The end of reality

Two years into the US-Israeli genocide of Palestine, which includes invasions into Lebanon and Syria, the bombing of Yemen, and most recently Iran, it’s difficult to summon any kind of language to describe the age of barbarity and horror we’ve entered. I just watched another video of a screaming Palestinian man holding a headless baby. Earlier, before putting my toddler to sleep for his day nap, I kept seeing the blood-drenched face of a martyred little girl flash over his. Whenever I prepare food, I see again the images of American and Israeli soldiers firing into crowds of starving Palestinians, which are not only images, but recurring daily violences. The killing fields of genocide are brought to us live hourly, and each new atrocity appears worse than the last. What could be worse than firing indiscriminately into a crowd of people you have starved near to death? I ask myself, only to read about tanks firing into the crowds. And then jets. What could be worse than starving babies into the earliest grave? I ask myself, then read about the orphaned toddlers eating sand. Then watching another flaming torso in the rubble, another person made into an inferno, this endless holocaust. With answers like these, I now fear asking the question.

On the eve of Israel launching its latest illegal act of war and bombing Iran, there are two truths we must foreground: 1) that internationally-wanted war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu had just begun to face cross-examination in his 5-year-long domestic corruption trial, and 2) that Iran was in the middle of negotiating talks with the US about a new nuclear deal to replace the one Trump tore up in his first term. This is not the first time that ICC-dodger Netanyahu has launched a major attack at a critical juncture for his trial. In March, the Times of Israel reported, “Netanyahu will not testify as planned in his corruption trial on Tuesday following Israel’s surprise attack on the Gaza Strip”, breaking the two-month ceasefire. Following his attack on Iran, in which numerous scientists and civilians were murdered, his criminal trial has again been postponed. 

The reaction from America’s henchmen (the so-called West, the colonial Axis) to this latest in a dizzying list of war crimes and violations, has been typically perplexing. All the leaders and their ministers stepped forward to bleat simultaneously that “Israel has the right to defend itself”, that familiar death-drenched phrase wheeled out to excuse, justify, or otherwise dismiss whichever massacre apartheid Israel has carried out that day. This uniquely supernatural phrase has never had much of an association with reality, but its power seemed to be on the wane months into the total starvation of a besieged civilian population including over a million children—as seen by allied countries like Australia, the UK, and Canada beginning to threaten sanctions. It was all, finally, too much for the nations which had wilfully violated international law for the past two years by continuing to trade weapons with Israel, allowing their citizens to join its genocide, supplying intelligence and so on. They had begun to indulge in at least the theatre of accountability, the weakest rhetoric.

Now that Israel has arbitrarily attacked Iran, the only nation in the region actually capable of fighting back on par, the phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself” once again began to fire rapidly from the mouths of Western politicians, killing—finally and forever—any tether the status quo’s presentations had with reality. A great many of us ordinary citizens have watched agog as this phrase emerged from the burned rubble of civilian apartment blocks in Tehran, draped in the corpses of the chief negotiators who had been talking to the US. As Iran began to retaliate, successfully striking many Israeli targets, easily penetrating the so-called “Iron Dome”, two new talking points quickly joined the detached-from-reality chorus: “Iran must return to the negotiating table” and “Iran can never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon”. 

To assert that Iran must return to the negotiating table (a talking point always coupled with calls not to strike back, to “de-escalate”) when said table had just been blown up, and the people sitting at it killed, is bizarre to say the least. To do so without referencing in any way why there’s no table anymore, the illegality of the Israeli attack, is obscene and frankly Orwellian in its creepiness. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” The chilling fact is that the majority of mainstream Western media has unquestioningly facilitated the US-Israeli genocide, and the divergence between reality and politics/news reports has never been wider. In fact, we can say now perhaps for the first time that there is almost no relationship between the two. We can see this clearly in the reporting of Israel’s unjustified strikes on Iran.

For the past two years we have seen the worst atrocities imaginable excused and justified on the basis of one attack by Hamas, every violation of law and human decency waved away, with the right for Israeli retaliation relentlessly reaffirmed. The colonial logics which have underpinned apartheid Israel from the start, and indeed the West, are as clear and violent today as the day these invaders first landed in the countries they subsequently stole and brutalised. These logics assert that colonial violence is forever just, and resistance to it—armed or unarmed—is never acceptable, and if it’s not outright criminal, just wait, it won’t be long. We’ve seen this play-out across the West with new restrictive laws, the punishing of dissent, the crackdown on student protestors, and most recently the allegations of “terrorism” levelled against Irish band Kneecap and UK-based protesters, Palestine Action group. 

Let’s attend, briefly, to the repercussions of the West rushing to back Israel’s illegal attack, which includes Australia. Penny Wong went from being “very alarmed” by it, to “non-committal” about our involvement if the US should attack Iran, to now, in the wake of that very extreme act, saying Australia “fully backs” the US strikes. Iran must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, parrots Penny again and again. Putting aside the fact that they don’t have one, that they are signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and routinely submit to IAEA inspections—while Israel is not, and does not, despite their own nuclear weapons and blatant contempt for international law—we should all linger on the word allowed. Who gave Australia or any other nation the right to determine whether another sovereign state can have a nuclear program? Why are we allowing this to slide?

In the past two years, Israel has detonated 100,000 tonnes of bombs—the equivalent of eight Hiroshima nuclear attacks—on a tiny strip of land with a trapped civilian population of over two million. While the spectre of a nuclear strike is firmly embedded in culture as the worst possible outcome, the nightmare of nightmares, modern weapons and warfare is more than sufficient to create incalculable calamities on par with that. We are seeing this daily. 92% of the buildings in Gaza have been entirely destroyed. Would it have been so much worse if it had been a nuke? Consider the fact that birth deficiencies and rates of leukemia and cancer in Iraq, post 2003-invasion, are worse than what was observed in Hiroshima. In Japan, rates of leukemia rose by 660% in the years following the bomb. In Falluja, it increased by 2,200%. The toxicity of war has never been greater, and we are in no way reckoning with the scope of the horror that’s been unleashed. 

We should all be clear about what is being said and why. Iran is “not allowed” to have a nuclear weapon because any sufficient deterrent to US-Zionist imperialism would mean this gross empire would have to compromise and actually negotiate in good faith instead of just trampling over the region and killing millions whenever they desire. North Korea is a salient example, in one respect: for all the endless hysteria about the dangers and manifold injustices of that despotic nuclear-armed country, the routinely feverish speculation about North Korea striking or being able to strike the US, it has of course never done so. Likewise, even if Iran were to develop or acquire a nuke, it would not use it. That would defeat the purpose, the very rationale of mutually-assured destruction. How can I know this for sure? Because, as we have seen these past two weeks, Iran has the capability of causing massive damage—indeed, of actually destroying Israel—if it so chooses, and it does not need a nuclear bomb in order to do so. 

As I write this, the Iranian government has closed the Strait of Hormuz, and the world teeters on the brink of a global conflagration the likes of which has not been seen since World War II. Why? Because Israel, with the support of the majority of its military-trained citizenry, wants to kill as many Palestinians as possible and complete the ethnic cleansing project they began over a century ago. Despite facing domestic populations that overwhelmingly oppose this—with massive civilian demonstrations against it occurring weekly in cities around the world—and despite the world’s top courts issuing orders that all signatory states must sanction Israel and do everything possible to pressure it to stop, Western governments and institutions continue to support Israel’s daily massacres. In fact, the US is now so far gone in its fascism that it has sanctioned the International Criminal Court and is targeting its prosecutors. The framework of international law, with its attendant notions of credibility, of justice, has always been one-sided in its application and as such, of dubious worth, but even so, to witness it destroyed so thoroughly and so publicly, is as distressing as witnessing the now complete break between what is real and what is presented as such by world leaders and a compliant media class.

I’m afraid, to be honest with you. The uncharted territory we’ve entered has serious ramifications for all of us. The question that must be asked now is: given the West has legitimised attacking other nations on the basis of vibes—the hysterical speculation that maybe one day someone will attack you if they gain a certain weapon—what is to stop China from attacking Australia to prevent it from acquiring nuclear submarines? Which is something both the US and Australia have been explicitly clear is aimed at a future war with China? Despite the Trump administration’s chaotic violence and obvious incompetence, in the past two weeks, the Albanese government has grovelled even further before the US boot, promising more defence spending and access to our critical mineral reserves. Not to say that any of this would be more okay under a Democrat—the strikes America carried out on Iran was practiced and prepared for under Biden.

To be clear: Australia will never have its own nuclear submarines. Neither the US or the UK can fulfil their ends of the shonky AUKUS pact, which leaves Australia paying $370 billion for the privilege of turning this continent into a giant radioactive US military base: America can station their subs here and dump their cancerous waste in our environment, and we’ll pay for the honour of being a convenient patsy. This pact is one of the greatest scams in the history of the world, a grand act of larceny and subservience facilitated by the most inept and cowardly politicians in Australia’s short, sordid history.

I pose the above question only to engage in the surface-level logic presented by our war criminal government and its pathetic servants in the mainstream media. Nobody has bothered to ask this most basic follow-up question about what this justification enables, instead anti-China rhetoric in our political and media sphere is the norm – never mind that China is our no. 1 economic partner, accounting for over a third of our entire international trade. What happens if the racist twits devoted to the US military industrial complex actually succeed in launching a war with China which neither they nor Australia have any hope of winning? God forbid they should ever tire of the endless provocations, the racist aggression and posturing—God forbid they should ever show even an ounce of America’s demented desire to dominate the world by force of arms. Over the past 20 years, by its own reckoning, the US has detonated over 377,000 bombs and missiles on other countries, averaging over 42 a day. It isn’t China nor Russia nor Iran that any of us should be worried about, it’s the endless American death machine. 

I’ve called this piece “the end of reality” because I started it thinking about this latest break between what’s real and what is presented as such by the status quo. I might have more accurately called it “the beginning of reality”, one in which we all now can put to rest forever any investment in mainstream media—whether run by billionaires or public broadcasters like the BBC and ABC, both have proven systematically biased and skewed. The other element on my mind is the language-learning-models and image generators deceptively and stupidly called “AI”, which the US government invested $500 billion in, in January. The US Dept of Defence followed this up recently with another $200 million. Money continues to pour into this content slop engine, with the specific end goal of more accurately being able to ape human writing and the human form, both still and in motion. We all know that our politicians are lying to us, that the narratives they push are patently false, and while this knowledge has not led to decisive action on our part – to our eternal shame – we still have this awareness, this most essential function that at least holds the potential for action. 

I see the end of that awareness. It won’t be much longer before governments will be releasing “AI”-generated videos to the public as evidence for their claims. It’s become a running joke how bad Israeli hasbara is, how pathetically obvious the lies and fantasies are, from the IOF soldiers holding up an Arabic calendar and claiming it represented the routine of Hamas soldiers holding hostages to the crude 3D-rendering of a “sophisticated” multi-layered complex under Al-Shifa hospital which doesn’t exist, except in the minds of depraved Zionists. (In reality, Israeli hasbara is awful because it doesn’t actually need to be good, they don’t need to convince anyone in power in the West, knowing their interests and racism are perfectly aligned). Consider this, then: we are rapidly approaching the moment we will no longer be able to see when the path between reality and mediated reality diverge. We are approaching the point when even Orwell’s famous quote will no longer apply. 

The last question, then, is this: what will we do now with what we know, in the little remaining time we have?