War, Covid And Narratives Of Control

I feel like reality is coming undone.

I feel like there is increasingly little point in declaring those things that are actually true, because it makes no difference to anything.

I feel like there is a giant cleaving between the values of good, ordinary, empathetic people and the values of the people that run our world and tell the stories about our world.

And that truly evil things are manifesting in this gap.

I feel like we are being led to the darkest places that any civilization could ever be led.

That we are being led to collective destruction.

A few things have made me feel like this recently.

First the outward expansion of Israeli violence. Because as it dismembers more children in another country, we’re being told, as we’ve been told for 11 months of genocide, that Israel is again acting in response, that it is all for defence, all for security.

History has been flattened.

Everything began in the blink of an eye.

When it comes to Israel, events are like the Big Bang, forever just happening, preceded by nothing.

This is how this story is told to us by the people elevated to help us make sense of the world. The journalists at the BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times, etc.

Their stories read like IDF press releases, framed by a Marvel-style good vs evil narrative. Israel killed 500 in Lebanon, including women and children, bombed its capital city, but all we hear about is big bad Hezbollah. Why did Hezbollah come into being? No matter. They are baddies firing rockets and that is all you need to know.

Look at this BBC story.

Israel 'strikes'. The headline emphasizes the military targets, civilian casualties are ignored even when the story acknowledges, like here, that it was a residential area. Hezbollah is 'powerful,’ an adjective providing no context. Powerful in relation to what? But this word reassures us that these are not feeble victims. We can feel ok about this violence. The use of ‘Iranian-backed’ is also subtle propaganda, coding for the good vs evil narrative, further reassurance that the violence was justified because Iran is bad. The strike is a 'major blow' to them. Is it really? How? Why? This is entirely subjective, editorializing presented as a fact. Imagine if October 7th had been bloodlessly described as a ‘major blow’ to Israel.

It wasn’t always quite like this.

I did a bit of research into how Israeli violence was portrayed the last time they bombed Beirut, in 1981.

The first noticeable thing was how the media used to refer to ‘bombs’ not ‘strikes.’ Strikes of course are the favoured language of security state propagandists, conjuring up imagines of straight lines from the sky and total precision. This shift in language is no accident.

Compare that BBC story with this from the Washington Post in 1981.

Israel ‘bombed’, the neighbourhoods are ’heavily populated,’ the implication being that the attack was not precise, that it will have killed civilians. Even the word attack in this context is rare now. The story is also quick to centre the emotions of the actual victims on the ground, with Palestinians and Lebanese described as ‘dazed and fearful.’ The attacks also came in ‘waves,’ emotive language that helps us empathize, as we should, with the victims, not the perpetrators of violence.

What else don’t we need to know? We don’t need to know about the expansionist rhetoric coming out of the mouths and Twitter feeds of Israeli government ministers about Lebanon. Unless you are very online you will not have read that an Israeli government minister tweeted that ‘Lebanon, even though it has a flag and even though it has political institutions does not meet the definition of a country’ and that Israel must ‘recalculate a course regarding the border line with the entity that calls itself the state of Lebanon.’

You certainly didn’t read about it on the BBC, in The Guardian or New York Times.

How many people know that Israel was closely allied with apartheid South Africa and that in the 1970s, Israel offered to sell South Africa a nuclear bomb? How many know about Israel’s long history of being a state sponsor of terrorism, a history almost totally obscured by the western media and political class?

So now a nuclear-armed state, with full western backing, gets to execute its expansionist wet dreams and murder innocent people with impunity. And they get to do this in significant part because an alternate reality was invented to suppress outrage among western electorates that could have demanded changes to Israel policy.

And if Israel ever feels truly threatened, we know what they’ll do. They’ll vaporize the planet and usher in nuclear winter. Known as the Samson Option, Israel has a policy, in extremis, to detonate its nuclear stockpile and bring the entire world down with it.

Who can look at the current situation and say for certain that isn’t where this is all heading?

More evidence of narrative control can be seen in recent headlines about the impact of Covid. No, not the virus. The lockdowns.

We’ve seen numerous headlines in recent months about how the measures intended to stop people dying from the virus, not the virus itself, are causing population-wide health issues. A few weeks ago The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC and others ran stories that lockdowns harmed teen brains, stories which totally omitted the fact that covid infection in the studied population was, to quote the study itself ‘widespread.’ And the study, despite noting that covid was rampant in the studied population, did not control for covid infection as a variable. Incredible. These stories further failed to mention that hundreds of papers by this point have demonstrated that SarsCov2 infects and harms the brain.

I would call it journalistic malpractice, but I’m beginning to think these errors are something more insidious, something more calculated.

This suspicion only grew when it was revealed the research was funded by the Bezos foundation. At the least it showed how billionaire NGOs can get huge press coverage for dodgy research simply because they have large and connected press teams. And how incurious journalists now simply regurgitate press releases from billionaire-funded sources.

Then this week the Telegraph, Britain’s most popular right-wing newspaper, said not just that lockdowns caused all the harm, but that they ‘destroyed our lives’ and the harm would persist for generations. Destroyed our lives! For generations! Generations of harm because some kids stayed home a bit longer in total, across 2 or 3 periods, than the summer holidays last. Generations of harm for adults who had to work from home for a few months and couldn’t eat inside restaurants!

And you know that people buy this. I know it because I hear it. Because cognitively it is comforting. Lockdowns are controlable, a social-political intervention. If they are the things that caused the harm, at least they have gone. If the virus is the thing that caused the harm, a physical and biological reality, that’s scarier, because that’s still here.

Better then for our mental health to tell ourselves children’s stories.

Talking of children and covid.

On the front page of reddit is the popular r/AskReddit where people pose random questions for the community to answer. One of those questions this week was ‘did anyone get any permanent damage from a covid infection?’ Amid the thousands of answers there was this:

How can you not be disgusted by the denial and callousness of a society that disables children. A society that decides it’s going to play out a massive game of eugenics to see who has the genetics to survive repeated infections with a novel virus. A society where the narrative control is so complete many would believe a few weeks at home, not a virus, did this to an 11-year-old.

Also this week southern Britain flooded with historic rainfall levels, tropical volumes in a non-tropical country. This followed historic flooding in central Europe. And now, for a second year running, farmers are panicking that they can’t sow seeds or the seeds they have planted have been ruined.

The spectre of food shortages now advances with every extreme weather event.

But still amid climate collapse, AI data centres expand, busting carbon budgets, consuming more electricity that entire countries, and pushing us faster and closer to the brink of global famine. And for what? For nothing any of us ever wanted or asked for.

Here’s something else I think about.

I think about how everyone alive today is living the furthest in the future that anyone has ever lived.

We are living on the edge of everything that has ever been, and every day we wake up that remains true.

What does that mean? It means no one has ever lived within these specific circumstances arranged in this particular configuration.

I think about this a lot when people say everything is going to be ok, or this or that has happened before, and everything is fine.

This hasn’t happened before. Everything really might not be fine.

I also think about about how dangerous it is being at the edge of a technological future that does not inspire, but instead invokes fear and dread. A future of technological change that promises enslavement, not liberation. A future that creeps closer with every new bastardization of the internet. Adverts when you pause Netflix? What the fuck is that about. If a screen is on, I suppose it is inefficient for it to not try and sell us something.

There have never been more ways to force-feed us capitalist and imperial propaganda.

It is precisely these kinds of circumstances that inspire reactionary politics and politicians who lure us back to the past with fascist ideals and traditional aesthetics. The trad wife, the cottage core, the log cabin.

A retreat into basics as complexity abounds. But I also get it. I get it.

There is something dangerous about being on this edge while led by politicians who offer nothing of substance, who are afraid to channel popular anger in moral and courageous directions. Politicians unwilling to take ownership of the technology and forcefully mould it to serve us, the billionaires and lobbyists be damned. Politicians who tell us the only good change we can vote for is no change at all. Who punch down, not up, and urge us to join in. Have you noticed how any compassionate rhetoric towards migrants and asylum seekers has evaporated from mainstream politics? Hegemonic nativist rhetoric now dominates.

In the face of this steady march to the bad place, where it feels as if the levers of control are so completely out of our reach, nihilism draws us in. The fuck it, let it all collapse position becomes thrilling. Freeing even.

I feel it, don’t you?

But I’m scared by that. Scared by what a total, widespread loss of control would look like, feel like. And really I know we must do everything to resist it, because the ones to suffer and die would not be the ones who deserve to suffer and die.

Yet it feels closer all the time.

In my most depressed moments I tell myself nothing matters, but again, really, I know everything matters. This duality at the heart of existence is one of the hardest forces to navigate.

We have never lived in this world, a world with historic amounts of climate pollution, or with a set of political actors arranged as they are, with genocidal states so far forward in their own history, states sitting atop a history of murder, a history which reinforces their murders tomorrow. In a world with a new brain damaging virus tearing through everyone two or three times a year.

We’ve never lived liked this.

And we won’t live like this for much longer.

We can’t.