Four days ago, in Georgia on my mind, I referred to the talented but indefatigably absurd Julie Burchill as “morally insane”. A pugnacious Zionist and wannabe Jew, she defends Israel not by the denialism most Western apologists resort to, but on the ground the apartheid settler state is doing only what European colonial powers did a few centuries earlier. If Israel has no right to exist in its current form, she argues, then neither do Canada or USA, New Zealand or Australia.
This is a common enough argument from a Daniella Weiss or Itamar Ben-Gvr, but for obvious reasons is seldom offered by Western Zionists, Jewish or otherwise. On the upside it packs the power of candour, but on the downside overlooks two differences.
First, that was then and this is now. The genocides and grand larcenies – and, let’s not forget, the industrial scale theft of human beings – of centuries gone by were not perpetrated in an electronic goldfish bowl, with the world and its grandma looking on. Second, had any one of the looters – Britain, France, Holland, Portugal, Spain and to lesser extent Germany – not acted as it did, the others would have filled the vacancy in the blinking of an eye. I don’t believe the phrase had been coined back then but, as races to the bottom go, the colonial adventure with its attendant crimes against humanity – another phrase in waiting – had the irresistible force of a natural law. Gravity, say.
Or nature abhorring a vacuum.
Israel differs on both counts. The whole world is watching and, in part because of that, were the Zionist occupiers to renounce racial supremacism and seek genuine peace with those they have robbed and murdered and are in consequence obliged to call ‘human animals’ – but must now learn, however long, hard and painful the road, to live with as equals – there’s no third party in the wings, drooling at the prospect of staking its own colonial claim.
These truths aside, Julie Burchill is right. Which just goes to show that, like a broken clock giving the time accurately once or twice a day, the high-functioning deranged can be eerily on target.
My calling her morally insane was in the context of a comparison with another writer, at least her equal as a wordsmith. 1 As chance would have it Caitlin Johnstone posted today on how the genocide Ms Burchill gives free pass to is in truth a mirror in which the West now contemplates its own monstrous reflection.
Western Civilization Is Not Worth Saving
We don’t need to rescue western civilization from outside forces, we need to rescue ourselves from western civilization
Western civilization is not worth saving. I think that’s been pretty well established by now.
That’s one of the silliest things about the way rightists are always babbling about how we need to protect our way of life from immigrants or Islam or “the trans agenda” or whatever. They’re beginning with the assumption that this train wreck of a society is worth saving at all.
I am not saying that westerners should die. I am not saying that all the ideals and values that westerners purport to hold are worthless. I am saying that this civilization, as it actually exists, is an indefensible disaster. Clearly.
Our way of living on this planet. The way we treat one another. The way we treat people on other continents. All the systems and social structures that give rise to the way things are. These things should not exist. We should not be the way that we are.
This civilization is genocidal. Ecocidal. Omnicidal. Imperialist. Racist. Dehumanizing. Degrading. Dystopian. Emotionally stunted. Culturally vapid. Spiritually impoverished. Intellectually enslaved. Why would any sane person want this to continue?
We don’t need to rescue western civilization from outside forces, we need to rescue ourselves from western civilization.
If we listen to our hearts we can understand that the call isn’t to save western civilization from corruption by foreign cultures or new ways of thinking, but to radically transform it from the murderous, tyrannical and oppressive nightmare that it has always been.
The western way of life doesn’t need to be preserved, it needs to end. We cannot keep doing this. We cannot go on this way. We cannot keep poisoning our planet, our minds, our hearts and our souls with the McGenocide ideology of the western empire. We are headed somewhere dark, somewhere none of us want to go, and we need to turn around.
Nothing about our old way of doing things has worked out for us. Everything we were doing before wound up bringing us to this terrible point. We don’t need to go backwards, and we don’t need to stay still. We need to evolve.
Gaza is a mirror. It’s showing us what we are. What we have always been.
It’s time to be real about what we are seeing.
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- Claiming one writer to be better than another is usually a pointless exercise in apples and orangery. Not here. Long before I encountered Caitlin Johnstone I was reading Julie Burchill, and wondering what so shining a talent would be like if paired with a desire to make the world a better place instead of using a mix of sparkling prose and irresponsible contrarianism as stepping stone to becoming, at turn of century, Britain’s highest paid columnist. When I came across Caitlin I had an answer. Quantitative comparison is not one of apples and oranges – E M Forster versus Mario Puzo, say – when the two women have similar strengths: high command of punchily written English, powerful intellect and well honed street-fighting instincts. Only one, alas, is a grown-up with a working moral compass.