannel buddies alike. There are certainly interesting material and economic reasons for this misalignment. There are broad historical rhymes with US support for terminal Apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia - two outposts of direct Western colonial power opening multi-front wars, giving way to the tides of history, lashing out at their neighbors as the walls close in.⁵

But what seems significant about the deployment of this framing at this particular moment in time is subtextual. Not only does this have nothing to do with you - even if it did, why would you care? What are these people to you? What do you think you are to them?

Ignoring for a moment the direct material relationship between the daily activities of us in the West and the recipients of our Imperial largesse across the planet, this framing is an interestingly structured appeal to the overriding self-interest baked into our culture. Similar rhetorical tricks are employed anywhere modernity’s megatrends surface in the West as crises. As an example, the construction of immigration at the southern border as an argument about a zero-sum problem which American institutions and apparatuses of power have been “forced to solve”.⁶ We find a wide cross-section of US opinion tacitly agreeing that “these people need to be dealt with, and that the resources just aren’t there to do so compassionately.” This language is deployed anywhere a potential site of structural instability makes systemic resistance viable, let alone theoretically popular. It’s the first resort of a system and regime that can no longer spare the luxury of couching its actions in abstraction (however little resemblance the abstraction ever bore to reality in the first place). There is an undergirding idea of a diminishing set of relationships and responsibilities in a world of diminishing resources and strained empathy. A motif of a shrinking circle in advance of a widening gyre.

This is the psychic infrastructure of cruelty and the social foundation of a world on fire. Its fundamental goal is to so thoroughly rob you of any capacity of care for the lives of strangers that it becomes virtually impossible for you to realize that you are in the driver’s seat of this machine. Its ideal operating environment is one in which you have no real particular idea of where, when, and how you exist the way that you do, nor any real inclination to want one. It does this through a series of symbolic definitions, common social perceptions and insulations from material consequence.

Paradoxically for a culture so suffused with such an unbelievable amount of atomizing individualism, in the US it works most efficiently through a strategic telegraphing from every angle that you are a spectator, not an agent in the world. The world and its suffering multitudes and its migrant refugee caravans of desperate people are limping toward specifically you. But you had no role in these things coming to pass. You are never a victimizer. But you may well someday be a victim. Why do you think we need the walls?

Such an outlook is recognized as a straightforward semiotic hallmark of fascism for good reason - it’s a critical structural support for the treadmill of reaction and mobilization fascism requires to operate. As contradictions increase, and quality of life diminishes in the core, as this psychological filter gets perforated more and more by a pixelated blur of high contrast, low resolution catastrophe, the faster the treadmill runs.

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In her 2023 novel Enter Ghost, Palestinian author Isabella Hammad likens Palestine to “an exposed part of an electronic network, where someone has cut the rubber coating with a knife to show the wires and currents underneath” defining it as a place which “reveals something about the whole word.”

The global popular response to this genocide, the effectiveness of militant non-state actors in opposing the commercial and logistics interests supporting it, and the efficient role-out of every repressive tactic available to the administrators of Empire in response have certainly shown this to be true. We’re witnessing the soldering of new circuitry, and the wiring of new nodes in the overlapping global networks of economic production and control - the components of something new taking shape.

The mechanisms of local and state power synchronize no more efficiently than when punishing mass action against these networks, and the pigs are enthusiastically re-enacting Kent State across the country (yielding scenes of domestic repression which will likely become increasingly prevalent as food production and climatic habitability careen downwards in coming years). At the same time, body after body is being uncovered from mass graves within hospitals in Gaza - doctors, nurses, patients mostly, some intubed, cathetered, handcuffed, often visibly tortured. And Israeli forces seem to be gearing up to make a new ground push into the makeshift evacuation zones in Rafah, inevitably murdering tens of thousands and forcing refugees into the sea. Bracketing all of this, we lurch daily further into an undeclared but subliminally acknowledged third world war, the pacing and timbre of which depend solely on how heavily the United States and its mosaic of vassals choose to retrench their primacy in a changing world order. Regardless of what particular course the coming months and years take, the impact will be - as always - devastation for populations in the global south.⁷

The professionally wise and economically sound thing to do in response to this knowledge is to shrug and say nothing. You are expected to reject your culpability in any of this, and plod along as a spectator to a world falling apart. Continue your life as normal, looking down, embedded in the machinery of consumption, direct deposits from arms manufacturers and surveillance merchants. Watch while the direct and indirect products of your daily work⁸ are launched into the sky and fall in long obliterative arcs that terminate in the streets of cities, the parking lots of hospitals, the playgrounds of schools, the laps of families huddled in tents.

Because it’s easier to say that these things aren’t your problem than to admit complicity in atrocity. It’s certainly easier than acknowledging the great chains of logistics and commodity flows and structural supports for repressive technologies that exist purely to continue your lifestyle as-is, let alone acknowledging that you are critically positioned to snap these chains at their weakest links. Were you so inclined.

There are entire cottage industries dedicated to preventing you from noticing you’re in the driver seat here.

You’re helping to pilot the machinery. You aren’t a spectator to this.

Americans hate the feeling of culpability. But the flip side of culpability is agency.

Maybe it’d be interesting for them to try agency on for size.

1. A message of support from children in Rafah, picture courtesy of National Students for Justice in Palestine

2. As has been noted by a variety of sources, this number has frozen since roughly January or February due to the Gazan Health Ministry’s logistical inability to effectively and reliably count bodies during a perpetual siege state

3. These tend to be conjoined with claims about an overlapping value set between the West and Israel: the solidity of Israeli democracy, their sanctity for freedom of worship, their persistence as a valued partner, that so and so could never be allowed to openly date gay in the Palestinian Territories (although, tellingly, these people never compare their right to marry in Israel). An overlapping value set indeed

4. It’s unclear to me if this is solely a product of the internet and its concomitant social technologies accidentally moving faster than the capacity for capital to mediate, and for state ideology to neuter, or deeper structural changes occurring sub-surface, which will be obvious in hindsight. I don’t know what’s happening. But the numbing anesthetic qualities of extractivist superprofit-cushioned lifestyles are wearing off rapidly

5. In response to it’s very own regional axis of resistance - the Frontline States - and as its social contradictions came into stark relief, Apartheid South Africa attacked Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Mozambique and Angola throughout the late 70’s and 80’s

6. Whether this comes packaged in liberal technocratic pseudo-empathy or the language of MAGA ethnic cleansing, the net answer miraculously always ends up being to convert the southern border into a surveilled military death-zone

7. Specifically, whether Israel will accept being tit-for-tat’d by a peer rival or lash out like a dying animal, and whether the US will continue to use it’s sock-puppets in the Pacific to press China into direct confrontation

8. Which, of course, begin in non-descript low-rises and office parks in cities and towns like Fort Worth, San Antonio, Roanoke, Merrimack, Boca Raton, De Leon Springs, Talladega, Arlington, Birdsboro, Ladson and Marietta and Greenville and Charlotte and Cedar Rapids and Chula Vista and Winston-Salem, among others