As the European powers officially recognise the Palestinian state and the Global Sumud Flotilla embarks on its last leg towards the Gaza Strip, as Donald Trump desperately tries to move past his deep connections to Epstein and Netanyahu attempts to convince the world Israel had nothing to do with the ‘meme-fied’ bullet that punctured Charlie Kirk’s throat, one cannot help but feel that this hyper-globalised world is on the verge of an inevitable climax.
We are currently embroiled in the denouement of a narrative rapidly unfolding, and as the crescendo intensifies, one also wonders: What comprises this inevitable climax? And what lies afterward?
‘Tis but a feeling, an irrevocably obvious feeling, but there’s no evidence for what I personally feel to be waiting for us on the other side. This prediction lies in seeing things not as they are, but as they have been presented. It is to see the subtle (and oftentimes blatant) hands pulling the strings behind all major world events. It is to understand that these hands belong to the transnational corporate and paedophilic elite, a tiny fragment of the human population primarily comprising technocratic billionaires and investors in the military industry complex. It is to recognise what ‘late stage’ truly means when it comes to capitalism, as the schism between the 1% and the working class seems to further widen its monstrous and gaping maw, ready to devour us all along with its relentless hunger for capital.
It is to sense the system, despite its enormous investments and efforts into narratives which normalise its behaviour and formalise its existence as unquestionable, and its omnipresence as the true enemy of the humane inherent within all of us.
Centuries of colonial conditioning and postcolonial industrialisation have left us struggling to identify the source of our own collective suffering, so successfully has it invisibilised the ‘mind-forged manacles’ that predetermine our motivations, purpose, and the subsequent decisions we take.
Bereft of class consciousness, miseducated from birth in the irrevocability of our roles as ‘individuals’ incentivised by self-aggrandisement, sacrificing the inherently humane and collective at the altar of power, our arbitrary identities are superimposed to generate division and the ineluctable presence of constant crisis.
How are we to recognise the imbalances of power governing every aspect of our de-natured and hyper-urbanised and tech-fuelled lives when we are constantly force-fed narratives which push us towards identifying the most vulnerable amongst us – the working class, the displaced, the deregulated – as existential threats?
And with each new threat, bureaucratic tentacles extend their reach with increasing fervour, strangling us with rules and regulations, categorisations which artificially inflate our differences, thereby creating cycles of fear and control. This translates to more police, more surveillance, more budgetary considerations for ‘defence’ expenditure.
Juxtaposed against ‘our’ safety is placed ‘their’ poverty, crimes, homelessness, and eventual descent into ‘madness’ and eventual erasure in dystopic signs of ‘beggar-free’ zones for your allocated weekend pleasure. No nation that boasts an annually funded system that generates homeless children – be they in Dhaka, Gaza or San Francisco – should have the audacious capacity for moral finger-wagging.
But the temptation to wag persists: That’s why Europe can fund a genocide while simultaneously preach the need for a swift return to democracy to third world foreign aid beneficiaries. That’s why the US can murder Venezuelan fishermen while its embassy here celebrates ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’.
And that’s why it takes two years (let us continue to pretend history began on October 7, 2023) for the UN to declare a genocide being live-streamed to the world so that the West’s Epstein-stained political elite can pretend Israel’s very foundation was not laid upon genocide itself.
The UN’s recognition of genocide and Europe’s recognition of Palestinian statehood do little, and further epitomise Western hegemonic order across the globe. Does truth even exist without Western confirmation? Does the technical term ‘genocide’ change our individual moral compasses which, one might have the audacity to presume, stand against the murder of children in general? Does it affect at all our universal understanding that violent resistance against an occupier is not only legal but perhaps even morally mandated in the face of such astounding levels of injustice?
“But, but, but – Hamas!” and “Human shields!” will, unfortunately, continue to be key components of the West’s ever-expanding arsenal of hypocritical rhetoric. A hundred thousand Palestinian lives lost requires a three-member UN committee to validate their veracity but an ‘offensive’ joke or comment about Charlie Kirk’s assassination can result in one of the biggest late night TV hosts having his show pulled from air.
That is why it is incumbent upon us to see Palestine for what it is. To see Palestine is to see the once-revered institutions and once-idolised leaders of our national and political lives as nothing more than mediums through which the elite ensure that democracy stops at the voting booth.
To see Palestine is to see the ‘everything’ of it all. To see Palestine is to see – maybe not the emperor in his naked glory – but his clothes crumpled up in a corner of his palace.
To see Palestine is to understand that the ones in charge have fully normalised and morally and spiritually legitimised not just this genocide, but all injustices when they so wish, and that what they can do to the Palestinians, they can do to you: An imperial boomerang that spins right back to be used against the empire’s own citizens.
It is to understand that Palestine, in its struggle for freedom and self-actualisation, represents the front lines of our battle in a war we have been serving as foot-soldiers in for decades without realising.
To see Palestine is to finally be free.
To see everything as connected thus was once to be a ‘conspiracy theorist’, but as the late great George Carlin once said so portentously: You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge.
A reckoning, long overdue, beckons, of a future in which the American empire crumbles along with its satellite ethnostate in the Middle East, and Palestine emerges free.
Or so I hope to see within my lifetime. Until then, to repeat the oft-quoted rallying cry, “none of us will be free”.
The writer is a journalist
