Rethinking Peace at a Time of Lucrative Genocides

EDITORIAL, 17 Nov 2025

#925 | Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service

In the previous TRANSCEND Editorial, Dr Diane Perlman paraphrased the oft-quoted insight into world-changing processes by Antonio Gramsci, the anti-Mussolini labour organizer and intellectual, against the backdrop of the US Empire on its steep decline.  She writes, “Antonio Gramsci described an interregnum period as a chaotic phase of upheaval where the old order ‘is dying,’ but ‘the new cannot be born.‘”   A “time of monsters” when authoritarians exploit chaos to hold onto power, while emerging forces struggle to consolidate power.”

In a recent public conversation on this great rupture, unfolding “before our eyes”, within the mix of the inter-state system and the global economy, where the United States can no longer dictate the behaviours of  other states, friends and foes, John Mearshimer, the renowned North American realist scholar at the University of Chicago, conveyed to his listeners what his Chinese academic colleague said to him: “the problem today is the United States is falling faster than the speed with which China is rising.”

However one looks at it, the United States is the Empire on its last leg, or a tanker sinking in slow motion.

Because the class of American foreign policy makers, whatever their party affiliation, simply don’t possess the kind of humility, foresight or capacity to look inwards, unlike the last crop of the Soviet leadership, namely Mikhail Gorbachev, Washington doubles down by renaming the Department of Defence as the Department of War, raising the war budget to one trillion dollars and openly talking about starting “nuclear testing”.

The Burmese have a saying that the last flame of a candle burns brightest, before its fire extinguishes.  The US delusion – that it can keep the rest of the world under its thumb for eternity – is already causing so much pain and suffering, most specifically in Gaza – and increasingly in the Caribbean waters, and very likely in Latin America.

The empire’s last flame is burning in Gaza in the two-fold form of a US-Israel joint genocide and the post-genocide’s “Gaza Peace Proposal”.

Just as Israel was brazen enough to declare its intent to wage its genocidal destruction of the entire society of, and the ecosystem for, 2.3 million Palestinians – its genocide financier and enabler in Washington is no less brazen in its quest for the colonial acquisition of Gaza, spun as the “Gaza Peace Proposal.”

Only in the warped minds of Israeli, North American and British genocidal participants is it alright to see the sites of mass sufferings as a place of “real estate bonanza” or “urban renewal”.  When the settlement-born Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s coalition partner who leads the National Religious Party ‘Religious Zionism’ openly talks about Gaza as “a real estate bonanza”, he simply speaks the quiet part loud for the entire class of war-profiteers, from the Silicon Valley tech billionaires and other US industrialists and real estate developers (including the likes of Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff), to Tony Blair and his international and Middle Eastern associates.

To our disappointment, a handful of states with global influence such as China and the Russian Federation have proven either unprepared or unable to serve as the counterweight against Washington.  Alas, China is not rising fast enough to serve as a relatively more moral actor.

Many of us associated with or supporters of Johan Galtung’s TRANSCEND, operate outside the corridors of state power.  To belabour the obvious, none of us is at the table of the states where impactful policies are drawn up, debates are had, proposals and counterproposals are tabled.

As helpless as we naturally feel, in our capacity as cultural and intellectual workers, we do a lot to intervene to stop in the Empire’s genocide, to kill its last flame.   Over the last two years, since Israel’s senior most leaders declared the settler colonial state’s intent to perpetrate a textbook genocide following the Hamas’ jail break on 7 October 2023, many TRANSCEND members have joined other fellow world citizens with conscience and compassion in numerous forms of collective political actions, including marches, signing petitions, taking direct actions.

But as peace activists, scholars, theorists, academics, advocates, what have you, we have been forced to think hard about peace, peace processes, the role of mediation, and the idea of conflict transformation itself.

For we are living in the world where there are at least three “hot genocides” being perpetrated by clusters of state and non-state actors on two vast continents – Asia and Africa.  They are, needless to say, first, Israel-US genocide in Gaza; second, Myanmar’s ongoing genocidal destruction of the remaining 500,000 Rohingyas, still trapped on their own ancestral land of Arakan or Rakhine, inside Myanmar’s national boundaries albeit the new spearhead is the Arakan Army, the most anti-Muslim and rabidly ethno-Buddhist nationalist militia; and Sudan where the formerly genocide militia known as Janjaweed, repurposed by the European Union as its proxy “border control” under the new name of “Rapid Support Force” (to deter conflict-fleeing Africans from coming to Fortress Europe in search of refuge).

These genocides are being perpetrated under the disguise of “wars”, with perpetrators offering various pretexts for their essentially mass atrocity crimes including unmistakable breaches of the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, a binding Inter-state Treaty.    Each case of these ongoing genocides merits a separate, comprehensive analysis, and proposals to bring a fast and decisive end.

However, it suffices to say that all three cases cry out for a fundamental rethink of peace or mediation as we know it.

As we seek to offer insights into the need to transcend our conflicting interests and values, how do we factor in the unfettered greed of US and Israeli, or Israel-First, billionaire class?

For these men and women of unparalleled wealth do not see Palestinians as humans with the equal right to life, or as humans at all.   By the same token, Myanmar’s perpetrators and complicit society don’t view Rohingyas as humans with equal worth.

Rather, these (Adam) Smithian “masters of mankind”, in the case of Zionist billionaires, only see lucrative minerals underground or off the shores of these mass killing fields.   Not only do they not see genocide victims as humans worthy of dignity, alive and in death, but the billionaires and trillionaires also don’t care that they will have to build their seafront prime properties over the mass graves, the final un-ceremonial resting places for hundreds of thousands of fellow humans.

Peace thinkers and advocates need to start thinking hard when Gramsci’s “monsters” in the time of collapsing empires are no longer simply Fascists or authoritarians.  They are billionaires who stand to profit from the wars of annihilation, be it in Sudan’s vast gold mines, or Rohingya’s fertile agricultural soil, or Gaza with its offshore natural gas, or Palestine’s beautiful seafront in Gaza.

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 17 Nov 2025.

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