Part 1. Nationalism versus Humanity.

For most working people, the dream of a benign nationhood has long been over. It now also looks as if it is over for the people of Palestine. The abstraction ‘nation‘ has always hidden far more than it has revealed and given that the modern world is entirely made up of nations, that has often been a problem. The term ‘nation’ reveals nothing of the socio-economic divisions within them or how the elites within them use this social form to oppress and exploit the non-elite human beings within them. However, in 2023, the reality hidden behind the term nation has been clearly exposed.

A nation is a hierarchical mass society form of living in which the hierarchy determine practically everything of importance, even if their decisions (such as on Covid) are seriously detrimental to the rest of the human beings living within them or living outside them. When it is also understood that the modern hierarchical mass societies operate on the economic basis of dependence upon the profits of capital investments, their apparent hypocrisy over decisions which harm working people start to make an elite kind of  sense. The capitalist mode of production can only be successful for capitalists, if it continually grows their capital and thus the economy. That is the reason its elites strive for ever more land and resources to exploit.

So the apparent brutal madness of elite determined bombing and shelling of Ukraine by the Russian elite and the similar vindictive madness of bombing and shelling Gaza and the West Bank by the Israeli elite, both have an economic motive and purpose behind them. At it’s most fundamental, the purpose is to obtain extra land and profitable resources. Likewise, elite access to profitable resources in the near and middle east, also explains the complicity of the UK, US and European elites in their long term support for Israel’s genocidal strategy of getting rid of Palestinians. The Israeli elite wish to get hold of the whole territory of Palestine and the middle east has long been a lucrative resource for US, UK and European capital investment, particularly since the change from coal to oil as an energy  resource to power European industry and commerce.

Consequently, the fact that further exploitable resources of the middle east might be taken away by unfriendly governments as it was in Egypt, Afghanistan and Iran during the 20th century, is a capitalist class’s worst nightmare. The 2008 financial crisis demonstrated how inter-dependently fragile the capitalist system had become, therefore, any significant disturbance – anywhere – could cause a domino type financial, economic or social collapse. As the multi-faceted global crisis of capitalism deepens and if the Arab masses become more discontent with their situation under their Euopean and American created middle east puppet regimes, west friendly governments may fall.

The Arab Spring indicated the depth of Arab discontent with their governments and western capitalist elites are anxious to preempt any additional Arab uprisings. Anything which may take the gulf state puppet regimes out of the wests spheres of economic and financial interest, is of immense concern to the wheelers and dealers of global capital. The existence of a successful Islamic Palestinian state sharing the land of Palestine with Israel, would not only weaken the wests client state of Israel, but also may just trigger a domino effect of further middle east popular uprisings, bringing down puppet gulf states and much else. The success of the Taliban in regaining control of Afghanistan, has demonstrated yet again just how easily and quickly mineral and agricultural wealth (and lucrative sales outlets) can be taken out of US, UK’s and Europes economic and financial control.

For this reason, (among others), from the Israeli elite perspective, and their ‘backers’ the Palestinian dream of a successful state must be shattered at all costs. The costs being, on the one hand, the almost complete annihilation of the people and infrastructure of Palestinian Gaza and the West Bank; and on the other; the complete loss of what remains of the prestige and integrity for Jewish Zionism among Jews themselves and the even greater cost of an ever more intense hatred of them by the Arab people. It never happens in the imagination and ambition of aggressors, (Israeli or otherwise) but actually in the real world even winners can become losers. It’s called a Pyrrhic victory and Israel (and the West) has kept clocking up such victories since 1948; often gaining territory and assets but losing credibility and their humanity.

Also the Israeli elite know a smaller Israeli state would create it’s own internal destabilisation process accompanied by civil unrest. From the US, UK’s and Europe’s slightly different perspective, a Palestinian state, if granted, must be small, US friendly and strongly controlled. In other words, the west would like Gaza as a small Palestinian state without Hamas and populated by a docile community available as a source of cheap and reliable labour. However, the Palestinians will not accept that and the Isaeli pro-Zionist elite will not grant it no matter how many reams of paper are consumed or hot air exhaled, producing  two-state feasibility studies. This particular strip of land just isn’t resource rich enough to accommodate two modern states. Indeed, the land of Palestine as whole is not resource rich enough for one modern state based upon the capitalist mode of production.

To exist, successful small states, need particularly rare advantages in the modern era. A monopoly of banking as in Switzerland, a monopoly of oil as in small gulf states, and a monopoly of religious authority as in Papal Rome. Palestine, as variedly beautiful as it is, has nothing comparable. Split into two states each would have even less. Even if the coming economic, social, ecological and climate crisis does not cause a wholesale collapse of most hierarchical mass societies, a victorious Israel within a generation, if it remains as it is, would need further land to colonise, leading inevitably to further wars. Leaving long-term guessing aside, the intended plan for Israel, as it is presently governed, (negotiated pauses or not), is that the war against Gaza and the West Bank must continue until the idea of Palestine is just a distant memory, like the former great Sioux tribal confederacy on the Great Plains of North America. However, the Palestinians will also not go willingly into any future ‘reservations’ devoid of their basic human rights.

The west’s opposition to Putins land-grab of parts of Ukraine is also fundamentally economic and not personal. Russia was once wrestled out of western capitalist financial control by the Bolsheviks in 1917 and this control was never fully regained evennafter the eventual collapse of the Communist regime. The alternative Russian elite having peronally absorbed all the state owned assets in Russia and banked their surplus cash into European property, also needed and wanted to get hold of profitable resources in Ukraine. Led by the USA, that particular Putin-led resource grab just had to be stopped by western, Anglo-Saxon elite controlled capitalism. Hence, expensive high end equipment was rushed out by them to Ukraine from US, UK and Europe, whilst penny pinching austerity was doled out to their own citizens.

Helping Ukraine resist Russia was the wests way that significant parts of those resource rich, Great Northern European Plains of Ukraine, might remain accessible to US, UK and European profit-making enterprises. Backing the resistance of Ukraine to Russia and opposing the resistance of Palestine to Israel may seem hypocritical and it is, but it is also capitalist business as usual. And of course strong and persistent capitalist economic motives also give rise to more than hypocrisy and inhumanity. However, the full extent of the inhuman symptoms and hidden motives of Nationalists and Capitalists are not usually advertised publicly by those high up in the hierarchy, but George Orwell did. Of the views of nationlists, he wrote;

“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no outrage – torture, the use of of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians…” “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not hearing of them…..(George Orwell. ‘Notes on Nationalism.)

Orwell did not include the economic concept of capitalism in his thoughts on the nationalist mind set, but the same essential thinking applies to the ‘capitalist’ as it does to the ‘nationalist – anything goes to protect or enhance the investment portfolio’s of those focused on the bottom line. Those who are lost for words to describe what is happening currently (2023) in these two macabre theatres of war and are puzzled as to how it is being reported by media and governments, George Orwell’s two sentences above may assist in understanding it. Furthermore, in mid 2023, the diplomatic mask of United Nations moral integrity dramatically slipped and the Janus faces of most nationalist elites have been revealed as something completely different.

UN, Peace-keeping has rarely been about keeping peace. That term has always been a rhetorical cover for what has actually been resource protection and the stabilisation of regimes friendly to capital. The refusal of UK, US and European national elites to demand cessation of the genocidal bombing and shelling of other human beings in Gaza by Israel and now the West Bank, was blatant enough. However, the best that the rest of the UN affiliated national elites could do was make the failed inadequate call for a short humanitarian pause. A pause  between a continuation of  24/7 genocidal bombing and shelling – really! This too revealed the sordid reality lurking behind the official charade of United Nations humanitarian concern.

Part 2. Elite interest quickly dissolves elite integrity, is to follow.

Roy Ratcliffe (November 2023)