For Palestine: When a coalition of military force is actually needed

We need nothing less than a coalition of troops committed to freeing Palestine to internationally-recognised borders and breaking the siege and genocide on Gaza, at bare minimum. Whether it's a global conference and there are countries attending being willing to commit troops or individual people with military experience who want to offer their service to this cause – there can be no greater cause right now. This would of course be alongside efforts in diplomatic matters and those in political agitations and propaganda.

A bold statement, yes, since none of the processes going on at the moment that are highly touted by western dissidents are anywhere near enough to meet the bare minimum for me… I still look at this with the same view that I would not want for Palestine any less than what my own people have.

I can't imagine a circumstance in which Nazi Germany would have agreed to a ceasefire to stop its massacre and genocide of Jews and others in Europe and voluntarily stopped its war of extermination to its east... It was the Soviet Union that liberated many in concentration camps.

I can't cite a circumstance in which the violent Australian settler-colonial entity would have called itself to stop committing genocide against the indigenous peoples of this continent... I don't think that changing whoever is in government at any particular time would change that.

The oppressors and murderers that comprise Israel and its colonial allies have shown no intention or sign of stopping – they are in fact utterly hell-bent on justifying their actions.

The United Nations is largely as useless (and still as much a power structure favouring the imperial powers) as it was during the imperialist wars on Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and so much more. The Soviet Union used to be there to "deter the worst of Western violence", as Noam Chomsky has said in How The World Works, since it could provide some support to those fighting for national liberation from colonizers (but in the case of Palestine, the Soviet Union also played a role in the legitimisation of Israel). Currently the U.S. has vetoed 4 motions in the UN to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, and even if passed, what is there to actually guarantee that Israel will not continue its current course?

People who are colonised and invaded and massacred have the right to armed struggle to fight their invaders and defend their survival and political rights.

Aaron Bushnell was a serving US Airman who recently self-immolated in protest of the US-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians. His act is of deepest courage.

But in my heart, I know it doesn't change anything for people in Gaza and Palestine. What if he and others like him had provided their services for the cause of fighting the genocide?

Israel has beyond utterly, cruelly and barbarically deprived Palestinians in Gaza of basic human necessities – like electricity, food, water, fuel – as well as continuously keep bombing them. Gaza is the most densely populated place in the world, more so than Tokyo. It has more than 2 million people forced into a 25 mile by 5 mile strip, where most people are refugees or descendants of refugees and many are children. It is an open-air concentration camp. So Palestinians don't have enough to survive, let alone do they have the appropriate level of support and means to win their freedom and defend their cause.

The Vietnamese had military backing to fall upon, as does Russia today, to struggle for and defend their freedom and cause, if the Western aggressors, oppressors and imperialists and their minions did not stop their incessant bombardment and killings, and if they did not follow through with any diplomatic agreements. (Donbass region formerly in Ukraine wanted to join Russia, not surprisingly as it was treated in Ukraine as a tumour to be excised.)

There is no Soviet Union today. And my generation of Vietnamese descendants have been acclimatised. So there is hardly anyone in circles outside the Middle East to call for a global armed struggle to back the liberation of Palestine. (And Palestinians have also expressed extreme disappointment with other governments in the Middle East.) We have to start with this position before this struggle can be realised.

In recent decades, the western liars and massacrers have screeched, time and time again, for invasions of other nations for their own gain, exploitation and brutality, disguised as "military interventions". They had sprawling propaganda networks to do it.

Far from those, there cannot be a clearer case than right now for people of the world to actually provide military support… like I have said, once we had let the imperialists bomb Viet Nam, Laos and Cambodia, we let them bomb Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Palestine. Once we condemned Libya and Palestine to a fate of suffocated destruction, once we let them do this to Palestine, we allow them to do the same to any of us, anywhere around the world. I cannot support the silent condemnation of Palestine to this fate of total annihilation.

The imperialists eventually retreated militarily from Viet Nam, from Afghanistan. They don't have any vital interests there in the end.

The position that Palestinians and Hamas have to kowtow to Israel, have to do de-escalation to demand a ceasefire from Israel, is the most despicable, deplorable, degrading. They don't have to do anything – it is Israel and the West that unconditionally must stop.

President [Lyndon] Johnson's reaction to all this was astonishingly close to that predicted by Nguyen Duy Trinh. At a TV press conference on February 2, the President backed away from all his previous proposals and called for "reciprocity" in exchange for a bombing halt, something which he knew in advance was unacceptable to Hanoi. He spoke of "mutual steps" of de-escalation, but the point was that Hanoi was not bombing the United States—it was the U.S. that was bombing North Viet-nam.

[Source: A Spurned Olive Branch by Wilfred Burchett, in Chapter 8 of Grasshoppers & Elephants: Why Viet Nam Fell]

If Palestine had enough military power and political power as Russia right now for example, this position of armed struggle would be far more readily realised and expressed globally.

Across the decades, I always consistently find that even the most supposed espoused of ardent Western dissidence and opposition to Western imperialist wars hardly guarantees even the most basic of dignities of self-determination and independence and any political sovereignty for oppressed peoples seeking to win their freedom and overthrow imperialist and colonial forces of domination. This is why I also seek the perspectives of those who are colonised and fighting for their freedom, to see what they're going through.

In recent years there have been coups in Africa where local populations have supported the overthrow of neo-colonial puppets, in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Gabon, Guinea and more. No western dissident, or any dissident elsewhere for that matter really, would have actively called for that, for example. But these populations felt that they needed this, at a bare minimum at least in some regard, to stop imperialist forces in their homelands.

After early October, when I attended a protest for Palestine here, I have been going through an ongoing mental health condition whereby I have been dragged in and out and in and out of psychosis, in and out, still ongoing. (It's probably familial. It's probably bipolar with mania with psychotic symptoms.) I felt like I have not been there when my words were needed. None of these descriptors that people use to describe Israel and the West, such as "psychotic" or "Russio-phrenia" are actually accurate by the way (or appropriate for that matter – crucially, people experiencing psychosis are going through beliefs and hallucinations that are outside their control and not in a usual way for them otherwise). All of what the West is doing is completely deliberate and of their own volition.

I don't really know where to leave this piece except to say that I have written like if this was my people under genocide, which it is, too – my brothers and sisters in Palestine – this is what I would do. We start with Palestinian-led coalitions to call for countries and organizations to submit troops and resources for the liberation of Palestine.

I'm so tired of being told that this nonsense of begging for mercy from the utterly merciless oppressors is going to make a difference. So this is where I find myself. I tried to write anything less than this and I could not publish it.

Like Uhuru expressing bold, solid support for Russia soon after Feb 24, 2022 before being raided by the FBI and indicted by the US Department of Justice under Biden, under the pretense of being Russian agents when they had long been fighting US colonialism; like Norman Finkelstein saying that Russia had the moral right if not legal right to invade Ukraine, and after all he has said in defense of Palestine too now his Substack has been censored even though he was found the fifth-most influential political scientist; I know that what I am saying is also well outside the range of acceptable opinion, even for those who regard themselves as dissidents in the west.

I still stand by it: We need to support the armed struggle for the liberation of Palestine.