On Genocide

There is no defence.

The post for January 30^th this year bade farewell to something called the Rules-Based International Order, known as RBIO for short – but not for long. The idea that relations between nations should be governed by rules, not by force, was born in the carnage of the “war to end wars,” World War I, in the form of the ill-fated League of Nations. It was resurrected after the next bout of bloodshed and rebuilt in much stronger form, including the UN and all its agencies, Bretton Woods, the IMF, the World Bank and an alphabet soup of agreements such as commerce and customs, air travel, international trade and finance, and so on. How successful it has been can be decided by historians unborn but we can be clear on one point: it's now dead. It has ceased to exist, an ex-order, throttled and cast aside by the very nations that were loudest in proclaiming its virtues. Its death notice was published yesterday by Herr Volker Türk, of Austria, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, in the form of a declaration that Israel is engaging in genocide in Gaza.

The report is 77 pages long but I have only skimmed the material facts on which the decision is based because it’s so horrific, but also because we see it all day, every day. Everybody should have a copy (link above) and be familiar with the legal case at least. Genocide is broadly defined:

13. The crime of genocide covers acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such (p5).

There are five factual criteria to be satisfied, the actus reus or guilty acts:

1. Killing members of the group;

2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

These must be accompanied by clear evidence of the mens rea or guilty mind, the intent to wipe out a group of people just because they are who they are. Moreover, there is a clear legal burden on third party states to act to prevent and punish genocidal conduct (at pt 17). This has universal jurisdiction and is binding on all countries regardless whether they have signed the Genocide Convention (1948) or the Rome Statute of 2002, which established the International Criminal Court.

The facts are established in brutal detail. Gaza was one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with an average of 6,300 residents per km² over the whole area of 365km² although sizeable parts of the land were devoted to agriculture or were beach areas: “Israel is dropping (explosives) in less than a week what the United States was dropping in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller, much more densely populated area” (p8). As anybody who pays any attention to the news will know, Israel has selectively targeted health facilities and their staff. There were 498 separate attacks on health services in the first ten months of its onslaught, and hundreds since, including the deliberate demolition of hospitals by ground troops. Deliberate starvation of the civilian population has been implemented; “…sexual and gender-based violence … has been widespread and systematic…” (p61, pt 204d) while there is extensive and clearly documented evidence of children being deliberately shot by snipers in different parts of their bodies on different days. Just yesterday, the last functioning children’s hospital was deliberately targeted in a series of attacks over hours. Health staff, including foreign surgeons, have stated: “Many (children) said that they wished the next bomb would just hit them to put an end to their torture” (p63, pt 204f).

As for the mens rea, there is irrefutable evidence that, from the highest offices of the state down, Israel is fully intent upon commiting the crime of genocide and is pleased to broadcast it. Nobody anywhere can question this again. The conclusions of the enquiry are set out in pts 252-255:

The Commission concludes that the State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure to punish genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip (p71, their emphasis).

Recommendations to the Israeli government, which has ignored them in the past, are set out at pt 256, followed by those for third states, who must: “(a) Employ all means reasonably available to them to prevent the commission of genocide in the Gaza Strip; (b) Cease the transfer of arms and other equipment or items …” (pt 257 at p72).

That’s all crystal clear. If there was ever any room for doubt at any point in this ghastly episode, or in the past 30 or 40 years (and I don’t believe there was), it has been blown away by the blunt facts set out in the spare language of the report. There is, of course, no defence to the crime of genocide or to being an accessory to that crime. Moreover, the allegation that accusing Israel of genocide is in some unstated sense “antisemitic,” whatever that is, has been shown to be false, just another in the litany of self-serving lies. However, there is a larger significance that impinges on all of us, namely, the final, overt destruction of the myth of the Rules-Based International Order and a series of closely related processes that are underway across the world.

There was never a genuine rules-based international order. It has always been Macht hat Recht, might is right, where “We make the rules and you follow the orders,” but it has been disguised, hidden behind a façade of sanctimonious propaganda, as in “We’re noble, God-fearing people who can do no wrong and anybody who opposes us is ipso facto diabolical and must be destroyed.” When the enemy was atheistic international communism, that was an easy sell but it was never more than the grain of truth in a very big lie. For example, we’re told the Korean War started when Stalinist North Korea invaded the democratic, freedom-loving South but this is false. Under the American-installed, ultra-rightist dictator, Syngman Rhee, there were repeated massacres of leftists or communist sympathisers along with numerous probing raids across the border, so the North finally attacked, at which the West cried foul. This model of covert hostility has been repeated dozens of times in dozens of countries since 1945, with invasions, coups and general mayhem provoked, paid and supported by the West in the guise of “preventing the dominoes from falling” or “making the world safe for democracy,” etc.

Over and over again, we have been fed lies by the most sophisticated propaganda machines in history: communist infiltration, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Gaddafi’s brutality, Islamist terror cells, on and on, but now the curtains have been ripped aside. Plucky Israel, the darling of the West, actively aided and abetted by practically every country in the Western fold, has been exposed as a criminal state, a berserker state, trashing any concept of decency in its deluded plan to clear every living Palestinian soul and every trace of their existence from the land they want to occupy. Not only has the West done nothing to rein in this bunch of religious maniacs, it has armed them and financed them and spied for them and protected them at every turn.

The whole concept of international rules stands as a monstrous lie and it can’t be put back together again. In chilling detail, the rising generations have seen the unspeakable wickedness of the West and they will never be fooled again. This is true, not just in our countries but, more significantly, in every non-Western country in the world: East, South and West Asia, Africa, South America, meaning about three quarters of the world’s population and over half its GDP. The ramifications of the depraved conduct in Gaza of Israel and its Western accomplices will ricochet for a hundred years. At this stage, we can’t predict what will happen but there’s no way the old, self-serving and soothing lies can be resurrected.

The idea of a rules-based order was always just a front to conceal the real attitude of the West: We can do what we like and to hell with anybody who opposes us. The French in Algeria and Vietnam, the British in Kenya, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Belgians in Congo, even the bloody Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique … When you know the actual history of brutality and exploitation that went on in Europe’s and in America’s colonies, not the carefully sanitised versions fed to us, then it’s clear that the concept of “self-determination” in the new UN Charter was pure bullshit, intended to placate any tender-hearted voters at home while the transnational looters got on with their job. Finally, the lie has broken down and we can see the truth: “We rich and powerful people have rearranged international relations as a dominance hierarchy in which we’re the winners and you’re the losers, and if you don’t like that, we’ll smash you.” That’s all it ever was, the only permissible change being that it can get worse, but never better.

I am not knocking the idea that life has to be conducted by rules. The biocognitive model is very strong on rules: as personality, they govern our reactions to life events and our dealings with each other, from playing games with the children to building nation-wide services. However, with the RBIO, we are forced to confront a crucial question: Were its builders genuinely concerned for the welfare of the human race, or were they just cynical opportunists who found a way of keeping the bleeding hearts quiet while they got on with pillaging-as-usual? We will never know the final answer but I’d say it’s a tentative yes. All of the above, plus a whole lot more. In any event, it failed. There hasn’t been a single day of peace since 1945, although that’s about normal for Homo sapiens so we really don’t have much choice than to try to enforce rules.

Meantime, another bold experiment has reached the end of the line, the neoliberal economic system. Over the past few weeks, I have given some figures to show how inequality is rapidly increasing in the world. Chuck Collins at inequality.org reports this morning how, in France, the combined wealth of the country’s 500 richest families has risen from 6% of the national GDP in 1996 to 42% today. Across in the US, the ten richest hedge fund managers are worth a combined $174billion. At just shy of $400billion each, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are slugging it out for title of world’s richest man, although Musk’s new contract may make him the world’s first modern trillionaire (Leopold II of Belgium beat him after he stole the whole of the “Congo Free State”). That’s great for the wealthy but, in practically every country, the poor and the middle class are groaning, which is fuelling the almost universal surge to the right in politics. Traditional political parties are either falling apart (Germany, UK, Australia, Canada, Democracts in US, etc) or embracing a vile form of right wing populism and lunging to grab more power (Republicans in US, Poland, Hungary, Italy, France etc). This can have only one end just because, once started, neoliberal economics can’t stop.

The central idea of “trickle down economics,” à la Thatcherism or Reaganomics, was that as the wealthy got richer, they would need to invest their excess funds in industries, which would benefit the working classes, and all would be well: the “rising tide would lift all boats,” as we were told. It hasn’t worked. As the rich have become obscenely rich, the well-paying jobs have disappeared, students are enmeshed in debt they struggle to repay, essential public services like health, education, water, power and roads are on the verge of collapse, on and on. Indeed, to a large extent, the rich have become obscenely rich by making the well-paying jobs disappear overseas, by enmeshing students in debt they can’t repay, and by reducing expenditure on privatised public services while creaming off vast profits (more figures here).

From this point of view, neoliberal economics is not a failure, it has succeeded brilliantly for those who devised it but it is now starting to consume itself. The profiteers are demanding more and more profits but the system can’t deliver. Wealth is not produced by the wealthy. It is produced by the working and middle classes (the middle class actually work, but don’t tell anybody), by farmers and builders and nurses and teachers. As the value they produce goes round and round, the wealthy dip their hands in it and take some out. The billionaire hedge fund managers have never produced a thing in their lives. Nothing. All they do is manipulate your money and mine and hand it around to their mates but their greed has no end. The more they get, they more they want; the more they have, the more they believe they’re entitled to, and thence the more resources they devote to manipulating and suborning governments to serve their ambitions.

Neoliberalism and the phony rules-based international order are cut from the same cloth, the cloth known as greed, one of the many faces of the innate drive to dominate our fellows. The drive to establish dominance hierarchies is fundamental to human existence but nobody wants to admit that. Instead, we’re told we need to dominate our neighbours because we’re the goodies and they’re the baddies and if we subjugate them, we’re doing God’s will. Just as Israel is doing their God’s will in Gaza. Well, some of it. Yahweh also said “Thou shalt not kill, nor covet thy neighbour’s house or land, nor tell lies,” but that bit seems to have dropped out of their hymn book.

It's all coming apart around us. The centre is not holding, but things are going to get much worse before they get better. The people who have snatched control of the wheel are convinced to delusional intensity that they can do no wrong, that they know everything and that anybody who opposes them is the spawn of the devil who must be crushed and destroyed. Trump is not an aberration. Netanyahu is not an aberration. They are the logical outcome of the politico-economic systems we humans have built with our own hands. What’s happening in Gaza is a warning. If we don’t change soon, we’re finished.