Gaza, psychosis and the empire …. Muhammad Shahzeb Usman
Few tragedies in the world expose everything so vividly: sheer hypocrisy of the intellectuals and academics; indifference and slackness of the bourgeoisie; power of the story embedded in big capital and consumerism; and sheepishness of the Global South states.
The crisis in Gaza reveals the true nature of the world which the people blind by eye can see but people blind by heart cannot decipher. After the end of colonisation, the flag of Western imperialism gazing over the disempowered was never so naked and brutal. In this situation, the reaction of the Muslim world is not a story of silence but a story of psychotic and neurotic hollow reactions that allow the space for Western capitalism to starkly anchor it as the dominant ideology that can govern ‘behaviours’. When Muslim men are painted as ‘medieval losers’ while Muslim women and children are lured into the ‘panopticon’ of Western capitalism under various ‘academic’ discourses, the only ray of hope comes from the moral clarity and resistance of the people of Gaza.
The framers of the current dominant system of the world have made the system very basic yet surrounded by excessive sophistry. It is the protection of Western interests at ‘all’ costs. The root of those interests is embedded in the capture of resources that are available for the consumerism and lifestyle of the West and their proxy elite and professional classes in Global South. This capture of resources is thrived under the fear of excessive technology of military power which reproduces itself further with every capture of resources. The system is further sustained through the soft power of academia, media, knowledge production and the development sector. Therefore, communists, Islamists and anti-apartheid movements were all branded as ‘terrorists’ though possessing so many different characteristics between themselves. This is how the current ‘Empire’ works and this is how every ‘Empire’ has operated.
In this framework of Empire, Israel was created to protect the Western interests in the Middle East — a region that was culturally and economically the biggest threat in the post-colonial world after communism. It was a little island of ‘Western Civilisation’ within the deserts of the Arab world in which the food for Western consumerism was buried. It was the proxy of the Western world that if, somehow, the Islamic world magically opened its eyes to slip out of the divisions that the Empire left within its womb, Israel would remain the most trusted ally of the West in the region. Therefore, if the security of this State was ever threatened, the whole of the Empire united.
Western media continues to equate the Palestinians with Israel as two belligerents rather than one simply being an oppressor and one being the oppressed. American academia bans that same freedom of expression which was their holy grail against their fight to the spectre of 20th century socialism. The Western companies that thrived due to the cheap labour and raw material of the Global South under the patronage of neo-liberal policies of the IMF continue to support the Israeli military as the saviours. The development sector continues to use the same taxpayer money from the Empire to keep policymakers in their pockets while no word on the screams of children of Gaza is uttered in these ‘humane’ conferences.
What they fail to understand is something very basic; you cannot achieve results if you desire momentarily something and if you yearn for it as a goalpost of success. One cannot think that the situation can ever change if one continues to cut the leaves without any desire to cut the base of that tree. When Gaza has revealed everything so clearly, such a wilful ignorance of the Empire is hypocritical and of criminal lethargy.
The time has come to dismantle the Empire through unison of economic actions which shall cut the root of the Empire. Anything less is just being an accomplice to the crime in Gaza. If one continues to keep engaging with an offshoot of the Empire keeping it alive within Pakistan, one probably is accepting the unison to the crime in Gaza. In this situation, intellectual honesty probably might be the greatest redemption for this psychotic cowardice.
Courtesy
