Looking back at 2024: There's No One Left With Moral Authority

Here we are at the butt-end of a brutal year. Does the language exist to describe just how appalling it has been, watching the world slip towards the abyss, any collective moral compass we might have imagined existed in the past now consigned to the rapidly overflowing, shit-filled dustbin of history?

Is appalling a word adequate to describe the doomsday hour that is upon us? What about disillusioning? Or dispiriting?

Disturbing. Sickening. Depressing. Painful. Frightening.

Upsetting. Disquieting. Disconcerting. Alarming. Distressing. Heartbreaking.

Stomach-churning. Soul-destroying.

It is fucking heartbreaking.

In fact it is all of those feelings, skittering one after the other, like a downpour in a gale force wind across the window of the soul, and deep into the wounded psyche. How can we maintain a semblance of happiness and joy when it has become inescapably, abundantly clear that the world is ruled and run and largely owned by thugs; and that people are being butchered mercilessly by the day, by the hour, by the minute? When any pretence at caring about human life – about women, children, babies even – has been stripped away, thrown onto the pyre, incinerated.

Burnt alive. Like thousands of children in Gaza.

When the aim is to destroy, disfigure and maim permanently anyone you fail to murder but still want, despicably, to monster.

Colour Of The Blood

Anybody and everybody with a scintilla of intelligence, honesty and integrity knows that the indiscriminate bombardment of people, buildings, infrastructure, farming land, water sources and even aid convoys by Israel is a deliberate campaign of genocide.

– They know that the decision was made by the Israeli war cabinet to create the conditions in which famine was inevitable: to starve Palestinians in Gaza so that more than ever should have been contemplated, or allowed, would die of illness or malnutrition or both if they couldn’t somehow crawl to the border and find a way of leaving, forever. This is what the Israeli government and army want. Ethnic cleansing. It is not what Jewish people want. Many Jews across the world, and some in Israel, are sickened and traumatised by what they see happening. “Not in our name,” they say. But they are a minority, scorned and abused as anti-semites and traitors. It would be farcical if it weren’t so poisonous, so deadly.

They know that the citizens of Gaza have been shunted up and down and round and round, like so much disposable debris being brushed hither and thither with a barbed-wire broom, till they are tired, wounded, desperate and degraded. But never degraded enough for the monsters that are calling the shots. Degradation is heaped on misery and misery on degradation. No torture is extreme enough for the heartless brutes led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

And powerful people, who might have changed things, who could have brought the catastrophic, fire and brimstone zealotry, the barbarous full-frontal God-driven assault that has killed 45,000 people that we know of in Gaza – 70% of them women and children – and wounded hundreds of thousands more, stood idly by and watched and let it all happen even though their own children, and their grandchildren, could watch it all in disbelief on their phones, often in real time. An entire region bombed into the dust.

So what? says the President of the United States of America.

Do you like the colour of the blood on your hands, Joe Biden? Is your middle name Kilgore? Do you love the smell of napalm in the morning? Could it be that you take just a small bit of pleasure in seeing the people of Gaza scream in horror as they watch the buildings in which they lived, and loved, and learned, and prayed, and were healed, being turned into dust, so that the whole place is a ruined, uninhabitable testament to the complete immorality of an arms industry that is out of control – and from which, by the way, some of your friends are also making vast sums of blood money? Or is it just about the millions of dollars that have been poured into your coffers along the way by pro-Zionist interests who knew that some version of this scenario was coming, and for whom compromising you was always top of the agenda?

Or does it really give you not just a little but a lot of pleasure? Are you genuinely as sick as you now look to an objective observer?

President Joe Biden addresses the nation from the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, July 24, 2024, about his decision to drop his Democratic presidential reelection bid. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, Pool)

Zionist Creed

And what about you, Olaf Scholz? How do you look in the mirror, knowing that you have been – that you are – complicit in butchering 45,000 Palestinians? Is the guilt you carry, as a German, for the extermination – by the terminally twisted and, yes, iredeemably, violently anti-semitic leaders of the Third Reich – of six million Jews in World War II, such that the state of Israel can, in 2024, with complete impunity, mimic the tactics of which you are so ashamed, in a brazen campaign of extermination of Palestinians?

Or you, Keir Starmer? Your silence is deafening.

I could go on and on and on – and on. How many leaders of supposedly liberal, democratic countries that pose as paragons of human rights, justice and equality have spoken out openly and unequivocally against Israel’s genocidal campaign?

Far too few.

Spare me the legalistic bullshit that we hear about the subtle differences of interpretation, or shading of intent, or technical distinctions, that might make the Israeli onslaught fractionally less than officially, undeniably, monstrously genocidal.

It is just that: officially, undeniably, monstrously genocidal. Israel is an apartheid state. Like Afghanistan or Iran, it is run by nakedly supremacist religious fanatics. But these ones have bigger bombs, an excess of illegally intrusive surveillance, a more savage, triumphalist army and a far greater presumption of their own superiority, and of their religion-based entitlement to rob, pillage, slaughter and subjugate.

Israel is, and has been for years, engaged in an ongoing campaign of land theft that is now more overtly enforced by the army and the civil administration than ever before. Morality doesn’t come into it. Nor legality. It is all about power and the ruthlessness needed to exercise it viciously and aggressively at every turn. The state of Israel has proven adept at that. See no evil, hear no evil. Stay focussed. Shoot them on sight. Kill as many as you can every time.

They are vermin, the thinking goes. The faster we dispose of them the better. This is the Zionist creed.

September 2024
Photo: UN Women/Suleiman Hajji

Cheerful Thought

I wish I could posit that karma will catch up on them, that their time will come to an end, that justice will hunt them down. But I do not believe that. What has been shown, in different ways, again and again, over the past many years is that money decides every time. Money and mutual, conniving vested interests.

The United Nations was a great idea, but it is paralysed into irrelevance by the ability of permanent members of the Security Council to veto resolutions that they don’t like. The US has done this again and again for Israel. Russia has done it too for its allies. And, of course, on its own behalf, in relation to the war Putin launched illegally against Ukraine – at a terrible ongoing cost in Russian lives.

America applauds the International Criminal Court when it acts against countries or individuals that oppose US hegemony, and abuse it when it accuses Israel of war crimes. Hypocrisy rules. And into that mix, the American public has thrown Donald Trump as the next President of the United States of America. He will betray Ukraine. Give Israel the go-ahead to steal more land, to turn Gaza into a theme park.

He will attack his rivals at home. Stifle independent media. Pack the courts. Do everything he can to establish an authortarian dynasty. And give two fingers to any attempt to address the climate crisis.

It’s going to be a rough ride.

Here in Hot Press, meanwhile, we’ve just published Power To The People: The Hot Press Years, by Michael D. Higgins. Based on the columns the future President wrote for us from 1983 to 1993, it is an exceptional, inspiring work, written with great foresight and vision, so that it resonates powerfully now.

Looking back to that era, there were times when all hope seemed to be lost. Even in Ireland, loyalist paramilitaries and Republicans alike were so intent on murder and mayhem that Ireland genuinely felt like it was up shit creek. But we survived.

Maybe the same will be true now – and in ten years time, we will look back and wonder what the fuss was about. On the other hand, Donald Trump may just blow the whole enterprise to kingdom come.

Now there’s a cheerful thought to evoke the Christmas spirit. Let’s do our best to keep the flame of humanitarianism alive. It’ll be a tough battle – but there is nothing else for it . The fight for freedom, justice, human rights and equality must go on, with renewed energy, discipline, resourcefulness and conviction.

Let’s work together...