Judiciary, Genocide and the freeze framed fireball of climate chaos

After a month mostly with First Nations here in so-called Canada, I woke to the Court of Appeal ruling that sides with a ‘Labour’ government that’s so rapidly paving the way to Farage and fascism in the so-called UK, just as it supports genocide in Palestine.

Since the Government lost the Judicial Review it felt possible that those in the judicial system were recovering their sanity. It turns out they are no more capable of that than those in the corporate political world are capable of tackling the causes of climate change.

Absolutely outrageous.

We need to take this to a different level. Not a different level of law, but a different level of social change.

The suffering of the Palestinian people won’t end without an end to the power of the monstrous man-boys and all their minions scurrying about hoovering up all power and resources to themselves, while good people continue to care within the system because they can’t imagine another system being possible.

We have to make it be possible.

Because this system will end – of our own choice as we build something else , or as it burns us all to the ground and freezes us all to the air in a freeze framed fireball of climate chaos.

No one can escape the consequences of their actions or inactions – look at the twisted faces of the powerful, and the cowed faux-superior faces of their minions.

Our actions and inactions are etched on the souls of our lives. Regaining our souls from servitude to this insane system is a prize worth pursuing whatever the outcome in the world.

But the outcomes in the world really matter. The mothers and fathers and children and babies and grandfathers and grandmothers being killed in the Zionist holocaust in Palestine really matter, just as their being killed in the Nazi holocaust (which Britain only opposed retrospectively) really mattered, and all those being endlessly harmed by this capitalist colonial system really matter.

Here in so-called Canada, visiting with First Nations communities, it’s clear that what is happening in Palestine is not a one off. It is part of the systemic spread of a barbaric system that presents itself as civilised as it brutalises those it meets into submission by murderijg most.

In the First Nations community, we’ve mostly stayed with the white colonial government, who deliberately brought smallpox, which killed off 14,750 of the 15,000 people in the glen. Later, they forced the First Nations children into residential schools – took them from their families to ‘beat the Indian’ out of them. They were forbidden their ceremonies, their dress, their language, and confined to tiny areas of their big territories, with the rest being ‘given’ to those who persuaded themselves they were embarking on ‘new lives on empty lands’.

The lands in Canada and the rest of North America, the lands in New Zealand and Australia, were no more empty lands than those in the Middle East, Africa or Asia that the Brutish Empire violently seized.

And who was used to seize those lands? Those whose lands in Ireland, in Scotland, in Wales, in England, had over decades and centuries been seized off them by a Norman feudal elite who owed no reciprocals allegiance to the community of land and people, but instead sought only power, and sought to make a world where only power and wealth mattered.

In many ways, we have fought back.

When ‘Lady Chief Justice’ Sue Carr reads out ‘their lordships’ judgement stating that Palestine Action is a violent organisation that is totally unlike the Suffragettes, she has zero knowledge of the ways in which the suffragettes were driven to the kind of acts of violence against property those seeking to protect Palestinian (and any) children are being driven to. She has zero awareness that her position has been made possible by those same suffragettes’ actions.

The Second World War saw a strange alliance in the so-called UK between those defending Empire (their own form of white supremacy) against the Nazis, and those defending democracy and our humanity against the Nazis.

In that pact tax on the rich rose dramatically during the war, partly to help the war effort but mostly to stop the rich having the power to take way more than their fair share. (Controlling their power is why we need severe taxation on them).

From that wartime pact between Empire-defenders and humanity-defenders came the post-war consensus where we could have ‘free’ health and education and social housing and nationalised industries. (It was not ‘free’ , it was just that we all paid for it and all benefited from it, just as free trade is not free it’s just that we all pay for it and a few benefit from it).

We had all that, but they kept their lands and titles and power to gradually erode what we had won. There is no constitution we can call on, just one they make up according to what they think they can get away with at the time.

That period 1939 to 1979 was a blip where Britain could look progressive (however much it also wasn’t) before gradually returning to form. And it’s a terrible form if we go by past actions and future forebodings. There has not been the same reckoning with our genocidal past that the Germans undertook after the war. Instead we took our being on the right side in that war as the starting point.

It never was.

Unless we reclaim our communities from capitalism, unless we reclaim our politics and economics and culture from continued capture by the corporate world with its fawning political and media cheerleaders, then it’s not only Palestinians who keep being slaughtered.

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There is a fireball coming from which no individual can escape unless we collectively wake up to just how insane the civilised-seeming system is we’ve allowed to disempower us.

We need to collectively do the work of regaining community lands in the cities and in the hills, land we can forge ways to sustain and be sustained by.

We need to collectively do the work of reclaiming our politics from the illusion that political parties can do anything, and in their place bring in peoples and citizens deliberative assemblies not as advisors but as decision-makers, and not as colluders and compromisers with the system as is, but as discarders and replacers of that system.

That’s when the hard work of being human begins.

We can all be dickheads, we can all make mistakes. We can fall for Empire, for Naziism, for Zionism, for flag-waving xenophobia, for fascism, for corporatism.

We are none of us that.

We are each of us living breathing, pulsing beings who need to go through recovery to recover the power of uncompromising tenderness. In that crucible is the power to transform.