The Heartbreak of Gaza and Ukraine

More imperial atrocities that my great nation has enabled

This post was partly inspired by Sam Husseini’s recent article on the genocide in Gaza, as Israel murders journalists. I’ll take Sam with a concussion over just about any other writer in the world on what is happening in Gaza and the enablement of it by the world’s nations.

When I was about ten years old, my first professional mentor invented a bomb that ruined weaponry but did not hurt people. This was at the height of the American genocide in Vietnam, and the Pentagon quickly moved to suppress that bomb. I did not hear about that bomb until several years afterward, probably around the time that I was being nominated for the Air Force Academy. My grandfathers served in the World Wars (1, 2), my father served in Korea, both of my brothers were in the army, and my uncles were in the military. I am the first man, going up my family tree since the 1800s, who did not become a soldier. But I was raised in a military household in a military community and was imbued with the idea that I would not be quite a man until I had been a soldier. What a terrible way to raise a child.

My first public writings were about the USA’s bludgeoning of Iraq that became genocidal long before we invaded, in what Noam Chomsky accurately stated is the greatest crime of the 21^st century so far. Noam wrote about Israel’s crimes for many years. Ed Herman, another Jew, called Israel a terror state. It is heartbreaking to see what is happening in Gaza, especially since the weaponry that Israel is using is largely American. Tens of thousands of children have likely been murdered by the Israelis in this latest wave of genocide.

Equally as heartbreaking for me has been the USA’s use of Ukrainians as cannon fodder in its attempts to undermine Russia, and it has even been scarier. Even the New York Times is beginning to admit how close the Biden administration came to nuclear war over Ukraine as it tried to use Ukraine as a puppet (like the USA did with Afghanistan) but Ukraine had its own ideas. Nearly daily for the past three years, I have gone to South Front and made myself watch battlefield footage. As Americans, we all own a piece of that. American censors simply deleted South Front’s primary domain from the Internet in 2023, as well other domains that American censors deemed were too friendly to Russia, and we are supposedly the champions of free speech.

In the years in preparation for writing my most ambitious essay, I studied science more than history, especially before the evolutionary path to humanity. In the decade between publishing that essay and the book preview that I published last year, I studied anthropology and history more. One of my site’s earliest essays was about how I was lied to while growing up, to make me a cog in the capitalist-imperialist machine. In the past decade, I gained greater appreciation that the lies that I was told were typical for all societies for all time. Those lies were to build in-group cohesion, in order to prevail against neighboring societies, in our world of scarcity and fear.

I have spent far too much of my time over the past 35 years studying wars, atrocities, and genocides (1, 2), it has taken an immense toll, but there has been a silver lining of sorts. Although many scholars have strenuously denied it, industrial societies are far less violent and far more humane than everything that came before, because they could afford to be. The biological compulsion to survive and reproduce in a world of scarcity is at the root of all violence. The only solution is to end scarcity, which is what my work is all about. I recently wrote about how relative scarcity and abundance have shaped human societies over the human journey. I also wrote on how my hellish experiences in Los Angeles after college graduation helped motivate my efforts to this day. I want to end this world, and nobody is going to miss it. In the meantime, my great nation keeps inflicting and abetting genocides and other atrocities, which writers such as Sam so capably expose. Americans have a duty to understand the bloodshed committed in their names with their tax dollars, but relatively few have lived up to that obligation, and that is normal, unfortunately.