In the last 18 months, the most economically powerful countries in what is known as "the West" have aligned themselves with the genocide being carried out in Palestine by the USA through its puppet government in Israel. Britain and Germany are most closely associated with this, and have become little more than tools and mouthpieces of the US oligarchy. Individuals based in the USA have to be acknowledged as the main agents of the genocide. If US actors withdrew their political, economic, and miltary support of Israel, the genocide would stop in days. Israeli leaders have no independent agency whatsoever.

The subservience of our nations to the USA is not limited to contributing (financially, politically, militarilty) to the slaughter of Palestinian civilians (including 16,000 children to date) and the razing to the ground of Gaza's buildings, institions and infrastructure. It is also manifested in a horrendous cortailment of civil liberties within our countries, and the large-scale suppression of pro-Palestinian and anti-colonialist voices. This is both active suppression (as in the arrest and harassment of activists leading to exclusion or deportation in some cases) but also at-one-remove suppresion, through the fear generated among the populations of those countries, terrified to put their heads up over the parapet lest their jobs or their positions in society be threatened. Most people in our countries self-police, and keep their heads down. This is exactly what most of the population of Germany did in the Nazi times. This process is hugely assisted by a corrupt and subservient mainstream media, whose main role is now to spin all news in favour of the dominant narrative of US exceptionalism, portraying it and its actions as saving the world from the Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Muslim threats which would otherwise destroy us all).

Politics is being hollowed out of any meaning. The options on offer to most elecorates are just different shades of the same neo-caplitalist liberal agenda. Political leadership in all our countries are in hock to those who finance their campaigns and set their agendas, the often-hidden industrialists, arms manufacturers, bankers, and oligarchs. The people who control these organisations have no interest in the welfare of the people, beyond ensuring they stay healthy and subservient enough to be financially exploited, and cast aside when they can be of no further economic use.

This process did not begin with Gaza, but Gaza has been particularly important test case which demonstrates to those in power that there is no atrocity so huge that willl mobilise the people to rise up and say "enough". Our masters are learning from this that whatever they are planning to inflict on us next can be proceeded with, because we will meekly submit to it.

What is to be done?

Many of us have decided that our main job in life is to resist and dissent at every juncture, loudly and publicly. This is important for more to do. It doesn't matter if one is not fully informed about issues, one can know when something stinks. Just say, "this looks wrong to me, and it needs to stop". Doing that can empower others around to do likewise. One could join one of the smaller political parties where, because they are not wealthy, they have not been bought by the oligarchs. In Britain this would include the Green Party, of which I am a member. Trades unions are also some of the important places where resistance can be supported and magnified. My union has been the Universities and Colleges Union, and I am proud to say that they have taken a magnificent stand on Gaza, and much else.

We can also be encouraged by the knowledge that suppression and repression are at their fiercest when those in power feel most threatened. The people running the West are feeling deeply threatened now because they know that the path that they are set on is an unsustainable path which can only lead to the fall of empire, as all other empires in history have fallen (through their own internal contradictions). And rather than blame themselves, they lash out to blame everyone but themselves. Many of them fear, rightly, that the world will soon become unlivable. That is why some people with the money to do so are investing in lunatic pipe dreams to occupy other planets, or build themselves life-time bunkers deep below mountains. Whatever scenario we imagine, it is certain that the US Empire is dying. It's hard to predict when it will die, it could be next year, it could take 50 years, but it will surely die, and we need to steel ourselves for ts death throes, which will challenge us in new ways. We need to welcome these challenges, because there is no possibility of just continuing on the same path. Those of us lke me, who are in the later phases of our lives must also listen the younger generations. They see much clearer than we do that we are coming to the end of the road. We were able somehow to sustain a belief in progress with the priveleges that many of us enjoyed in the height of the post-second-world-war boom. Our children know through lived experience that talking about progress is now a sham. Their lives are so much worse, on average, than ours have been. And because they see this more clearly, they need our encouragement to assume the leadership that rests on the clearer vision that they have. True leadership does not come from the wealthy and priveleged, it comes from the dispossessed and oppressed.