Tag: Free Palestine

The Moral Compass Begins To Point

By Amit Sengupta

As Trump’s 20-point peace plan on Gaza unfolds, the sinister shadow of Tony Blair has suddenly come to loom large on the ravaged landscape. Meanwhile, the Israelis shot a nurse on the forehead, according to reports.

Doctors, nurses and para-medics, apart from journalists, have been IDF’s chosen objects for target practice. Several doctors have been kidnapped, and while the Israeli hostages must be freed, does Trump’s peace plan include the 10,000 plus Palestinian prisoners rotting in Israeli torture chambers, including women and kids?

So why is Trump in such a hurry? Why has he declared that the occupied West Bank, will not be allowed to be annexed?

And why is Belligerent Bibi so suddenly gracious and magnanimous, when he has loved every bit of it?

On November 21, 2024, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant, charging them with the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and crimes against humanity. For a leader of a western-backed nation, especially the US, this is a rare first case. Considering the fact that the US and UK, especially, have wrecked bloody mayhem on several human civilisations, from Vietnam to Chile to Iraq, Bibi is the unlucky one.

France and UK are among the 125 ICC member states, who, theoretically, should arrest these two Israelis if they enter their territory. Country after country is moving to use sanctions, ban, or boycott Israel, starting with Ireland and Spain. And Bibi seems to be in a quagmire of his own making.

So what happened?

It’s mass pressure from the ground, from inside homes and hearts, every heart that beats. Relentless, ceaseless, endless people’s collective outrage and mass movements – on campuses, schools, cafés, local trains, subways, packed rock and solo shows, packed open-air music shows, packed football stadiums, international film festivals, classical music concerts, pavements and public squares, during lightening protests in conferences and award-ceremonies, in songs and soliloquies, on social media, with paintings, drawings, cartoons, animations, masks, drums, violins, guitars, posters and placards.

The answer, literally, is blowin’ in the air.

In Bavaria, Germany, a global slogan was banned: ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. Cops have been exceptionally brutal, especially in Berlin. (This is where the victorious Red Army entered, the fascists were defeated, and Hitler committed suicide, in a bunker.)

But the people kept coming back.

One persistent schoolgirl has become a household name. Her videos have gone viral. She has been dragged by the cops and arrested umpteen times; but in typical satyagraha mode, she comes back, to be dragged and detained again, while she shouts: Stop the genocide!

Old people, some in their 90s, some on wheelchairs, defied the British government, which banned Palestine Action, a solidarity direct action group. So, they all came out, old and young, holding placards, saying, yes, we support Palestine Action. They were arrested by the London police. Reports say that some cops seem to be suffering from guilt and remorse.

British PM Keir Startmer’s government, while backing Israel, refused to call it genocide. He hosted the Israeli president in early September despite protests. His public image has taken a real beating.

The Guardian reported (September 9, 2025): As many as 61 parliamentarians wrote to Keir Starmer expressing concerns over Herzog’s visit. “At a time when more than 64,000 Palestinians have been killed, the overwhelming majority women and children, such a visit risks suggesting that the UK is indifferent to its international legal responsibilities,” the letter said.

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Finally, the Labour Party Conference held in Liverpool, backed by the biggest trade unions in UK, declared that it is indeed genocide, and that a full arms embargo should be declared. Earlier, the UN Commission of Enquiry had called it genocide – which it is – and not a war.

Besides, Berlin, which has faced brutal police repression, said enough is enough: more than 100,000 marched this week.

Sydney, London, New York, Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Barcelona, Scandinavian countries, city after cities have exploded across the West. Entire Italy came to a standstill with a nation-wide strike. Dock workers in Italy blocked all ships loaded with arms to Israel. The Italian Right-wing regime, has been compelled to send a Navy squad along with the Sumud Freedom Flotilla carrying baby formula and humanitarian aid.

Spain has joined, and so has, reportedly, Greece and Turkey, even while the 44-nation Flotilla with over 50 ships have entered the Gaza waters. Several celebrities, doctors, lawyers, including Nelson Mandela’s son, are on board.

Many big brands, including in food and cosmetics, doing business with Israel, have been boycotted, their fancy stores raided, their losses running into millions; many shut down their outlets. US campuses rose in protest — no alliance with the Israeli murder machine.

Students wore the Palestine keffiyeh in convocations across the country, some of them were expelled and jailed – they refused to succumb.

At the UN General Assembly, speech after speech, especially by the president of Columbia, called Israel out. He said he is ready to send troops to Gaza. The Indonesian president said, “If and when the UN Security Council and this great assembly decide, Indonesia is prepared to deploy 20,000 or even more of our sons and daughters to help secure peace in Gaza.” Other countries like Canada have started to speak of a peace-keeping force.

Despite strong opposition by the US, France, Andorra, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Great Britain, Luxembourg, Portugal, Malta and San Marino have recognized Palestine. That is, a majority of nations now recognize Palestine – barring the US, Germany and Italy.

Bibi had to criss-cross across the globe to avoid ‘unfriendly’ international air space. His speech in the UN General Assembly, New York, witnessed an empty hall. Majority of the countries walked out. Zohran Mamdani has said, he will follow the ICC orders, if he becomes the Mayor of New York.

Ireland and Spain have led from the front, along with South Africa and others. Both Ireland and South Africa trace their freedom struggle in synthesis with the liberation movement of Palestine. Ireland has imposed a ban on certain Israeli ministers. It will not participate in Eurovision 2026 if Israel joins. A global boycott campaign is on.

There is a huge campaign to ban Israel from all international sports competitions, including football, as it was done during apartheid in South Africa. Football stadiums are erupting with Palestine flags.

Thousands of actors, directors and others in Hollywood have pledged to not work with anyone or anything linked to Israel. Brad Pitt and Jaoquin Phoenix, among other big shots, have produced The Voice of Hind Rajab, about a little girl in Gaza, crying for help, trapped in a car with her dead relatives, while the car was riddled with 335 bullets. The paramedics who reached her were killed. So was she.

Indeed, it was little Hind Rajab, just about 5, who became a symbol in the first campus protests in the US, starting from Columbia University. “I am so scared, please come, get me,” she pleaded to the helpless woman on the helpline, surrounded by tanks, with bullets flying all around her.

Her voice will haunt the world for all time to come.

Spain has locked its bases, Rota in Cadiz and Moron de la Grontera in Seville –American planes and ships are forbidden to transit to Israel.

The spineless dictators and monarchs in the Middle-East seem to have woken up after the Israelis bombed Qatar. Now, led by Qatar, trade deals with Israel worth billions, are being cancelled – including bilateral relations. Sanctions, arms embargoes, trade deals, total boycott of Israel, the isolation of this Rogue State might be marking a changed global strategy.

Majority global opinion would want this genocide to stop, the release of hostages (and Palestinian prisoners), and a two-state solution. The irony is that between the US-Israel-Hamas, who is speaking for the people of Palestine?

And if Tony Blair comes to call the shots in Gaza, it might become even worse. Dissident labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has tweeted: “Blair’s catastrophic decision to invade Iraq cost thousands upon thousands of lives. He shouldn’t be anywhere near the Middle East, let alone Gaza. It is not up to Blair, Trump or Netanyahu to decide the future of Gaza. That is up to the people of Palestine.”

Corbyn is right. Blair is bad news. It’s like getting another Bibi in disguise. He should be rejected lock, stock and barrel. Period. Predictably, the Middle East countries, including muscle-flexing Turkey, rushed to toe the Trump line.

You Can’t Bomb The Truth, Bibi!

By Amit Sengupta

The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a ‘completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him,’ the implication being that the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and present the true enigma of the trial.
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Another Nakba seems to be unfolding, now in Gaza city. Do the people of Israel suffer a pinch of guilt, or trauma, at what their nation is so relentlessly doing to the unarmed, innocent people of Gaza, and also in the armed, forcible settlements in the West Bank? Is there a slow and silent paradigm shift happening in the pathologically sick society that is Israel?

It seems so. Just on the margins, perhaps. Some youngsters are refusing to join the IDF. Others are protesting in small numbers, facing police repression. While the last mass protest in Tel Aviv had demanded: the release of hostages and that Benjamin Netanyahu must go. Genocide? Well, that has never been on their mind.

Indeed, Bibi cares a damn for the hostages – he never had. Now, he has bombed Qatar – the principle facilitator for ceasefire and hostage-release. QED.

Majority of them in Israel, since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, have whole-heartedly backed the mass murder in the Gaza Strip, especially that of children and women, especially that of young mothers and pregnant women, and premature children, dying in the incubators. Or bombed, droned, with their first breath on earth.

These just born – were they all supporters of Hamas?

Did the Israelis enjoy this grotesque spectacle? Yes, most of them did. They still seem to do.

If Israel is a mentally sick society, and if the US, Germany, UK, France, are allies, let’s enter this abyss once again in this daily hell that is the world.

People say, how can they sleep, after doing all this?

This is a question of morality. How can they sleep after doing all that they are doing: the cold-blooded murders of journalists, doctors, paramedics, pregnant women? How can they shoot kids between the eyes? Or, starving kids asking for a loaf of bread?

And, yet, they sleep. Bibi and his men and women. They sleep well. Because, the next morning, they will do the same. Like what Nazi officers like Adolf Eichmann did to 6 million Jews at the gas chambers and concentration camps.

And if, “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” as philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote – not much has changed in the world. Barbarism continues to be normal.

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It has taken two years for many to call it genocide. Others, including in the big media, still refuse to call it genocide. The latest is that the US, for the sixth time, has vetoed an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza in the Security Council. It is the only nation.

Does Morgan Ortagus, who raised her hand against it, sleep well?

Speaking prior to the vote, she said that Washington’s opposition “will come as no surprise” – as it fails to condemn Hamas or recognize Israel’s right to defend itself, UN News reported. The whole world knows that this is a fake claim, now a morbid cliché, repeated ad infinitum by the Trump administration, as it was by the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris regime led by Democrats.

The majority resolution demanded the release of all hostages held by Hamas, and for Israel to lift all restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid. It sought to ensure that this aid is safely distributed to the population – in particular by UN agencies and partners.

The draft was put forward by the Council’s 10 non-permanent members: Algeria, Denmark, Greece, Guyana, Pakistan, Panama, Republic of Korea, Sierra Leone, Slovenia and Somalia. “Even though this resolution was not adopted today at this 10,000th meeting of the Council, 14 members of this Council have sent a clear message,” said Danish Ambassador Christina Markus Lassen.

Algerian Ambassador Amar Bendjama said: “Palestinian brothers, Palestinian sisters, forgive us.”

Olga Cherevko, UN spokeswoman, speaking to the BBC, said the situation in Gaza City is “nothing short of cataclysmic”.

The US veto has come days before the UN General Assembly, where the majority of nations recognize Palestinian sovereignty, and it might finally have France and UK recognize it as well – that is after backing the genocide to the hilt. As I write this, thousands are out on the streets in London protesting against Trump’s visit.

Surely, as the main ally of Bibi’s murder machine, he too sleeps well.

And yet, despite the everyday gloom, there are strong signs of hope. The non-stop, ad infinitum, breathless protests across the world, especially in the West.

Celebrities in Hollywood, 3000-plus, are refusing to do anything with Israelis in the film industry. Inside campuses, football stadiums, boulevards, homes and balconies, open-air cafes and auditoriums, international film festivals and concert halls, on sea beaches and parks, outside the Israeli embassy, factories, ports and docks, inside restaurants (while Trump goes for dinner) – some are 500,000 strong – and relentless.

These protests have stormed the world. Ceaseless. Endless.

Dead children are being displayed in bundles everywhere – women and men are crying. Holocaust survivors and orthodox Jews are opposing the killings, prime ministers like that of Spain, are seeking a total boycott of Israel, even in the complicit EU, its president has promised sanctions against Israeli cabinet members, settlers in the West Bank, (and Hamas).

Other countries are declaring sanctions, Zohrab Mamdani has said that if elected Mayor, he will arrest Netanyahu if he comes to New York, even the Right-wing Italian PM has promised to do the same. The spineless Arab conglomerate of American stooges in the Middle East seem to have half-woken up finally – that as and when the Israeli militarily subjugates them – which it will eventually – the US will leave to them to the sharks.

And the Freedom Flottila of 50 ships, with celebrities and freedom fighters, including the son of Nelson Mandela, is almost near Gaza. One of them has been bombed.

Truly, enlightenment, like humanity, is not dead. Bibi might want to become another Adolf Hitler, but he too must meet his fate. While Israel stands isolated, as a Rogue State, hated across the world.

Barbarism will stay, of course, but so will the resistance. And there will always be women and men who shall refuse to succumb, or compromise. The brave too must have their day.

At the sold-out Wembley Arena in London, with the who’s who of global celebrities attending, English actress Florence Pugh said: “Silence in the face of such suffering is not neutrality. It is complicity. And empathy should not be this hard, and it should’ve never been this hard,” said Pugh.

As journalist Mehdi Hasan said in Wembley, in his tribute to the murdered Palestinian journalists in Gaza: “We have been lied to, manipulated, misled, gaslit… Shame on those Western journalists who have said not a word about the mass killing of their Palestinian counterparts. Shame on them.” (Since October 7, 2023, 270 journalists have been murdered in Gaza.)

He said: “As a Western journalist myself, I can tell you all this, the Palestinian journalists, they are the best of us. They are the best of us because they are not just documenting a war, or genocide, they are documenting their own annihilation, their own starvation. In real time… They have shown the world that you can’t bomb the truth away.”

How Dare You?

By Amit Sengupta

You – have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?
– Greta Thunberg, UN Climage Action Speech, September 23, 2019

The first sailing ship to Gaza recently, ‘Conscience’, was bombed by Israel. It could not thereby sail with food and aid. In 2010, Israeli commandos killed 10 people on a Turkish ship, the ‘Mavi Marmara’; it was leading a small flotilla towards Gaza.

So where are they, 12 of them, bravehearts, Greta and her comrades?

Madleen, the Freedom Flotila, has been kidnapped by the killing machine of Israel. A picture shows an armed soldier with bread and water, with a defiant Greta, half-smiling, facing him.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said via a spokesperson that footage of the October 7, 2023  Hamas attacks will be screened for the Madleen crew after they reach Ashdod Port.

“Antisemitic Greta and her Hamas-supporting friends should see exactly what the Hamas terrorist organisation — which they came to support and act on behalf of — truly is,” he said. “They should see the atrocities committed against women, the elderly, and children, and understand whom Israel is fighting to defend itself.”

Born in Stockholm, she was first sensitized about global warming when she was just about eight. Reports say that she had bouts of depression when she was 11. Her father, Svante Thunberg, an actor, said:  “She stopped talking… she stopped going to school.” (BBC, May 9, 2024).

She was soon after diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. Her mother, Malena Ernman, an opera singer, said she became “much happier” once she decided to engage with the issue. She said that she became a kind of “superpower” once she was diagnosed with autism. Being ‘different’ became a ‘gift’.

In August 2018, when she was 15, Greta skipped school and began a solitary protest outside the Swedish Parliament.  She held a placard which said, ‘Skolstrejk för klimatet’ (School Strike for Climate).

Her solo protest sparked a spontaneous movement — a global campaign on climate change — ‘Fridays for Future’. And who were her first supporters?

Enlightened students, including from schools, from across the world. Many of them decided to skip school on Fridays, in solidarity with the campaign.

In April 2019, she told the European Parliament, “Our house is falling apart and our leaders need to start acting accordingly, because at the moment they are not.”

A few months later, she went on a two-week trip across the Atlantic Ocean, campaigning for her cause. Time magazine reported that she was given a warm welcome when she arrived in New York. There were high school students with hand-made signs. “The students broke into chants as the sailboat slowly pulled into the marina in Lower Manhattan: ‘Sea levels are rising and so are we!‘There is no Planet B!’”

ALSO READ: God! Don’t Break Our Hearts

“It is insane that a 16-year-old would have to cross the Atlantic Ocean to make a stand,” Greta said in a press conference.

At the UN Climate Action Meet, she said: “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet, you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

“World leaders have held 26 COPs. They have had decades of blah, blah, blah — and where has that got us?” This was again Greta speaking in Glasgow, in a youth protest, in 2021.

Nominated every year for the Noble Peace Prize from 2019 to 2023, clearly, the  young had found an inspirational icon, an indefatigable, dogged and visionary role model.

Then she was 16. Now she is 22. Small, stoic, frail, gutsy, resilient, determined, with a ready smile. Her strength of character is transparent. She smiles easily, even as she risks her life. Her comrades in Madleen, from different countries, also smile easily. They are not afraid. No, not at all.

She stands on the edge of the deck, holding the sail, inhaling the sea wind. Her images, her quotes, her dogged resistance, her clarity of vision, her compassion for the people of Gaza, her anger and angst at the non-stop mass killings, and systematic starvation of the people, bombed and shot dead while standing in queue for food, her disgust at the world leaders, especially in the West, for being complicit in this genocide — Greta has spoken her heart out, and the world has listened — in rapt attention.

Madleen, sailing towards Gaza via the great ancient city of Alexandria, became a floating platform of resistance and hope. A symbol of defiance and justice.

Now, in a pre-recorded message, she has  said that they have been abducted by the notorious Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Reports indicate that before the ‘abduction’ a chemical substance was thrown on the ship – which created itchiness in the eyes.

The Israeli foreign ministry has tried sarcasm: “The ‘selfie yacht’ of the ‘celebrities’ is safely making its way to the shores of Israel. The passengers are expected to return to their home countries. They were provided with sandwiches and water. The show is over.”

The show, indeed, is not over. It has just begun.

Rima Hassan, member of the European Parliament, on board Madleen, had a message, and it is all over social media: “If our boat is intercepted and stopped, I don’t want to hear excuses, everyone to the streets! We  will not turn back! We are continuing on our path.”

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese was on the phone with the crew during their detention. “Madleen must be released immediately,” she said in a post on X. “Breaking the siege is a legal duty for states, and a moral imperative for all of us… Every Mediterranean port should send boats with aid, solidarity, and humanity to Gaza. They shall sail together—united, they will be unstoppable.”

All over the world (barring India, of course) mass protests have erupted, including in Tel Aviv. Hundreds have marched in Tel Aviv, Al Jazeera reported, holding candles, with pictures of the dead children of Gaza.

Stockholm, London, Holland and elsewhere, people are on the streets. In thousands. In Geneva, they have made a huge water fountain with the colours of the Palestinian flag. Inside football stadiums, Palestinian flags are fluttering with chants of ‘Stop the starvation, stop the genocide’.

On campus after campus in the US, students are denouncing the Israeli regime at their graduation ceremonies. Those who are arrested, are refusing to succumb — many more are joining in protest, unafraid of the notorious ICE, the latest Repressive State Apparatus of Donald Trump.

Spain, Columbia, Ireland, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, nation after nation is asking for a total boycott of Israel (not India, surely). As many as 14 nations in the UN Security Council have sought a ceasefire, with a lone America vetoing it. France, Germany, UK — their governments there are under intense pressure.

Dock workers in the West have refused to load deadly weapons bound for Israel. Jews across the world, including Orthodox Jews in Israel, are standing up against the relentless killings. Hollywood actors have signed statements in support (Bollywood etc, well…).

Doctors in the US have protested inside the hospital, despite warnings by the police that they will be arrested. One female doctor shouted, “If you starve children, they just die.” Doctors are risking their lives and reaching Gaza, despite most hospitals having been bombed, especially targeting pregnant women, mothers, and just-born children. 

Greta and her comrades have resurrected infinite optimism. And the will to fight back! Their message has reached the nooks and corners of the world. This grotesque dance of death and enforced starvation must end. Now!

Many more Madleens must now sail for the Mediterranean shores of Gaza. And many more Gretas will now be holding placards, in angst and anger, asking: How Dare You?

Donald’s Trumpet Plays Songs of Death

By Amit Sengupta

War is Peace.
– 1984, George Orwell

Trump’s trumpet, always cacophonic, unpleasant and jarring, is now turning bloody red. Unpredictably so.

An extreme Right-wing, racist, white supremacist, real-estate capitalist fanatic, he inflicted no war on the world, unlike almost all the presidents of the United States, backed by the arms industry, and their insatiable blood lust, including Barack Obama. Surprisingly, and ironically, he was bestowed the Noble Prize for Peace much too early in  his tenure — and one which he never really deserved. As was proved later.

Now Trump is celebrating the dead in far-away Yemen, a tiny and defiant country, unlike the American stooges spread all over in the Middle East. Women and children, scores of them are dead, and injured. Predictably, they always end up killing innocent, unarmed, defenseless citizens, as Benjamin Netanyahu has done  yet again in Gaza, killing 400 people in one go, yet again claiming that it was Hamas he was targeting with “full force”.

Indeed, as BBC and other media reports have categorically stated, Israel has said multiple times that the Americans were duly informed about the latest bloodbath, following obviously the typical Trumpist declaration that “all hell will break lose”. “We have made incredible achievements up until today,” said a proud Netanyahu. “Together we are changing the face of the Middle East.”

Indeed, they are. A face soaked with human blood.

Since a long time now, it has been transparent like hell that Netanyahu, on a weak wicket inside Israel, and disliked by a huge chunk of people who are not orthodox, blood-thirsty, retrograde fanatics, that he never really wanted a deal on the release of the Israeli hostages in custody of the Hamas. He dilly-dallied, did U-turns, turned his back, promised but retracted, played footsie, but he never really cared a damn for his own people. He knew, that as long as they are trapped somewhere in those dingy and dark tunnels in the ravaged landscape which the Israelis could not enter despite one year of relentless bombing, he can continue to satisfy his blood lust and kill thousands of Palestinians. This was his ‘Mission Ethnic Cleansing’ — so as to finally capture and conquer the mythical holy land — which never really belonged to them, not before the two world wars, and never ever after 1945.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum in Israel have condemned the bombing by air: “The Israeli government chose to give up the hostages.” Israel has violated the ceasefire which was  patronised by the US, post-Trump. Around 59  hostages still remain out there, waiting for freedom. Now, their fate seems to have been sealed.

Meanwhile, Mahmoud Kalil, a pro-Palestine activist from the prestigious Columbia University in the US has been detained only because he was campaigning against the genocide in Gaza. In a viral video, he was handcuffed and taken away, even while his wife, an American citizen, ran after the officers, pleading again and again that at least tell me, where are you taking him, really, you don’t have to do it this way. His detention, apparently with no legal validity, is a clear indication, that the witch-hunt in the new Trump era has finally begun, perhaps this time more brutal and nasty than the witch-hunt during the Cold War against dissenters, peaceful rebels, Leftists, artists, filmmakers and writers.

Something, which is a staple of most dictators, almost of them buddies of Trump — from Vladimir Putin to Victor Orban. A reminder of the relentless narrative ongoing in India since the summer of 2014.

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Playright Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, written in 1953, uses the historical similarity of the ‘Salem witch-hunts’ in 1692, in the backdrop of alleged witchcraft, to make a sharp comment on the Cold War witch-hunts in the US. Trump, with Elon Musk of the Nazi salute fame, and a dubious past record of inherited fascist ideology in South Africa, is now leading the witch-hunts upfront. Writes Miller in the thin book: “We are what we always were in Salem, but now the little crazy children are jangling the keys of the kingdom, and common vengeance writes the law!”

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, writes counterpunch in a recent article (Operation Newspeak, March 18, 2025), is a warning about political repression, historical revisionism, mass surveillance, propaganda, censorship, and the State’s total control over truth. In the novel, which is set in an imagined future where war is perpetual, the dictator, Big Brother, and his government, ruled by the Party, dominate the superstate, Oceania…

“Newspeak is the Party’s official language, designed to prevent dissent, obstruct critical thinking, suppress rebellion, and control the perception of reality, which is achieved by eliminating words and manipulating language. “We’re destroying words—scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language down to the bone,” says Syme, a character who works in the Ministry of Truth and oversees the compilation of the latest edition of the Newspeak dictionary… “Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”

Published in 1949, the book expresses a similar narrative as in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, released in February 1936.  The tragic story is that of an industrial worker trapped in the relentless, mechanical motions of a ruthless machine age in an oppressive factory always under surveillance, and who finds solace and hope with a homeless young woman.

Counterpunch says that the New York Times ran an article about words that are discouraged at Federal Agencies under the new Trumpist administration. A total of 172 words appeared printed in red: Native American. Women. Black. Immigrants. Disability. Gender. Advocacy. Mental health. And, of course, any phrases or expressions having to do with diversity, equity, and inclusion: diverse backgrounds, diverse communities, diverse groups, diversified, diversify, diversifying, enhancing diversity, increasing diversity, inclusiveness, inclusive leadership… These words are all to be purged from websites, grant proposals, class curricula, without delay.

Undoubtedly, Trump’s Make America Great Again in in full play in fast forward. An America which perhaps wants the slave trade back, where all Afro-Americans must be shackled and turned into slaves, sold like cattle in open markets, and their women turned into sex slaves. An America where gender justice is abolished, so is women’s rights, the rights of immigrants, now shackled and chained and forcibly deported, students, dissenters, artists, writers and filmmakers, and those of the LGBTQ communities.

A 1984 dystopia stalks America, originally a land of immigrants, while the first white settlers conquered native land by enacting a million genocides of the indigenous communities who lived in their homeland since centuries. A Make America Great Again born in the quagmire of massacres and blood lust, constantly resurrecting its vicious past, here, there and everywhere, now in Yemen and Gaza.

And, yet, we need to hold on, dig in, write graffiti on the walls and inside our soul, notes of dissent, make meaningful films against all odds, like No Other Land, refuse to succumb or compromise, and peacefully continue an infinite struggle, with a thirst which can never be quenched — like the brave people of Palestine.

As Toni Morrison wrote: “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

Gaza on the lips of campus protestors

Gaza On Their Lips

By Amit Sengupta

Give Flowers to the Rebels who Failed!
– Wall writing, Sorbonne. France. May, 1968, students’ uprising

It’s just that, now, the rebels have not failed! Instead, they are flying on the wings of justice, painting the walls with the water melon colours of the Palestine flag. And they are all dancing the ‘Dabke’ dance on the same liberating song from Palestine, hands holding hands, wearing the black and white keiffyah, going round and round in circles, their young faces flush with all the luminescent colours of youthful rebellion and freedom!

Perhaps they know. Perhaps they don’t. April 30, 2024 marked the ‘Liberation Day’ in Vietnam. A tiny country with no military power defeated the world’s mightiest military and financial empire. The war started in 1955. After 19 years of mass murders of innocents, relentless bombing, burnt out villages, the guerilla forces of Vietnam, using the dense forests, defeated the Americans. Legendary communist revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, led the guerillas, and, finally, became victorious in 1975. Most American soldiers who came back alive suffered all their lives – with guilt, remorse, nightmares of what they did and what they saw, and ‘mass psychological trauma’.

Remember Apocalypse Now, the movie, by Francis Ford Copolla, with Marlon Brando in an epical role, as a brilliant American soldier (tipped to be a future general), who turned a rebel leader in Cambodia: The film begins with a famous song by Jim Morrison of ‘The Doors’:

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end…

The My Lai massacre shocked the world. More than 500 unarmed people of a South Vietnam village were killed by what was called a ‘search and destroy’ mission, on March 16, 1968. And who can ever forget that stunningly horrific picture – naked Vietnamese children running, screaming, scared out of their minds, as they were ‘napalmed’– genocide by bombs which spread like a raging fire burning all that is around, including human flesh.

In Satyajit Ray’s Pratidwandi (1970), an educated young man looking for a job is asked by an interview board, as to what was the most significant event in the 20th century? He says, it was the victory of the Vietnamese people against the US. They said, why not the landing on the moon? He said, cryptically, that with the progress of science, this was waiting to happen – hence, it was predictable. However, who could have ever imagined that a little country would defeat the mightiest military empire in the world? They ask, cynically: Are you a communist? He says that one does not have to be a communist to accept this truth!

Now Vietnam has resurrected yet again, as yet another dead-end called Gaza, with the mass protests of the 1960s stalking the campuses and the American conscience. One thousand flowers are now blooming in almost every campus. This magical ‘flower- power’ has spread across to other countries: Switzerland, Canada, Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands and Puerto Rico. In Amsterdam, where the cops are almost always invisible, they have suddenly turned brutal. Hundreds have been arrested in the US, including faculty members. At UCLA, the cops allowed Right-wing Zionists to enter the campus and attack the students with rods and chemical spray. At Columbia, where it all started, they have broken the ‘Free Palestine’ encampments, while the students have resurrected them again and again.

The faculty wrote in a letter on May 3, 2024: “We, faculty members of the History Department of Columbia University, condemn the use of police force against students, as well as the ongoing presence of the NYPD on our campus. We insist upon the rights of students and scholars to engage in non-violent protest or public speech, and we deplore the arbitrary disciplining of students, faculty, or staff for doing so. We are also dismayed that the use of public force resulted from a decision-making process, from which faculty were excluded. We disagree about many of the issues being debated on campus this year, but we agree that history shows how deeply damaging it is for a university to meet students’ protests with violence and criminalization. Since the last time the police were called on this campus in large numbers, in 1968, Columbia has worked hard to restore community, build shared governance, deal peacefully with protest, and maintain a culture of respectful debate. We must hold on to this legacy.”

So who is Hind Rajab?

She was a six-year-old beautiful girl in Gaza who was murdered by the Israeli army. So the students in Columbia captured the Hamilton Hall, with it etched memories of the 1960s, and renamed it ‘Hind’s Hall’!

Hind Rajab

Since her murder, Hind’s mother had withdrawn into a silence of infinite suffering. On hearing this news, she said: “I started crying, because I wanted all these movements and support to come while Hind was still alive! Wake up now! Why are others like Hind still going through this?”

Writes Keenga Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker, (May 8, 2024): “Students who engage in civil disobedience do so with the expectation of some reprisal. That is, after all, the moral imperative at the heart of this particular form of activism: self-sacrifice in the name of a higher political goal. But many of the student activists had not anticipated being arrested; they were shocked when set upon by police aggressively seeking to clear an area or simply to forbid public demonstration… Whatever the cause of arrests, the punishments pursued by school administrations have been excessive and cruel. Students and faculty members who have participated in the protests have been suspended and banned from campuses, and evicted from university housing, before disciplinary proceedings have begun. Some have been expelled; others have been banned from graduation ceremonies, have faced uncertainty about their legal records, and have generally been treated as pariahs. The level of repression has been shocking.” (Taylor is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, among other acclaimed books.)

Despite the State repression, with a shaky, discredited, Joe Biden at the helm, the ‘counter-narrative’ as ‘counter culture’ is now etched on the walls. In Canadian campuses, streets are being renamed with Gaza landmarks. In Naples, Italian artist Eduardo Castaldo turned his photographs into street murals as a form of ‘creative resistance’.  He has visually documented life under Israeli occupation as a photojournalist. ‘Bella Ciao’ is being sung, with the sublime strings of guitars. Frida Kahlo is now a Palestinian. And so is Jesus Christ on the cross.

The ‘Caitlin Newsletter’ quoted Secretary of State Anthony Blinken: “Now, of course, we are on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond. And, of course, the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative. And you have a social media ecosystem environment in which context, history, facts get lost, and the emotion, the impact of images dominates. And we can’t –  we can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

The newsletter says: “Notice how he said the word “narrative” three times? That’s how empire managers talk to each other, because that’s how they think about everything. This is because empire managers are always acutely aware of something that normal human beings are not: that real power comes from manipulating the stories –  narratives –  that people tell themselves about their reality. They understand that humans are storytelling animals whose inner lives are typically dominated by mental narratives about what’s happening, so if you can control those narratives, you can control the humans. They understand that power is controlling what happens, but true power is controlling what people ‘think’ about what happens.… That’s what’s going on with all the mass media propaganda, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, plutocrat-funded think tanks, and mainstream culture manufacturing in New York and Hollywood. A few clever manipulators understand that you can control a society by controlling its dominant narratives…”

It’s just that the counter-narrative has come to stay. And it is spreading far and wide. This time, even in Sorbonne, the rebels have not failed! They are, instead, winning an impossible war. In solidarity with the trapped people of Gaza and Rafaa. While the slogan resounds in collective chorus – Say no to Genocide! Ceasefire Now! Free Free Palestine!

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