Posted on Nov 19,
2012
By Chris Hedges
Gaza is a window on
our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its
miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many
impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff,
are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the
planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of
pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are
increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras
and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to
kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to
China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where
brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without
an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective,
are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial
warfare.
In the new global
landscape, as in Israel’s occupied territories and the United States’ own
imperial projects in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan, massacres
of thousands of defenseless innocents are labeled wars. Resistance is called a
provocation, terrorism or a crime against humanity. The rule of law, as well as
respect for the most basic civil liberties and the right of self-determination,
is a public relations fiction used to placate the consciences of those who live
in the zones of privilege. Prisoners are routinely tortured and “disappeared.”
The severance of food and medical supplies is an accepted tactic of control.
Lies permeate the airwaves. Religious, racial and ethnic groups are demonized.
Missiles rain down on concrete hovels, mechanized units fire on unarmed
villagers, gunboats pound refugee camps with heavy shells, and the dead,
including children, line the corridors of hospitals that lack electricity and
medicine.
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