Two children are brought up in a tumultuous household. Both parents are deeply in debt and traumatized by their own demons and they chose to take it out on their children. The oldest is humiliated, scapegoated, and blamed for all his parent's misfortunes. The youngest is left to the mercy of the oldest who in turn blames the younger sibling for his own abuse and torments him with horrors that shock even his derelict parents. Outside forces chose to intervene and the youngest is separated from the violence of his family.
But the youngest child can't escape the demons of his violent past. He's placed with a new family in a new home in a new town. But the wounds remain open and with no abusers left to confront, the child takes on the role of the abuser and seeks to settle the score with his new siblings. Their innocence is rendered irrelevant by their adopted sibling's blind rage. Their bodies are bruised and bloodied. Their property is stolen and broken. Their once happy home is transformed into a veritable prison. Their lives are made a living hell. Soon they fall prey to the very same demons their adopted sibling inherited and begin to turn to increasingly violent and self-destructive means to fend off their abuse to little avail. Soon they turn their violent impulses towards each other and themselves.
Germany found itself the scapegoat of a world war they didn't ask for. Humiliated, depressed, and depleted, they directed their rage against the very weakest members of their population; Gypsys, commies, queers and most especially Jews. The Jewish people became the source of everything that ailed Germany. Bad economy- blame the Jews. High crime rate- blame the Jews. Tiny dick- blame the Jews. There was no grievance too petty to be pinned on these people. They became human lightning rods. The state could do no wrong as long as they had the Jews to blame their flaws on. But soon scapegoating and state sanctioned terrorism wasn't enough. The hideous nature of Germany's demonology became too grotesque to be contained behind a concrete mask of bureaucratic sanity. Terrorism gave way to slavery and slavery gave way to wholesale slaughter. Picturesque Prussian villages became company towns devoted to the booming industry of genocide on a level never seen before in the developed world. Everyday people became willing monsters. Untold millions perished. Entire families. Entire Neighborhoods. An entire generation of European Jews pulverized into a fine pink powder. Millions. Millions....
Once the acrid smoke of the death camps settled, the survivors were gathered by their victors and rather than being aloud to properly confront their demons face to face, they were transferred back to the Holy Land where they were guaranteed a biblical paradise under the circumstances that they remove the locals and provide a toehold for the victorious Allied Powers in the tumultuous post-Ottoman Middle East. Before the trauma of the Holocaust, the majority of European Jews rejected Zionism as a radical (and sacrilegious) fringe movement that bastardized the text of the Talmud to justify racially motivated acts of terrorism against civilians (including Jews) in the British Mandate of Palestine. But racked with the fresh wounds of genocide, sensible educated people found themselves possessed by the very demons of their tormentors and the Nakba began. Suffering under the dangerous delusion of being the chosen people, the new Israelis unleashed their pent up rage against the innocent people of Palestine.
What has transpired is 70 years of slow burning ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Millions murdered, maimed and displaced in an orgy of explicitly racist state violence that has become increasingly genocidal with each passing year. And it all feels so hauntingly familiar. People herded into ghettos, starved and deprived of basic human rights. Handsome young black-clad commandos cackling with sadistic glee as they open fire on crowds of unarmed children fleeing for their lives. A seemingly modern democracy becoming increasingly indifferent to the horrors committed by the officials who represent them, officials who speak increasingly of a single racially pure state and a final solution to their Arab problem. It has become almost obnoxiously obvious that the victims have become the victimizers, the oppressed have become the oppressors, the prey have become the predators.
Nations are a lot like children. When they develop in safe, nurturing environments they tend to grow into relatively stable democracies. When they're raised in households possessed by violence and abuse, they develop into sociopathic states and like any sociopath they tend to pay it forward by creating more victims who all too often develop into victimizers themselves in a hollow attempt to even the unbalance of their powerless pasts. It's a vicious cycle that seems to repeat itself over and over again.
Hamas, an organization once possessed by this vicious cycle, now seems to be trying to rise above it with the Gandhiesque civil disobedience of the March of Return. Their noble attempts at peaceful resistance have been met with machine gun fire and cruel praise by western leaders for the "restraint" shown by the perpetrators of these massacres. Israel and its handlers don't seem to realize that they are sowing the seeds of their own demise. Every Reich has its Stalingrad and Israel's Stalingrad is the very people they've failed to destroy. I continue to maintain that a single state solution is inevitable and in spite of Israel's best efforts the Palestinian population has only swollen in the face of the Nakba. Once Israel burns the last of its bridges with its chauvinistic brinkmanship it will be left alone on an island with a deeply traumatized majority of oppressed people who may not be as willing as the "terrorists" in Hamas to break the cycle.
The greatest tragedy of the Holocaust is that many of its survivors have become the new Nazis. This isn't a politically correct position to take but history hasn't left me with any other conclusions. A beautiful people with a long proud tradition of radical resistance to tyranny, from Moses to Emma Goldman, have had their good name soiled by a state that carries their name in spite of being the antithesis of everything they represent. I pray to a god we all share that Palestine doesn't meet the same fate.
Rise above, dearest motherfuckers. Rise above.
Peace, Love, & Empathy- CH
Soundtrack: songs that influenced this post
* Rise Above by Black Flag
* Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2
* Bulldog Front by Fugazi
* Don't Look Back In Anger by Oasis
* Zombie by the Cranberries
* Lexicon Devil by the Germs
* Polly by Nirvana
* My Name Is Luka by Suzanne Vega
* Severed by the Decemberists
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