Transcript. Original written article published on The Hal Blog on June 20, 2025 here on Substack. Read by Hal Masonberg.
I know I am not alone in this feeling of dread and alienation that comes in sweeping and ever-intensifying waves. Each bout chips away a little bit more at my sanity and hope. I’ve watched many Left and independent journalists, political commentators and podcast hosts express their struggle in navigating a landscape where friends, family and a multitude of strangers refuse to see - or cannot see - what is happening around them. And a corporate media that actively hides the truth. Briahna Joy Gray on her Bad Faith podcast has been quite vocal about these personal battles. When she speaks of needing to take long walks and listen to music just to keep the despair at bay, I can relate. I do the same. While she’s listening to Diana Ross, I’m listening to live Grateful Dead shows or jazz. That’s my reminder of the positivity and transcendence human beings are capable of; the magic they can create and the joy, emotional resonance and healing they can provide in their best and most inspired moments. It is a fine balance, however. And lately, that balance has been shifting even farther away from hope and longing and moving increasingly toward despair. I don’t know about others, but I was not raised with the tools to navigate a world where the majority of the people I know are either denying that genocide is taking place, don’t know that it’s taking place or, worst of all, support it taking place. A world where a sadistic mass-murdering sociopath wanted by the international justice system for war crimes can travel freely to the United States, stand before Congress (without getting arrested!) and be greeted with 58 standing ovations. It’s a scene worthy of a Leni Riefenstahl film.
And now Israel and the United States have managed to escalate global tensions and atrocities even further by engaging in a massive, wildly illegal and unprovoked attack on Iran. Donald Trump so much as admitted on social media that his “peace talks” and “negotiations” with Iran were all theatre, staged to make the Iranians believe that peace was possible, that diplomacy was an option, and to let their defences down. Others have suggested, perhaps rightfully, that Israel attacked Iran without the US green light and that Trump was simply posturing after the fact to cover the truth that Netanyahu directly defied Trump’s position and authority and purposefully undermined the scheduled peace talks with Iran set to take place two days later. Either way, Iran was attacked, its nuclear facilities targeted, its top military officials, peace negotiators and scientists murdered and civilian apartments and infrastructure bombed. It was a massive, unprovoked act of war and Trump and the US claimed direct complicity.
Attacking Iran has been decades in the making and many of us have been living in dread of the day it might finally happen. To actually witness it take place and to understand the very likely repercussions and trajectory of such a wildly villainous and globally devastating act is almost too much to bear. This is only made worse by friends and family who insist that it’s no big deal, or that Iran asked for it, or that it’s just another war taking place on the other side of the world that will eventually “work itself out.” Far too many people refuse to see just how powerful the forces of change are right now and how this full-scale war with Iran that the United States has forged with Israel is likely to be the final piece in the collapse of the American Empire. Or worse. Our political and social landscape has already been changed in dramatic ways from the loss of free speech, to no longer needing Congressional approval, to draconian laws designed to criminalise dissent, to brown-shirt-like masked ICE agents kidnapping citizens off the streets, to the normalisation of genocide itself. And this is but the smallest of tastes of what may be to come as a direct result of the irresponsible and unforgivable warmongering and soulless bloodlust of the United States and Israel.
When faced with a live-streamed 20-month-long-and-counting genocide, alongside what is in very real danger of becoming the provocation for WWIII and the collapse of the world economy, it is far from comforting to have friends and family tell you that you are “always looking on the negative side of things” or “overreacting.” As if such existential and terminal occurrences weren’t worthy of sober assessment and understanding, no less attention.
Pile on the almost impossible-to-swallow reality that in this new global war, the United States - the country I was raised in - along with Israel, the UK and other parts of the West, are the moral, ethical and historical equivalents of Nazis. It’s not only that we have managed to completely shatter the mythologies and narratives of US and Western benevolence and heroism, we have shown the US, Israel and the UK to unequivocally be the face of evil itself. At least in so much as one would consider Naziism, genocide, rape, dehumanization, calculated mass-starvation, the mass-murder of children and gleeful sadism evil.
“All of that rhetoric about human rights and democracy is gone and the mask is ripped off and now the entire agenda is laid bare…” shares journalist Abby Martin on Gray’s Bad Faith podcast “[It’s a] sadism that I've never really grappled with before. Unadulterated fascism that I have been seeing throughout the genocide. That this is the way a lot of people think and perceive things and I just have to accept that, which has been a tough pill to swallow for me as someone who thinks if people just knew the information they would have empathy for their fellow humans no matter where they live. But that's just simply not true and I think the system not only rewards sociopathy, but it breeds it and it tamps down on our brains’ ability to actually feel capacity as human beings.”
As I lie awake in bed at night, tossing and turning and, sometimes, weeping at the sheer horror of it all, I am also aware of the social and cultural system that is in place to encourage people to look away, to deny, to focus their attention elsewhere. I understand the allure. So why am I incapable of retreating into that more comfortable (and some would say optimistic) space? I have no answer. Growing up Jewish and being inundated since birth with real-life stories of the Holocaust and the sadism of Nazis, having met and conversed with those who physically survived those horrors, I was always left with the same two questions: “How did the German people allow this to happen?” and “Who would I have been during that time and what would I have done? Would I have remained silent? Would I have spoken out? Would I have risked my life to stop it, combat it, weaken it?” The answer to the first question has been answered for me in real time. I am witnessing it right now in the people around me. NOW I understand how populations are trained to be so committed to their narratives of exceptionalism and national or religious identity that they are able to not only justify what is happening, but to cheer it on. I also see now the private deceptions that allow emotional and intellectual distance in the face of the worst horrors imaginable. I see now how privilege and a false sense of exemption (“so long as it’s not happening to me, it’s not my problem”) lure people into defensive tribes of self-righteous denialism.
This is exemplified for me in the vapid posturing of Liberals and Dem-Party loyalists who speak the language of inclusion, of equality and justice, yet continue to empower, vote for, rally around and shame people into supporting those individuals and institutions that thrive on and depend on the complete decimation of both equality and law. The most corrupted or the most sociopathic or the most castrated are held aloft as heroes, as solutions, as viable alternatives. All while marching in “NO KINGS” rallies that do little-to-nothing to instigate or inspire anything more than the most banal and effortless of all tasks, loathing Trump. It’s not a movement or a rally focused on being anti-genocide or anti-mass-murder or anti-imperialism or anti-war, it’s not about truth-telling or raising public consciousness. It’s not about engaging in acts of civil disobedience that might actually affect power structures or challenge media narratives. It has more to do with fostering a false sense of purpose and morality steeped in doing the absolute minimum while propping up Democratic Party candidates and continuing to empower neoliberalism, the very ideology that birthed our current existential crisis. It’s more of a selfie-photo op for social media posts than an effective strategy to challenge power or promote real, life-saving change. Yes, any act of protest is better than none at all, but the most effective ones are the ones that involve risk and sacrifice. The rest are more knee-jerk reaction and self-soothing tokens than acts of bravery, defiance, resistance, selflessness or transformation and, more often than not, they are enacted by the most privileged among us. I don’t think one single person I saw posting photos from their NO KINGS “demonstrations” ever posted any photos or even attended a single gathering to protest Biden as he was committing genocide. Nor did I see any social media photos from pro-Palestinian protests. Or any Arms Embargo on Israel protests. Or anti-war or anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-apartheid protests or demonstrations since we started mass-murdering a population of over a million children and eviscerated an entire culture, its historical artefacts, literature and people. But they’ll come out to protest Trump’s parade.
GENOCIDE DENIALISM
When family members insist that genocide is NOT taking place or when friends of friends make social media posts imploring people NOT to call what Israel and the US is doing a genocide, a piece of me dies. As human beings - and certainly those of us whose ancestors perished in holocausts - we have a responsibility to call this what it is. Genocide. There is no more accurate or appropriate word. It is the textbook definition of what is happening. Israel is using the same tactics, the same playbook used by the Nazi’s in the Warsaw Ghetto and beyond. Every humanitarian group on Earth recognises this as a genocide. International courts recognize this as a genocide. Holocaust scholars recognise this as genocide.
Even the language used today by Israeli politicians, soldiers and citizens alike is eerily reminiscent of the rhetoric used by the Nazis to describe Jews and other “unsavoury” peoples: “human animals,” “cockroaches,” “a cancer,” “vermin,” “dirty,” “primitive,” “vile,” “deviant,” the proposed solution of “removing” them, making Gaza a “slaughterhouse,” “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth,” calls for “annihilation.”
“The language of systemic dehumanization is evident here,” points out South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi before the U.N. world court. “Genocidal utterances are therefore not out in the fringes. They are embodied in state policy.”
To refuse to call this a genocide is to be a genocide-denier. Is this negation of reality justifiable because what is taking place is happening to people of color or people that we have been told are somehow innately barbaric (“much of Muslim culture is in the grip of a death cult that sacralises bloodshed”)? The reason the Nazi holocaust is still so prevalent in our history and culture here in the West - versus so many other holocausts that receive far less attention and historical reminders - is because Hitler used the exact same playbook colonial empires had been using against people of color in far away lands and brought it home to Europe to use on white people. If we do not call this genocide out, right now - fuck, yesterday - then we dishonour every human being that has perished and suffered in previous genocides. We fail the potential of Western “civilization” and we disembowel any future of decency for our children and grandchildren. We resign them to a mass-furtherance of dehumanization, ethnic-cleansing and violent intolerance and lawlessness that will spread - and is already spreading - to our own shores, just as it did in Germany and Europe during WWII. Call it what it is. And if you can’t, then at least stop telling others that they should remain silent or in denial. I personally can’t imagine anything more irresponsible or egregious.
As if all of this weren’t enough to grapple with, Israel and the US have also introduced me to new emotion, a feeling that had eluded me for most of my life: hate. I have held deep resentment before. I have been on the receiving end of both physical and emotional violence. I have been traumatised by the actions of others. I have even had moments of wishing ill upon others. But I have never known hate until now. When I see and hear Benjamin Netanyahu speak or even see his face, I feel hate. I have always had room in me for forgiveness of even the most cruel actions taken upon me and others. But I have never known outright hate without the possibility of forgiveness before. That is new for me. Others’ cruelty and malice have brought me close. Hillary Clinton, Dick Cheney… But this new world has brought with it a new emotion, one that I would prefer not to feel, but is now a part of me I fear will endure. Of this, I am not proud.
I have no answers, no solutions, no recommendations outside of countering personal alienation by continuing to try and find more people who are experiencing something similar to what I am going though, those grappling with the same questions and the same sense of moral and ethical obligation. To continue writing and talking and sharing and yelling from the rooftops. To publicly call a genocide genocide. And that, if I am being honest, still feels tepid and grossly and embarrassingly insufficient. Do I pack my things up and head to Egypt to stand in protest at the border? Do I join those brave souls on the Freedom flotillas? Do I make a film - I am a filmmaker - that directly addresses these struggles and forces viewers to look at that which they so vigorously and fervently do not want to see or recognize? Or do I drink some more wine or smoke some more cannabis, listen to some more music, watch some more TV and lie awake at night in a paralysed stupor of helpless cynicism and dread? The one thing I know for sure, the longer I wait, the more people die and the closer we move as a species toward violent self-annihilation. All while friends and family shake their collective heads and wonder why Hal just can’t be happy.
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