There Is A Lesson Here

But we won't learn it.

Photo by Jean on Unsplash

I go on holiday for one week, try to unplug, and somehow, in that blink of an eye, the world descends to a new depth. An oppressive militarised cloud settled over Washington, DC. London buzzed with police as they carted off hundreds of people for saying they would like this genocide to stop, please and thank you. Yet they made sure to leave those who enabled and profited from this wave of death well alone. All while the final phase of this barbaric ethnic cleansing was being openly put into action. This is Hell. Not just because of how quickly things seem to have descended, but because we knew how to stop this, and we still did nothing. Will we ever learn our lesson?

The signs were obvious from the beginning.

Netanyahu has wanted to destroy the Palestinian people for decades. He has shown maps of what he envisions as “Greater Israel” at the UN, where Israel’s borders cover not just all of Palestine but parts of Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, and has called it his spiritual mission to bring this to fruition. His dehumanising rhetoric and apartheid policies towards the Palestinian people have been evident since the start of his political career in the ‘90s.

So, are we really surprised that he has supported and initiated a plan to push the entire population of Gaza into concentration camps and occupy the territory? Just to remind you, the IDF has routinely bombed safe zones and refugee camps and now frequently kills civilians at aid sites. What do you think will happen to those people once they are forced into these camps?

After all, members of Netanyahu’s government are already stoking the fire. Smotrich has stated the plan doesn’t go far enough, despite even Israeli human rights groups calling it an open and shut case of ethnic cleansing. Another member of the government baselessly claimed that the recent aid drops by the West, used to ease the deadly and wildly illegal enforced starvation of Gaza by the IDF, were supplying weapons to Hamas. With rhetoric like this floating around, it won’t stop at a concentration camp. We have been here before.

However, the massive smoking gun is Netanyahu’s justification for this crime against humanity. Bibi has said multiple times that “We intend to [take over] in order to ensure our security [and] remove Hamas.” But that argument contains some pretty significant holes! Firstly, Israel and the IDF have a long track record of not being able to define who is and isn’t a part of Hamas. In fact, several members of Netanyahu’s government have said that even babies born in Gaza should be considered Hamas. Also, Netanyahu supported Hamas for years by enabling funds to bypass PA sanctions on Hamas, funnelling tens of millions of dollars to them. In fact, before October 7th, Netanyahu openly propped up Hamas in a divide-and-conquer approach to Palestine. Hamas’s power was only possible because of him.

And it gets worse. Hamas has said repeatedly that they would cede governance and hand back all of the hostages for a permanent ceasefire — that goes for both sides, and this is a far weaker position for Hamas, as the IDF is substantially better equipped and has been accused of breaking ceasefire agreements. If Netanyahu wanted Israeli security and the disarmament of Hamas, he would have signed this deal months ago. In other words, his justification is a blatant lie. He can’t take this deal, as it would stop his heinous imperialist goals.

If you were paying even the slightest bit of attention when this all started, you would have seen this coming from a mile away.

So, while it is wonderful that many US-aligned countries are moving to recognise a Palestinian state, the Council of Europe is urging its member states to halt deliveries of weapons to Israel, and the international political community is beginning to recognise this as the genocide it is, it’s all too fucking late.

The same is true in America.

Washington DC’s crime rates are at a 30-year low, according to its own police force. There is zero justification for federalising or militarising the police there. So, why is Trump doing that?

A DOGE worker nicknamed “Big Balls”(though, based on that nickname, he is likely about as well-endowed as an amoeba) ) was assaulted. The right-wing narrative was that he heroically stopped a carjacking, but the evidence doesn’t quite support that. Let’s be real here, this guy was happy to openly rape the US government and its public services under false pretences for his own gain. He isn’t exactly what we would call reliable, nor moral. Someone could have been defending themselves against him. But literally millions of US citizens have a motive to beat the living shit out of him thanks to his work at DOGE. We absolutely must maintain a healthy level of suspicion over what actually happened but also stand by the fact that Mr Amoeba Dick should never have been assaulted.

Trump’s reaction to this minor assault in a statistically peaceful city? Call the city “lawless”, order the National Guard to DC, and federalise the police force under his control, then give the police permission to “do whatever the hell they want” in the face of provocations.

LA was testing the waters. To see if he could consolidate power. This is an attempt to set a precedent, enabling him to strengthen his power across the board, regardless of the reason.

This is called a police state, where a militarised police force is placed under direct control of an authoritarian leader, with no real oversight, to intimidate and control the population. In fact, what is happening in LA and what is happening in DC eerily mirrors the first steps taken to create the Gestapo back in 1933, the 1933 Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended civil liberties and empowered the Gestapo, and how Hitler’s paramilitary, the SS, took control of the Gestapo in 1934. That was how he solidified himself as a brutal all-powerful dictator.

The signs that Trump is a fascist have been obvious all along. His rhetoric, policies, anti-democratic stance, and political alliances have made that crystal clear for years. DC proves that he now has the ability and path to see this ideology through to its conclusion.

Just like with Gaza, the direction of where all of this was going was so clear. Yet we, the entire Western world, did functionally nothing. We barrelled towards this. And now we stand at a precipice, staring down into oblivion. How?

Trump and Netanyahu, like all power-crazed narcissists, push reactionary conversation and policies. Why? Because we need to be proactive to stop their heinous goals, as once that ball is rolling, it can’t be stopped, as Gaza and DC show. They manipulate the zeitgeist so that we all focus on culture wars and distracting talking points that don’t actually impact anyone. Then, they push their opposition to firefight meaningless issues constantly, allowing them to get the ball rolling in peace.

If you called Trump a fascist in his first term or said that Israel’s reaction to October 7th had genocidal intent in the following weeks of that atrocity, you would have been called unreasonable or an extremist or accused of scaremongering. Ask me how I know.

But that is how psychopathic narcissists win. They weaponise the structure of discourse. When you paint a big red flag in the sky, they force others to cut off your hand. As someone who was diagnosed as autistic in their late 20s and is still recovering from years of abuse, again, ask me how I know.

That is the lesson here. It was the lesson from Germany in the 1930s. It is the lesson from both of Trump’s terms. It is the lesson from Netanyahu’s decades-long brutalisation of Palestine.

We need media and politicians that take these obvious and extreme red flags, and the people pointing them out, seriously. To avoid miscategorising them as holding an extreme stance, be happy to put down the reactionary talking points for a while, and give these warnings the critical eye and exposure they deserve.

If we did that, there would be no erosion of rights, no consolidation of power from the people, no trampling of freedom, no genocides, no destruction of the planet, no daylight robbery of the middle and lower classes, and no vulnerable groups at risk of becoming scapegoats.

The dust will settle, and the truth will one day be undeniable. We will have to face the mountain of death and oppression. When that day comes, Islamophobia will carry the same weight as antisemitism, fascists will again be afraid to show their faces, and in the ruin of civilisation, freedom and rights will be venerated once again.

But this colossal destruction was preventable. It could have been stopped months or years earlier if we had just learned from history and collectively paid attention to the red flags. How many times does humanity have to go through this hellish cycle before we learn our lesson?

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Sources: Times of Israel, Politico, The Guardian, Times of Israel, Times of Israel, Al Jazeera, BBC, Will Lockett, Al Jazeera, NBC News, Will Lockett, Middle East Eye, Times of Israel