Four Futures

Where events in Israel and Gaza might go from here

1) Slaughter, ceasefire, wider war, or revolutionary change:

Below is a translation of that incredible post by the president of Columbia, a description of how the state of Israel pays forward the awful oppression and suffering that Jewish people suffered elsewhere, a short summary of the whole situation, and a longer discussion of Gaza and violence and revolution.

The barbarity of consumption based on the death of others is taking us to an unprecedented rise of fascism, and therefore to the death of democracy and freedom. It is barbarism, or the global 1933, as I call it. 1933 was the year Hitler came to power.

What we see in Palestine will also be the suffering of all the peoples of the south.

The west defends its excessive consumption and its standard of living based on destroying the atmosphere and climate, and to defend it, knowing that it will cause an exodus from the south to the north, and not only of the Palestinian people, it is ready to respond with death. It does not want to transform its economic system except as far as the market might decarbonize it. And it knows that the effort will be minuscule to save life on the planet. Its policy seeks to defend the consumption bubble of the rich on the planet and not to save humanity, whose majority is disposable, like the children of Gaza.

That’s why there are strong anti-immigration policies, concentration camps for immigrants, thousands dead in shipwrecks, the Darién Gap, the economic blockades of rebel countries.

The right in the west sees the solution to the climate crisis as a “final solution,” the right once again dreams of Hitler and conquest, the majority of the rich and Aryan peoples of the west and our Latin American oligarchies, who do not see another world to live in than that of the malls of Florida or Madrid.

The right in the south uses violence, they destroy democracy, they feel legitimized by the north to do so. They believe they can kill and commit genocide, they just need the blessing of world power.

We are heading to barbarism if we do not change that power. The life of humanity, and especially of all the peoples of the south, depends on the way humanity chooses a path to overcome the climate crisis produced by the wealth of the north. Gaza is just the first experiment in considering us all disposable.

—Colombian President Gustavo Petro, original here

2) Paying it forward:

3) Short summary:

4) Thoughts on violence, revolution, and Gaza genocide:

Thank you for your interest friends and enemies and internet strangers.