How 'Israel' Has Attrited The Human Attention Span
'Israel' is waging a war of attrition against not just human life but the human attention span. Mass murder has been laundered through the mass media and is not actually news anymore. After 10 months of genocide, it's not new.
Hospital, flour, and child massacres have gone from being headlines to footnotes, from extraordinary to ordinary, from scenes to statistics. The colony of 'Israel' and the colonizers of America have legitimized every sort of murder, torture, and genocide, and that's just what we live with now. That's just the blood we swim in, in a goldfish bowl with goldfish attention spans. The monstrous has become mundane. The evil has become every day. The abominable has become normal.
When the martyr Aaron Bushnell immolated himself in February, he said, “this is what our ruling class has decided will be normal” and it's still true. The only choices in the UK election were genocide and genocide and it's the same across increasingly illusory liberal democracies. It's becoming increasingly obvious to even imperial citizens that no 'one' is in charge and that their votes are worse than meaningless. That their elections are just the ritual anointment of regular atrocity, like choosing Coke or Diet Coke, or having a salad bar inside a Wendy's. Nations, international institutions, media, and universities; these have all been revealed as illusions around a literally inhuman ruling class that simply does not give a fuck about human life and doesn't even bother hiding it anymore.
Now the journalists are dead and the hospitals are destroyed and no one can even count the dead, let alone help the living. The diminishing millions of Palestinians that survive are traumatized generationally and the billions watching are not doing well either. I'm not. But at least we have the coping mechanism of 'noping', of just checking out, whether consciously or unconsciously. God knows I'm guilty. How many dead children can you see before breakfast? I've written that post twice because it keeps happening. At some point, psychologically, you have to block it out. The bleeding is still leading, but at some point people just stop reading. That's what they're counting on, while they count their money and discount all the blood.
The cheat code on 'news' is that it must be new, and if we're witnessing multiple hospital, refugee camp, and child massacres, it stops being news entirely. The Genocide of Gaza is not news anymore. It's history. The conscript colony of 'Israel' is also history, as is the carrying White Empire, as is the carrying climate, but this is cold comfort to the hot blood still spilling. A dying empire has nothing but death to offer, but that it has aplenty. The tactical massacres of White Empire are only accelerating in strategic defeat, but that doesn't make the fact that we are living through a literal holocaust any more tolerable. Just because it is tolerated doesn't make it so.
Like the last Holocaust, this one will keep going until armed forces dismantle 'Israel' completely and liberate the extermination camps. And the only people doing that are Hamas and the Palestinian Resistance, Hezbollah, Iran, and Yemen, with a shout-out to the Popular Mobilization Forces across Iraq and Syria. All the people we're supposed to piously condemn while advocating 'peace'. But as Kwame Ture said, peace is the white man's word. What these men braver than you or me are fighting for is justice. This is already World War III if you count colored people and the Axis Of Resistance are fighting the genocide in front of us.
Given that Hamas is a popular movement, 'Israel' has concluded that the only option is killing or cleansing the whole population. The continued extermination campaign in Gaza is a tactic by Empire. There are meetings about this, about which hospitals to hit, about where the refugees are, about how much food is getting in (and how to stop it). The fact that these massacres have no strategic value is immaterial, because there is no strategic thinking happening within Empire anymore. Just witness Joe Biden, a fitting representative for late-stage Empire, increasingly senile and incoherent but still quite capable of killing people. Or the anointment of Kamala Harris, who has never won a single primary, because they're not even pretending anymore. White Empire is just going on muscle-memory now, and all it knows is genocide and corruption. That's how the colonial empires came in and it's how they're going out.
Burying the news in history might be a brilliant strategic move if it led to further imperial victory, but the material conditions are not the same anymore. America is not fighting for the Lebensraum of their continental campaigns, they're just bombing an area not much bigger than Manhattan, over and over, in front of the whole world. There's no more land to win here, anyone with a heart has lost faith in the whole imperial project, and 'Israel' has in fact lost territory to both the south and north. Meanwhile, the greater imperial army has lost the Red Sea and even air supremacy. They were trying to project power, but all they've shown is that the whole colonial project is fatally wounded, wildly lashing out at women and children and running from men in the field.
Genociding men, women, and children might have a point if—like in America, Australia, or Canada—you can 'finish the job', but that took hundreds of years in entirely different circumstances. White Empire today has barely a decade left and the whole carry climate is gone this century. All they're doing in Gaza is writing themselves out of history with an exclamation mark. Of course, as clearly I can see this in history, but in the present my eyes are clouded with tears. All I see is misery, and I feel miserable.
'Israel' is seriously asking the question, ‘how much genocide will people take?’ and the answer is a lot. 'Israel' has already killed at least 10% of the population of Gaza (186,000 by the now outdated Lancet estimate) and the decimation has become just background noise. A rattling hum in the machine we live in, as it crunches bodies and bones. Massacres that would have been headlines a year ago just pass before dead eyes that have seen too much. Your mind is a site of battle, and they're trying to attrit your attention span down to the bloodless bone.
The massacres have become mundane, the atrocities have become historical curiosities, the genocide has become the general reality that we just live with, while braver people don't. The Resistance says, “It is a jihad of victory or martyrdom” and the Empire have martyred the attention spans of billions of decent people across the globe. But, mashallah, the spirit of resistance lives on.
It doesn't make the news, but White Empire is history and as much as they try to white-out this holocaust, they cannot write it out. As much as they try to kill the future by literally killing children, their killing machine doesn't work against men anymore, and their mind control is descending into an obvious farce. We are witnessing not news anymore but history, whether we pay attention to it or not.