“It is happening again.” A distressed old man on a mysterious stage speaks these words slowly and painfully in the climactic episodes of David Lynch’s brilliant “Twin Peaks”.
Genocide is happening again in more than one region of planet earth today. We talk about Israel’s violence in Palestine on the latest World BEYOND War podcast episode, titled “Speechless About Gaza”, a conversation I hosted with peace activist Maria Santelli and military base researcher Mohammed Abunahel.
The title of the episode is inspired by a 1936 novel by Aldous Huxley called “Eyeless in Gaza“. But I’ve never actually read that novel, and the episode is really inspired by the simple fact that I am speechless when I try to talk about any of the horrors around the world today.
How can I not be speechless? I spent my entire life believing I lived in a decent society that would rise up, one way or another, to avoid collapsing into blatant tyranny and totalitarianism. It’s pretty surreal that as a society we are watching our government collapse together. I laid out my prescription for what activists can do during a time of national collapse in last month’s episode of the World BEYOND War podcast, “How to Unplug an Empire”.
The 3-way conversation on this month’s episode hits me even closer to home. I’ve spent my entire life studying both ethical philosophy and European history in order to help me understand the Holocaust that killed millions of Jews during World War Two, including my ancestors. I thought my own civilization had at least reached a level of modernity and self-awareness that would prevent us from becoming complicit in a deliberate major genocide. I was wrong.
Every taxpayer in my country, the so-called United States of America, is complicit in Israel’s cruel, sadistic and deliberate genocide in Gaza. Too many people who understand and see what is going on are reacting with cowardice, hiding behind veils of self-induced perplexity, or “avoiding news” to protect their mental health – sadly failing to realize that they would find much greater mental health if they became activists and worked productively for change instead of seeking a fragile sense of sanity by “avoiding news”.
Sure, it’s tough to face up to the reality of how much damage is being done by war profiteers and their politician puppets today. In this podcast episode we hear quiet despair in the voice of Mohammed Abunahel, who grew up in Gaza City and is now separated from his endangered parents and siblings while completing his studies and raising his own young family in Mysore, India.
When I listen back to this conversation a few days after recording it, I hear me and Maria and Mohammed all saying a lot of words. Yet I sense that both my guests felt as speechless as I did, that we all saw our words dissolving into useless dust as we spoke them. As we tried together to grasp the reality of what Israel has done and is continuing to do to Gaza, a year and a half after October 7 2023 (when my own friends Judih and Gad Haggai were among the first killed) – and what Israel is signaling that it plans to do next in the West Bank.
Desperate words can find various shapes and forms. Mohammed is a media studies PhD. and critic, and naturally he has has a lot to say about the hollow, bitterly false pro-Israel reporting that substitutes for honest journalism about the Gaza genocide in many parts of the global north. To become more educated, Mohammed advises, “just don’t listen to western media”. If you haven’t already, substitute Al Jazeera for CNN or MSNBC or Fox News or the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal (they all deliver the same one-sided pro-war messaging). You will quickly become a lot more clued-in about what’s going on around the world.
Mohammed also speaks about the hypocrisy of Arab and Middle Eastern governments who offer a lot of loud opposition to Israel’s war crimes while secretly collaborating with Saudi Arabia and the United States.
Maria Santelli has done great work for decades on behalf of soldiers who want to become conscientious objectors, and she has a lot to say in this episode about how progressive communities in countries like USA must gather the courage to start protesting more effectively. We aren’t going to stop Israel’s ownership of the US government by supporting the donor-rotten Democratic party in the next election.
What Maria says brings up another painful life-change for me. I have voted for Democratic candidates my whole life, but I feel today that Joe Biden’s embrace of the obviously Nazi-emulating Benjamin Netanyahu has broken my lifelong relationship with the Democratic party permanently. I still believe that if Kamala Harris had managed to break the Israel lobby’s ownership of both the Democratic and Republican parties and spoken truthfully about Israel’s genocidal plans, she would have inspired voters and easily beaten Donald Trump, who was never popular and still isn’t. But the wealthy Democratic party establishment continues to block its own best voices of opposition to Trumpism. All it has to offer is obnoxious fools like John Fetterman and AIPAC phonies like Hakeem Jeffries. This is obviously planned obsolescence: the wealthy forces that run the Democratic party will continue to sabotage its own best candidates because they’d prefer to have white supremacist women-hating clowns like Trump and Rubio and Vance in office.
Meanwhile, of course, protesting is becoming more dangerous in USA and around the world in 2025. We all know about the students arrested in American colleges for speaking out truthfully about Israel’s war crimes. My fellow peace activists are shocked and disturbed to hear just yesterday about a drone attack by a secret Israel-friendly military force on the Conscience, a defenseless boat operated by peace activists including Greta Thunberg, Ann Wright and CODEPINK’s Tighe Barry in international waters near Malta.
“We didn’t shut it down,” Maria says in this podcast. I think we all need to remember the images of protestors getting their heads busted on the bridge in Selma as our own movement builds. We’ve all spent our lives admiring the courage of the marchers who faced violent police under the leadership of Martin Luther King, and in 2025 it’s obvious that Donald Trump’s authoritarian government will encourage cops “busting heads”, torturing activists in prisons and prosecuting activists in kangaroo courts. How brave are we? How smart can we be? How well can we support each other and trust each other, as the danger increases?
Protestors everywhere need to adjust our mindsets so we can comprehend the levels of sacrifice and backlash we will be called upon to endure. We should expect the worst historic patterns of totalitarian behavior to repeat. Remember: war always enables fascism, and fascism always enables war. This is the cycle we are now stuck in together until we find our way out.
I’m glad Mohammed and Maria speak sensibly and calmly about the media and national strikes in this episode, because I only hear myself sputtering with rage and disbelief about the warped psychology we are witnessing around us. The cracked signposts of genocidal hatred that stick out of the news these days like quivering bone fragments stuck in battlefield muck. War is a mental illness, a toxic by-product of truama and fear, and today we are all in its grip.
Today’s Litkicks blog post feels bleak, so let’s end with a link to something Mohammed Abunahel have both spent a lot of time and hard work putting together. Military Empires: A Visual Guide to Foreign Bases is a World BEYOND War presentation calling attention to foreign military outposts all over the world whose continued existence only leads to escalation to war, sexual abuse of vulnerable local populations and rampant taxpayer waste. This is an all-new and much improved version of the visual database and mapping system that has been one of the most popular pages on our antiwar website for a long time.
Working together to end cycles of fear and violence and abuse is the best way out of the morass our civilization is in. It’s the best way to save our own souls too.
