Stop Committing Crimes

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is one of many that represent the height of our absurdity as a species. We are waking up daily to news of starving civilians, mostly children, being used as political pawns between world leaders with colonial ambitions beholden to extremist groups, who are trying to cling onto power amidst countless domestic scandals. World leaders not held to account by state or corporate media, or by the discordant noise of the online rage-farming social media machines rife with propaganda. Leaders and their crony elite enriched and emboldened by crises of their own creation.

In their care, populations overwhelmed by debt, labor and information overload, attempting to get a grip on their role in global affairs.

Israel/Palestine is the most visible modern example, but hardly the only one. Of the dozen or so genocides underway globally, this one captures the world’s attention precisely because there is an almost universal consensus on the appropriate way forward that is not being implemented. Unfortunately, the states that have refused to action this consensus dating back to 1967’s Six-Day War and its aftermath, primarily the U.S., U.K. and Israel, have instead chosen to enable decades-long suffering and torture. Which entirely tracks with the rest of their historical record, but grinds the gears of anyone charged with listening to their empty words as they continue to feed their supercharged war profiteering industries.

Their allies are not blameless, but complacent. Canada among them. Statements condemning atrocities abroad have no meaning when no substantive action follows for decades. While the world has talked around the problem, the Western-facilitated and -catalyzed rot at the heart of the Middle East has created deeply radicalized societies that will continue to foment conflict for generations.

But there is a route towards healing that the West can take. The same one people have been protesting for repeatedly. Rarely entertained (with exceptions), given the governments of the West largely answer to oligarchs and lobbyists, rather than their citizenry, unless the public sustains a disruptive presence in the streets en masse.

I want to bring your attention to part of this lecture from fourteen years ago, from Noam Chomsky at Williams College in Massachusetts:

Relevant section 40:42-47:15, also transcribed below.

In response to a question about what constitutes a “humanitarian crisis” and what criteria should be used to determine intervention, Chomsky had the following to say (emphasis and paraphrasing mine):

“Let’s look at particular cases of humanitarian crises and see what we can do about it.

Take, say, the 1990s, the period when the U.S. was in a noble phase of its foreign policy with a ‘saintly glow’. There were many humanitarian crises then. One of the worst of them was in Iraq. U.S. sanctions in Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of people, maybe up to a million people. They strengthened Saddam Hussein – they destroyed any possibility of any uprising against Saddam, they forced the population to rely on him for survival. They were so horrendous that the administrators of the so-called ‘Oil for Food’ program…both of them resigned in protest because they regarded the sanctions they were asked to administer as genocidal. […]

There would have been an easy way to end that humanitarian crisis. Namely: don’t take part in it. That’s easy, doesn’t cost anything. And there are many like that.

One that was going on at the same time was in Turkey. Not in the Balkans. Inside NATO, not near NATO. Turkey at the time was carrying out vicious atrocities. Trying to suppress a Kurdish protest movement in Southeastern Turkey. Kurds were deprived of the most elementary rights…there was an uprising and Turkey launched a counterinsurgency campaign, killed tens of thousands of people, destroyed about 3,500 towns and villages, drove something like 3 million people, something like that, out of the region. That was pretty awful. There was an easy way to stop that. Namely: stop participating in it.

The arms were coming almost entirely from the United States, almost 80%. As the atrocities increased, U.S. arms increased. In the year 1997, which incidentally is the year Clinton was praised for the noble phase of his foreign policy with a ‘saintly glow’ in the New York Times, in that year, Clinton sent more arms to Turkey than in the entire Cold War period combined up until the onset of the insurgency. So yes, there’s an easy way to stop that one. Stop providing the arms. […]

Many cases of major atrocities can very easily be stopped by stopping our participation in them. And it works.

One case that illustrated that is the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Authorized by the United States, supported by [Britian who provided most of the arms]. This one was about as close to genocidal as anything in the post-war period. It was aggression and invasion and occupation. It wiped out maybe a quarter of the population, a third of the population. That went on right through 1999, always with strong U.S. support. The atrocities there were worse in 1999 than anything reported in Kosovo, and of course the background was incomparably worse than anything reported in the Balkans. Finally, in September 1999, under quite a lot of domestic and international pressure, Clinton quietly informed the Indonesians that the game was over. They told them, “You’re going to have to leave”. They left, instantly. A day later. That could have been done for the preceding 25 years.

Those are not the kind of cases ever discussed. The only cases that are discussed is what are the criteria when somebody else is carrying out a crime. Okay that’s harder. It’s much harder to stop somebody else’s crimes than to stop your own.

What are the criteria? Well, difficult criteria. They have to ask, what are the purposes? What are the likely consequences? What are the general effects? A lot of the particular considerations have to be looked at, which are complex. That could be an interesting question, but I don’t think there’s much point discussing it frankly because the question almost never arises. In fact, I can’t think of a case when its arisen. As I said at the very beginning [of this talk], it’s hard to find a case in history of a genuine [state] humanitarian intervention. One carried out for humanitarian goals and with the consideration of what the humanitarian consequences would be. If the question doesn’t arise, it’s very hard to answer.”

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Coming back to the Israel/Palestine question, this most effective course of action – of not backing an apartheid regime’s actions universally, nor funding their decades-long displacement of and occupation over millions of Palestinians via illegal settlements, open-air prison infrastructure, a separate legal system and blockages of aid, all while providing arms for their ongoing genocide and daily subjugation of Arabs within their territory and the surrounding nations – is one that is never on the table. Mostly because peace is not the goal and the Western nations cannot step back from their imperialist desires.

The idea of “do no harm” is immediately dismissed by states that have built their economic might on foreign campaigns of destabilization and neocolonialism. State-backed terror is the political gold to humanitarianism’s silver in the age of predatory, capitalist plutocracies. (I guess it is appropriate that my mind went to a metal analogy – Canada has a long history, which continues to this day, of assisting autocratic regimes with exploiting and displacing millions across the Global South to increase mining profits.) States regularly look the other way when their power depends on oppression and subjugation elsewhere.

And if asking our governments to stop committing crimes is too much or risks our economies falling apart, then I think we all need to reflect on what kind of world we are creating. If we are not building together, in peace and with moral accountability, we are cultivating dystopias that will entrap future generations in even more cycles of violence.

Those curious can continue watching the above video further for Chomsky’s explicit thoughts on the Israel/Palestine conflict (@53:54).