Affichage des articles dont le libellé est Gaza genocide. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est Gaza genocide. Afficher tous les articles
31/05/2026
29/05/2026
28/05/2026
24/05/2026
Ben-Gvir's video EN->ES FR
JACK KHOURY
Israel’s
Real Red Line Isn’t Violence. It’s Filming It
The reactions in Israel to Itamar Ben-Gvir’s provocative video
La verdadera línea roja de Israel
no es la violencia, sino el hecho de filmarla
Las reacciones en Israel ante el provocativo video de Itamar Ben-Gvir
La véritable ligne rouge d’Israël n’est pas la violence, c’est le fait de la filmer
Les réactions en Israël à la vidéo provocative d’Itamar Ben-Gvir
22/05/2026
25/03/2026
‘Torture and Genocide’, a new report by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese
On March 23, 2026 a new report by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese to the Human Rights Council was published, with the title ‘Torture and Genocide’. Here is a brief abstract. The report can be downloaded, by clicking on the image below.
Torture and Genocide in Palestine: A Systemic Policy
The report
by the UN Special Rapporteur exposes a stark reality: the torture inflicted on
Palestinians is neither incidental nor exceptional. It is a central pillar of a
system of colonial domination and an ongoing genocidal process.
For
decades, Israel has embedded coercive violence within its mechanisms of
control. However, since October 2023, an unprecedented escalation marks a
qualitative shift: torture has become massive, openly endorsed, and directed
against the Palestinian people as a whole. It no longer targets individuals
alone, but a population “as such.”
In prisons
and detention camps, testimonies describe a regime of extreme brutality:
beatings, sleep deprivation, deliberate starvation, sexual violence, and
systematic humiliation. Children, doctors, journalists, and humanitarian
workers are arrested, tortured, and in some cases killed. Bodies are broken,
minds shattered, lives destroyed. This violence is not a deviation—it is coordinated,
institutionalized, and publicly justified.
But torture
is not confined to detention sites. The report demonstrates that the entire
occupied Palestinian territory has been transformed into a “torturing
environment.” In Gaza, siege, famine, mass bombardment, and the destruction of
hospitals, schools, and homes create permanent collective suffering. The entire
population is trapped in a space where death, fear, and deprivation are
constant.
In the West
Bank, pervasive surveillance, settler violence, forced displacement, and the
destruction of livelihoods extend this logic. Daily life itself becomes a form
of torture—an existence defined by insecurity, humiliation, and constant
threat.
International
law is clear: torture is absolutely prohibited. But the report goes further. It
shows that the systematic use of torture against a group is a key indicator of
genocidal intent. By inflicting widespread physical and psychological harm,
destroying living conditions, and targeting social structures, Israel is
implementing a strategy aimed at weakening, fragmenting, and ultimately erasing
the Palestinian people.
This system
is not sustained by the military alone. It is reinforced by legislation,
validated by courts, legitimized by political discourse, amplified by media,
and normalized within parts of society. Torture thus becomes a collective
enterprise, socially produced and politically defended.
The
report’s conclusion is unequivocal: the ongoing genocide also manifests as continuous,
collective, and generational torture. These are not isolated acts, but a
coherent architecture of destruction.
In the face
of this, international inaction is no longer tenable. States have a legal
obligation to prevent, investigate, and prosecute these crimes. Ending torture
also requires ending the system that produces it: occupation, apartheid, and
settler colonialism.
18/03/2026
Jürgen Habermas: In Lieu of an Obituary
In the first two or three quarters of his life, he had belonged to that Germany we loved—the Germany of “Dichter und Denker” (poets and thinkers)—only to end his long existence (96 years) on the side of the “Richter und Henker” (judges and executioners). Jürgen Habermas passed away on March 14. He no longer had the time or the strength to declare his support for Operation Epic Fury/Silent Holy City [sic & resic], unleashed by the well-known duo of executioners against the land that gave rise to Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Omar Khayyam, Rumi, Al-Ghazali, Suhrawardi, Al-Razi, Al-Farabi, Mulla Sadra, and… Ali Shariati. Having become a sacred cow of self-righteous but wrong-acting Germany, Habermas, shortly after October 7, 2023, committed an infamous text of unconditional support for the Zionist killers. This ultimate perversion of his own “communicative action” earned him a stinging response from an Iranian sociologist, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Asef Bayat, author of extremely creative works on social movements in the Mashreq and the Maghreb. We reproduce it below in lieu of an obituary, as it was first published in New Lines Magazine.-FG, Tlaxcala
Jürgen
Habermas Contradicts His Own Ideas When It Comes to Gaza
One of the world’s
most influential philosophers has weighed in on the war in Gaza. A Middle East
scholar tells him why he’s wrong
Asef Bayat, December 8, 2023
Philosopher Jürgen Habermas (left) and sociologist Asef Bayat (right). (Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP via Getty Images)
Editor’s note: Jürgen Habermas and Asef Bayat are towering global thinkers. Their books have been translated into multiple languages and are taught in universities throughout the world. Habermas is part of the pantheon of the legendary Frankfurt School of critical theory, along with the late Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse. Yet he is perhaps best known for his ideas about the “public sphere” — a realm where citizens come together to debate matters of general concern and “public opinion” is formed, which he traces back to coffeehouses and literary salons in 18th-century Europe — and as a defender of liberal democracy against its critics on both the left and the right. He is no stranger to the challenge that Bayat poses in this open letter; his very public debates and intellectual battles over many decades have made him a household name in Germany.
Bayat is a sociologist of the contemporary Middle East best known for his concept of “post-Islamism” and for his textured studies of street politics, everyday life and how ordinary people change the Middle East (the subtitle of his 2013 book, “Life as Politics”). Habermas has been widely criticized for his recent statements on the Gaza war, but what distinguishes this open letter is its immanent critique: Bayat sets out to show how Habermas fails to apply his own ideas to the case of Israel-Palestine. It is a critique from within the logic of Habermasian thought. This gives it a force that will — or should — resonate with Habermas and his defenders. It is more of an invitation than a polemic. It is an attempt to engage, and we publish it here in hopes that it will do just that.-New Lines
Dear professor
Habermas,
You may not remember
me, but we met in Egypt in March 1998. You came to the American University in
Cairo as a distinguished visiting professor to engage with the faculty,
students and the public. Everyone was enthusiastic to hear you. Your ideas on
the public sphere, rational dialogue and democratic life were like a breath of
fresh air in a time when Islamists and autocrats in the Middle East were
stifling free expression under the guise of “protecting Islam.” I recall a
pleasant conversation we had on Iran and religious politics over dinner at the
house of a colleague. I tried to convey to you the emergence of a
“post-Islamist” society in Iran, which you later seemed to experience on your
trip to Tehran in 2002, before you spoke about a “post-secular” society in
Europe. We in Cairo saw in your core concepts a great potential for fostering a
transnational public sphere and cross-cultural dialogues. We took to heart the
kernel of your communicative philosophy about how consensus-truth can be
reached through free debate.
Now, some 25 years
later, in Berlin, I read your co-authored “Principles of Solidarity” statement
on the Gaza war with more than a little concern and alarm. The spirit of the
statement broadly admonishes those in Germany who speak out, through statements
or protests, against Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza in response to
Hamas’ appalling attacks of Oct. 7. It implies that these criticisms of Israel
are intolerable because support for the state of Israel is a fundamental part
of German political culture, “for which Jewish life and Israel’s right to exist
are central elements worthy of special protection.” The principle of “special
protection” is rooted in Germany’s exceptional history, in the “mass crimes of
the Nazi era.”
It is admirable that
you and your country’s political-intellectual class are adamant about
sustaining the memory of that historic horror so that similar horrors will not
befall the Jews (and I assume, and hope, other peoples). But your formulation
of, and fixation on, German exceptionalism leaves practically no room for
conversation about Israel’s policies and Palestinian rights. When you confound
criticisms of “Israel’s actions” with “antisemitic reactions,” you are
encouraging silence and stifling debate.
As an academic, I am
stunned to learn that in German universities — even within classrooms, which
should be free spaces for discussion and inquiry — almost everyone remains
silent when the subject of Palestine comes up. Newspapers, radio and television
are almost entirely devoid of open and meaningful debate on the subject.
Indeed, scores of people, including Jews who have called for a ceasefire, have
been fired from positions, had their events and awards canceled and been
accused of “antisemitism.” How are people supposed to deliberate about what is
right and what is wrong if they are not allowed to speak freely? What happens
to your celebrated idea of the “public sphere,” “rational dialogue” and
“deliberative democracy”?
The fact is that most
of the critics and protests you admonish never question the principle of
protecting Jewish life — and please do not confuse these rational critics of
the Israeli government with the disgraceful far-right neo-Nazis or other
antisemites who must be vigorously condemned and confronted. Indeed, almost
every statement I have read condemns both Hamas’ atrocities against civilians
in Israel and antisemitism. These critics are not disputing the protection of
Jewish life or Israel’s right to exist. They are disputing the denial of
Palestinian lives and Palestine’s right to exist. And this is something about
which your statement is tragically silent.
There is not a single
reference in the statement to Israel as an occupying power or to Gaza as an
open-air prison. There is nothing about this perverse disparity. This is not to
speak of the everyday erasure of Palestinian life in the occupied West Bank and
east Jerusalem. “Israel’s actions,” which you deem “justified in principle,”
have entailed dropping 6,000 bombs in six days on a defenseless population;
well over 15,000 dead (70% of them women and children); 35,000 injured; 7,000
missing; and 1.7 million displaced — not to mention the cruelty of denying the
population food, water, housing, security and any modicum of dignity. Key
infrastructures of life have vanished.
14/03/2026
Normalized Trauma, Traumatized Normalcy – The Palestine Exhibition “Kalanlar Filistin” in Istanbul
On March 30, 2026, the solidarity exhibition "Kalanlar Filistin" [What remains of Palestine] closes its doors after three months in Istanbul Harbiye. Milena Rampoldi of ProMosaik visited this exhibition for us and reports on her impressions.
Milena Rampoldi, March 14, 2026
At first glance, this exhibition organized by the Turkish cultural association Kalyon Kültür would be seen as the narrative of the Zionist destruction of Palestinian life (family, school, childhood, culture) and thus as a material presentation of the Zionist genocide. However, what really counts here, if you are in the middle of the exhibition and experience it, is not the brutal destruction that you perceive on the surface, but what is “left” and lives on after the destruction.
It is about everything
that Zionism cannot hit, namely the soul, resistance and humanity. In fact, the
title of this innovative exhibition, which somehow turns classical museum
pedagogy and its dialectical paradigms completely upside down, could be
translated as “What remains of Palestine”.
What remains and stays
after the bombings and airstrikes of the Israeli military, the symbol and
essence of new colonialism in the Middle East, are human dignity, the spirit of
resistance and the Palestinian humanity of an oppressed people, but who are by
no means the victims of this destruction.
The visitor enters into
an empathic dialogue with the war reality of Palestine, which is “recreated” in
the exhibition premises. The visitor loses all distance, his empathy is the
result of the abolition of any dialectic between his safe and stable existence
in Istanbul-Harbiye and the genocide in Gaza. However, the visitor is not there
to perceive Palestine as an object in the sense of Edward Said and to pity it
as a do-gooder, but to appear as a witness for Palestine and to leave the
exhibition as a witness.
Like the testimony in the
Qur'an, the testimony of a historical event is not a right, but an obligation.
And this commitment leads to ethical responsibility. The visitor interacts with
the destruction and does not get out of his responsibility number. Since the
obligation to stand up for Palestine is not a choice of a sunny day in Harbiye,
but the ethical obligation of a life as an ethical thinking, witnessing and
acting person. As it says so beautifully on the website of the exhibition: “This
exhibition is not a visit; it is an attitude.”
What remains after the
Zionist destruction is the ontological “remnant,” the remnant that opposes any
ontological brutality.
“Destruction is not a
moment here, but a structure that has gained continuity; trauma is the new form
of everyday life.”
Trauma gets normalized in
Palestine. Palestinian life in Gaza is the remnant of this traumatized
normality. However, the trauma is now also an everyday aspect of the visitor,
who has turned into a responsible confidant/witness for life.
“The visitors are not
invited to emotional relief, but to an ethical debate. Here, not compassion,
but testimony is expected. Because testimony results in responsibility.”
It is not about the
catharsis of the visitor, as it is the case in a Greek tragedy, but about the
inconvenient knowledge of the Zionist genocide in Gaza.
What remains are silent
people and silent objects that stay immovably in their place as witnesses of
destruction. This can be seen in particular in the rooms where the kitchen, the
school class and the Palestinian home are shown after the Israeli bombings. The
material remains, a piece of wall, an empty pot, a school desk, a
blackboard..., and these objects are silent.
The first victims are
always the children. For the Zionist genocide is above all a child genocide.
Therefore, the figure of Handala is also central in this exhibition.
Handala is the famous
cartoon character of the Palestinian artist Naji al-Ali from 1969, which has
very strong autobiographical traits. The murdered children of Gaza and the
children who, like the cartoonist himself, became surviving refugees are the
symbol of testimony that remains and defies brutal destruction.
“What can be seen here is
not a loss, but irretrievable time.”
“The barbed wire at the
centre of the installation transforms the border from a geographical line into
a permanent experience imprinted in body and memory. This installation is not
conceived as an aesthetic composition; it wants the visitor to immediately feel
the interruption between today and yesterday and its ethical significance. The
work calls for observation, not pity.”
The trauma is, as mentioned,
the normality. War is continuity and the labyrinth of the exhibition is a
constant reality. The visitor walks into the labyrinth. He remains there
voluntarily and experiences the darkness of imprisonment acoustically as a
permanent experience. The children teach the visitor what is war - acoustically
and visually. The cries of the children are imprinted in the mind and soul of
the witness spectator. At the same time, the guided tour of the exhibition
illuminates the various movements on the grey walls of the labyrinth. Violence
and brutality become part of everyday life and are no exceptions. You do not
escape from this labyrinth, you stay, listen and painfully learn the
resistance, which then remains as an echo once you left the exhibition.
When the bombs are
asleep, we too can sleep
Is there chocolate in
paradise?
Allah is with us
“What is happening here
is not a deviation, but order itself.”
The visitor can't get out
of the situation. This is not an escape room, this is his testimony of
Palestine, the Zionist colony of the Middle East of children like Handala.
The other room, where the
names of the martyrs are read, performs the same function. Here, too, the
witness does not flee, but remains. The dialectic between testimony and witness
is abolished. We are in the post-dialectical space of the Palestinians' response
to the Zionist State and its outdated dialectics.
23/02/2026
They Served in Gaza, Then Died by Suicide – but Are Not Recognized as Fallen IDF Soldiers
Taking part in genocide can indeed be stressful
The IDF's policy is clear: while soldiers are in
uniform, they're the military's responsibility. The day after? Not anymore.
Soldiers who take their own lives after discharge because of their service are
not recognized as fallen and do not receive a military funeral. Six bereaved
families tell Haaretz how it feels to be left outside the gate
Tom Levinson, Haaretz, 19/2/2026
It happened late at night, after another tense, even
turbulent, day. Roi Wasserstein, a reservist who served as a combat medic, was
speaking to his company commander, whom he had known since they were both
conscripts. Perhaps they discussed some of the scenes they had witnessed;
perhaps they shared fears of what was to come. Details of the conversation
remain elusive, like a black box no one will ever find.
Around 2 A.M., Wasserstein retired to his creaky bed.
It was the night of October 10, 2023. He was in a staging area near the Gaza
Border.
He slept for about three hours. At dawn, comrades woke
him. Come quickly, the commander needs medical attention, they said. "He's
been shot." In truth, he had shot himself. The commander, a doctor at
Schneider Medical Center, was pronounced dead at the scene.
Wasserstein told his family nothing, kept it to
himself. They only heard about it later. "Everything is fine," he
answered laconically when confronted. One year and nine months later, in July
2025, his father found him in his room, dead by gunshot. Roi Wasserstein was
24.
Only during the Shiva did his family learn of other
secrets he had carried from the war. "His friends told us he was one of
the first to arrive at the Givati Brigade armored personnel carrier
incident" – in which 11 soldiers were killed – "and that he personally
pulled out the bodies, or what was left of them, from the vehicle," his
brother Tom says. Soldiers who were present at the scene told Haaretz of images
they will never forget ("ashes, body parts, charred flesh, a smell that
won't let go").
16/02/2026
To Honor the Memory of Those Massacred on October 7, Israelis Must Recognize Their Actions in Gaza
Gideon Levy, Haaretz, 15/2/2026
Smoke rises following an
explosion, within the "yellow line" zone, which is controlled by
Israel, in Khan Younis in the southern earlier this week. Credit: HASEEB
ALWAZEE/Reuters
The recent outrage over an
Israeli minister’s rejection of the word ‘massacre’ in reference to October 7
revealed that in Israel, the word is reserved for one side. Those fighting for
its preservation must apply it to what happened in Gaza
In the first months
following October 7, I constantly used the term massacre to describe what had
happened. What I saw with my own eyes as I wandered through the southern border
area with photographer Alex Levac could only be defined as one.
In Sderot, Ofakim, in the
Re’im parking lot, on death-strewn Highway 232, in Be’eri and Nir Oz, we saw
endless silent testimony to a massacre. The trails of congealed blood in the
rooms of kibbutz members, the lives cut short in an instant, the weekend copies
of Haaretz, with readers massacred as they were perusing them, the bodies of
their dogs lying in their yards, the crushed and shattered cars with their
silent remnants of the Nova music festival, ID cards and personal effects in
the ruins of the police station in Sderot, and of course, the surviving
witnesses – all told a story of a horrific massacre. A massacre – what else
could you call it?
The temporary memorial for
victims set at the Re’im parking lot in the initial months after the Nova
party, in January 2024. Credit: Hadas Parush
A year later, I could no
longer use that term. This was after the word massacre came to be used in
Israel’s discourse only for describing what was done to us. The only massacre
was the massacre of Israelis in the south, and no other. Hardly anyone used the
word massacre to describe what was happening across the border, in Gaza, at our hands.
When an Israeli said
"massacre," he meant the massacre of Israelis, as if he were stating
that there was no other. The word massacre became a fraught one, a tendentious
one serving propaganda and thus disqualified for use, as far as I was concerned,
due to its one-sided meaning.
Meanwhile, the second
massacre proceeded at full force, and no one called it by its name. It did not
cancel out the first massacre, but its scope, in numbers and devastation, far
exceeded it. The fact that it was perpetrated mainly by air did not diminish
its nature by one whit.
Destroyed buildings in
Gaza, as seen from the Israeli side of the Israel-Gaza border earlier this
week. Credit: Amir Cohen/Reuters
The furious argument that
has erupted in the last few days over the government’s foolish attempt to erase
from people’s minds the massacre we suffered can only evoke a bitter smile.
Nothing could be more
ironic: After more than two years in which the public discourse refrained from
using the word "massacre" or its synonyms for describing what the IDF
was doing to Gazans; after more than two years in which Israel tried to tell
itself, and the world, that the only massacre that took place was that of
Israelis; over two years of playing the victim, in which Israel put on display,
for itself and the world, only its own war wounds; over two years in which it
forbade any expression of compassion, humaneness and solidarity with the
victims of the other massacre; after over two years in which the Israeli media
concealed, ignored or blurred the other massacre, along comes the government
trying to erase from Israeli minds the first massacre as well, as if it never
happened.
Culture and Sports
Minister Miki Zohar speaking at the first government-funded film award ceremony
in Jerusalem last month. Credit: Naama Grynbaum
Culture Minister Miki
Zohar actually objected to adopting a stance of victimhood, in which Israel had
wallowed, as long as this served its purposes.
Nevertheless, there was a
massacre in Israel, as well as a genocide in Gaza. One should recognize this.
The power of words is great. The fact that so few Israelis are bothered by what
their country has done in the Gaza Strip proves the immense power of words. The
fact that every time the word "massacre" was or is still used in
Israel, people mean only the killing of 1,200 Israelis, never the killing of 70,000 Gazans, proves how easy it is to brainwash people and shape
their mindset.
Therefore, the current
battle over this term is important. People who are justifiably fighting to keep
this term intact regarding the events of October 7 should at least also adopt
it for describing what Israel did in its reckless retaliation in Gaza. One
cannot say "the October 7 massacre" and not say a word about the
punitive and vengeful massacre that followed it.
The blood of Israelis
massacred along the Gaza border cries out, but no less so than the blood of the
thousand babies that were massacred in the Gaza Strip. Both groups were victims
of barbaric and criminal behavior. Both groups deserve the correct definition,
not mendacious propaganda. There was a massacre in Israel. In Gaza, there was a
genocide.
12/02/2026
The self-righteous Empire: “Keep England white!”(Churchill, 1955)
Rafael Poch de Feliu, CTXT, 28/1/2026
Translated by Tlaxcala
After Gaza, the question being asked, from a place of vertigo, by the conscious sector of European public opinion is how to explain the complicity and cooperation of European governments, institutions, and media with the Israeli colonial genocide. The answer lies in history: it is European colonial history that links Western governments to the Israeli massacre.
The entertainment industry is a fundamental tool of
Western hegemonism. In close collaboration with the political, military,
financial, and media complex, its production penetrates every household daily,
performing a key ideological function, perfectly identified and understood. In
retrospect, the Hollywood industry managed to turn that universal encyclopedia
of infamy—the history of European colonialism, particularly that of the
British, direct relatives of today’s hegemon—into exploits, epics, and romantic
tales. The list of films glorifying great colonial crimes has yet to be
written, but it suffices to cite classics like "Lawrence of Arabia"
(1962), "55 Days at Peking" (1963), "Zulu" (1964), or
"Khartoum" (1966) to remember how an entire generation grew up lulled
and entertained by this exalting genre whose legend they internalized.
It is instructive to compare reading any serious work on the action of the British Empire in India or China with films like "Victoria & Abdul" (2017) by Stephen Frears, or "Tai-Pan" (1986) by Daryl Duke, to measure the level of vileness of such bombardment. Frears presents the warm friendship between Queen Victoria and her Indian servant at a time when Indians were dying of hunger in horrific crises directly related to colonial governance. Duke’s film is inspired by the figure of William Jardine (1784–1843) to construct a romantic, erotic, and heroic fiction around history’s principal drug trafficker, who condemned 150 million Chinese to drug addiction and became one of the richest and most powerful men of his time.
The Empire Marketing Board (EMB) produced more than 800 advertising posters to encourage the British to consume colonial goods, without much success. Created in 1926, it was dissolved in 1930.
Maintained for over two centuries of violence, racism,
and exploitation, the British Empire is still presented in the most haughty and
arrogant manner as a civilizing and model enterprise, alongside the French,
Spanish, Portuguese, etc. empires—declared defective or manifestly failed.
"For some nations, Spain for example, the opening
of the world was an invitation to prosperity, pomp, and ambition, an ancient
way of proceeding. For others, like Holland and England, it was the occasion to
do new things, to ride the wave of technological progress," writes David
S. Landes (In: The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, 1998).
This consistency with the more than ambiguous
"vector of progress" noted with satisfaction by the illustrious
Harvard historian may explain the current and renewed nostalgia for the British
Empire, warned of by two authors critical of the phenomenon (Hickel and
Sullivan). "High-impact books like Empire: How Britain Made the Modern
World by Niall Ferguson and The Last Imperialist by Bruce Gilley
have claimed that British colonialism brought prosperity and development to
India and other colonies. Two years ago, a YouGov poll revealed that 32% of
Britons are proud of the country’s colonial history," they note.
This same pride in the colonial past is, without
doubt, shamefully still present in many other old imperial nations, but
nowhere, as among the "Englishmen on both sides of the Atlantic" that
Benjamin Franklin defined as "the most important nucleus of the white
people," does this feeling have more consequences for the present.
"The empire, as it had been, formally came to an
end in the 1960s, but its unhappy legacy remains in today’s world, where
numerous conflicts occur in former colonial territories," observes Richard
Gott in his compendium on British imperialism (Britain’s Empire, 2012).
"If Britain was so successful with its colonies, why do many of them
remain significant sources of violence and unrest?" he asks. The
British—now reduced to the humble category of sheriff’s deputies, to an even
greater extent than the rest of the Europeans—"have continued to wage wars
in the lands of their former empire in the 21st century, and much of the
British population has unquestioningly reverted to their old stance of unthinkingly
accepting what is done in their name in far-flung places of the world,"
says Gott. The role played in the 19th century by "civilization,"
"commerce," and "Christianity" imposed on the
"savages" is now played by the ideology of human rights, gender
equality, and other noble causes. For all these reasons, recalling the
exemplary exploits of such a virtuous empire is not a historical exercise but
an imperative for understanding the present, and very particularly for
understanding European complicity (political, financial, commercial, military,
and media) with the Palestinian genocide.
Caged prisoners on route to Sydney, New South Wales
The British Gulag
The British Empire was a military dictatorship in
which colonial governors imposed martial law at the slightest dissent. For over
200 years, it was the scene of constant revolt and repressive violence. In the
metropolis itself, hundreds of thousands were confined in His Majesty’s island
Gulag. Especially after the independence of the United States closed that
colonial territory of the new world—in the thirty years before 1776, a quarter
of emigrants arriving in Maryland were convicts—Caribbean islands like Bermuda
and Roatán (Honduras), Asian ones like Penang (Malaysia), or Indian Ocean
islands like the Seychelles or Andaman, were part of the British island prison
system, which also sent many Indian and Chinese prisoners to Singapore. In the
19th century, the Seychelles were a prison for leaders of revolts and local
notables from Zanzibar, Somalia, Egypt, or Ghana, who for one reason or another
could not be executed. Archbishop Makarios, leader of the Greek Cypriot
nationalists, was held there as recently as 1956. But it was Australia, the
great island-continent offering unlimited space, that was the primary
destination the government needed for the social detritus of its catastrophic
industrial revolution—that great milestone of "progress" extolled by
Landes.
In 1840, half the population of Tasmania, about 30,000
people, were prisoners. Since maintaining prisoners in metropolitan jails was
expensive, the minimum sentences for deportation to Australia—to get them off
the government’s hands, even for petty theft—were seven years. Between 1788 and
1868, 162,000 convicts were sent to Australia, including 4,000 trade unionists,
Chartists, Luddites, the famous "Daughters of Rebecca" from Wales who
smashed tollgates and barriers to protest privatization and road tolls, as well
as 2,000 Irish revolutionaries.
The terrible situation of repressed individuals and
convicts from the metropolis themselves repressing and massacring native
populations in the colonies—so vividly seen in the United States with Native
American nations—was repeated in other European colonies and also in Australia.
In 1824, the military governor of New South Wales granted colonists, many of
them deported ex-convicts, a license to kill Aborigines at will. The governor
was named Thomas Brisbane, and his surname today names one of Australia’s major
cities.
Below Decks, by Rodney K. Charman (1995). Representation of the interior of a “coffin ship”( long cónra) transporting Irish migrants to America. Knights of Columbus Museum collection
The Irish Famine
Some consider the Chinese famine during the Great Leap
Forward (1958–1962) the largest in history. A century earlier, the Irish Famine
("An Gorta Mór") was considerably worse than the Chinese one when
considering the proportion of the population involved. With eight million
inhabitants, hunger and its consequences carried off between one and two
million Irish people. Some places lost a third of their population, half dead
and the other half through emigration. (Patrick Joyce, 2024, Remembering
Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World).
"I have visited the desolate remains of what were
once noble redskins in their North American reservations and I have explored
the black neighborhoods where Africans are degraded and enslaved," wrote
English Quaker philanthropist James Hack Tuke in 1847 in a letter following his
visit to Connaught, "but I have never seen such misery, nor such advanced
physical degradation, as that of the inhabitants of the bogs of Ireland."
Other countries like France, Belgium, Holland,
Germany, and Russia also suffered potato blights in 1846/1847, but unlike what
happened in Ireland under British rule, they halted exports of other foodstuffs
to compensate for the loss. English policy destined food produced in Ireland
for export—a strategy whose maintenance was considered more important than the
lives of the Irish. One of the protagonists of this policy, Assistant Secretary
to the Treasury Charles Trevelyan, was more concerned with "modernizing"
the Irish economy than saving lives, and thus saw the famine as an opportunity
to apply radical free-market reforms.
"We have not the slightest doubt that, by virtue
of the inscrutable but invariable laws of nature, the Celt is less active, less
independent, and less industrious than the Saxon. This is the archaic condition
of his race," wrote The Times, the central newspaper of the
imperial establishment.
The Economist,
the same weekly that in the 1990s preached the virtues of the Russian shock
therapy—which left a demographic toll of half a million, mostly working-age
men—while denigrating China’s reform, published on January 30, 1847, an
editorial dedicated to the Irish crisis. "That the innocent should suffer
with the guilty is a sad reality," it said, "but it is one of the
great conditions on which the existence of all society is based. Every
violation of the laws of morality and social order carries its own punishment.
That is the first law of civilization." (In: The Economist and the
Irish Famine — Crooked Timber)
Since the 16th century, a tithe was in effect in
Ireland whereby the mostly Catholic Irish had to pay a tenth of their annual
income to finance the Protestant church. Until 1829, Catholics who refused the
Protestant oath of allegiance to the crown could not hold public office. During
the famine, English Protestant theologians attributed the potato blight to
"popery," that is, Catholicism, which had "provoked the wrath of
God." The satirical weekly Punch constantly published cartoons
depicting the Irish as brutish, dirty, lazy, violent apes, solely responsible
for their own misfortune.
In 1847, while The Times ignored the famine’s
disasters, a relief campaign was launched in the United States that exposed the
London government. Packages marked "Ireland" were transported free by
rail, and 114 ships were chartered with aid.
The Irish Holocaust continued for those who managed to
emigrate. In the last of the three centuries of the slave trade, during which
about ten million Africans were transferred to the New World, with half of them
dying in the process of capture and transport, according to one of the great
historians of that traffic (Joseph Miller, 1988, Way of Death), Irish
emigrants met a fate not so different. On the English ships carrying Irish
emigrants to America, conditions were so appalling that one in four died during
the voyage or within six months of arriving in the New World. The mortality
recorded on what were described as “coffin ships” was no less than that on
ships transporting African slaves to the colonies. That this mortality was
particularly high on English ships points to clear criminal negligence: for
every death of an emigrant aboard an American ship, there were four on a British
one; and for every sick person arriving in the United States on a North
American ship, five arrived on a British vessel. In 1847, of the 98,000
emigrants who arrived in Canada on English ships, 25,000 died on the voyage or
within six months of arrival. All this was news in the US and Canadian press,
but the Times of London ignored it. The British government only began
taking measures in 1854, seven years later. (Thomas Gallagher, Paddy's Lament, Ireland
1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred, 1982)
The entertainment industry has completely ignored the
Irish Famine, but in 2018, a rare Irish exception produced in Luxembourg
presented "Black 47" by director and screenwriter Lance Daly, an
action film with a breathless western rhythm built upon the framework of that
historical tragedy. The Times this time highlighted the film’s
"macho theatricality," noting that "everything is deeply absurd,
but within a hauntingly profound setting." The Independent
emphasized the "excessively bleak" character of what it dubbed a
"potato western" in allusion to spaghetti westerns, and The
Guardian lamented that "the caricaturization of the villains
diminishes the impact" of that excellent film, which was nonetheless a box
office success…
Ireland in the West and Burma in the East were the
territories most powerful and tenacious in their resistance to the English,
which is why repression was particularly harsh there, but convulsions, famines,
and revolts were also chronic in India.
Fresco on the walls of Shaheed-Smarak or Martyrs'-Memorial Auditorium in Jabalpur MP (India), depicting the Quit India Movement by local artist Beohar Rammanohar Sinha from Santiniketan
India
According to a recent estimate, in just the forty
years from 1880 to 1920, British colonization caused an estimated 100 million
deaths in India, resulting from the impoverishment of the population and the
increased frequency and mortality of famines. (Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan,
"How British colonialism killed 100 million Indians in 40 years").
"This is one of the greatest policy-induced mortality crises in human
history," the authors state. "It is larger than the combined total of
deaths that occurred during all the famines of the Soviet Union, Mao’s China,
North Korea, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia," all in the 20th
century, they say. Before that, in 1770, a great famine devastated Bengal,
killing about 10 million of its inhabitants, a third of the population. The
situation was worsened by the monopoly on rice and other products imposed by
the British East India Company, which governed the territory. Collapse and
taxes, combined with drought and hunger, marked the beginning of English rule
in India, a pattern that would persist for 200 years.
Since its arrival on the subcontinent in the 17th
century, Britain destroyed India’s manufacturing sector, which had exported
textiles worldwide. The colonial regime eliminated tariffs on British textile
products and created a system of taxes and internal barriers that prevented
Indians from selling their products within the country, let alone exporting
them. "If the history of British rule in India had to be condensed into a
single fact, it would be this: between 1757 and 1947 there was no increase in
per capita income, and in the second half of the 19th century, incomes surely fell
by more than 50 percent," says Mike Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts,
2002). The new colonial economy made populations more vulnerable to droughts
and adverse natural phenomena that fostered hunger. According to historian
Robert C. Allen (Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction,
2011), under British rule, extreme poverty rose from 23% in 1810 to over 50% by
the mid-20th century, real wages decreased, and famines became more frequent
and more deadly. Distant past?
England’s most important politician of World War II,
Winston Churchill, who died in 1965, was a confessed racist. In the 1940s, he
referred to Indians as "a beastly people with a beastly religion" and
of the 1943 Bengal famine, which left three million dead, he claimed it was
"their fault for breeding like rabbits." In 1919, Churchill declared
himself "quite favorably inclined to the use of poison gas against
uncivilized tribes." In the 1930s, he defined Palestinians as "barbaric
hordes who eat nothing but camel dung." Before the war, he was an admirer
of Mussolini ("I could not help being charmed by his gentle and simple
bearing and his serene poise") and had words of praise for Hitler in 1937,
the year of Guernica: "One may dislike Hitler’s system and yet admire his
patriotic achievements. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a
champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place
among the nations." In the 1955 election campaign, Churchill proposed a
slogan for the Conservative Party that many Europeans subscribe to today: “Keep
England White!”
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