Rafael Poch,
Published por Globalter,
Translated by María Suárez
Summary:
“In the absence of “new worlds” to which to export demographic
surpluses and vital metabolisms … the horizon that is seen is to
create islands of well-being and rights strictly protected by armies
and navies to, say, 20% of the world’s population, and confine the
rest in humanity in environmentally disastrous areas.”
With their complicity in Israel’s genocidal action, the Western powers are consistent with their past, but above all they point to a direction for the future.
Beyond the cruel genocidal slaughter underway, the most terrible thing about what is happening before our eyes in Gaza is that it offers a perspective for the future. The attitude of Western governments, their media and propagandists, contains a clear warning about how the privileged part of this world can solve the dead end to which the capitalist system invented and defended by them has led us in this century.
The Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, has referred to this by pointing out that “what the barbaric military power of the north has unleashed on the Palestinian people is the prelude to what it will unleash on all the peoples of the south when, due to the climate crisis, we are left without water; the prelude to what will trigger the exodus of people who, by the hundreds of millions, will go from the south to the north.”
The solution is the one used for centuries by those same powers that today fear being displaced from the command bridge: decimate populations and seize resources through war.
In the absence of “new worlds” to which to export demographic surpluses and vital metabolisms that are unsustainable and incompatible with the principle of equality between human beings, the horizon that is seen is to create islands of well-being and rights strictly protected by armies and navies to, say, 20% of the world’s population, and confine the rest in humanly and environmentally disastrous areas. For those who try to escape from these areas, walls, shots and shipwrecks (28,000 deaths since 2014 in the Mediterranean alone, in anticipation of what the great environmental emigration announces). A planetary Gaza.As Immanuel Wallerstein observed, this is not a very different plan from what Hitler and his contemporaries had in mind. What we are witnessing these days, not only the massacre, but its political and media treatment, and not only in the United States but in the parent nations of the European Union such as France and Germany, reminds us that this modus operandi is perfectly compatible with the “European values”, and all the semantic instruments about “democracy”, “rule-based order” and designs of the “international community”, fully discredited outside the geographical limits of the blind minority that manages it. Colonialism spread civilization based on genocides perfectly compatible with enlightenment, separation of powers and parliamentarism. Renaissance humanism was with the religious wars and Auschwitz with the German “great culture.” Why couldn’t the series continue today? The denial of the principle of equality between human beings, reducing the dominated to an animal condition, aims to work today in Gaza in the same way that all of this worked before for Africa, Asia and Latin America. The problem today is that this continuity with recent centuries is seen as an unacceptable anachronism by the majority of the world’s population. This “first fusion of old-school colonial and genocidal violence with cutting-edge advanced heavy weapons,” that “twisted amalgamation of the 17th and 21st centuries, packaged and wrapped in a language that harkens back to primitive times and thunderous biblical scenes that they imply the defeat of entire peoples: the Jebusites, the Amelikites, the Canaanites and, of course, the Philistines”, in the words of Saree Makdisi, https://globalter.com/ningun-ser-humano-poder-existir/es un challenge to humanity and intelligence. The principle of equality between human beings is the universal value that will decide the future of the world. Continuing to ignore this principle in the 21st century, as was done in the past, condemns humanity to disaster. What is happening today in Palestine is consistent with the history of the West over the last five hundred years, but above all it warns of its viability as a program for the future. (Published in Globalter October 31, 2023)
