By Alex Lo, A Socialist In Canada, Feb 15, 2024 (Alex Lo is a regular columnist at South China Morning Post, where this column first appeared on February 15, 2024.)
We live in an upside-down world. Countries that we have long been told are “rogue states” and groups that have been branded as “terrorist” are the ones currently committed to carrying out the international obligation to protect an entire people against a genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Countries that have sanctioned, invaded and destabilised others at the cost of millions of lives to uphold a “rules-based international order” and that lecture others on human rights, freedom and democracy are the ones committing or aiding and abetting a genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
For decades, from a moral high ground, the international media – from major news networks to the biggest film studios – have taught the world the horrors of the Holocaust and other genocides. Now, with some courageous exceptions, they are aiding and abetting a genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, justifying and excusing them, and worst of all, helping to demonise the victims and turn them into something less than human.
When you take off their sanctimonious masks, it’s just moral depravity and cowardice for all to see.
However, genocides are a lot more difficult to commit in a world that runs on 24/7 news. What you need is a double manoeuvre. It’s not enough to demonise and dehumanise your victims into faceless monsters. That is a necessary condition for carrying out a genocide by brainwashing your domestic audience. But you also need a foreign media with global reach that filters out your most repugnant propaganda and re-portrays you as the victim facing a monster bent on your destruction. Who doesn’t applaud the killing of monsters? That’s what affirms your manliness and righteousness.
Even so, with 24/7 news and global social media, there are so many information “leakages” you simply can’t block them all like you once could. In any case, what is being done before our very eyes is so horrendous and inhuman that 100 Joseph Goebbels would not be able to hide it from the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, for those who do study history rather than rely on the mainstream media for information and knowledge, it shouldn’t be surprising that the one country committing genocide is fully supported by another country that is founded on genocides. Who were the Seminole, Arikaree, Cayuse, Apache, Haida, Tlingit, Nisqually, Muckleshoot, Klickitat, Nez Perce, Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Paiute, Bannock, Shoshone – whose people suffered genocide and whose nations were effectively erased from history?
They were called “savages”, and they did carry out many horrific atrocities in their resistance. Today, they would be called “terrorists”.
In what is surely the height of perversity, many major weapon systems such as Tomahawk missiles, Apache and Cheyenne attack helicopters and Chinook heavy-lift transport copters have been named after some of those peoples exterminated by the same military that is now prolifically deploying those weapons around the world.
This country, the USA, has been actively supplying weapons to enable the other country to carry out the genocide. The flow of weapons and funds continues in flagrant violation of the orders from what is actually at the centre of international law: the International Court of Justice under the United Nations.
Nor should we be surprised, though it is almost never mentioned in the standard news media, that this ethno-colonial apartheid state of Israel, disguised as a “democracy” with the full complicity of the West, had supported through weapons sales the previous apartheid state of South Africa. It was the democratic successor state to South African apartheid that brought the current case of genocide before the international court.
Why do so many people find this picture of an upside-down world, which ought to be so obvious and so disconcerting and unsettling, to be false and malicious? That’s mass cognitive dissonance, a world in which what we are taught and shown is very different from what we see for ourselves. We are finally seeing through the widening cracks.
