Many Say They Want Peace When What They Really Want Is Obedience: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Everyone says they want peace, but they mean different things by this. To an anti-imperialist, peace means the end of violence, oppression and exploitation. To a Zionist, peace means Palestinians lie down and accept their fate and neighboring nations cease disobeying Israel. To a supporter of the US empire, peace means all nations around the world submit to US unipolar hegemony. Many say they want peace when what they really want is tyranny.

If “peace” to you means other populations bow down and submit to your will, then it makes perfect sense for you to believe that your wars are being waged to attain peace, because those wars are being used to violently bludgeon those populations into obedience. If your definition of peace means the cessation of all violence and abuse, then you will support ceasefires, peace negotiations, diplomacy, the de-escalation of tensions, the cessation of imperialist extraction, and the end of apartheid and injustice.

Pay less attention to people’s words about wanting “peace” and focus instead on what actions they are supporting to accomplish that end. This will show you the truth about what they really want.

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Someone asked “Can we all agree that our world would be better without a Hamas?”

This is the sort of question that can only make sense to you if you view Hamas as some kind of invasive alien presence that was imposed upon Palestine from the outside instead of a natural emergence from the material circumstances that have been forced upon Palestinians. If you’ve got a group of people being sufficiently oppressed and violently persecuted by the ruling power, you’re going to start seeing violent opposition to that ruling power as sure as you’ll see blood arise from a wound.

If Hamas had been completely eliminated a decade ago, there would be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel today under that or some other name. If Hamas is completely eliminated tomorrow, there will be a Palestinian group organizing violence against the state of Israel in a matter of years (assuming there are any Palestinians left when this is all over, of course). If a man starts strangling me, at some point I’m going to try to gouge his eyes and crush his testicles. That’s just what happens when humans find themselves under a sufficient amount of existential pressure.

Asking if the world would be better without Hamas is as nonsensical as asking if Alaska would be better without coats. The presence of coats in Alaska is the natural consequence of the material conditions in that region, and as long as those material conditions persist for the population of Alaska then there will necessarily be coats.

Don’t ask if the world would be better without a Hamas, ask if the world would be better without the conditions which make a Hamas inevitable.

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Biden has started a new US war in Yemen while backing a genocide in Gaza, both of which are fully supported by the party which supposedly opposes him. But by all means go ahead and spend the rest of the year fixating on the US presidential race.

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Know how you can tell it no longer matters who the US president is? They stopped getting assassinated.

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The Biden administration’s justifications for its acts of war in Yemen are premised on the absurd assumption that the world economy should march on completely uninhibited during an active genocide.

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Supporting the world’s most powerful government bombing the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide is the most sycophantic bootlicking you can possibly cram into a single political opinion.

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Israel isn’t relentlessly murderous and abusive because it’s run by Jews, it’s relentlessly murderous and abusive because that’s the only way to maintain an ethnostate that was abruptly dropped on top of an already existing civilization. This would be true if it’d been a Mormon state or a Romani state.

Take any already existing country with its own ethnic and religious makeup and its own relationships with surrounding countries and drop a brand new artificial ethnostate on top of it with a deluge of immigrants who are designated special and above the people in that region, and you’re going to get a ton of violence. You’re also going to see the dominant group espouse supremacist ideological beliefs to justify why it’s fine for them to be placed above the other group and receive better treatment by the state. These things would happen regardless of what those respective ethnic and religious makeups happen to be.

How can we be sure of this? Because we’ve seen it happen time and time again in other settler-colonialist projects throughout history which had nothing to do with Jews or Muslims.

It’s not about Jews and Judaism, it’s about the nature and character of the ethnostate which got placed overtop a pre-existing civilization in the 1940s. The religions and ethnicities are interchangeable with pretty much any other in terms of how much violence would be necessary to institute and maintain such a state.

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People who say they oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza but don’t forcefully oppose Biden’s facilitation of Israel’s actions in Gaza do not actually oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza.

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There’s a type of uninformed comment I keep seeing, usually from Americans, that goes something like this: “What do I care about Israel and Hamas? It’s none of our business and we should stay out of it.”

This comment is born of the misunderstanding that people want the US to meddle in middle eastern affairs to stop the slaughter in Gaza, which is a notion many Americans reflexively oppose these days because they have learned that US “humanitarian interventions” in that region are consistently disastrous and often very costly.

But that isn’t what’s being called for. What’s being called for is for the US to STOP intervening in Israel and Gaza — to END an intervention that is ALREADY taking place. The US has been pouring billions of dollars of weaponry into Israel every year for many years now, and has sent a whole lot more since October 7 to assist the Israeli butchery that’s been happening in Gaza. If the US ceased supporting Israel’s violence in Gaza, that violence would necessarily be forced to end.

As a retired Israeli major general named Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate in November, “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the US. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

If you don’t want your government engaging in foreign conflicts and intervening in foreign affairs, then you should oppose the US-backed massacres in Gaza, because that’s exactly what it is. The anti-interventionist position for an American to have is to demand that the Biden administration stop actively facilitating this mass atrocity.

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/many-say-they-want-peace-when-what