Bring The War Home?

 It is now almost two years into the genocide in Gaza, a genocide that has been fastidiously documented and demonstrated to be a genocide, and yet it continues. The imperialist camp, which has for a long time proclaimed a rules-based international order and used this to chastise whatever state they have deemed "rogue", has hypocritically allowed this genocide to persist, inventing reasons that would otherwise be deemed crackpot conspiracy theories if they were made by anonymous bloggers. All attempts at demonstrating the evidence––from proof that the propaganda around the October 7th attacks are akin to claims about the flat earth, let alone the images and recordings of an avalanche of genocidal war crimes––are ignored by the most powerful states, with the truth being cynically called "anti-semitic", who grant Israel the same kind of impunity they have always granted themselves.

When Israel extended its genocidal war into Lebanon, its friends and allies simply shrugged and repeated platitudes about Hezbollah being akin to the already demonized Hamas. And now, when Israel has gone further and initiated a war with Iran with the laughable claim of "preemptive" bombing, the US, Canada, and large parts of Europe are extending the same impunity: Israel can do what it likes, it can make up its own international laws, sort of like how a police chief's favourite bully brother can beat up their neighbours (as long as their neighbours aren't friends with other pigs) and it's the neighbours who would be arrested for defending themselves. Beyond this pithy analogy I don't feel the need to elaborate on the relationship between Israel and the rest of the imperialist camp: others have already done so, and the fig-leaf of the "anti-semitism" discourse merely disguise the fact that Israel––like Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa before it––is being given the violent free reign all junior settler states have been given right up until it is no longer economically/politically feasible to keep funding their excesses. But who knows how long this feasibility will extend with Israel, nor should we speculate on its time-line––by the time that clock runs out, the mass deaths could be far more immense than they are now.

Moreover, Israel's initiation of war with Iran, now defended and joined by the US, has even less justification than the 2001 invasion of Iraq. Everyone knew the "weapons of mass destruction" discourse was ludicrous, and time has proved that it was wrong, but still it was cunningly used after the 9/11 attacks to extend the War on Terror from Afghanistan to Iraq. (This discourse also worked, amongst a particular liberal population, to justify the war on the people of Afghanistan: that war was okay, but its extension to Iraq was not––this was indeed the message of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.) But in this case, we have a situation where it is very clear that Israel decided to bomb Iran, and then when Iran retaliated it was the retaliation that was treated as the initiation of war. Just like October 7th was treated as an initiation of violence, and not everything that had happened up to that point––but this was more obvious than October 7th since the dominant ideology surrounding Israel has worked overtime to hide (however paltry this hiding was) the overall situation of settler-colonial violence that determines all responses to its vicious order. In the case of Iran, Israel just went and bombed another state and called it "preemptive" because they were supposedly developing nuclear weapons. Imagine if some right-wing gun nut building an arsenal decided that somebody several blocks away that they didn't like was also building an arsenal, and decided to preemptively set their home on fire because only they should have the right to have all the guns.

Let's be clear: the entire discourse around whether this or that state should have the "right" to have nuclear weapons is an imperialist discourse. In a sane world nobody should have nuclear weapons. But this is not a sane world since it is a world where the most powerful states have accumulated these weapons and have denied the right to anyone else to have them. Why should Israel, or the US for that matter, have nuclear weapons but Iran should not? There is no moral argument to justify this decision––Israel and the US are not moral states, and the US is the only state to have actually used the bomb––and anyone with half a brain would realize that it makes no sense to go to war to prevent a state from having what other states already possess. "You can't have what we have because we are better than you," is the most impoverished argument, especially when it is made by actors who have historically proved that they are capable of genocide and behind the vast majority of the worst wars of the 20th and 21st century. The only moral argument, as aforementioned, is that nobody should have a nuclear monopoly and so, conversely, the argument for nuclear monopoly is grossly immoral. What Israel and the US are arguing (and perhaps more imperialist states who might back this war), as this war is prosecuted against Iran, is that only they have the right to bomb with impunity. Such moral vacuity.

All the arguments made about Iran's theocracy's immorality regarding their treatment of women and LGBTQ people are equally morally vacuous. To be clear, as a communist I am not a fan of Iran's theocracy––I know people who were political prisoners and political refugees of and from this regime. But these people would have also been prisoners and refugees of the American-backed Shah regime. The most basic anti-imperialist analysis recognizes imperialist intervention has nothing to do with such moral claims, that the war declared upon the people of Iran is not about feminism or LGBTQ rights. Those of use who marched against the War on Terror, and saw the war on the people of Afghanistan as heinous, did not support the Taliban. We simply understood what imperialist war actually was, and that its express "moral" justifications were in fact lies. The fact that the Taliban is back in power, after years of pitiless war upon Afghanistan that backed imperialist cronies who had the same anti-woman politics, proves it was never about those cynical moral justifications. And the fact that the activism of the progressive Afghan journalist organization, Zan Times, is now largely ignored by the imperialists who once claimed they cared about everything this organization supports, proves the moral vacuity of the original stated claims. Moreover, the current administration of the US has the same understanding of women's and LGBTQ rights as the theocratic regimes it seeks to overthrow: the Trump regime has sought to overthrow abortion rights, divorce rights, and has targeted trans persons––they were even talking about God and Christianity when they decided to join Israel's war on Iran. Israel is no better, with its poor record of LGBTQ rights and theocratic hatred of anything Muslim. In another world they would have been friends with this theocracy, as the US was with the forces that would become the Taliban in the days of the Cold War, but these are the days of war carried out in the long shadow of the so-called "New World Order".

If only these were also the days where the declaration of "bring the war home" could be carried out. Lacking a strong anti-imperialist movement in the imperialist metropoles, as there was during the days of the Vietnam war, we do not have anything that can make these life-destroying forces reconsider their actions. There are not urban guerrillas carrying out warfare within the belly of the beast, as there was in the 1960s/1970s, because there is not an organized anti-systemic movement of the same kind. Nothing to unify the riots against ICE deportations with the imperialist wars. The worst fragmentation amongst the left in the imperialist centres, with liberals (who chastised the left for not voting for genocide) happily going along with the Trump regime regarding the war against Iran––Van Jones was celebrating it even––proving again that the Kamala Harris regime would have been just as open to this current war against life as Trump has been, although she would have been more canny with her moral messaging.

There is nothing left to say. I despair at the world I'm leaving for my daughter as I mourn the mass deaths this current imperialist order has relegated to the furnace of capitalist genocide. As I recognize the ecocide that accompanies these massive war crimes. We need to bring the war home now.