WMD 2.0 is so half-arsed, be embarrassed for people falling for it

“They’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war” – Howard Zinn

Spell it out. It’s absurd. There’s this freaky little Nazified genocidal colony swallowing Palestine, 82% of Israeli residents are in favour of ethnically cleansing Gaza, 47% of them want to murder every man, woman and child still cursed with being alive inside the concentration camp, and if you speak out about it anywhere, even in fucking Australia, you might lose your job. Grace Tame, Ozzie of the year eternally and close friend of The Shot, lost her Nike endorsement last week, following yet another witch hunt led by The Australian. Tame’s sins? Publicly believing in the humanity of Palestinians, of course. Genocide: Just do it.  

It all makes it rather obvious you live inside a subservient (and embarrassingly eager) military vassal state to a rotting fascist empire eternally fueled by white supremacy and the blood of the Global South, doesn’t it? God that was a mouthful. It really fucking should at this point. Lack of information is NOT the problem here. 

You’ve given yourself various degrees of post-traumatic stress watching Israel’s infanticide on Instagram for nearly two years, and then you turn on the television every night and absolutely everybody, your government, your media, anyone that moves their mouth within an inch of the amnesiac blob that is mainstream Australia, lies to your face about it all. Some anchors and journalists understand this and still do it anyway, and some of them are just perfect products of their environments – private schools – and are as thick as paste. 

We kept being told that journalism was a bulwark against fascism, a ‘fourth estate’. This is the liberal frame for perceiving the industry’s worth. But the reality is the polar opposite: fascism and all its genocidal, authoritarian trappings has been allowed to thrive, and could not have done so, without journalism. (The problem, as ever, is who owns journalism. And because of its narrative shaping powers, it is inherently the richest people that own it. And those people are inherently out for themselves and they don’t give a fuck about your democracy, having sold us all out long ago.) The single token hanging of Nazi propagandist journalist Julian Stricther at Nuremberg was clearly not enough of a discouragement for posterity.

With barely a breather between disguising the last series of Western atrocities, the ABC, the Guardian, the BBC, CNN, fucking everyone, have reliably and obediently done that horrendous thing mass media always does: bang the drums of war, laying the pretext, making up down, left right, the aggressor the victim. 

The scary terrorists of Derkaderkastan, this time represented by Iran, have been half a season of 24 and three episodes of Homeland away from having nuclear weapons for 30 fucking years now. Nukes they apparently want to use on BackwaterVille Ohio, for some reason. Just like the Iraqis did. For some reason. Something about ‘hating our freedom’.

I’m sorry, but if you’re a fully grown adult claiming to have a working mind and a degree of emotional intelligence, it’s simply unforgivable to fall for identical war propaganda used the last time America/Israel wanted to bomb the shit out of somewhere for oil. Doubly so after watching the ‘good guys’ commit genocide for nearly two years.

It is insulting how half-baked the narrative justifying this Iraq/n rerun is. WMDs 2.0. It’s the ChatGPT of warmongering, with the pacing of the last season of Game of Thrones. The oligarchs must have dopamine burnout too from these dumb fucking apps. 1980s Schwarzenegger movies with shifty-eyed Arabs and nukes and lalalal Death to America have been left to do much of the psychological heavy lifting. Racism, fear, and the stress of financial hardship do the rest. 

We memory-hole this stuff perpetually in the West, so it’s worth re-stating: those annoying anti-war progressives were extremely correct in 2003 – and it has only been proven so, over and over again, for two decades, as millions of people were needlessly slaughtered at the hands of the American military machine, as violent an institution as any that has ever existed.   

We have Western atrocity normalised for our consumption before breakfast; greed and psychopathy celebrated by the time we go to bed. Our world is designed so you only notice this peering through the cracks of a boarded-up Overton Window, but that excuse wore thin long, long ago. Genocide and Forever War are the eternal flipside of this American world order, of increasingly fascistic vampire capitalism, and it is a cost far, far, far too many white liberals are comfortable to pay for the illusion of peace and a portfolio of negativealy geared Airbnbs. 

If you’re falling for the bullshit, I understand these are scary times and we make terrible judgments when we’re triggered and racist, but try breathing, using your memory, your pattern recognition skills, and understand that periodically, if the US doesn’t bomb the Middle East, the CEOs of Palantir, Raytheon and Elbit can’t cum. 

And your governemnt, your media, they all have the same fucked up kink. None of them can get hard unless Australian children are on their way to die and/or commit war crimes in the Middle East. The mouthpieces for the Masters of War want you to believe that the safety of the ‘free world’ depends on a bloodlusting supremacist ethnostate being allowed to murder civilians in yet another country, as though you can’t just Google a map of ‘Greater Israel’. 

As Israel enters the final stage of its genocide in Gaza, images from the starved, flattened concentration camp are somehow even more apocalyptic. The UN this week said Israel had committed the crime of ‘extermination’, or, as described in the Australian press, ‘exercising its right to defend itself’. TomAYto, tomato. 

The rubble is torched, the death accelerating. Israel murdered more than 100 people yesterday – 100 people they lured with the promise of a chance at food, only to fire on them with tank shells. 

The ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation’ (note the eternally deployed Orwellian naming convention of flipping the truth and calling your death squads The Happy Flower People) and American private security contractors are using aid to lure starving Palestinians into shooting range, and then more efficiently murdering them. With tanks. 

This is peak depravity. This is holocaust. And at the end of Gaza, which is near, death tolls will be astronomically higher than the figures quoted today (I stopped using them almost a year ago because it feels irresponsible). The true number will be in the hundreds of thousands. Challenge that all you like, but time will tell, and I certainly won’t be in the fucking Hague.

And everybody knows.

And everybody who wants to not be Latouffed pretends they don’t. 

Especially the Prime Minister. 

Anthony Albanese of the Australian Labor Party has spent two years pretending to be the dumbest motherfucker on the planet, a guy that just doesn’t have a clue what’s happening in Palestine and can’t remember all the recent and fresh weapons contracts his country has signed with Israel. It’s the same exact play as your high school friends that have 12-hours of screen-time a day, a job inside corporate Australia or the arts, and somehow still haven’t fucking noticed. 

Albanese’s origin story feels designed, weaponised almost, to either radicalise or deflate you – the co-founder of the Parliamentary Friends of Palestine, loves ‘fighting tories’ and not raising JobSeeker to a liveable rate. Sanctioning just two ministers, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, after everything the world has seen, is the equivalent of pointedly laying the diplomatic smackdown on Goering and Himmler, but not Hitler and Goebbels. Winking to your American overlords, your Zionist backers, that the slaughter is still on track, and no, you’re not going to be difficult about it. It is such a pathetic position to take; it redefines shamelessness. If you are seeking moral leadership through the darkness, search elsewhere, for these are the actions of a holocaust enabler during a time of atrocity. What a small man for such a large moment.

There is no moral difference between what Israel is doing to Palestine and what the Nazis did to the Jews, the socialists, the unionists, the gypsies, the disabled, the homosexuals. This is a holocaust of Palestinians, and so many of us in the West are complicit. We will all face a reckoning for our complicity. 

This is a sick society and however outraged you feel, you’d be justified ramping that up many notches. Let your heart break as the unthinkable happens again. Allow space for the sadness, the grief, the rage. And then do something about it. We all need to react in ways that feel authentic and appropriate to our values, but my personal opinion, which is what you’ve clicked on, is fuck their social cohesion and you should absolutely let Gaza radicalise you. That’s just being in touch with your humanity at this point.