We have created a monster
History will judge us and history will be right
And now it’s Lebanon.
Hollywood movies have this fantasy of a monster roaming the earth, plotting. I don’t mean an actual monster like Frankenstein (yes, I know, but wasn’t he truly the monster?), Dracula or an Alien Thing — I mean a group of people. A government. A country.
For a while, the monster was Germany, and that was fair enough. Then, for a long time, it was Russia. In the 90s they started scrabbling around for a new monster and found drug cartels. But national interest won out, and soon the dumbest movies you’ve ever seen were making the monster Iran. North Korea. Vaguely referenced African nations. Russia again. China.
In all of them, the fantasy holds that ‘rogue states’, nations psychotic with an overdose of propaganda and evil ideology, are willing to destroy the world in their rapacious quest for power, revenge or the joy of violence itself.
Anyone not recently kicked in the head by a slow-witted horse recognised that this trope was fantasy. Lunatic leaders and evil ideologies exist, of course, but the odds of the monsters always being our enemies (or, more accurately, nations who threaten the profits of our corporations or challenge our addiction to invading other countries) are logically slim.
Yet Hollywood (and their sisters in TV, authors of bestselling thrillers and the Anglo-American political world) continues with the monster fantasy that ‘everyone who isn’t on our side must be evil’. And we develop a habit of expecting (or fearing) the monster du jour.
We see Iran build a nuclear power plant and we threaten their people with murder to stop it. DPRK launches a missile (less powerful than the myriad owned by the nation that has invaded more countries and started more wars than any other in 100 years) and our political-media elites soil themselves and we ourselves aren’t too smart to feel afraid. China does literally anything (reducing poverty, curing a disease — ‘but at what cost?’) and the mavens of our press will turn it into a negative, a sign of their threat to our way of life. ‘We’ll all be speaking Mandarin soon’ — as if China was in the habit of behaving in its imperial ambitions the way we have.
Psychological projection is playing a part, for sure. Much paranoia is about what we ourselves want to do to others, fermented, by guilt and cognitive dissonance, into fear. But deep denial is also playing a part. We can see the monster in front of us, the rogue state that will, potentially, stop at nothing to achieve its ends, protect its pride and take everything it believes it is due.
Spoiler: it’s not China.
Israel, with Western backing and protection, has, since its creation in 1948, acted with relative impunity. In this, it has been a vassal and a proxy for the US, the UK, NATO and the Anglo-American Consensus World (including enclaves of white conservatives and liberals in all hemispheres — the ‘us’ and ‘we’ I’ve been referring to). But that didn’t make Israel a monster in the Hollywood sense. A settler colony, yes (just read the early Zionist documents planning the state — they were not squeamish about the concept or the word), an ethnic cleanser, of course. But not a stop-at-nothing force of unhinged id willing to destroy itself and everyone else if it didn’t get its way.
The US always held the strings. Israel would listen. On 12 August, 1982, Israel was months deep in a violent incursion into Lebanon (not their last before the latest, either). Israel had besieged Beirut for months, cutting off power, water and food supplies (they have a distinctive style, don’t they?) and then, on that Thursday, Israel bombed the city for 11 straight hours, killing more than a hundred people. And US President Ronald Reagan intervened.
Ronald Reagan, a Republican’s Republican. America’s Thatcher. Enabler of death-squads, funder of civil wars. Not a liberal.
On 12 August 1982, Reagan called then Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin and called what Israel was doing in Lebanon a “Holocaust”. Twenty minutes later, Begin called back to say that he had ordered the bombing to stop. One phone call, and in twenty minutes the horror stopped escalating.
Biden claims to have made phone calls, too. Harris intimates that she is doing things to end Israel’s genocidal expansionist terrorism in the Middle East (though she has not so far used such accurate language). And yet, Israel continues. It doubles down.
Not content to destroy Gaza and its people, Israel has been enacting a terror campaign in the West Bank and has now expanded into Lebanon. Following Israel’s terrorist attacks in Lebanon (which British media, including the BBC, praised for their ‘technological ingenuity’) which maimed, blinded and wounded about 3,000 people, it started bombing Lebanon. This week, in a period of two days, Israel killed 50 children in Beirut.
The horror and fear the people of Lebanon and the people of Palestine have been living with is unimaginable to me.
And I’m not sure it can be ended with a phone call.
Many people watching what Israel is doing will surely feel we are beyond talk. If Iran were doing this, if North Korea, if even a nation we hadn’t been propagandised into hating were massacring civilians at this scale, we would have sent drones and missile strikes to stop the aggressor already. If the people being harmed were white and spoke English with an accent we favoured in our movies, we would have sent in troops. There are many people saying (quietly, for fear of reprisals from a government that allows only certain opinions to be expressed on these matters) that military action against Israel is long overdue. Others would see more civilian bloodshed as a tragedy, even in the nation perpetrating these crimes. Many of us just want the US to stop funding the murder, want the UK to take the sausage out of its mouth and do or say something meaningful on the subject.
But could a phone call, Reagan-style, stop Israel’s murderous rampage?
I am not so sure. If Biden could find a phone, he probably wouldn’t make that call, but Harris claims she would. She suggests she has. And yet Israel expands the parameters of its terror. And yet Israel continues. Like one of those fictional monsters in American movies.
Through years of Appeasement (with a capital A), through funding Occupation and political cover for Apartheid, through painting legitimate resistance under international law as terror and hate, and especially through Western reactions to the post-October-7 carnival of violence, we have created a monster. A nation with nuclear weapons and an articulated willingness to use them rather than lose a war, on a bloody killing spree that covers an intention to grab land and ethnically cleanse the region.
It’s not just that Israel won’t listen, it’s that it doesn’t have to. We’ve given it the ability to fight back against us. We’ve given it the ultimate leverage in weapons of mass destruction and enabled, systematically and repeatedly, its delusion of righteousness. We have helped to build a country that will not obey the entreaties of its biggest backer and would conceivably lay waste to the region (or beyond) if any nation decided to use more direct methods than a phone call to stop them. We have created a monster.
Or we haven’t and our leaders are lying to us. Arguably, with the withdrawal of America’s unconditional backing and financial support, Israel could be stopped at a regional level. In which case, a military ally in a region understandably hostile to the American empire is just more important to Us than the ever-rising mountains of bodies. Ameritain (Briterica?) and the rest of NATO will let the genocide unfold, because it suits them. Us.
The real monster, of course, is the empire making all this possible. That’s a classic Hollywood reveal. The ally and supposed friend who was pulling the strings all along.
It’s amazing we didn’t see it coming.
Coming soon on the podcast:
David Benjamin Blower
Poet, artist, musician, theological thinker, map-maker, writer and sometime podcaster, David Benjamin Blower joined us to talk about everything from Deconstruction to Anarchism (actually that doesn’t seem very broad but it was) and that episode will be coming out soon!
In the meantime, go check out our latest episode with Steve Chalke and all our previous episodes which are lovely!
Coming soon: something exciting!
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Oh hi. Well the news has been awful. The horror just keeps happening, our politicians mostly disappoint with their weakness and barely-hidden venality. And people suffer and suffer. It’s a lot. I hope you’re okay. I went to see Los Campesinos last night. They were great. Banners on stage calling for trans rights and a free Palestine, and a venue full of enthusiastic supporters, young and my age (old). Senior Churchpeople have started speaking out against the horrors. Which is a start. There is some hope. But let’s not get complacent in doing good and speaking out. That genocidal bastard Bibi literally held up maps calling countries either blessings or curses. We religious (or our institutions) have enabled this. We have a responsibility to stop the violence.
And also we’re allowed to feel overwhelmed. Just don’t give up.
Lots of love, J xxx