{"id":277410,"date":"2024-10-21T12:00:17","date_gmt":"2024-10-21T11:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=277410"},"modified":"2024-10-16T05:56:53","modified_gmt":"2024-10-16T04:56:53","slug":"extermination-works-at-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/10\/extermination-works-at-first\/","title":{"rendered":"Extermination Works. At First."},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Extermination Nation – by Mr. Fish<\/p><\/div>\n

Israel will continue its mass killing to achieve its immediate goals, but in the long run the blowback from its genocide will doom the Zionist state.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

14 Oct 2024 <\/em>– Extermination works. At first. This is the terrible lesson of history. If Israel is not stopped \u2014 and no outside power appears willing to halt the genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon \u2014 it will achieve its goals of depopulating and annexing northern Gaza and turning southern Gaza into a charnel house where Palestinians are burned alive<\/a>, decimated by bombs and die from starvation<\/a> and infectious diseases, until they are driven out. It will achieve its goal of destroying Lebanon \u2014 2,255 people have been killed<\/a> and over one million Lebanese have been displaced \u2014 in an attempt to turn it into a failed state. And, it may soon realize its long cherished dream of forcing the United States into war with Iran. Israeli leaders are publicly salivating over proposals to assassinate Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei and carry out airstrikes on Iran\u2019s nuclear installations and oil facilities.<\/p>\n

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, like those driving Middle East policy in the White House \u2014 Antony Blinken<\/a>, raised in a staunch Zionist family, Brett McGurk<\/a>, Amos Hochstein<\/a>, who was born in Israel and served in the Israeli military, and Jake Sullivan \u2014 are true believers<\/a> in the doctrine that violence can mold the world to fit their demented vision. That this doctrine has been a spectacular failure in Israel\u2019s occupied territories, and did not work in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya, and a generation earlier in Vietnam, does not deter them. This time, they assure us, it will succeed.<\/p>\n

In the short term they are right. This is not good news for Palestinians or the Lebanese. The U.S. and Israel will continue to use their arsenal of industrial weapons to kill huge numbers of people and turn cities into rubble. But in the long term, this indiscriminate violence sows dragon\u2019s teeth. It creates adversaries that, sometimes a generation later, outdo in savagery \u2014 we call it terrorism \u2014 what was done to those slain in the previous generation.<\/p>\n

Hate and a lust of vengeance, as I learned covering the war in the former Yugoslavia, are passed down like a poisonous elixir from one generation to the next. Our disastrous interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen, along with Israel\u2019s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which created<\/a> Hezbollah, should have taught us this.<\/p>\n

Those of us who covered the Middle East were stunned that the Bush administration imagined it would be greeted as liberators in Iraq when the U.S. had spent over a decade imposing sanctions that resulted in severe shortages of food and medicine, causing<\/a> the deaths of at least one million Iraqis, including 500,000 children. Denis Halliday, the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq, resigned<\/a> in 1998 over U.S.-imposed sanctions, calling<\/a> them \u201cgenocidal\u201d because they represented \u201ca deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq.\u201d<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s occupation of Palestine and its saturation bombing of Lebanon in 1982, were the catalyst<\/a> for Osama bin Laden\u2019s attack on the Twin Towers in New York City in 2001, along with U.S. support for attacks on Muslims in Somalia, Chechnya, Kashmir and the South of the Philippines, U.S. military assistance to Israel and the sanctions on Iraq.<\/p>\n

Will the international community continue to stand by passively<\/a> and allow Israel to carry out a mass extermination campaign? Will there ever be limits? Or will war with Lebanon and Iran provide a smokescreen \u2014 Israel\u2019s worst campaigns of ethnic cleansing and mass murder have always been done under the cover of war \u2014 to turn what is happening in Palestine into an updated version of the Armenian genocide?<\/p>\n

I fear, given that the Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress and the two ruling parties, as well as cowed the media and universities, the rivers of blood will continue to swell. There is money to be made in war. A lot<\/em> of it. And the influence of the war industry, buttressed by hundreds of millions of dollars spent on political campaigns by the Zionists<\/a>, will be a formidable barrier to peace, not to mention sanity.<\/p>\n

Unless, as Chalmers Johnson writes in \u201cNemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic<\/a>,\u201d \u201cwe abolish the CIA, restore intelligence gathering to the State Department, and remove all but purely military functions from the Pentagon\u201d we will \u201cnever again know peace, nor in all probability survive very long as a nation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Genocide is done by attrition. Once a targeted group is stripped of its rights the next steps are the displacement of the population, destruction of the infrastructure and the wholesale killing of civilians. Israel is also attacking and killing international monitors<\/a>, human rights organizations<\/a>, aid workers<\/a> and United Nations staff<\/a>, a feature of most genocides. Foreign journalists are being arrested<\/a> and accused<\/a> of \u201caiding the enemy,\u201d while Palestinian journalists<\/a> are being assassinated<\/a> and their families<\/a> wiped out. Israel carries out continuous<\/a> assaults in Gaza on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), where two-thirds of its facilities have been damaged or destroyed, and 223 of its staff have been killed. It has attacked<\/a> the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), where peacekeepers have been fired upon<\/a>, tear gassed<\/a> and wounded<\/a>. This tactic replicates the Bosnian Serb attacks in July 1995, which I covered, on the U.N. Protection Force outposts in Srebrenica<\/a>. The Serbs, who had cut off food deliveries to the Bosnian enclave, resulting in severe malnutrition and starvation, overran<\/a> the U.N. outposts and took 30 U.N. troops hostage before massacring more than 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys.<\/p>\n

These initial phases are complete in Gaza. The final stage is mass death, not only from bullets and bombs, but famine and disease. No food has entered northern Gaza since<\/a> the beginning of this month.<\/p>\n

Israel has been dropping leaflets demanding everyone in the north evacuate. 400,000 Palestinians in northern Gaza must leave or die. It has ordered the evacuation<\/a> of hospitals \u2014 Israel is also targeting<\/a> hospitals in Lebanon \u2014 deployed drones to fire indiscriminately on civilians, including those attempting to take the wounded for treatment, bombed<\/a> schools that serve as shelters and turned the Jabaliya refugee camp<\/a> into a free fire zone. As usual, Israel continues to target journalists<\/a>, including Al Jazeera\u2019s Fadi Al-Wahidi<\/a>, who was shot in the neck and remains in critical condition<\/a>. At least 175 journalists and media workers are estimated to have been killed<\/a> by Israeli troops in Gaza since Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.<\/p>\n

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warns<\/a> that aid shipments<\/a> to all of Gaza are at their lowest level in months. \u201cPeople have run out of ways to cope, food systems have collapsed, and the risk of famine persists,\u201d it notes.<\/p>\n

The total siege imposed on northern Gaza will, in the next stage, be imposed on southern Gaza. Incremental death. And the primary weapon, as in the north, will be famine.<\/p>\n

Egypt and the other Arab states have refused to consider accepting Palestinian refugees. But Israel is banking on creating a humanitarian disaster of such catastrophic proportions that these countries, or other countries, will relent so they can depopulate Gaza and turn their attention to ethnically cleansing the West Bank. That is the plan, although no one, including Israel, knows if it will work.<\/p>\n

Israeli Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, in August complained<\/a> openly that international pressure is preventing Israel from starving the Palestinians, \u201ceven though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is happening in Gaza is not unprecedented. Indonesia\u2019s military, backed by the U.S., carried out a year-long campaign<\/a> in 1965 to exterminate those accused of being communist leaders, functionaries, party members and sympathizers. The bloodbath \u2014 much of it carried out by rogue death squads and paramilitary gangs \u2014 decimated the labor union movement along with the intellectual and artistic class, opposition parties, university student leaders, journalists and ethnic Chinese. A million people were slaughtered. Many of the bodies were dumped into rivers, hastily buried or left to rot on roadsides.<\/p>\n

This campaign of mass murder is today mythologized in Indonesia, as it will be in Israel. It is portrayed as an epic battle against the forces of evil, just as Israel equates the Palestinians with Nazis.<\/p>\n

The killers in the Indonesian war against \u201ccommunism\u201d are cheered at political rallies. They are lionized for saving the country. They are interviewed on television about their \u201cheroic\u201d battles. The three-million-strong Pancasila Youth \u2014 Indonesia\u2019s equivalent of the \u201cBrownshirts\u201d or the Hitler Youth \u2014 in 1965, joined in the genocidal mayhem and are held up as the pillars of the nation.<\/p>\n

Joshua Oppenheimer\u2019s documentary \u201cThe Act of Killing<\/a>,\u201d which took eight years to make, exposes the dark psychology of a society that engages in genocide and venerates mass murderers.<\/p>\n

We are as depraved as the killers in Indonesia and Israel. We mythologize our genocide of Native Americans, romanticizing our killers, gunmen, outlaws, militias and cavalry units. We, like Israel, fetishize the military.<\/p>\n

Our mass killing in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq \u2013 what the sociologist James William Gibson calls \u201ctechnowar\u201d\u2014 defines Israel\u2019s assault on Gaza and Lebanon. Technowar is centered on the concept of \u201coverkill.\u201d Overkill, with its intentionally large numbers of civilian casualties, is justified as an effective form of deterrence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We, like Israel, as Nick Turse<\/a> points out<\/a> in \u201cKill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam<\/a>\u201d deliberately maimed, abused, beat, tortured, raped, wounded and killed hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians, including children.<\/p>\n

The slaughters, Turse writes, \u201cwere the inevitable outcome of deliberate policies, dictated at the highest levels of the military.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the Vietnamese \u2014 like Palestinians \u2014 who were murdered, Turse relates, were first subjected to degrading forms of public abuse. They were, Turse writes, when first detained \u201cconfined to tiny barbed wire \u2018cow cages\u2019 and sometimes jabbed with sharpened bamboo sticks while inside them.\u201d Other detainees \u201cwere placed in large drums filled with water; the containers were then struck with great force, which caused internal injuries but left no scars.\u201d Some were \u201csuspended by ropes for hours on end or hung upside down and beaten, a practice called \u2018the plane ride.\u2019\u201d They were subjected to electric shocks from crank-operated field telephones, battery-powered devices, or even cattle prods.\u201d Soles of feet were beaten. Fingers were dismembered. Detainees were slashed with knives, \u201csuffocated, burned by cigarettes, or beaten with truncheons, clubs, sticks, bamboo flails, baseball bats, and other objects. Many were threatened with death or even subjected to mock executions.\u201d Turse found \u2014 again like Israel \u2014 that \u201cdetained civilians and captured guerrillas were often used as human mine detectors and regularly died in the process.\u201d And while soldiers and Marines were engaged in daily acts of brutality and murder, the CIA \u201corganized, coordinated, and paid for\u201d a clandestine program of targeted assassinations \u201cof specific individuals without any attempt to capture them alive or any thought of a legal trial.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter the war,\u201d Turse concludes, \u201cmost scholars wrote off the accounts of widespread war crimes that recur throughout Vietnamese revolutionary publications and American antiwar literature as merely so much propaganda. Few academic historians even thought to cite such sources, and almost none did so extensively. Meanwhile, My Lai<\/a> came to stand for \u2014 and thus blot out \u2014 all other American atrocities. Vietnam War bookshelves are now filled with big-picture histories, sober studies of diplomacy and military tactics, and combat memoirs told from the soldiers\u2019 perspective. Buried in forgotten U.S. government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is no difference<\/a> between us and Israel. This is why we do not halt the genocide. Israel is doing exactly what we would do in its place. Israel\u2019s bloodlust is our own<\/a>. As ProPublica reported<\/a>, \u201cIsrael Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.\u201d<\/p>\n

U.S. law requires the government to suspend weapons shipments to countries that prevent the delivery of U.S.-backed humanitarian aid.<\/p>\n

Historical amnesia is a vital part of extermination campaigns once they end, at least for the victors. But for the victims, the memory of genocide, along with a yearning for retribution, is a sacred calling. The vanquished reappear in ways the genocidal killers cannot predict, fueling new conflicts and new animosities. The physical eradication of all Palestinians, the only way genocide works, is an impossibility given that six million Palestinians alone live in the diaspora. Over five million live in Gaza and the West Bank.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s genocide has enraged the 1.9 billion Muslims worldwide, as well as most of the Global South. It has discredited and weakened the corrupt and fragile regimes of the dictatorships and monarchies in the Arab world, home to 456 million Muslims, who collaborate with the U.S. and Israel. It has fueled the ranks of the Palestinian resistance. And it has turned Israel and the U.S. into despised pariahs.<\/p>\n

Israel and the U.S. will probably win this round. But ultimately, they have signed their own death warrants.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for\u00a0<\/em>The New York Times,\u00a0where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief. He previously worked overseas for\u00a0<\/em>The Dallas Morning News,\u00a0The Christian Science Monitor, and<\/em> NPR. He used to be the host of the Emmy Award-nominated <\/em>RT America show\u00a0<\/em>On Contact.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Copyright 2024 Chris Hedges<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – chrishedges.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

14 Oct 2024 – Israel will continue its mass killing to achieve its immediate goals, but in the long run the blowback from its genocide will doom the Zionist state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":277411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[3287,1161,417,554,1854,87,865,1029,3339,487,742,88,2097,767,2571,427,818,880,413,539,124,70,965,481,1025,174,886],"class_list":["post-277410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide","tag-anti-zionism","tag-arms-industry","tag-bullying","tag-children","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-hamas","tag-hezbollah","tag-human-rights","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-lebanon","tag-middle-east","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-palestine","tag-proxy-war","tag-state-terrorism","tag-syria","tag-unicef","tag-united-nations","tag-usa","tag-war-crimes","tag-warfare","tag-west-bank","tag-yemen","tag-zionism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":277412,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277410\/revisions\/277412"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277411"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}