Free Palestine Archives - Lokmarg

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.

ALSO READ: Trump And The New World Order

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.”

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 20^th 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’!

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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Tag: Free Palestine

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