From Knives and Forks to Guns and Bombs: On Not Getting Your Hands “Dirty”

“Gandhi was asked "Mr. Gandhi what do you think of Western civilization?" for which he replied "I think it would a wonderful idea"”

“Civilization”: Word as Weapon

In recent months we have come to understand the true meaning of the word “civilization” as ordained by the West. While countries such as Iran and Yemen with centuries of rich culture and heritage are indeed the cradle of civilization in its true sense, we see today a perversion of the term, used as a “highfalutin” means of condescension by those that usually lack it.

Just as words like “sophisticated” and “glamorous” have become cliches when self-applied, laughable when utilized in a consciously self-referential way, exhausted through overuse and associated with trying too hard, the term “civilized” has also become a word that bears many excesses of meaning and baggage depending on the context.

Calling other peoples “uncivilized” just because they have a natural, organic and fluid way of interacting with their environment is the height of banality and indeed, lack of sophistication. It is also often a form of sophistry and propaganda as when Benjamin Mielkowski has repeatedly used it as one of the linchpins of his propaganda on Palestine, in a way that is palatable and appealing to the hard of thinking.

For it is precisely those who labour the point of professing to be “civilized” and who point to, or label, the “other” to white Eurocentric culture as being “uncivilized”, that usually lack the intellectual nuance to really understand what it means and why they themselves most probably are not it.

In common parlance this type of aspiration to sophistication and urbanity was often humorously known as “Lady Muck” style pretensions to grandeur. It is of a strain with those types of white individuals who complain “foreigners” don’t speak their language in public and that then visit other countries without any jot of understanding about the local culture; it is those people who make crude jokes about eating without a knife and fork and yet not only seek culture and authenticity abroad, but spray the perfume of pretence over the odour of ordure.

Native courage faces down clinical detached cowardice

Keeping it “Clean”

Today, civilization as spoken by the usurpers, pretenders and colonizers, means not getting your hands dirty. This can be understood in a number of ways and on a number of metaphorical levels. There is a pretension and hypocrisy inherent in the notion of keeping your hands clean, a clinical detachment and sense of keeping reality at several removes; this can apply to eating as much as it applies to killing.

“Israel” and its colonial sponsors have in recent months been on a campaign to spread propaganda through leveraging cultural tropes and emphasizing cultural differences. Phrases such as civilization vs savagery misappropriated to apply to Palestinians and the resistance are easily psychologically absorbed and then used to reference and label by those who unquestioningly accept propaganda and also seek to justify their own prejudices.

The spreading of cultural stereotypes in relation to those from non-European cultures in order to cause discord, promote racial division and ultimately to justify hatred towards them, has been a popular strategy recently.

The colonial powers project themselves as gatekeepers of some dubious civilized values whilst bombing cultural and heritage centres, ancient churches and mosques, whilst wiping out villages whose elders are much older than the belligerent imperial outpost of “Israel” itself.

Ironic also therefore, that while pointing to Middle Eastern cultures as being somehow primitive, backward and savage, the Europeans and American colonizers try to find relevance and identity through appropriating and stealing their customs. The divided psyche of the coloniser cannot make up its mind what it is and what it wishes to be.

Stereotypes and Reality

While those on the ground defending their right to existence, resistance and self-determination have to make use of what is available to them after decades of colonial thievery, and utilize their environment and resources with exemplary courage and bravery, “Israel” through its sugar daddy the US, is able to employ artificially enhanced killing and at a distance savagery to kill thousands of people.

The cowardly “IDF soldiers” point and shoot as if playing video games, their leaders pour millions into drones and explosive robots, and then brag that they have been “defending” their country.

This claim is replete with lies, from that of “defending” to “country”, from professing bravery and courage to being soldiers. The truth here is that the “Israeli’s” are cowards from top to bottom, and they deploy an assortment of big budget killing methods to assail a defenceless civilian population.

The detachment from reality implicit in their methods and pretensions is staggering. “Israel” itself is the biggest of lies, its people are a crudely sewn together patchwork quilt with bits stolen from here and there to assume the appearance of a culture – one that disintegrates the moment you approach it with the interrogatory touch of truth.

Palestine and the Palestinians have been a revelation to all those people in the West who were largely ignorant of and unaware of them, and only began their journey into the heart of the truth with the great swindle of October 7^th.

While “Israel” executed a plethora of killing strategies including Apache helicopters and tank shootings at cars, rapidly followed by a campaign of smearing and disinformation, lurid lies and fabrications that have all since been debunked but nonetheless did their damage and are still repeated by Western media outlets, the truth still surfaced for many.

Nothing can substitute for our direct lived experience. While I am aware of techniques that range from dragging corporate executives through the compulsory ritual of watching disingenuously spliced together manipulated footage of October 7^th to gagging the press and manipulating the very semantics of reportage, what really stands out is our actual experience of Palestinians and “Israeli’s”.

For every single person who has taken the time to get to know the Palestinians, they have remarked how dignified, civilized and gracious they are; how educated and refined, how eloquent, hospitable and refined.

Of course, the pretenders, upon hearing these descriptors will impotently rage: rapist, hamas, murderer, savage! In swearing and cursing, abusing and name-calling, losing their self-composure and ultimately behaving in line with the insults that they project on others, they inadvertently end up revealing their own nature as deeply and profoundly uncivilized; that is the irony.

But we have seen them on the television; we have seen their politicians on news shows; we have seen their people trampling on aid. We have watched “Israelis” screaming, cursing with fury and screeching with hate; and we have seen Palestinians with their usual composure and demeanour of humbleness, continue to try their best to co-operate and survive the harshest of killing campaigns we have seen in our lifetimes.

We have seen Palestinian mothers crying in grief, men digging through rubble with their bare hands and children trying to play amidst the wreckage of their former homes; we have seen “Israeli” teenagers throw cats from their balconies for entertainment and Palestinian children feeding stray cats with their last crumbs of food; we have seen “Israelis” killing with joy – the only joy they seem capable of – while Palestinian doctors work through the impossible, in hospitals stripped of the most basic necessities.

This is the difference between savagery and humanity, between cruelty and dignity, between brutality and civilization. One culture has been nurtured over centuries with love and belonging, the other cradled in the devils embrace of colonialism, grown fat and decrepit on its own theft.

A False Pride

Western culture prides itself on its civilization; the diplomatically smiling terrorist wearing a suit, the Macbethian specks of blood on his soul not visible from the outside, he can flick them off and make them land rhetorically on the “other” while he brandishes his hygiene certificates and signs multi-million pound arms deals.

He invented AI killing, and he covets the nuclear capabilities that only the West and their allies are allowed to have, because they are so civilized. Don’t you know, they have credentials to prove how clean they are?

As we have moved into the 21^st century, we have become ever more detached from consequences, ever more distant and removed in how we do things. We are in dangerous times of AI weaponry, biometric surveillance and digitized killing, the natural outcomes of being divorced from a lived, felt, deeply experienced sense of the world.

Palestine – the beating heart of humanity, brutalized by the technological savagery of the West, its colonial cruelty – was a test. Civilization chose otherwise, it chose to prop up the lies and disseminate the propaganda. We will now see the consequences of these choices in the years to come.

Free Palestine - as if your life depends on it!