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Have we become soulless?
GAZA TELLS US WHO WE ARE
Caitlin Johnstone
Some days it’s hard to say which is more horrific: the Gaza genocide
itself, or the moral decay throughout our society which makes it
possible.
I mean, the atrocities in Gaza have a couple million victims. If you
add up the populations of the US, Europe, Canada and Australia, you’ve
got around a billion people living in a dystopia whose collective
conscience is so warped and twisted that they’d allow their governments
to support a live-streamed genocide in full view of the entire world. A
billion people who are so morally bankrupt that they find it tolerable
for such a nightmare to be inflicted upon their fellow human beings
right in front of them.
This has been especially pronounced during the heat of a US
presidential race, with tens of millions of voters falling all over
themselves to cognitively sweep Gaza under the carpet so they can throw
their support behind one of the two mainstream candidates who’ve both
pledged to support the Zionist state which is perpetrating this
genocide. At best they see Israel’s crimes as an annoying side issue
which the left keeps disrupting their Kamala parties about, and at worst
they support Israel’s actions entirely.
What a pointless, meaningless, soulless way to live. What a betrayal
of truth, and of our own humanity. How could anyone possibly find
satisfaction in that kind of zombie-like existence?Mindlessly shuffling
along to the beat of the status quo, devouring human flesh because it’s
more comfortable than the cognitive dissonance which would come with
divorcing the power-serving worldview you’ve been indoctrinated from
birth into espousing.
I was listening to an interview with a doctor who
worked in Gaza during the genocide and he discussed the time many
months ago when the IDF forced the evacuation of a hospital and left
four premature babies to die in their incubators after assuring the
staff they’d be taken care of. Their tiny bodies were found decomposing
weeks later after Israeli forces cleared out of the area.
How did that one incident, just by itself, not stop the world? How
did it not stop us all in our tracks and force us to re-evaluate
everything that led to this point? It wasn’t a secret that those four
babies died; it was in the mainstream news. It was right there, right in front of us, and we did nothing.
Such atrocities have been happening on a daily basis for thirteen months now, and still nothing.
We’ve got to live like this. We’ve got to live in this genocidal
dystopia, surrounded by shambling sleepwalkers covered in human blood.
Our lives here in the west are far, far more comfortable than the lives
of people in Gaza, but they are also far less truthful, and far less
capable of nourishing the human spirit.
We marinate in lies and psychopathy, watch lies and psychopathy, eat
drink sleep and breathe lies and psychopathy. Our minds are full of
garbage and our hearts are full of shit, and we are wading around up to
our ankles in the blood, sweat and tears of the global south. This
festering sore of a civilization is the only soil in which the
western-backed genocide in Gaza could take root.
The people in Gaza have to suffer the consequences of who we are and
what we have become, but we have to live with who we are and what we
have become. We’re killing their babies and leaving them to rot, but
we’re the ones who have to live with the corpses of rotting babies in
our souls.
One way or another the killing in Gaza will end one day. But the
forces within us which gave rise to that butchery will live on long
after the sounds of the drones and explosions have ceased.
We will have to live like that. We will have to live knowing that this is who we are. — Caitlin Johnstone November 4, 2024 |
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