Speechless in Gaza
Trading in Sentiment - MET - 53
As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice! Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed. Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve.
Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza
... Promise was that I
Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver;
Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves ...
John Milton, Samson Agonistes,1671
Of Huxley and Orwell, two of the greatest dystopian novelists of the 20th century, it was the latter who painted the most vivid pictures of the horrors and terrors of totalitarianism. But it was Huxley, the former, who most accurately foresaw and foretold how information would be weaponized to control our thoughts and behaviors at the whim of demagogues whose names and agendas we can only guess at.
If this sounds a touch paranoid it’s because paranoia is our best — and quite possibly our only — defence against viruses of every type. And especially against the kind that shape our beliefs and allegiances by manipulating our feelings.
Huxley had this remarkable way of describing what the media would become. He said the media would stop trading in information and instead it would trade in sentiment.
ABC broadcaster Scott Stephens, referencing Huxley’s influence in the writing of the film Network
In the following quote, from a 1949 letter Huxley wrote to Orwell to congratulate him on the visionary thinking that produced 1984, we get more than a glimpse of his starkly ironic predictions of a future world in which the manipulation of the truth will have replaced the zombie armies that once shepherded thought-criminals into torture cells from which they would never return.
Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience.
Aldous Huxley
Huxley witnessed more political turmoil than any of us will hopefully ever get to see in a lifetime. If he is right about means determining the nature of ends, the end of the Gaza conflict, with the violent and patently unjust means that are being used to pursue it, will be a lot worse than anything we’re witnessing now.
Hamas must have imagined that the end they had in mind would justify their barbaric slaughter of some 1,200 innocents on Oct 7.
Netanyahu’s government clearly believes the end it has in mind will justify the means that have laid much of Gaza to waste and thus far taken the lives of some sixteen thousand people, guilty and innocent.
We don’t get to hear much about moral equivalency from Palestinian sympathizers on TV or in the press. Justifications from the Israeli side, on the other hand, are loud, clear and frequent. And they’re being made in terms that chime perfectly with the effect of psycho-physical numbing I described in MET 52.
Numbers alone mean nothing. They are merely cold facts. For statistics to justify moral equivalence in any given scenario, and notably here in the case of targeted v collateral killings on either side, all they must do is feel about right.
Israel believes that it has killed two Palestinian civilians for every Hamas militant in its intense campaign to eliminate the armed group from the Gaza Strip, a ratio an IDF spokesperson described to CNN Monday as “tremendously positive.”
The AFP news agency first reported the Israeli assessment on Monday, citing a briefing for foreign media by senior Israeli military officials. Asked about reports that about 5,000 Hamas militants had been killed since October 7, one of the officials replied, according to AFP: “The numbers are more or less right.”
CNN:12:36 AM EST, Wed December 6, 2023
Regular readers will know that I have very little faith in the human mind’s ability to make rational judgments on anything outside of the domains of cricket averages, the physical sciences and Sudoku.
The moral evaluations that shape our values, principles and ethics have their genesis not in the heart but in the gut. Which is to say, in rather more technical language, deep down in our somatic systems where unspeakable thoughts, unsayable words and indigestible images trigger our neuro-endocrine systems to produce the oxytocin, progesterone, estrogens, testosterone, corticosteroids and arginine-vasopressin hormones that signal our brains to register a disgust reaction.
cf - https://journal.psych.ac.cn/xlkxjz/EN/10.3724/SP.J.1042.2022.00085
Pace the Cartesians. Our social behaviors, our religious convictions and our political views are rooted in the disgust responses we’ve learned over time to post-rationalize as an entirely logical and philosophically indisputable Weltanschauung. Rationally, we think.
Our disgust profiles and sensitivities were formed by the rewards and punishments of our childhoods; by approving fathers or angry mothers; by the shames and gratifications of our adolescent experiments, our developing sexualities, our hurt pride or our insatiable hungers; by our social mores, our cultural inheritances and the moral norms of our contemporaries.
They taught us what to admire and what to despise, what to keep and what to abandon, who to love and who to hate. The are responsible for our predilections and our prejudices, our hopes and fears, our ambitions and our abominations.
And when it comes down to how much we value the lives of individual others, it’s disgust and disgust alone that pulls the trigger.
Good propagandists know that of all the sentiments traded daily on the media’s stock exchange of half-truths, disgust if by far the most valuable.
And they will cross any number lines to inspire it. The gruesome details of the unforgivable gang rape and subsequent murder of an Israeli hostage described two days ago on the legendarily prim and prudish BBC is a case in point.
The more horrifying and disgusting their crimes, the more effective the elaboration of it will be at diminishing the value of the lives of the perpetrators and, by association, the lives of people like them.
To a neutral observer with no stake in the outcome it then seems highly unlikely that the recent release of the graphic details of Hamas’s most viscerally vile and vividly disgusting sexual atrocities were not timed to subdue the rising tide of global empathy for the humanitarian catastrophe we’re witnessing daily and nightly from Rafah to Atatra.
The numbers of innocents per perpetrator were no longer feeling “…more or less right.”
Unless there was another, more pressing reason since the beheaded babies were no longer speaking on behalf of Netanyahu.
Perhaps there was.
November 4th would have been a very good day to bury bad news with much more disgusting news.
If this is true, and if its implications go where logic suggests they go, the following has got to be the most cynical, if not the most graphically brutal, of all the dreadful news emerging from currently the most benighted place on the planet.
Israeli authorities are investigating claims by US researchers that some investors may have known in advance about the Hamas plan to attack Israel on 7 October and used that information to earn millions of dollars by short-selling Israeli shares.
Research by law professors Robert Jackson Jr from New York University and Joshua Mitts of Columbia University found significant short-selling of shares leading up to the attacks that triggered the war.
According to the research, the short-selling observed prior to 7 October “exceeded the short-selling that occurred during numerous other periods of crisis”, including the recession after the financial crisis in 2008, the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, and the Covid-19 pandemic.
In one example documented in the research, 4.43m new shares in Leumi, Israel’s largest bank, were sold short between 14 September and 5 October. Leumi’s share price dropped by almost 9% on 8 October in the immediate aftermath of the attack.
The report notes that the sharpest increase in short-selling occurred during what is normally a time of relatively little activity in Israel due to Jewish holidays.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/04/israeli-authorities-investigate-claims-of-short-selling-before-hamas-attacks
Oddly, weirdly and disturbingly, I’ve yet to see this story circulated on wider platforms. The BBC website mentions it only to say, “…the report has since been called ‘inaccurate’ and ‘irresponsible’ by the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE).”
Three days later, digging deeper in the morass of controversy surrounding the credibility of the report, I’ve found any number of confirmations, suspicions and angry denials. One account suggests that the dodgy dealings were the work of Hamas insiders.
Who knows. We’re seeing only the means. Like Milton’s Samson wandering the wastelands of Gaza, we’re blind to the ends.
Perhaps I’m too easily disgusted. Or the numbness hasn’t kicked in yet. But I’m lost for words.
Maybe this world is another planet’s hell.
Aldous Huxley