A Revolution, not a Recalibration (That's What we Want)

The pack of wolves that devoured Gaza are trying to lull us to sleep, but we must be adamant: institutions and norms that have betrayed humanity must not be allowed to survive the Gaza Holocaust

Alon Mizrahi

I am not, and never have been, a man of institutions and establishments. The combination of architecture and authority has always given me an actual fear of death; whenever I faced such a combination, since my first day in school, I had to run away or engage very lightly, always with an eye on the nearest exit.

When I wrote my first book (dedicated to the subject of freedom) in the politically useless language of Hebrew, much of it was about the danger establishments posed to personal, philosophical, and political liberty.

Granted, I grew up and spent my life in the deeply conflicted and now notoriously deranged Israel, where establishments are actually tools of merciless colonization, but anti-establishmentarianism is not only about Israel: political power has used establishments and institutions (as well as language and visual icons) to shape society and consciousness since the dawn of the political community.

Alon Mizrahi

In my understanding of the world, the less room an individual has to shape and express their own views and beliefs in a given society, the less likely that society is to do the right thing when faced with a moral dilemma.

The colonial wars of the last 60 years and how they were framed in official Western narratives, and the offensive, outlandish support Western establishments have been showing the Gaza Holocaust, provide robust backing to this theory.

The more establishment, conformity, and thought-policing, the less morality (which makes total sense, because no one needs to curtail the discussion of positive things).

The importance of being an outsider (and why alt-MAGA can do what Democrats can’t)

There isn’t a shortage of reasons why left-wing opposition has been so weak and ineffective throughout the West in recent decades, if not downright draconian and complicit in all the squalor and ruin of capitalist-colonialism (and I name one quite interesting one at the end of this article).

But one reason I have been able to diagnose is the growing and now sweeping institutionalization of liberal and left-wing thinking and representation, including among many who consider themselves radical.

In virtually every left-wing and liberal party in the West, the backbone, skeleton, mind, and heart of the system have been shaped not by direct life and street experience, a marginalized group’s piercing sense of justice, or blue-collar hard work and decency, but by inherited privileges, papers, titles, and departments.

The sense of disconnectedness and highbrow, articulate inhumanity that we all have, coming from those people, was rather inevitable.

Whereas anti-Vietnam, pro-equality protesters in the American 1960s understood that the establishment was not their friend, with many proud to think of themselves as a counterculture movement that rejects materialism, ownership, and stability, left-wingers and liberals, in recent decades, have focused on real estate, investment portfolios, high-paying corporate gigs, tenure, or all of the above.

Hippies weren’t intimidated, but exhilarated, by the idea of existing beyond conventional norms. They wanted to transform society and challenge its most basic beliefs. Our generation’s lefties and liberals don’t want to challenge the status quo (or their own bourgeois habits); they want to immerse themselves in it and become its winners. In many ways, they are the status quo and the actual wall of resistance to change, as Britain’s Labor and America’s Democratic Party have shown us with absolute clarity over the past two years, or maybe since we can remember.

Interestingly, the opposite process happened on the right. Whereas right-wingers used to be the thought and language police, and promote the image of institutions as almost divine, in the last 10-15 years, it’s right-wing circles that gave rise to actual anti-establishmentarianism in the West: they don’t idolize the banks, the universities, legacy media or the political collection of people the left loves calling ‘science‘ for some very prosaic reason (members of their tribe hold all those lucrative, influential and presigious positions, like, duh).

They question and doubt, and it is a critical function in any society.

It is no coincidence that those right-wing groups are the fiercest critics of Israel’s special place in the American theater, and no wonder that they are the ones pushing hardest for the exposure of the Epstein files, for AIPAC to be registered as a foreign lobby group, or for the US to stop going after imperial wars, especially Israel-initiated ones.

This doesn’t mean in any way that they are flawless; I am simply taking note of the authority-rejecting impulse, which is vital for political change, and which the established left and liberal world has lost completely, putting political-correctness and politeness above all else (which is precisely what you’d expect from people who are really commited to defending the status quo, and not challanging it).

Why has this healthy atmosphere of revolt taken over parts of the right, but has almost zero traction on the left? Well, it’s because the right is not led by upper-class people with tenures and portfolios, but by middle-class and working-class people with a fiery desire to change society.

If you’re on the bright side of the way things are, you’re not going to work to change anything.

Down with the BBC, the NYT, the Ivy League, NATO&Co.

This long introduction is meant to make one clear argument: we must not let the Zionist liberals and lefties succeed in their conspiracy with the Zionist right-wingers to dilute and make empty of meaning the reaction to the Gaza Holocaust.

We need to choose rebellion over fake, immoral stability.

It is on us, the simple people who care, not to let the rage and grief be co-opted by Western establishments, which have already, through style and content, begun to minimize and marginalize the Gaza Holocaust and its Palestinian victims.

Such an abomination as the Gaza Holocaust being allowed and encouraged in our midst requires a powerful, historic reckoning. And the conclusion that must follow is that institutions that served the Israeli agenda must cease to exist in the post-genocide world. Any call that seeks to achieve less than that will ultimately fall short of achieving any meaningful change.

As part of freeing ourselves from bourgeois (and criminally naive) thinking habits - those habits that allowed the Gaza Holocaust to happen - a much more radical approach is in order. Not just because of Gaza’s babies, but because Western institutions and establishments have become the enemy of change and justice and the enemy of Western societies and mankind.

There is no reforming an institution that has dedicated itself to promoting child murder, like the BBC, Sky News, American academia, and so many other Western institutions have done. This is the crucial part. This is where we will fail if we don’t have enough courage.

We don’t need to be obsessed with preserving the order that brought us here, which makes us feel a false sense of security and comfort. We need to be on a religious-like quest to overrun and overturn it.

While the fascists and right-wingers push ideas that will break Western systems and societies, the liberals and left-wingers have deluded themselves into thinking that their job is to uphold those institutions and establishments.

But this is not our job. Our job and mission are to build a just society and world. We cannot have those if we keep in place the institutions and establishments that sustained the worst human catastrophe that we have witnessed in our lifetime.

This is the time to start thinking about new institutions in every field of life. The old ones, from the UNSC to corporations-run political systems to genocide-safeguarding schools and Zionist-controlled municipal councils everywhere, have betrayed and deceived us.

We want a revolution, not a recalibration, and it definitely, definitely also applies to what Judaism, Christianity, and Islam stand for, as the establishments of the three have proven absolute rubbish in the Gaza Holocaust as well.

Gaza and the cost of living crisis loaded the atmosphere with explosive gases. An economic collapse will most probably bring about the blast

Some historical processes have a dynamic of their own and require little direction and involvement from would-be players. The final chapter of the Western capitalist-colonial system seems to be one of those huge cataclysmic events that simply happen, as if without anyone directing them.

People these days are saying and thinking things that used to be taboo, and it seems that the entire structure is rocking and shaking in place, unable to hold the weight of all the blatant contradictions, absurdities, and cruelties: the racism and paranoia that used to feed imperial adventures are not as strong as they used to be, and the contrast between a small club of near-trillionaires and millions upon millions who can hardly make rent and put food on the table has become too vulgar and disgusting.

The political and military system that enabled the USD's dominance is fading, and the US is already perceived as lagging behind China in some important metrics. Plus, the ability to sell Americans a military costing a trillion dollars annually and endless war overseas, when they can’t afford healthcare and basic necessities, is already mostly nonexistent. Very few people believe this anymore.

The beliefs, assumptions, and capabilities that allowed the West to dominate humanity for centuries are no longer valid. It is very sad, and very telling, that their final collective act was mass murdering the children of Gaza.

But they did all that using their establishments and institutions as weapons of mass subjugation and destruction, from finance to tech, from medicine to culture. We have to have other means of creating stuff, communicating, learning, working, and using our time and money.

Perhaps America was only great because the USSR made it so

When was the US really great? Not during slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, or the Great Depression. America was arguably great (or ‘great‘, because we’re not forgetting Korea and Vietnam, or the KKK) from the Second World War to, more or less, the seventies. That’s the American golden age, right?

But what was it that made that period so great? Well, maybe the fact that it was the most socialist phase in American history. Maybe it’s because, during that era, workers made a good living and could afford an excellent quality of life, and many of them were unionized (28.3% in 1954, vs 10.1% in 2022).

Can we make an educated guess as to why that period was so atypically socialist in American terms? Could it be because, in those years, the USSR was at its peak of power, and American capitalist-colonialist elites were afraid they might lose in the competition with socialism and communism, or their people to it?

You know why I think that? Because as soon as the USSR began showing signs that it was losing ground and confidence, every socialist aspect of the US was thrown overboard. When there was no need to defend from Soviet Russia and its weird obsession with workers’ rights, the US regained its slave-owning, egalitarianism-hating mentality. Once the USSR was no more, the ‘free market‘ went on a rampage that has only gotten worse since, ushering in an era of unprecedented inequality.

Perhaps America was only great, for a while, because the USSR made it so. And perhaps this is also why, since the USSR fell, being left-wing in the West has become mostly a sign of wealth and privilege, without any serious ideological component. Maybe people needed that feeling of a big, strong, and revolutionary establishment to give them a sense of confidence and clear purpose.

To contradict and complete how I started this, perhaps this is what we need now: a new framework that transcends national borders, and gives people a feeling that they are working collectively toward a better and more egalitarian, and just future. I‘m just thinking out loud here.

Source: The Mizrahi Perspective