We who criticise atrocity tread a very thin line between denouncing it and encouraging it
No scepticism. Huge hope.
This week, I have been busier than normal with contributing to the blogposts of fellow bloggers on the Substack. As the week slowly draws to its close, I have not got much to add to those thoughts, but for anyone who is interested and who perhaps missed them, I give you a run-down of them below, and the relevant links to where you can read more about these stories, which concern me. Quite a few people said they liked what I’d commented. Maybe you will too.
A depressing week ends with an uplifting piece of news: that Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, two independent MPs in Britain, wish to found a new political party. One that will represent the best traditions of British socialism. They will not force their views on anyone. They will present their manifesto and ask for people’s support. It is a long way to the next General Election. Much water will pass under the bridge till then. But it is a spark of hope, and they are not frequent these days, so we must cherish it.
The places where one is able to draw a modern parallel with the world you describe as existing in 2600 BC or 1200 or 1400 AD are not easy to find, not within easy reach. The Javari River, which flows through Peru, Colombia and north-western Brazil could be a useful starting point. But it’s where Dom Phillips and Bruno Pereira were murdered as they tried to defend the very people who live that way: the indigenous tribes of that part of Amazonia, many of which have little to no contact with our modern way of life. Some westerners, in their naivety, wonder why.
But I know of one example that comes close from my own experience. It is the Youth Hostels Association (originally a German institution, where they are known as Jugendherberge). For hikers and cyclists and even those in motorised vehicles, Youth Hostels offer basic overnight accommodation for a very low price. They’re not hotels: you must move on the next day, but not before you have performed a chore. Hoovering, or dusting, or washing-up or chopping firewood, anything to contribute to the community of which you were part for only a few hours. I never knew any visitor to a youth hostel who complained at having to do a chore, or who refused.
What this demonstrates is that it is possible to have a system of co-existence whereby the willingness to contribute to the communal bounty is not procured by duress, but by inculcating a sense of community (communes themselves of course exist based on this philosophy). Capitalists cannot understand a society that functions without the impulse of duress. They proceed on a basis that inextricably links the ability freely to take from the commune’s provisions according to need to a conclusion that that will result in theft, because theft is the only ultimate means of acquisition that the capitalist recognises. A capitalist is NOT a mercantile entity trading according to value, added value and realisable worth. That is TRADE, or COMMERCE, if you like. But that has little to do with CAPITALISM, which is predicated quite simply on theft. Trade relies on the purchase of inputs, the addition of value, and resale of the result with an honest mark-up. Capitalism is not trade; it is predicated on stealing. Theft of land, of resources, of manpower, of countries, of seas, of the bounty stolen by others. Capitalism is theft.
In his 19th century novel The Ghost of Guir House (which is available through the Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8182, and about which I wrote here: https://endlesschain.substack.com/p/levachan), Charles Willing Beale sketches out an existence of which we can, at present, only dream but which, perhaps not quite in the form Willing Beale describes, once existed across our globe, before the Portuguese showed us the evils of capitalism on the isle of Madeira (see The Invisible Doctrine by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison).
The idyll is called Levachan and a resident introduces Willing Beale’s protagonist to its beauties and answers the rapacity of thieves with enticingly ingenious logic, thus:
“Here, if a man wants a coat, he takes it, and the owner reimburses himself from the great reservoir of the world’s goods, which is open to all men as integral parts of a unit.”
“What check have you upon the unreasoning rapacity of a thief, who will take ten times as much as he requires?”
“The system operates directly against the development of that trait. Here, men are only too anxious to have their goods admired and taken; for, being certain of their own maintenance, they feel a pride in contributing to that of others, and there is no temptation to take that which can not be kept, since his neighbor has equal right to take from him an idle surplus. Here the laws are the reverse of [y]ours, for here a man is encouraged in the taking, but never in the holding. Wealth is measured by what a man disburses; hence all are anxious to part with their individual property for the advancement of the commonwealth, knowing that the one can only thrive when the many are prosperous.”
Thievery in Levachan is pointless, for it is legal to thieve from the thief. And, because of that fact, nobody possesses more than they need, because no one will buy from a thief the surplus that he steals: they can take what they need from anywhere. There is no need for thievery. Two other sentences stand out in my eyes: Wealth is measured by what a man disburses and The one can only thrive when the many are prosperous.
Willing Beale’s work was written in 1897, in the age of the robber barons, which came to a crux with the Wall Street Crash in 1929, in the wake of which government gave Wall Street a leg up, poor flailing institution that it then was.
https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/gaza-doctors-under-attack-shows-the/comments#comment-131734323
Can you imagine 1936, when the first concentration camp opened in Germany, at Dachau? It had gas chambers but they were never deployed. No one—apparently—knows why. But there was no outcry. Not until the British army liberated Bergen-Belsen would anyone know about the Holocaust. But they did know about the desperate attempts of Jews to flee Germany and, later, Austria. Respectable families in Vienna advertised their children for adoption so that they, at least, should escape the bloodbath that was so imminent.
Now, imagine a 1936 in which British members of parliament are vociferously defending the right of the German Reich to defend itself against the Jewish plague, against these so-called vermin, backing refusals of western nations to allow shiploads of Jewish refugees to dock. Some did at that time, and remained lone voices. So clear was it in 1936 that those whom you cheered on in their struggle—in ihrem Kampf—depended on who was the party more likely to profit you once the dust had settled. And, even by 1938, Britain was still cordial enough to engage in diplomacy with the German Reich.
It was this kind of partisan wavering that the United Nations—first conceived of in 1945 and brought into reality in 1948—was supposed to settle, for once and for all. No one needed any more to look to whom they favoured or who they believed had done what wrong to whom: the procedures for settling disputes were set down in clear text and the aims of those procedures likewise. The UN Charter arose in part out of a simple conundrum: that compassion is not enough; who wins in a case of injustice depends on the party for whom one expresses that compassion. The UN Charter laid down who is deserving of compassion: it is he whose territory is taken by force. It is the civilian persecuted by the military. It is the defenceless subjected to the whim of the armed.
Only one thing we must guard against now, and I risk your wrath in stating it, but we surely all must recognise it. That the compassion we demand from the unwarranted aggressor we must also cherish in our own hearts, for without that, in denouncing atrocity we may yet seek to encourage it. If right is on our side in denouncing the State of Israel, then the denunciation itself must be rightful. Against us are stacked law, legality, legitimacy, justification, constructs of defence that portend aggression. We must take Gandhi as our inspiration, and not Hitler.
https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/gaza-doctors-under-attack-shows-the/comment/131743151
I dream of the day when the truly righteous will arraign the truly guilty before a court of justice, and pose questions to them such as these:
Did you willingly ignore the mass extinction of a civilian population, and actively defend the aggressors, nay supply them with the means by which they accomplished their acts of destruction and death, who perpetrated these acts with the aim of securing the victims’ land for themselves?
Can you in any way reconcile that with your obligations as signatories to the United Nations’ Charter?
Tell us, why was it that your nation even signed the United Nations’ Charter: was it mendacity in order to inveigle the world into trusting you? Or was it naïvety, believing we would not notice your acts of betrayal?
https://michaeldsellers.substack.com/p/part-5-she-won-or-did-she-election/comment/131439957
Clark County is where Las Vegas is situated. There’s no such thing as late night in Las Vegas.
Okay, tell me: if all the people, like, who’ve been telling us WHY Kamala Harris lost, backed with sound reasoning and logical argument, or so they would have it, will they now switch to arguing why it is that she OUGHT TO have lost?
https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/jeremy-corbyn-and-zarah-sultana-are/comment/131839506
No scepticism. Huge hope.
https://peacefulrevolutionary.substack.com/p/from-abundance-to-artificial-scarcity/comment/131530656
I love the idea of degrowth. Just as I love the idea of tackling human-induced global warming. There is a similarity in the two, however. Because global warming is fast approaching, if it hasn’t already exceeded, what are called tipping points: criteria that, once they exceed certain values, can never be reversed. That is what we have in capitalism now. The capitalists are richer than the governments that govern them. And that is a pretty major tipping point, because there are individuals now who have more wealth that some countries do. How they got to that point is of academic interest, but how degrowth can be achieved depends less on academic analysis and more on manning barricades, I fear.
https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/listen-is-a-glastonbury-chant-the/comment/131068803
When Israel lashed out at the attacks of 7 October, I thought they had justification. When they killed 1,000 Gazans, that seemed enough. At 1,600, the losses were even. They were, weren’t they?
But now they have taken upward of 70,000 Gazan lives. And they have Gaza. And they have delighted in it. We didn’t joyfully detonate explosives under German homes when the Allies pushed the Wehrmacht back to Berlin, did we? Did we film ourselves exploding German universities and German hospitals into the air, grinning manfully into the lens as we turned the detonators?
Why not? Why did we not wreak such vengeance against the monsters who’d systematically destroyed a whole people in the concentration camps? Were we afraid of what people would say about us, let alone about the monsters? Perhaps there was an element of the Allied forces possessing a greater sense of humanity than their Axis counterparts, who'd starved and bombed 1.5 million in a siege of Leningrad that was ultimately to be deemed legal.
When will our leaders be outraged, then? Is 70,000 not vengeance enough? Are we waiting till Gaza resembles Leningrad, and its 1.5 million dead? Perhaps they will stop when they've avenged 6 million? They will stop then, won’t they? That’s the nub of their argument, is it not?
Or are our leaders waiting until the money that greases the pole up which they clamber ceases to flow into their pockets?
https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/listen-is-a-glastonbury-chant-the/comment/131125651
Daphne Gilbert
Did you miss the Hannibal directive? Many Israelis killed by their own side. How did Hamas breakthrough the most highly surveilled security fence in the world??
Yes, that’s very true. I didn’t really want to turn an already long comment into an essay, but your point is well made. My goodness, for a moment there, I gave the IDF the benefit of the doubt.
We who criticise atrocity tread a very thin line between denouncing it and encouraging it.
https://peacefulrevolutionary.substack.com/p/the-necessities-of-life-as-rights/comment/131174235
They have a right to water in France. They’ve been told, in a town near the Swiss border, not to drink it out of the tap, however. Instead they’re buying bottled water, and they’re receiving a payment of €80 each to cover the cost. So, in Buschwiller, France, there is a right to water. The problem with the tap water stems from PFAS pollution, from a local airport, because PFAS is a component of the foam they use to put out aircraft fires and, even if aircraft don’t catch fire that often, the firefighters at the airport do a lot of practising. The foam goes into the ground and pollutes the water. And now they are banning use of the water from the taps of Buschwiller even though they stopped using this foam in 2017.
So, a right to water is a nice right to have, but to what level of cleanliness would you like your water? I’m wondering how long it will be before they find that bottled French water is also contaminated with PFAS. When it starts to affect western, rich nations, the right to water will be proclaimed from every hilltop. Except from hilltops in poor countries, of course.
What drives someone to be a capitalist?
Suppose, like I was once, you’re at the optician and you’ve asked them to fix the leg of your glasses back onto the frame. It’s come loose. With a smile, they say they’ll attend to that right away, if you’d just like to take a seat for a while. As you sit there, you see a basket of chews and toffees: a thank you from the optician, a sweetmeat to sweeten your day. You reach out and, without really thinking, pick one up, unwrap it and pop it into your mouth. And there you sit, chewing your chew till your glasses are ready. It takes a while so; presently, you reach out and go to pick another chew. There is no sign saying “one per customer only”, and no one is particularly watching what you’re doing. You could, without particularly being noticed, pocket the entire basket of chews. So: do you?
Well, it depends. If you live on the streets and have no income and see this offer of apparent generosity on the optician’s part, perhaps you take them all. After all, you may not get the chance again for quite a while. But, if you have a home and a job and an income, even if you may not see a sign saying “one per customer only”, you may imagine one. You may regard it as unseemly to take two. They’re a gesture and one does not take advantage of a gesture.
Yet, I’ve held the door open for people before and they really do march through without acknowledging you. Gestures are not always taken as a gesture: they are taken as rights. But what if I had a home, a job and an income, and still pocketed the entire basket of chews? Well, that is capitalism. The chews are taken because they’re there to be taken and, even absent a legal prohibition against taking them all, the mere fact that they can be taken is reason enough to take them. Capitalism is not predicated on what you do in particular, but on the way the capitalist rationalises what they do: they turn a gesture into an entitlement. The King of Tahiti who welcomed Captain Cook on his first voyage was less welcoming when Cook returned, after he’d appropriated the islands for his own king.
Just like people who march through doors that are held open for them. An aristocrat, a gentleman of breeding, may walk through the door with entitlement, but his equerry would tip the holder of the door a sixpence. Aristocrats buy their entitlement, or they earn it through victorious battles on land and sea. At least, their forebears did. Capitalists steal it.
So, what drives someone to be a thief, sorry, a capitalist? Nowadays the common word we hear is greed. Someone is greedy if they take everything for themselves and leave nothing for anyone else. But that doesn’t answer the question. It just describes a capitalist differently: why are they greedy?
I think it has to do with fear. The greedy are frightened of going without. That’s what makes someone a capitalist. The chance of getting something for nothing seems like a stroke of luck decreed by heaven. They grasp at it because it elevates them out of the zone of fear. Fear of destitution; and they pursue their greed because the fear of falling backwards never properly lets them go. If they come to afford a mansion house, they fear falling back to a semi-detached bungalow. Because they’ve never trusted another individual, and they never will. Jeff Bezos doesn’t like people taking a break from work to go to the toilet, because he fears that they may not simply do a wee-wee. They may read the newspaper, or scribble a ditty about him on the toilet wall. And that makes him afraid. It’s not the time loss, it’s not knowing what they’re doing in there.
Anyone who has ever joined a theatre group will know the trust games that actors play. One classic is to stand on a table, and without looking behind, to fall backwards, without making any attempt to soften the fall. Behind the subject is the rest of the troupe, who link arms, like a guard of honour, and cushion the subject’s fall and cradle them in an embrace of safety. I wonder if there has ever been a capitalist who played these—very serious—games. Who has learned to place faith, trust, reliance, in the group of which they form part. Trust and reliance banish fear. They instil a sentiment that, no matter how bad things are or will become, as a group we are able to depend on one another for that which we need. It’s a philosophy that needs no reflection, because it can be observed in just about every other species on Earth. But we need to search high and low to find it in its pure, unadulterated form among our own species. That, I think, was what distinguished the society spoken of, of 2600 BC and of 1200 and 1400 AD, from ours in 2025: an ability to banish fear through mutual reliance.
These may be high-sounding words, but I will admit that I cower in shame when I say I don’t know if I could achieve this myself. I did the table-falling challenge at the university theatre company, and I passed it, and I remember the glow that surrounded me as my smiling, laughing fellow actors caught me in my fall. But abandoning fear of financial deprivation: that presents itself as a large chasm. And I don’t necessarily fear what is on the other side of the chasm. But I do wonder whether I have the strength of spirit to launch myself across it. Maybe there’s a part of me that will always be a little bit capitalist. Or I need to find a troupe of good actors who’ll jump the chasm with me.
https://peacefulrevolutionary.substack.com/p/from-abundance-to-artificial-scarcity/comment/131738095
By Tenacious Eve
I think you’re making a lot of assumptions based on what you know. In 1200 AD if your parents wanted to murder, maim or otherwise mess you up they could and that includes starving you. You assume all people are cared for before capitalism? That’s such a leap. Every period has its good or bad, most of history it’s been bad at the bottom. We evolved this way as groups of people leverage what they know or have to cajole other groups to serve them. Not much changed.
It’s not that your article sucks or anything. Is that I like how my entire lifeline has been completely eradicated by the right only to them be completely eradicated by the left and now we’re gonna completely eradicate the rest. I literally caregiver for a child on my own. I have no family, so what happens in that world where we have to go backwards and depend on gifts from people who like us? So my kid starves cause I’m an asshole?
Why can’t we start imagining something new. Why is it always about going back in time?
Assumptions are something we need to do when imagining how life was in the past, so you’re right. Except it’s all too easy to assume, as you seem to do, that life then was no different to life now. And that diminishes the role played by capitalism in the past 300 years, which radically changed work life and home life, and colonialism since about 1450. Indigenous communities, in the Caribbean or northern South America, nonetheless still live lifestyles that we have long since abandoned. So, they can provide a model of what our lives were like back before industrialisation.
It was the Portuguese who invented both colonialism and capitalism. They discovered the island of Madeira, which they named for the resource the island provided them with: wood (madeira is the Portuguese word for the material). Nowadays there are no woods on Madeira. It is pretty bare of wood. They chopped it all down, did not replant it, and the Atlantic winds that blow across the island now prevent replanting. You can visit Madeira today, and enjoy its wines. Vines will grow, trees won’t. The colonists came, took all the island’s resources and then left again, and the people who remained make wine today.
Looking to literature, we gain a sense of what life might have been like in ancient times. King Lear tells us that disagreeing with a leader could easily lead to banishment, even if one was a trusted counsellor. And that treachery was to be found at every turn. But the Canterbury Tales tell us of a sense of community that would be hard to imagine in modern times.
When the loom made its way to Europe (from China) and textile production took off, there was a surge in prosperity, during the Middle Ages. That was marked with the introduction of feast days, high days and holidays. A public holiday was a very different occasion upon its inception to what it is now. Nowadays people make plans to depart with family to national monuments or grandparents, but they rarely do so with their neighbours. But the whole idea of a public holiday back then was that the entire town downed tools, prepared a suckling pig or something similar, and sat down together at a communal table to enjoy a day of eating, drinking and cavorting, with games, and fun, and, in the evening, perhaps a little nookie. A public holiday was public because the entire public celebrated it together. They didn’t head for the nearest airport, and that wasn’t because there were no airports, it was because the feast day was intended to cement relations within the community. These are things that give us insight into what life was like in those days gone by. There was far more inter-dependence, therefore much more interaction and much more cohesion in society. Modern public holidays have, quite honestly, outlived their purpose. We should just give each worker an extra ten days, or whatever it is where you are, of holiday entitlement, and let them take it when they please and use it how they please, because that’s more or less what they do anyway.
Now, there are some assumptions in there, but a careful perusal of anthropological history will give you insights into how societies today differ from societies in yesteryear and indeed how societies in some places today differ from other ones today. The question you ask is whether we can’t instead have something different, from both yesterday and today. For that, we need to put our thinking caps on. Perhaps we need to look to the best of what both yesteryear and today have to offer us. From yesterday, community and sharing. From today, electricity and mains water.
The prospect of a new political party led by Jeremy Corbyn does not excite people because it is a new political party, or because it could be led by Jeremy Corbyn. Everyone has their reservations about both those facts (and the absence of proportional reprersentation as a voting system in the UK).
It is the fact that this news comes at the end of three years of manifest and constant injustice, and it offers a certain body of the general public one thing that has been lacking over those three years. Hope.
It offers a tangible hope of a better future. It offers a stand against the outrage of Israel and Gaza. It offers the injection of a sense of justice and fairness into society. It offers the prospect of a caring government, one that doesn’t lambast sleaze and then indulge in it.
Those who hope must also brace themselves for failure, just like the passengers on a crashing airliner.
That’s how strong this hope is.