The Moral Rot At The Heart Of Civilisation

This civilisation is letting a genocide happen.

Israel and the west are to blame for the genocide but not one country, bar Yemen, has come to the material aid of the Palestinians.

Not one government in the entire world has done anything.

Shoutout to Hezbollah and a few militant groups in Iraq. Well done South Africa for bringing the ICC case against Netanyahu and his fellow Zionazis.

But no government on Earth used its state capacity, used its navy or its air force or its army to do anything to help the Palestinians.

A military mission to stop Israel would have been nice. No-fly zones and the like, with the threat of force. But in the absence of that, many of us would have settled for a humanitarian mission, a country or countries sending a fleet of ships and planes to deliver aid, come what may.

These vehicles could have been unarmed. The country or countries could have made it very clear to Israel this was solely a humanitarian mission, it would have called their bluff and created a stark binary choice: bomb unarmed aid ships of a nation state, effectively a declaration of war, or let them through.

But no, nothing. Looking at a list of the roughly two hundred countries in the world, well over half would have the capacity to send aid via air force or navy assets.

On the ladder of complicity in genocide, the western states supplying Israel with the military equipment and political cover for genocide sit on the top rung, but the countries with the greatest capacity to have done something, to have carried out a humanitarian mission, must sit on the next rung down.

In the end it has just been empty words of condemnation and a few symbolic gestures on trade.

In the end it has come down to a handful of activists on a crowdfunded sailing boat to be the moral conscience of the world and do something not one single country in the world did.

It’s hard to get your head around.

This inaction and apathy in the face of an actual genocide, in response to twenty months of 4k videos of children being shredded, blown up, ripped apart, beheaded, burnt alive and starved, signals a deeper moral rot at the heart of our societies.

A moral rot that cannot be separated from neoliberalism and how money and profit have come to dominate our brains, dominate our political systems and dominate our world.

When it comes to a unifying vision for society, the only thing most of us ever hear from our governments is one word: growth.

Growth is the spiritual centre around which the entirety of our politics is orientated. And it doesn’t mean anything at all! We can’t be richer. We have all the food and technology and money we could possibly need. We have never lived in more abundant times. The richest people are richer than countries. Footballers and tennis players are billionaires. The idea that if we just had another one, five, ten percent of economic growth we could create that extra bit more we need and solve all the problems is actually a comical insult to our intelligence.

Yet this is the myth and the legend that underpins all of modern politics. This is the story that so many people fall for and buy in to. Growth is the secular religion for an areligious age. And as such, it must be worshiped. Anything that creates growth is to be lauded and encouraged, and anything that hampers it is to be rejected. To speak out against growth is a crime against the religion.

Even a genocide must be no obstacle to growth.

Which is why, just a few days after the UK’s defence secretary David Lammy said the country had suspended trade talks with Israel (because even the genocide enablers in the British government couldn’t justify starving children), the UK’s trade envoy to Israel was live tweeting from Tel Aviv about his trade mission to the country.

The moral cesspit of neoliberalism looks at a genocide on the one hand, and a percentage point of growth on the other, and chooses growth every time.

A few weeks ago I revealed that the son of the attorney general for the Conservative Party in the UK, (Lord) David Wolfson, who was a minister in Boris Johnson’s government, is a soldier in the IDF. Sam Wolfson went to Israel to join the IDF in 2022, participated in the genocide, and only returned to London earlier this year. He’s now working at the right-wing neoliberal think tank Policy Exchange, because killing civilians and doing a new holocaust, rather than being an obstacle to a career path, is a valued skill. The more death you create, the more doors you open and the richer and more powerful you can be.

Neoliberalism enthusiastically rewards death-eating immorality.

Just look around!

From Donald Trump to Elon Musk to Tony Blair to Joe Biden to Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel to Jeff Bezos to the bank bosses to the arms company bosses to the fossil fuel CEOs. Boringly the list goes on and on and on and on. Some of quite literally the worst people in the history of the world with the most blood on their hands are the richest people with the most power.

Neoliberal economics has created a moral cesspit of a civilisation in which there’s no financial upside in stopping a genocide.

On the contrary, the financial upside is in genocide.

From the American mercenaries running the sham aid distributions centres in Gaza, to the software being provided by Google, Microsoft and Meta to smooth the genocide, to the AI being provided by Palantir to track the Palestinians, to the missiles being provided by Lockheed Martin to liquify them.

The money is in the killing, not the saving.

The money is in the enabling, not the stopping.

The money is in the trade deals and the good relations.

Morality is all downside.

This is why I cannot stand to look at the faux moral posturing over Ukraine by the west. The truth? The money is in keeping that war going, funding Ukraine, rearming Europe. Latest estimates are that the war has caused 1.4 million casualties. These are absolutely horrifying numbers. Wanting more dead young men isn’t moral. Supporting Ukraine has nothing to do with good or bad, right or wrong. It’s only about blood money, resources and strategic interests.

And this moral cesspit of a civilisation is one in which we all swim, whether we like it or not.

How many times have you said to someone “X should happen because it would be good” or “Y shouldn’t happen because it’s bad” and their sincere response, hollowed of all morality, has been along the lines of: but who would pay for it/there’s no money in it.

Our brains and value systems have been rewired to think about the world only in terms of money and profit.

This is why the foundations of our existence as biological beings - the air, the soil, the water - are being demolished. The money is in death, not in life. Good or bad and right or wrong don’t enter the calculation.

It’s hard to look at this civilisation, a civilisation tearing down the pillars of our own existence, a civilisation that allowed a genocide to happen in such a visible way, and see any redeeming features.

People are worth saving. Beauty is worth saving. The animals and the rivers and the seas and the ecology are worth saving. But from the political to the economic to the legal, institutionally there’s nothing worth saving.

The liberals and the centrists have had their shot at reforming this mess. But the contradictions at the heart of their ideology (capitalists, but good ones!) couldn’t be resolved, and they’ve only ended up perpetuating the horrors of the system.

I’ve said it before but I’ve never felt it more keenly than after watching the west collaborate on genocide and the rest of the world do nothing to stop it: the future will be radically pro-social and anti-capitalist or there won’t be a future at all.