Comment: Inaction (is a weapon of mass destruction)

Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction.

The lyrics of Faithless’s Mass Destruction came to me this week when I had to choose a title for a Ditch X Spaces and Instagram Live. Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction.

I remember back in 2004 when the song came out, an anti-Iraq War anthem that told us about the actual weapons of mass destruction, distinct from the myths about which we’d been lied to so brazenly. As a teenager into Michael Moore and Rage Against The Machine, Che Guevara posters on my wall, I loved it. I bought it as an MP3 to be delivered to my Nokia smartphone precursor. Whatever about what some pejoratively call students’ union politics, these were secondary school politics, politics I’ll admit to have kept, a little tinkering here and there aside, all these years. I suppose that’s the benefit of getting it so right so young.

Faithless’s lead singer Maxi Jazz performed the song – which has aged well enough for me to choose some of its lyrics as subheadings in this piece – at a Stop the War rally in London in 2005, backed by a guitarist wearing a t-shirt reading FREEDOM FOR PALESTINE. It’s a reminder, necessary for some, that Israel’s ongoing genocide didn’t begin after the Al-Aqsa Flood and that Britain and the US’s illegal war in Iraq, 20 years ago, shares a bloodline with the occupation of Palestinian land and the attempted erasure of its people. The blood shed in service of both is the same. It spilt for the same reasons.

This bloodshed continues because of inertia, because of cowardice, because of denials of history and refusals to imagine futures. The Irish state continues to allow weapons to fly through our territory, continues to engage in military trade with Israel, continues its failures to pass our Occupied Territories Bill.

Campaign group Uplift has given government notice of its intention to see them in the High Court. It has a simple ask: for the state to fulfil its obligations under international law. Uplift says that to do so government needs to stop these weapons flights through Irish airspace, as reported by The Ditch, as well as halt military and dual-use trade with Israel. “The government has 14 days from today to comply with those international obligations. We look forward to hearing from them in the near future,” said Darragh Mackin of Phoenix Law, which is representing Uplift in its challenge.

Much of the public looks forward to hearing something meaningful from government in the near future too. And they’ve been waiting multiples of those 14 days for which Phoenix Law has allowed. The state’s response to both what Israel is doing in Gaza and Ireland’s possible complicity has been to keep the public waiting. It’s been a response of inaction.

Whether you’re soaraway Sun or BBC One / Misinformation is a weapon of mass destruct

I don’t worry about misinformation, not the kind of misinformation that mainstream media speaks about in its campaigns to sell newspaper subscriptions and advertising space, the kind governments that haven't demonstrated real commitment to truth, invoke in arguments in favour of regulating its subjects' speech. I don’t worry about it because what’s new?

Before the Iraq War misinformation was less about cryptocurrency ads using Enda Kenny’s likeness and more about things like the Iraq dossier, which used lies about weapons of mass destruction to “make the case for war”. This dossier was promoted in Britain’s legacy media thanks to the likes of Alastair Campbell, the war criminal rehabilitated in certain circles as avuncular podcaster, always welcome on RTÉ as long as he’ll answer the one or two perfunctory questions about his role in an illegal war that killed around 1 million people.

I will say this: we have lively debate in our mainstream media. Noam Chomsky said as much about most journalism produced in liberal democracies.

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views,” he said in The Common Good.

That’s what we have here. In one case the question is whether we should introduce the Occupied Territories Bill. (Not whether the bill, which having been blocked by government since 2019 as Paschal Donohoe assured his Israeli counterpart it would be, even though it’s passed through both houses of the Oireachtas, is a suitable response to the depravity Israel is unleashing in Gaza today, whether it represents the full sum of what Ireland can contribute to the cause.)

In another case the question is whether it was a good thing to recognise the state of Palestine. (Not whether recognition of a state drawn to imperial borders is just a slightly more progressive-sounding way of voicing support for a two-state solution, a meaningless incantation used by people like Kamala Harris as she continues her role in the administration making even the idea of a two-state solution impossible, while also seeking a mandate to continue this work over the next four years.)

Allowing this kind of debate serves a purpose, said Chomsky. “That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

One of the people who helps give this sense of free thinking is Dan O’Brien.

Whether Halliburton, Enron or anyone / Greed is a weapon of mass destruction

Economist Dan O’Brien, an emblem of the question as to whether an economist is just something you call yourself or something you actually do, appeared on Virgin Media’s Tonight Show late last month to discuss the Occupied Territories Bill. He seemed to think he’d arrived at a never-before-voiced truth: that there’s an economic aspect to imperialism, with the associated implication that any response to same would necessarily involve financial considerations.

“I always think that countries need to look at their own interests as well,” he said, arguing against the bill’s enactment. He said Israel could respond. “There’s absolutely every reason to think the Israelis would hit us back in retaliation. There are jobs at stake here. Now if people want to accept that other people’s jobs would be lost – there’s a half a billion in goods exports we send to Israel… The Israelis will retaliate and that will mean lost jobs.”

Jobs! Can’t forget about ‘em. (Nor should we forget John Ruskin’s early 20th century reminder, “All our hearts have been betrayed by the plausible impiety of the modern economist.”)

Whether you look to Vladimir Lenin’s theory on the highest stage of capitalism – financial imperialism, enabled and maintained by militaries – or Zack de la Rocha’s observations of, “All the Fistagons, the bullets and bombs, who stuff the banks, who staff the party ranks”, the argument that money is involved in colonial matters is too obvious to be worthy of comment – at least in the way O’Brien did it. “Greed is a weapon of mass destruction.” I understood that as a teenager. O’Brien, maybe, understands it now. But thinks it’s good.

Edward Said’s 1979 The Question of Palestine caused discomfort among western liberals, including among its chapters one titled Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims, in which he posited, “Jewish and Gentile Zionism are in the culture of high liberal capitalism” and in which he wrote about the finances involved in the displacement, carried out by western or western-backed forces, of people across the world.

“Everything in those territories that suggested waste, disorder, uncounted resources, was to be converted into productivity, order, taxable, potentially developed wealth. You get rid of most of the offending human and animal blight – whether because it simply sprawls untidily all over the place or because it roams around unproductively and uncounted – and you confine the rest to reservations, compounds, native homelands, where you can count, tax, use them profitably, and you build a new society on the vacated space,” he wrote.

Just as Said wrote about why all of this occurs – not because of some abstraction like evil but straightforward economics – people like Dan O’Brien understand the (marginal) benefits a particular class of Irish person can accrue by shutting up. People like O’Brien decide it’s best to shut up. The Irish people who think this deny who we are.

Just how many centuries have we been waiting for someone else to make us free? / And we refuse to see that people overseas suffer just like we

In Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new one, The Message, he writes about three trips he took, to Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine. In his reflections on these trips he makes connections that have caused uproar in the same US politico-media communities that once lionised him. In an opinion piece in Bari Weiss’s Free Press, representative of the criticism he’s shipped, Coates was accused of weaponising identity politics. “The specter haunting this book, and indeed all of his work, is the crudest version of identity politics,” wrote Coleman Hughes.

Coates’s analysis isn’t however based in what we call identity politics, but rather something altogether more powerful: it’s a location of the racist injustices in Africa, the US and the Levant within the same international power structures and a recognition of what these injustices share. His work isn’t, as his critics try to argue, of disparate groups with different, competing grievances for which redress is sought, but of a shared humanity among these people, a collective humanity that has been wronged. That’s what made the book intolerable to the people who once made him a MacArthur Genius.

What also made the book unacceptable to US elites was Coates’s questioning of his country’s mythology, the stories taught in schools, in colleges and later told by the people these institutions produce. Coates wrote, “If you believe that history, then you are primed to believe that the American state is a force for good, that it is the world's oldest democracy, and that those who hate America hate it for its freedoms.”

Believing this collection of stories is important for Americans because once one believes these stories, one can believe the blood on Americans’ hands is there for good reason. “And if you believe that, then you can believe that these inexplicable haters of freedom are worthy of our drones. But a different history, one that finds its starting point in genocide and slavery, argues for a much darker present and the possibility that here too are haters of freedom, unworthy of the power they wield,” wrote Coates.

For Coates the American story should begin in violence and displacement. So too should the Irish story – from the other end, with the acknowledgement that we were the recipients of these forces. During his stay in Palestine, Coates, a Black man, experienced something many in the north’s occupied six counties will empathise with: colonial overseers high on power, men with guns, given the power by their state to point these weapons as they see fit.

“These soldiers roam as they feel, stopping and interrogating according to their whim,” wrote Coates. He recounted a trip to a shop. “Before I could get there, a soldier walked out from a checkpoint, blocked my path, and asked me to state my religion. He looked at me sceptically when I told him I did not have one and asked for my parents' religion. When I told him they were not religious either, he rolled his eyes and asked about my grandparents. When I told him they were Christian, he allowed me to pass.”

We need to find courage, overcome

All-Ireland winner at club and county level, scorer of one of Croke Park’s greatest ever goals – you’ve gotta love the insolence of a near-post finish – Oisín McConville, growing up in Crossmaglen, XMG, Bandit Country, home of Slab and the Carahers, put up with similar harassment. When British soldiers exerted their authority in Armagh, McConville took refuge in football. “It was good to stick the fingers up and say, 'Regardless of what you do, you can land your helicopters here, you can build your barracks on top of us, you can stop us, throw our clothes out on the street, throw our bags out, you can chase people going to training, you can try and intimidate us, but fuck youse, we're going to win an All-Ireland anyway,” he said.

Power hassled Oisín for the same reason it hassled Ta-Nehisi. And just like Ta-Nehisi, with his cheek about his religion, Oisín said, “Fuck youse.”

McConville and Coates recognise the hierarchy and where we, that collective we, sit in it. The Irish government ministers who so love their occasional jaunts to Brussels, the photo opportunities with their party MEPs and those they consider their betters, don’t like to acknowledge our history – they’d prefer if it had never been written, if the world didn’t have an account of what was inflicted on us, didn’t know that it comes from the same place as what’s being inflicted on the Palestinian people.

Though Palestinians today face this violence most acutely, we all end up hurting. This is something Jean-Paul Sartre recognised and which animated his opposition to attempted genocide in Vietnam. “When a peasant falls in his ricefield, mown down by a machine gun, we are all struck,” he wrote. For Sartre the Viet Cong was fighting against empire not just for the Vietnamese but for humanity itself. “Because, gradually, the threat of genocide is extended to the whole human race… perpetrated every day before the eyes of all, makes all those who do not denounce it the accomplices of those who commit it and, the better to bring us under control, begins by degrading us. In this sense, imperialist genocide can only become more radical – because the group aimed at, to be terrorised, through the Vietnamese nation, is the human group in its entirety,” he wrote.

As that threat is extended to the whole human race, as Phoenix Law waits to hear from government about illegal arms flights and military trade with Israel, as government refuses to enact the Occupied Territories Bill, with Simon Harris saying those who wish to see it passed are playing politics, genocide continues in Palestine.

Inaction is a weapon of mass destruction.