These are not wars. These are the systematic annihilation of a people.
5 April 2025 – – Alfred, Lord Tennyson said it best: “Nature is red in tooth and claw”. Take away the restraint of all law, revert to tribalism, and we become worse than animals.
But nations are tribes. Traditional cultures operate without police, armies, etc. and are mostly peaceful.
But this, what is going on today? The pain of the unethical deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza and Ukraine and Yemen and so many other places makes the concept of “genocide” a performative gesture of shock and horror.
Trump is pro-Russia. He is pro-Israel. He has given both the “green light” to do as they wish.
• The Russian attacks have primarily targeted civilian areas, such as residential neighborhoods and playgrounds, and include a devastating missile assault on Kryvyi Rih 2 nights ago which killed at least 18 people, including 9 children, and injured over 60 others. Every missile, every drone strike proves Russia wants only war. Russian attacks on Ukraine have skyrocketed since Trump’s election. The death toll has exploded exponentially in just 3 months.
The Russians deliberately target civil infrastructure to kill and annihilate. They purposefully destroy peaceful cities without mercy, and they are not planning to stop.
• Earlier this week, 15 more rescue workers killed by Israel in Gaza. That’s 408 aid workers and 1,060 health workers killed so far. Israel has called for the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians. I jumped to my notes on the Eichmann trial. A short video clip:
In a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, Adolf Eichmann – the architect of the Holocaust’s logistics – sat encased in glass, shielded not from justice, but from the rage of those whose families he’d erased. When asked about his role in deporting millions to their deaths, he called it “a regulated planned emigration”. Pressed on whether this meant forced expulsion, he smirked: “Yes, but forced emigration meant accelerated emigration”.
Words coiled in bureaucracy, designed to neutralize genocide.
Decades later, Israel has weaponized the same grotesque wordplay.
Gaza and Ukraine. These are not wars. These are the systematic annihilation of a people.
The meaning of genocide is being emptied out by an unsettling of the grounding conditions of political debate and the relativization of political language.
This is the crisis of (Western) civilization now from which we will not recover.
I do not know what a life is without a future, where every day could be your last day. Where you’ve lost your job and your dreams. Where you have lived in a war that tears families apart, losing your relatives, your friends, your home. Where you have been robbed of your sense of security. To witness the destruction of your country and destruction of your cultural heritage, the destruction of all life.
But I do know one thing. In conflicts around the world, attacks on health facilities and civilian structures have increased by 90% in the past five years, and twice as many aid workers have been killed in the last decade as in the one before that. In recent years, civilians account for 84% of war casualties — a 22% point increase from the Cold War period. With no accountability.
That lack of accountability for crimes in all of these places simply fuels the culture of impunity we see globally. It’s not just war zones. Impunity is a helpful lens through which to understand the global drift to polycrisis, from climate change to the weakening of democracy. Where corruption runs rampant. Where billionaires can evade taxes, oil companies can misrepresent the severity of the climate crisis, elected politicians subvert the judiciary, and human rights are rolled back.
War, politics, money and the power of impunity. Because in our new world order, laws and norms are for suckers.