John Wight: The truth about the Houthis

That same Europe, where they were never done talking with humanity, never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of humanity. Today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind. Frantz Fanon

First, let us deal with the howling hypocrisy and mendacity. Over 23,000 and counting Palestinians slaughtered, including 9000 children. Over 60,000 people maimed. Children forced to endure amputations without anesthetic. Most of Gaza destroyed. Looming famine. A humanitarian catastrophe materially supported by the West and unleashed in the name not of defence but a Zionist settler colonial project that is and has always been the acme of injustice.

BUT THE SHIPPING LANES! THE SHIPPING LANES ARE UNDER ATTACK!

In a world underpinned by even the most basic level of justice, a multinational military force would already have been assembled and deployed to protect the Palestinians of Gaza from the genocidal slaughter that we have been forced to bear witness to for the past 100 days.

Sadly, clearly, we do not live in such a world. Instead we live in a world in which rather than stop genocide, our governments in the West seek to justify, defend, and ride shotgun for it it. We live in a world in which rather than cherish the sanctity of all children, we have self-declared Christians in power deciding that the lives and protection of some children is deemed important than others.

READ: Hussein Ibish: The Biden administration’s failure in the Middle East

Genocide Joe Biden is by this point in human affairs a beast in human form. As for Benjamin Netanyahu, here we are dealing with a ‘man’ who carries a lump of excrement in his chest where his heart should be.

Here’s Fanon:

When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.

What Frantz Fanon understood more than anything was that the decolonisation of the body must begin with the decolonisation of the mind. In such a process the victim of the coloniser can only but rise up against their chains with righteous rage and the willingness to emancipate themselves by any means necessary.

The Hamas operation on October 7 is merely the most recent example of an enslaved, colonised, and an oppressed people doing precisely that. In this, Hamas acted in the tradition of the slave revolts which pepper the history of Rome; the slave revolts led in the antebellum South by Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner and John Brown; the native American Indian revolts. The rebellions that erupted in Kenya, India, the Caribbean, and in Ireland against British colonial rule and exploitation likewise stand in the same tradition.

John Brown

None of the above were pretty, but then an ugly oppression has never given birth to a pretty resistance.

“The most dangerous product of any society is the man who has nothing to lose.” So once opined the great black American author and thinker, James Baldwin. The self-same sentiment can be applied to entire peoples — i.e. “The most dangerous product of any world order is a people that has nothing to lose.” Marx’s famous dictum of “nothing to lose but your chains,” springs instantly to mind.

READ: UK TV host panned for vulgar interview with Palestinian MP

The Palestinians and the Houthis are currently two peoples joined in resistance against a common enemy. That enemy is Western imperialism, its Israeli proxy, and the rancid hypocrisy that defines both. This said, over these past few months during which biblical violence has been unleashed with restraint against the people of Gaza, one wonders who really fills the role of proxy in this malign dynamic.

The merchant ships that have been intercepted and occupied by the Houthis in the Red Sea in recent times are among the most visible assets of a global capitalist economy that enriches the few at the expense of the many.

Your enemy is not the Houthis. Your enemy is this enriched few and their political servants who are telling you they are.

The author is a writer and commentator and can be found on medium where this article was originally published