Whatever safer targets are available
Today Arvind Dilawar talks to someone in the West Bank about what life is like there now.
“When you lay in your bed at night and you hear the planes and you know exactly a few minutes later someone will be killed…you don’t know what to do with your thoughts and your feelings... We live in a kind of mass depression and anxiety.”
Paid subscribers can read it below or here:
Luke O’Neil
The plan was to have a piece on what it's been like in Los Angeles the past few days but then the writer got too busy running from fire to report on it. A pretty understandable excuse.
Please take a look at this lengthy list of resources compiled by Mutual Aid Los Angeles for people and animals displaced by the fires. It also includes donation and volunteer suggestions. This is a list of music industry people who have lost their homes including a number of fundraisers you might consider giving to. And here is a list of displaced Black families who can also use help.
Like you I have been devastated seeing much destruction from these fires as well as hearing from so many friends who have had to evacuate their homes and others who have lost them entirely. There have been at least ten reported deaths and ten thousand destroyed buildings so far.
There are so many different moving parts to this story of course but the one that I have chosen to be personally pissed off about is the utterly disgusting and utterly predictable move by the right to – as they always do – blame all of this on immigrants and the homeless and "DEI." In their worldview it is always always always the least powerful among us who are responsible for anything that ever goes wrong and never the actual culprits.
As the writer Peter Raleigh noted "We seem to have reached the stage of fascist subject formation where there is literally nothing, no matter how obviously absurd, that won't be blamed on an invented conspiracy of previously identified racial enemies."
Here's a list of mutual aid groups focused on the unhoused in the city you might also consider donating to.
Jonathan Katz spelled this all out well I thought:
Yet the clear story here — industries burn fossil fuels, the Earth gets hotter, disasters and wars become more frequent and more intense — is a subplot of the national conversation at best. It’s being drowned out by the noise of irrelevant partisan bickering (“Karen Bass was out of town!”) and conspiracy-mongering (“They’re burning evidence in the Diddy case!” “It’s a space laser!” “It’s nonwhite people having power!” “It’s the Jews!”). This is all fed and exacerbated by the billionaire-sponsored murder of the news industry — and their true goal: the death of social trust. (LA newsman Matt Pearce has the local angle on that one.) I’ll repeat what I wrote after the Lahania fire in 2023: The intent is to help the powerful shift the blame, and thus the responsibility for bearing the burden of solving the crisis, away from its actual drivers—the oil companies, tech billionaires, and their political handmaidens—to whatever safer targets are available: a rival political party, racial and ethnic minorities, or those who advocate for holding capital accountable through social change.
I was also sadly not surprised to see a number of LA officials going full Elite Panic-mode and coming out immediately to fearmonger about "looters."
"The full weight of the county will come down on you," LA County Supervisor Kathryn Barger warned these supposed villains.
What the fuck are they supposed to be stealing here man? Are they stuffing their pockets with fistfuls of ash?
You hear this same shit after every natural disaster be it a flood or hurricane or earthquake. This is because the state can only protect capital it can't do anything to help people and any time something horrific like this happens a switch flips in our leaders' brains where it dawns on them that they can't arrest or shoot fire or water or wind and after that they're completely out of ideas. Violence and punishment being their one single move.
I thought of what Joe Keohane wrote in here about Covid:
Luke O’Neil
It’s been said before the Covid-19 exploited some key American vulnerabilities: an individualism that can be indistinguishable from pathological selfishness. A society that moves around a lot. And, of course, a government ruled by vandals, paranoids, and dead-enders. But for me one of the hidden vulnerabilities was our national addiction to a certain idea of heroism. James Baldwin wrote this about cops during a protest march: “There they stood in twos and threes and fours, in their Cub Scout uniforms and with their Cub Scout faces, totally unprepared, as is the way with most American he-men, for anything that could not be settled with a club, or a fist, or a gun.” The coronavirus crisis was incompatible with American hero mythology, with our idea of action. We simply did not have the psychological tools to cope with something that would not respond to violence, threats, or bombast. You couldn’t kick its ass, or root for the army to kick its ass, or even console yourself with fantasies of kicking its ass yourself--that sad but enduring Walter Mitty man-saves-the-day fantasy that I suspect provides much of the drive of the American male’s love for guns. No, with Covid there was no comfort in violent fantasy. You couldn’t do anything. You really could only do nothing. In fact, for the vast majority of us, nothing was the thing you had to do.
And this piece of mine on "looting" and what happens to prisoners during floods and our nation of snitches:
Luke O’Neil
Living as a citizen of the carceral state not only incentivizes such behavior it insists upon it. A case of water taken from a large corporation isn’t just a crime committed against the store itself after all it’s a crime committed directly against the millions of petty tyrants operating in the coordinated implementation of punitive fascism.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that the so-called predators and violent criminal element are also the ones that California so often deploys to save everyone.
Sam Levin
A reminder too that California voters recently rejected a measure that would have banned forced prison labor (aka slavery.)
A related piece from ACWF:
Meanwhile this was going on yesterday:
Remember how heartening it was to liberals everywhere to see the Obamas and the Bushes fraternizing at John McCain's funeral as a specific rebuke to Donald Trump the first and only bad president?
Ok here's Arvind Dilawar on life on the West Bank. Israel's genocide is certainly not the same exact story as the California fires but climate change and war are inextricably connected and will continue to be so for as long as we have either war or a climate.
Dilawar previously wrote for Hell World about the similarities between the current genocide and the Vietnam War era.
Luke O’Neil
You'll have to subscribe to read both of those in full.
We live in a kind of mass depression
The ongoing Israeli genocide compares to nothing in the history of Palestine
by Arvind Dilawar
For the last 15 months, “Alex” has rarely been able to travel more than 10 miles from their home in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Following the attacks by Palestinian militants from the Gaza Strip on Israel on October 7, 2023, the Israeli military not only besieged Gaza, but placed severe restrictions on Palestinians in the West Bank too. Alex, whose identity has been obscured here for their safety, is in their 50s and suffers from a medical condition for which they need to see a specialist in East Jerusalem. Like Gaza and the rest of the West Bank, East Jerusalem is internationally recognized as Palestinian territory, which Israel has nevertheless occupied since 1967. In order for Alex to go to the doctor they need a permit from the Israeli military — a permit which the military will not issue.
As Alex readily admits, the experiences of Palestinians in the West Bank pale in comparison to those in Gaza, where the ongoing Israeli genocide has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, including at least 17,000 children, per the Palestinian Ministry of Health as cited by Al Jazeera. The true toll of the genocide, obscured by continued Israeli attacks, blockade and propaganda, may in fact top 330,000 deaths, according to estimates published in The Guardian. Israeli soldiers and settlers — that is, Israeli citizens who live illegally on Palestinian land — have also used the genocide as cover for increasing violence in the West Bank, where more than 800 Palestinians, including 170 children, have been killed since October 7.
“When you lay in your bed at night and you hear the planes and you know exactly a few minutes later someone will be killed … you don’t know what to do with your thoughts and your feelings,” says Alex, referring to Israeli fighter jets and drones. “We live in a kind of mass depression and anxiety.”
In the face of such violence, Palestinians like Alex, as well as even some Israelis, recognize that Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its lower-intensity war on the West Bank are like nothing in their shared history, including the two most prominent previous periods of Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation: the First and Second Intifada.