Calling Genocide Genocide

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, crown jewel in the progressive treasure chest and bane of hard ass conservative white supremicist Christian nationalists, has finally, after exhaustive in country documentation and research, finally, at long last, belatedly, deigned to call a spade a spade,as it were. Genocide is now genocide in Gaza. I, and presumably millions of other less than percipient televised news watchers, probably could have told them that, oh, months ago. You wonder what Hamas was thinking. You always did. You know what Israel is thinking, and always was. It is this: Now, we have the pretext we have long sought; a pretext for the elimination of arch enemy Hamas, and the horses they rode in on, namely, the Palestinian people. Hamas was and is willing to precipitate the extermination of the people over whom it allegedly governs and whom it laughably claims to protect, all for its own glorification and martyrdom. The butcher of Tel Aviv, Benjamin Netanyahu, is quite willing to oblige, believing, like any normal right wing ideologue-demagogue, that he can justify the unjustifiable with platitudes and bombs, predictably. The United States, Biden or no Biden, is content to assist in the Israeli genocidal project, and to issue lame press releases of meek condemnation and threats of fewer gift bombs and bullets for use by the murderers. In other words, to stand by, stand back, and do...nothing.. There is, as the astute like to say, more than enough blame to go around. Blame lord Balfour. Blame the British. Blame the failure of the Hebrews and the Christians to unite in the fommation of a single, unified religion, dedicated to the glorification and love of the monotheistic deity. Truman Capote, the great gay writer whose seminal 1966 novel "In Cold Blood" detailed the true story of the vicious, senseless murder of the Clutter family in rural Kansas, wrote the novel to make a point. Its not the point that many think it is, that killing is bad, that many misread, and keep misreading. The point is not that brutal murders of a livng wholesome family is a bad thing. After all, we all, including Truman Capote, already knew that. The point is that we are all, as a species, as a supposedly civilized intelligent group of beings, participatants in all that we create, and all that we bestow upon the world. No, this in no way abrogates our individual responsibility for or individual actions. We act, and we experience the consequences thereof. The point is that we are all complicit, we are all a part, whether great or small, of the enormous panorama we call "the human experience", to wit, of the societies we create in which love, hope, despair, and gratuitous violence all play a part. Every single one of us is directly responsible for every murder which ever takes place, and for every noble act of the heart and soul nobly enacted by every loving human entity who ever walked across the face of the Earth. Truman capote said this, straight to Johnny's face, straight to all our faces, live and in livng color on the Tonight Show, starring Johnny Carson. We all killed the Clutter family, all of us, together, as a unit. Carson sat and looked straight into the eyes of Truman capote, and neither winked, nodded, nor offered a smart ass hilarious dry witted rejoinder. Johnny Carson was transfixed, impressed, duly. So was I, if also a bit bemused, for I was only a teenager at the time. So it turns out that genocide is still genocide, and that we are all responsible for it, anywhere and every where it happens. Truman Caopte, I think, had a point. So did Bertolt Brechet, perhaps, when he wrote in a poem "There shall remain of our cities but the wind that blew through them"... All that remains for us is to hope and pray that Bertolt Brecht was wrong, and that we, with our weak and transitory powers of action, can finally make it so.