The Occident Is Heading For An Accident

In civilisational terms, war is a backward, primitive thing; it solves no conflicts and creates no security – only hate, which fuels more war.

It’s a system or structural evil – much more than a human evil.

Equally primitive and uncultured is, of course, this type of black-and-white, simplified narrative: there is only one evil party – the Palestinians and Hamas. The war has only one cause: Hamas’ attack, and we in the West need neither history nor conflict analysis to understand anything.

Further, we don’t need empathy with innocent suffering human beings on all sides, only with one side. All that is needed is politically correct emotionalism and side-taking, no matter the fact that these two irrelevant tools are guaranteed to make everything worse and get more innocent people killed.

The European Union's top leader von der Leyen has the guts to declare that “Europe stands with Israel”. But which ‘Europe’? And were you ever elected by ‘Europe’ or by the EU citizens to speak on their behalf, Madam?

The indefatigable Irish for-peace European MP, Irish Clare Daly, made exactly that point, much more eloquently than I just did, on October 8 when she demanded that von der Leyen shut up because she doesn’t represent ‘Europe’ at all.

It has all become too easy to take stands. It’s a display of intellectual and moral laziness: Condemnation requires no knowledge or complex understanding, but it speaks to the minds of kakistocrats.

It’s Kitsch politics! It actively promotes the death of thousands upon thousands on all sides, and it is fundamentally immoral because other ways of engaging in the Middle East conflicts were eminently possible.

In Ukraine, EU/NATO countries side with the underdog that has been invaded. In this war, it sides with ‘topdog’ Israel, the apartheid occupier with nukes who has created history’s largest prison with the full blessing of the declining West through decades.

From another perspective, it is a huge blow to Israel and the United States, a complete ‘intelligence’ failure. If that is what it was. Most likely, it wasn’t.

More and more info and statements from local expertise underpin the dreadful hypothesis that Israel was aware of Hamas’ attack and let it happen. Allegedly, a fox would not be able to run through the border installations; Hamas did for hours.

When Israel’s occupation-to-extermination policy has run its course – “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” and no mercy plus total ethnic cleansing and flattening of dwellings – the US/NATO/EU governments will have drowned with it in a blood-drenched unsolvable moral dilemma of their own creation.

They won’t see it, never foresaw it. They did not care about the consequences of their ”response” to Hamas’ attack - despicable as it was, yes, but not unprovoked, for sure.

So to cover up yet another Western politico-moral disaster, Western knee-jerk reaction is, as usual, ‘more weapons,’ no ceasefire, no mediation and no negotiations. Militarist thinking excludes diplomacy. We never make mistakes!

Since the decision-makers in Western capitals have lost on both economic, political, cultural, diplomatic and moral power dimensions, there is only one left, as in all falling empires in history: Militarism. Mass killing. Ethnic cleansing. Kill the people instead of the problem that stands unsolved between the parties and caused the violence in the first place.

What we are going to see in weeks and months to come in the Middle East will make the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia and the war in Ukraine pale. Western foreign policy can no longer be understood by rational analysis, political science or international relations thinking.

We need concepts and theories from psychology, psychiatry and religion to understand the blame games, emotionalism, psycho-political projection, presumed innocence, denial, compulsive repetition, paranoia, scapegoating, revenge, and aggression that get full blast in various blends in the policies of the US/NATO/EU countries.

Therefore, words like conflict analysis, conflict-resolution, mediation, peacekeeping, negotiations and reconciliation, not to mention peace, no longer belong to the vocabulary of Western foreign ministries, and neither in state-financed research and the mainstream media.

The Occident is heading for an Accident. Its reservoirs of legitimacy, knowledge and ethics are even more depleted than their arsenals of weapons.

Jan Oberg, PhD, is the Director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, in Sweden. Views expressed are the writer’s own.