Truth, Progress, Humanity and Genocide

“People ask how I’m doing. I laugh at the chasm of the question. How is anyone doing? Climate catastrophes, genocide, the election from hell” so answers Sarah Kendzior, one of the most astute writers on the American crisis. While it’s mesmerising to lean-in to the US elections with a wry and smug complacent European superiority, we have nothing to be superior about.

Here, as the live-genocide spools out we have the deeply compromised Douglas Alexander, a figure regurgitated from New Labour past and now acting as a defendant of atrocities on your BBC Question Time. We have the case of Asa Winstanley, one of Britain’s leading and most celebrated investigative journalists, who, on October 17, in a dawn raid, had all of his devices, all his journalistic materials, seized and are now with the authorities. He was not charged with any crime. In a statement, he said: “On Monday I watched horrified as a young, living man burned to death in a fire caused by Israeli bombing of tents for the displaced outside of a hospital in Deir al-Balah. Shaaban al-Dalou was only one of dozens of Palestinians massacred in Gaza that day, with barely a word spoken in British media outlets. On Wednesday I watched from the backend of the @intifada livestream as our regular guest @abubakerabedw — a football journalist just trying to survive — told us he had eaten only three meals all week. This is caused by Israel’s deliberate policy of starving Gaza. Viewers had already been commenting how thin he looked . He smiled and said “Alhamdillilah” — thank God for everything. He apologised for leaving us on the verge of tears and instructed @norabf and @AliAbunimah to smile. On Thursday just before dawn, about 10 police barged into my home and seized all computers, phones and other similar devices I use for my journalism. They did not arrest me or charge me with a crime, but explained they were from Counter Terror Command (SO15). I asked why they were doing this. The senior officer would say only “social media” postings I’d made. He refused to be any more specific. I told them that this is the Holocaust of time and that in years to come they and their children will look back on their actions with regret. Some of them looked ashamed.”

Meanwhile, Britain’s most mainstream liberal media is being exposed as deeply compromised by its own coverage of the atrocities taking place by Israeli forces, now on multiple fronts. Susan Abulhawa’s novel Mornings in Jenin has sold over one million copies in 32 languages since it was published in 2006. This makes her by some measure the most widely-read Palestinian author in history.

Novara’s Rivkah Brown reports that the Guardian editor Katharine Viner had personally intervened to block a piece by Susan Abulhawa for describing Gaza as “the holocaust of our time”. Meanwhile staff claim they are subject to a “double standard” on Israel and Palestine. Novara reports that: “After 7 October, staff say that the Guardian’s editor-in-chief has maintained a vice-like grip over the paper’s output on Israel and Palestine – or at least one side of it. Some desks say that in the initial weeks and months following the Hamas attack, every piece on the subject was sent to Viner for approval, delaying and sometimes halting publication.

“Everything is scrutinised,” said one senior staff member. “You’re under such an amount of suffocating control, it’s like throwing sand in the gears [to] deliberately… frustrate the smooth running [of the paper].”

“In two cases, Viner overruled section editors to withdraw pieces by Palestinian contributors, Abulhawa and Dylan Saba. Both were commissioned by the Guardian US, whose distance from the paper’s London headquarters has emboldened it to push left on certain issues where the UK edition tends right (notably gender, though also Palestine).”

The accounts are of different forms of censorship, in a political culture (Britain), which, oddly, perversely even, still preens itself on its old reputation of being a ‘safe haven’ and a bastion of free speech. Like most of the things we are talking about today, this is an article of faith that has no basis in the real world. It is a ghost of a previous Britain, long long gone.

In the case of Asa Winstanley, this is about state repression, the appliance of new and terrifying surveillance laws and the stamping out of honest journalism and reporting. It is using social media as a repressive tool. It’s largely ignored by the legacy media, who will ignore it because he is an independent investigative journalist (he is associate editor of The Electronic Intifada, the world’s leading Palestine news site in the English language). In the case of Susan Abulhawa, it is the subtle censorship of a gate-keeper editor. Instead of giving voice to those closest to the action, those people with ‘real-world’ experience, Katharine Viner is doing the opposite of what a good editor should do, she is closing down rather than opening-up true voices from the ground.

This isn’t some incidental journalist point-scoring here. Telling the truth, as best we can, in these dark times is more than just some journalistic credo, it is vital as we try desperately to navigate the madness and the onslaught. After we all watched, in new depths of despair, the images of people being burnt alive in tents in make-shift hospitals, while still attached to IV drips, David Mencer, former head of UK Labour Friends of Israel and now an Israeli Govt spokesman, took to the studios of LBC to describe it as a ‘Pallywood fabrication’. He told LBC’s Ben Kentish that the story has been ‘fabricated to spark global outrage’.

More than ever, we are in a war of words to uncover and share some simple truths. But we live in a world where few of the truths that we were brought up to believe in exist anymore. There is no ‘world order’, there are no laws that will contain military threats, whether it be from Russia or Israel, or anywhere else. There is nothing Israel can do that will evoke any response from its supporters in the West. There are no red lines. There is no threshold.

There is no brave media, speaking truth to power, outside the marginal, under-resourced independent media. There is no ‘pendulum’ theory of British politics anymore. The political culture does not swing from left to right through the years, but it is stuck, broken on the far-right end of this supposed spectrum. It’s deeper than that though.

Dougald Hine, outlines this in his new book ‘At Work in the Ruins’: “By 2010, there were surveys across the Western countries showing that those who still believed today’s young people would have a better life that their parents were outnumbered two-, three-, or four-to-one, by those who thought they were going to have it harder.” He continues: “The basic promise of progress had broken down in the everyday experience of ordinary people in the societies that were meant to serve as a model of where everyone else on the planet was headed.”

This then is the next on the list of ‘things that don’t exist anymore’, supposed truths or ideas that we have been brought up to have faith in, that simply don’t hold true anymore. So far we have collected: faith in media, the idea of Britain as a ‘safe-haven’ for dissident voices, and the idea of ‘progress’ as an essential part of modernity. I think we can add-in – just to cheer everyone up – the belief in growth economics as a panacea (widely and unthinkingly dispersed by mainstream politicians every day); the belief in a functioning public sphere (now being grossly distorted by the billionaire tech bros); and the belief that climate breakdown is some far-future event (a myth being shattered daily).

None of Sarah Kendzior’s three horses of the Apocalypse “climate catastrophes, genocide, the election from hell” are distinct, they are an inter-related blur. They have in common violence and a disassociation from truth. These movements, these phenomenon are part of a pattern.

Writing in The Atlantic about Storm Milton, Charlie Warzel writes (‘I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is‘): “The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality. As Hurricane Milton churned across the Gulf of Mexico last night, I saw an onslaught of outright conspiracy theorizing and utter nonsense racking up millions of views across the internet. The posts would be laughable if they weren’t taken by many people as gospel. Among them: Infowars’ Alex Jones, who claimed that Hurricanes Milton and Helene were “weather weapons” unleashed on the East Coast by the U.S. government, and “truth seeker” accounts on X that posted photos of condensation trails in the sky to baselessly allege that the government was “spraying Florida ahead of Hurricane Milton” in order to ensure maximum rainfall, “just like they did over Asheville!”

But here’s the killer line, and one that connects Kendzior’s dots: “Even in a decade marred by online grifters, shameless politicians, and an alternative right-wing-media complex pushing anti-science fringe theories, the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism. As two catastrophic storms upended American cities, a patchwork network of influencers and fake-news peddlers have done their best to sow distrust, stoke resentment, and interfere with relief efforts. But this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.”

This idea of “willing participants” has of course echoes down history, down recent European history and points to Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’.

This notion of truth even relates to time and history. The story we’re told that the present crisis in the Middle East started, remarkably specifically and abstractly on the 7 October 2023, is a lie. Just as it is a lie that the climate crisis is an event on some distant horizon. This is not just a matter of journalistic standards or ‘truth-telling’ but the stories we tell and are told.

“What the climate crisis is, what we can do about it, and what kind of a world we can have is all about what stories we tell and whose stories are heard. Climate change was a story that fell on mostly indifferent ears when it was first discussed in the mainstream more than 30 years ago. Even a dozen years ago, it was supposed to be happening very slowly and in the distant future. There were a lot of references to “our grandchildren’s time”. It was a problem that was difficult to grasp – this dispersed, incremental, atmospheric, invisible, global problem with many causes and manifestations, whose solutions are also dispersed and manifold. That voices from the climate movement have finally succeeded in making the vast majority understand it, and many care passionately about it, might be the biggest single victory the movement will have. Because once you’ve won the popular imagination, you’ve changed the game and its possible outcomes.”

So understanding what time it is, what time we’re in is one of the first of the great re-tellings we need to come to terms with. These figures, often on the margins, are urging us to take up new stories because ‘stories can give power – or they can take it away.’

There is hope, somewhere, but only if we discard old stories that no longer function.

In America, as the most bizarre election campaign draws to an indeterminate close, people are restoring the power supply in Florida whilst children sit at home reading textbooks that have had all references to climate change removed by Republican politicians. But if post-truth is pre-fascism – and this is the greatest threat to democracy that the Trump phenomenon presents, there is another one. The reality is that the liberal hegemony that the Democrats represent is deeply distrusted by millions of Americans. The power – and dark hypocrisy of the religious right in supporting such a man is a moral stain, but also a political reality. America stands once again on a threshold of a very fragile democracy, and so do we.

These are dark days indeed, but they are also days of revealing – revealing the true scale, nature and origins of the challenge of climate breakdown, revealing the true extent of Western complicity with the Israeli state, revealing the limits of parliamentary politics, and revealing the paucity of the stories we have been told. These are insights into the fragility of our worlds – and insights into the forces that are maintaining them. On these insights we can shelter, heal and re-build – but only on the basis of honesty, solidarity and truth – as the grounding for creating effective resistance to the horrors inflicted upon us.