Our Fictional War In Gaza Will End

Ken Loach, Hopes For Justice, And Why James Cordon Isn't The Worst Person In The World

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt said: "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction... no longer exists."

Ironically, U2’s Bono once sang about war: “we’re immune when fact is fiction and TV reality” but last weekend received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for being empire’s utter lickspittle.

Lies pervade. A memo sent by the bosses at the New York Times told its journalists to avoid using the words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory”.

Al-Nusra is now in charge of Syria, which somehow we think is just terrific but… we’ll just bomb them very heavily anyway? Including a bomb so big it registered on the Richter scale.

Wikileaks acquired emails from Sony, which expose the pro-Israel bias of several of the most powerful names in Hollywood – the very heart of the fiction industry. The emails reveal an obsession with Ken Loach. One CEO demanded that the whole Cannes Film Festival be cancelled just for having him there.

But the manipulation of truth doesn’t stop at the corporate level. It trickles into our public conversations, where trivial distractions overshadow real atrocities. The other day, I got into a discussion where someone told me that the worst person in public life is James Cordon. I said I don’t think that’s true. He said, well who’s worse?

I barely knew where to start… I said, I think pretty much everybody in the national security establishment for starters. People like John Bolton. People all the way from Keir Starmer to Elon Musk - supposed enemies, but allies in their willingness to successfully make every single Palestinian in Gaza homeless, dead or injured.

I suppose what bothers me is that some still see all this as another far-away war. Or a partisan cultural debate. It isn’t - it’s about a country, Israel, which has plummeted into a savage fiction, and backed by two other countries - Britain and America - who have long used allies to divide and smash regions to suppress peer competitors. Tens of thousands of robotic people in the military brass, security services and arms industries are actively dismantling our global infrastructures - whereas James Cordon is a somewhat overly jolly fraud who wrote the best Christmas sitcom since Only Fools and Horses.

Israel appears to be victorious after a series of decapitation bombings but we still don’t know how this conflict will play out.

I remind you, friends, the 1970s became the most peaceful, anti-imperialist decade of the twentieth century but that was just just months after the worst bombing campaign in history - Vietnam. Or consider how in 1941 it seemed that Nazism would cloak Europe in a permanent fiction, an eternal lie, but just four years later the world was stabilised, denazified, and the UN charter declared:

“We the peoples of the United Nations are determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind; and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights and live together in peace with one another as good neighbours.”

It is still these hammers of international justice - backed by good populations - that threaten to grind the imperial plans into dust.

They say "a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." Well, I say to our emperors in the security state “we are fully clothed” - while your pants are on fire.

This is not fiction. The law is real. We are real.

And if we can't stop the war this year then we’ll improve the peace the next.

It can be done. It has been done. It will be done again.

Let’s do it - together