Paul Edwards
In Conrad’s masterful novella, Kurtz, the central figure, becomes a monster. He is driven to madness by the futile effort to inflict his arrogant Western dominance on the uncontrollable mystery of primordial Africa and, in the end, he abandons his own morality and descends into cruelty and murder. The point, for Conrad, was that the inflexible arrogance of Western racist prejudice, immersed in alien, indigenous reality, had to produce disaster.
The creation and evolution of Zionist Israel has, similarly, driven that evil, illegitimate, apartheid state to madness in its genocidal assault on the Palestinian people of Gaza. The Zionist program, facilitated by cowardly, amoral England was, from its inception, to violently dispossess and eradicate the Semitic people whose ancestors had lived in Palestine for hundreds of years.
Psychology has long known that when a subject is intentionally injured, the abuser will try to justify its evil by blaming the victim. So it has been with Zionist Israel from its beginning with the Nakba in 1947-8. As with South Africa, Israel’s vicious cruelty has become undeniable and unconcealable to the world. Their shameless bleating of anti-Semitism in defense of murderous infamy has failed, since what they are and what they do, is obvious, and profoundly offensive to all religious and ethical Jews. Judaism is a religion; Zionism is a Nazi political scheme.
Nations watch passively as Palestinian innocents are butchered, terrified into complacency by the threat of massive regional and perhaps even world war should they militarily intervene. Whether this stasis can hold is doubtful as the strain of inaction in the face of racial murder increases. The United States’ posture as chief backer of Israel’s evil, makes it the determining factor in enabling Palestinian genocide. This will have consequences at home.
As America has degenerated morally, and decomposed for the profit of bloody Capitalism, our government, such as it is, has followed the fixed trajectory of empires. It is now as totally indifferent to the welfare of its people as Rome was, or Stalin’s USSR. Like all empires, its vast powers exploit its subjects and their resources for the obscene enrichment of its ruling Money Oligarchy. The aspirations and the needs of its disempowered citizenry are routinely, contemptuously spurned, and because The Empire knows how deeply it has indoctrinated them, it has lost all fear of its torpid people. If its full bore backing of Zionist genocide continues, it will be forced to re-assess this position.
For generations, but increasingly since WWII, America was able, through financial and military dominance, and with its cultural eminence based on victory over the Axis powers and enormous commercial output, to urge, bully, and coerce the world to bow to its might and obey. Its status as sole dominator and absolute hegemon in world affairs has eroded and been dismantled over the last twenty years by a long series of astonishingly inept and spectacular failures of force and will which have cumulatively reduced its status in the world and bared the unchallengeable reality that The American Empire is not only in decline, but is already an egregious, obvious disaster desperate to retain a semblance of what it is not, and can no longer ever be.
Along with its monumental pratfalls in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, and its proxy war in Nazi Ukraine that has resulted in the bloody obliteration of that sink of corruption, the floundering, feckless Imperial elite has elevated a series of grotesque, lackey incompetents. In the next Presidential election, Americans are given the choice between a vulgar, bellowing, criminal Mussolini, and a sleazy, fatuous, criminal simpleton, long gone in senility. One of these specimens will be the face of The Empire and its exalted “leader”, and quite possibly the last one. The nation is so blind, cruel, conflicted, and bankrupt morally and financially that cataclysmic meltdown is likely and even probable.
Two dangerous, ultimately ruinous lines of policy are certain to be implemented regardless of which of the subhuman monstrosities is placed as hood ornament on the Imperial Clown Car.
In the international sphere The Empire will embark on ever more perilous lunatic adventures, based entirely on inflamed ego and total incomprehension of strategic realities, that will dramatically increase the chances of triggering a world war from which only its catastrophic, crushing destruction can result.
In the national context, inevitable resistance to tyrannical political control will augment and enforce a punishing, pervasive and savage repression and domination of the people, and the brutal stifling and cancellation of Constitutional rights that have already been viciously curtailed, to be justified by our ruling criminals as higher patriotism to preserve their unravelling, moribund system.
These psychotic Hail Marys will bring nothing to The Empire but prompt and immanent disaster, and yet their implementation is now certain and unavoidable. The Empire will have its way.
Zionist Israel, an illegal, rogue state from its beginning, founded on the bodies, blood, and lands of its invaded victims, is living out the role of conquering abuser, as Kurtz did in Conrad’s novel, following the same ineluctable vector into madness.
The United States, though even more vicious and imperial in its origin and growth, had no inevitable role in the horror in Palestine but chose to play it. By nurturing, supporting and sustaining Nazi Israel, it is partaking electively, as it is in Ukraine, of madness by proxy. To any mind alive in the last century, this is no surprise.
America pioneered the Heart of Darkness.
Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
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