Part 3. Truth, the first casualty of war.

It has long been a cliche that the first casualty of any war is the truth. This cliche applies to much more than military wars, but certainly military and civil wars contain the worst examples. It is certainly the case that many people in all countries will be directly or indirectly aware that outside of warfare those people with power and authority will deliberately, mislead, hide evidence of their wrong doing; plant or fabricate evidence where non exists; and get away with lies and false accusations, if it assists what they wish to achieve. Dodgy documents on “weapons of mass destruction”; “there were no parties at number ten during lock down”; “I never had sex with that woman”, “…we don’t bribe people with cash for questions in parliament”; “.. we found this gun in the suspects glove box”; such examples have all been repeatedly exposed as lies.

The ones noted above are just the everyday deceitful activities of police forces, politicians and bureaucrats, practically everywhere. ‘Licensed to Lie’ is not just the title of a book exposing deceit and corruption in the US Department of Justice, but is a statement of fact for the vast majority of state institutions and their elite occupants in all countries. Because they have the power to control events and people, they can lie with impunity. When they are colonising countries they can also steal land and property as Israel has done with Palestine, the USA did with North America, Europe did with Africa and the UK did with many Egyptian and Greek monuments and artefacts.

Of particular contemporary relevance is the case of the ‘Elgin Marbles’ stolen from Greece. In November 2023 UK prime minister Sunak lied about the ownership of the stolen Elgin Marbles and that therefore they could not be given back to Greece. This is an obvious lie. Governments have unlimited powers to not only hang people never mind give back previous stolen countries, land and monuments. Clinging on to stolen property and lying about it seems to be in the DNA of powerful national elites.

Even the knight of the floundering UK realm, Sir Kier Starmer could only suggest lending the ‘Marble Frescoes’ back for a period of time. The offer, of lending back something previously stolen, would be laughable if it occurred in a local magistrates court or small claims court, but this offer by a leader of the loyal UK opposition just about sums up elite integrity. It also demonstrates the extremely narrow differences between the two wings of the cultured gangster mobs currently in political control of the hierarchical mass society of Britain. That may seem bad enough.

However, when it comes to war, the stakes are much higher and the motives and opportunities for deceit and false evidence are much greater for those elites involved. Babies being ‘bayoneted’ or ‘decapitated’, women being raped on initial contact (as if these were primary mission objectives for enemy combatants), are common fabricated tropes traceable over many centuries of organised warfare initiated by hierarchical mass society elites. Sadly men do rape in war as they do in peace time, but not all men do. So extrapolating from the relative few who do in order to smear the relative many that don’t is not only false propaganda but takes serious analytical attention away from the social and psychological factors influencing the actions of those males that do.

Lies about how bad the enemy is, are often supported by dodgy, fabricated or often no evidence, just outright assertion. In other cases, sophisticated levels of false or incriminating evidence are produced by special state departments tasked with creating such falsehoods. The ‘Protocols of Zion’; the ‘Zinoviov Letter’ are notorious examples of such practices. There are books full of such activities and their exposures. In terms of the middle east, I personally, would not trust the truth of any Israeli or Hamas claim or counter-claim against their opponents or the statements of either sides political representatives. In these days of artificial intelligence and photo-shopping, I would certainly count myself naive or stupid if I believed anything I read or saw on TV or in news photos, unless it was sufficiently confirmed by independent, trust worthy evidence and confirmed by non-partisan third parties.

I was advised long ago by one of my teachers to always keep my ‘crap detectors’ well honed because in modern societies there is a lot of crap being churned out hourly and daily. And that advice was given in the days of radio, newspapers and TV. In other words before AI and internet plarforms allowed anyone to say anything without any attempt at rationality or accuracy. My life since those days at college have provided ample evidence that most of what those in authority; government, politics, and management say should be viewed with great suspicion. Indeed, the more elevated the authority articulating any so called ‘conveniently’ manipulated facts, the more that suspicion is warranted.

It may or may not be true that Hamas has bases under schools and hospitals, but I also know that Israeli elites having claimed that this is so, if none are actually found under schools or hospitals, Israeli troops will be unable to resist ‘planting’ some ‘evidence’. As with other elites, those with power, opportunity and motive in the Israeli hierarchy are certainly able to ‘stage’ some event or fill some space with sufficient incriminating material and equipment, to fool those who wish to be fooled. Retrospectively justifying having done something nasty such as bombing, shelling and killing, teachers, doctors and patients in medical locations, has long been in the play book of black ops state actors. Furthermore, the Israeli elite have authorised and perpetrated so much killing and destruction in Gaza that they probably think that without such ‘evidence’ the global disgust they have already brought upon themselves will be even greater. If so they are correct.

Moreover, planting evidence to justify a crime pre-supposes a knowledge that what has been done is morally wrong and that planting evidence is also legally wrong. Technically getting away with such crimes does not mean they did not happen.
However, I suggest that even if it were true that every school, hospital, public building and apartment block obliterated in Gaza had one or more Hamas operatives hiding there, this would still not lessen the injustice and crimes against humanity of killing tens of thousands of men, women and children who were not perpetrators of crimes against Jews or Christian’s in Israel or elsewhere.

Is it not a fact that even enemy combatants in most previous wars, ancient and modern – once trapped and surrounded by superior numbers – were taken prisoners and became prisoners of war, not obliterated along with non combatants by remotely collapsing buildings on them and leaving them to die of injuries or starvation? Such obviously unnecessary callous cruelty and inhuman indifference to members of their own species, by the Israeli military is a phenomena previously restricted to the Nazis, the Stalinists, the Argentinian Junta and Plantation slave owners.

Furthermore, the enormous, vindictive cruelty inflicted by the armed forces of Israel on Gaza and the West Bank, plus those of Russia against Ukrainian villages and towns, together with the enormous indifference and silent consent of the global elites everywhere to this latest example of genocide against the Palestinian working classes, should also act as a wakeup call to the working classes of the entire world. The wake up call is that in 2023 the charade of elites being against crimes against humanity is unequivocally over; that elite nationalism and elite capitalism is yet again engaged in a full-on war with collective humanity, albeit one or two national communities at a time.

This ongoing spectacle is so horrific that at a superficial level of thinking, what is happening in the 21st century world can appear to be, (and has been said to be) a form of madness by elites. However, using such terms provides no ‘explanation’ at all, for there is method to such apparent ‘madness’. The hierarchical mass society system has run out of new resources to exploit and so it is in a protracted period of decline, economically, ecologically, intellectually and morally. Consequently, in order to retain their privileged positions, its elites are turning in upon each other and upon their own citizens. What is occuring in response to ordinary Palestinian resistance to their oppression by the militarised hierarchical mass society elites of Israel, is also happening elsewhere in the world and this universal elite response to their system in crisis, prefigures what will happen to all forms of working class resistance to their oppression by hierarchical mass society elites.

Whether future uprisings occur in Asia, America, Africa or Europe, unless the hierarchical system collapses before hand, the available might of a militarised state or combinations of them, will be used to suppress any concerted resistance, uprisings or revolutions by ordinary citizens. Evidence? It has already happened in Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, Myanmar, etc. Movements aiming at radically changing the current system and its latest mode of production will be ruthlessly stamped upon by elite self interest. In such cases all ordinary human beings resisting oppression have effectively become, or will effectively become the equivalent of Palestinians in their own geographical versions of Gaza or the West Bank.

Nevertheless, in contrast to this ‘reactionary’ development among the global elites, mass popular demonstrations world wide, over issues of oppression have long illustrated where the remaining sources of humanity reside. This is so even though they failed to prevent the war against Iraq, motivated as it was, by the false weapons of mass destruction claims by Blair, Bush and their national and global cronies. They just went ahead anyway, with silence or complicity of most other global elites. Mass popular demonstrations world wide in support of Palestinian people again demonstrated in 2023 where the source of humanity still resides and this too has failed to halt the blitzkrieg war against the masses in Gaza and the West Bank.

This latter case is also a war motivated by false claims – this time the false claim of occupational legitimacy! These events strongly suggest that on a more global and ecological scale, saving humanity and the planets climate and ecology as a whole, is not going to be spearheaded by an elite who have so little in common with humanity at its ordinary everyday level, and so little in common with life on earth in all its myriad species forms. Resolutely turning their backs on what is really important is a result of a life-long elite reflex of turning their attention exclusively toward their own selfish self-interests.

What is really important to humanity is actually achieving peace, justice and sustainability, not just hoping for it. The dream of almost effortless transitions to better times are over. The dream that popular elections can make the lives of national communities better; that trade union strikes can bring improved results for everyone; that at least a core of politicians are in politics to help others, not just to help themselves; that modern hierarchical mass societies are a source of civilised behaviour; that people under this hierarchical mass society system have the right to self-determination; that the elite can eventually be persuaded by rational argument, to stop polluting the planet and killing the myriads of species which support all life on earth. In actual fact, the historic and contemporary reality is both dark and stark. It is a reality of  elite governed hierarchical mass societies  versus humanity and the rest of the life on earth species.

So the future of global humanity and the general life support system of integrated and inter-dependent species evolution, will of necessity have to be decided and constructed by the ordinary working people of planet earth. Like life itself, the humanity of the human species, is reborn with each generation and if humane characteristics are not socialised out of individuals by them becoming part of the self-indulgent elite, these humane characteristics are overwhelmingly retained within the majority of ordinary people. Their humanism may not be fully thought out,  considerably hindered by the dominant dualist framework of western thinking and not yet revolutionary, but it is there nonetheless.

They are the only section of humanity that has little or no vested interest in continuing to labour in the equivalent of a 24/7 socio-economic treadmill of production that rewards an elite, while impoverishing the many and damages the atmosphere, the water quality, the fertility of land and the ecological balance of life on earth. This undoubted fact means there is still a need for the ordinary people of the world to overcome any less important differences and unite, because as difficult as that may be, there is an amazing world of variety and species interdependence to lose if we do not.

However, there is another warning that arises from documented history as well as being illuminated and confirmed by contemporary events. As long as the hierarchical mass society form is accepted as a legitimate form of socio-economic organisation, little else matters. It will matter not whether the hierarchical elite chosen to lead them are of left, right, centre, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Atheist, Socialist, Communist or Fascist persuasions. The socio-economic logic and the material conditions of hierarchical mass societies, at the very best determine what transpires within them, and at their worst dictates what must be done by elites to maintain and sustain these systems. Thinking that a different ruling elite can solve the problems endemic under all previous ruling elites is an intellectual product of cultural and ideological entrapment by the form and content of one dominant but disfunctional type of social organisation.

To realise a really revolutionary transformation of how all life on earth is treated, any future popular uprising needs to include the intention to achieve a revolutionay transformation of human social and economic forms of organisation. Human societies will need to cease to be socially hierarchical, economically unequal and anthropocentric. One or even two of these transformations would be insufficient, all three are essential for social stability and ecological sustainability. Finally, it is important to remind ourselves of the well known unreliability of statements and claims by all nation state elites in their military wars of possession or annexation or also in their internal civil wars undertaken to maintain their domination. Truth is still the first casualty of war and; in 2023 the ‘Dream of Bourgeois Progress’ is clearly over.

Roy Ratcliffe (November 2023)