The Gaza genocide is a last stand for the West’s billionaire class. If it passes with impunity, they’ll effectively win the class war.
Gaza: a test of how much brutality they can get away with
Obscenely-rich individuals are already winning the class war against the rest of us. They have more wealth than perhaps ever before, which continues to grow, rapidly. Their wealth exceeds that of all but two countries. They also spread propaganda via media outlets and social media, while funnelling money directly into political campaigns, to help protect and increase their power.
But with Gaza, they’re testing out how much brutality they can get away with. While they’re not the ones dropping bombs or holding guns in their hands (for now), their support for the US-Israeli genocide is very much out in the open. And if they face no punishment for this, it could be game over for the class war. Because it could emerge from the shadows and go full-on dystopian. Some companies are already frothing at the mouth to establish an era of techno-dictatorship.
Billionaire rule out in the open
The US has a long history of genocidal imperialist terror. So perhaps unsurprisingly, it has also become the epicentre of the billionaire battle for global domination. In April, Statista said it had “a record 902 billionaire citizens, almost a third of all worldwide billionaires”. It leads the top ten of countries with most billionaires. Alongside it are Western allies Germany, Canada, Italy, and the UK.
Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, thanks in part to establishment crony Joe Biden’s shameless genocide participation, marked an escalation in the billionaire takeover in the US. It allowed an actual billionaire to become president, pack his team with other billionaires, and openly surround himself with a fascist billionaire mafia.
Trump has just had 13 billionaires around for a dystopian White House dinner. And he’s now wasting around a billion dollars simply to put up “Department of War” signage.
The billionaires have the real control. Israeli fascism is just a tool.
It’s clear that billionaires control the West today. Whether it’s liberal or conservative lapdogs in power, the push to scrap protections for ordinary people is relentless. And the reason Israel has been getting away with genocide is because its crimes serve a bigger purpose. The settler-colonial state has long been an outpost, proxy, and tool for imperialism in the oil-rich West Asia. It doesn’t just help to ensure Western billionaires access to the region’s resources. It also uses Palestine as a brutal laboratory for tech giants and arms dealers, whose tools of destruction and control benefit from ‘battle testing’ on Palestinian refugees.
As journalist Jonathan Cook insists, Israel is just a tool and a distraction. Those with real power in the world are the billionaires. They can deny direct involvement in the genocide, but they overwhelmingly support the apartheid state. And we can absolutely guarantee that the pro-Israel lobby only has big influence in Western politics because its behaviour aligns with the interests of billionaires.
If Israel gets away with its genocide in Gaza, it will only embolden the West’s billionaire class even more. They’ll be able to drop the veil covering their war on vast majority of the world’s population. And they’ll feel confident enough to use force and technology to win the class war once and for all.
Now is not the time for half measures. We need to tackle billionaire control head on, by any means necessary.
Featured image via the Canary
By Ed Sykes
This post was originally published on Canary.