Three views of the same war

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. This is Friday the 17^th day of November in the year of our Lord 2023. I will be talking about war, especially the ongoing war in Gaza. I will be looking at the different views of the war by different people who have different perspectives on the same series of events Then I will argue that neither of the first two perspectives is completely accurate. But the third perspective explains not only Gaza but war in general.

I will begin by reminding you that next Thursday is Thanksgiving Day. I plan to spend some time with my family having a good meal and giving thanks. So no Castle Report next week. Have a good holiday with family and don’t forget to give thanks.

What do we know about the Fourth Arab-Israeli War?

What do we know for certain about the war in Gaza? I don’t mean what the news media tells us or what we hear through rumors. Rather I mean what do we know for certain. There are so many conflicting opinions of the war that we don’t know much beyond what is happening on the ground with the movement of troops, etc. We can have at least a little confidence in what the reporters on the ground monitoring and reporting on the fighting tell us. But even then, their work is filtered through their networks, newspaper editors, etc.¹

It seems that Israeli forces are moving through Gaza destroying tunnels and Hamas fighters where they can find them. This is urban warfare and that is the most casualty intense war especially for civilians. For example, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights as of September 2023 a total of 9,614 civilians died during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to that date. That low number is because very little of the fighting is urban. And in urban warfare often 90% of the casualties are noncombatants.

Casualty figures in Gaza

According to Reuter’s wire more than 11000 people have been killed during the start of the Israeli operation in Gaza. Most of these are civilians. The civilian casualties are undoubtably higher because Hamas is embedded in the civilian population. The Israelis report that they discovered a headquarters unit of Hamas under a large hospital. I saw video of an Israeli military spokesmen showing the tunnel entrances, weapons recovered etc. Can that video be believed or is it fabricated? That’s the difficult thing about our propagandized technological world. Almost anything is possible so almost nothing is certain and almost nothing can be believed.

Hamas seems to be conducting a delaying operation, withdrawing a little at a time to delay the inevitable and inflict maximum casualties while at the same time waiting for media coverage to take its toll. The war is spreading with attacks in the West Bank and out of Lebanon. The delaying action gives Hamas more time to rally support from its Middle East partners and from news propaganda around the world. Thus the longer the fight, the higher the casualties and the more international sympathy is generated.

Can we believe even our own war coverage?

So, we sit here in America and we watch television, listen to the radio, or perhaps even read The New York Times or The Washington Post. If you read your local paper, it is just a reflection of the opinion of those two papers and is editorially virtually identical. Can we have any confidence that what we are being told is accurate? Not in my opinion because it’s all lying propaganda and nothing can be believed without further investigation. Getting to the truth these days is very hard work. And no matter how hard you work you can never be totally confidant. I am, therefore, confident of only one part of the mass media reporting. And that is that it is all lying propaganda designed to reinforce the existing regime’s power structure.

The regime’s power structure is in turn, there to serve the interests of the moneyed classes. For as George Orwell said:

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

War has another advantage for today’s elite billionaire class. Which is: it furthers their aim of destroying humanity therefore thinning the herd of rabble left for them to manage. That short explanation is the third view or my own view of this war and all the others.

Why do people fight?

People fight and kill each other in mass numbers because they become inflamed about perceived threats and bad people doing bad things that other people tell them about. These other people don’t care about them or their families. They just view them as so much meaningless rabble. But they are oh so enraged and can’t wait to go kill all the bad people their leaders tell them about. Who are the bad people? Well that’s easy. They are whoever their leaders tell them they are.

There are three sides to almost every dispute these days. There are the two sides fighting and then there is the side directing and profiting from the fighting. In the Gaza war we have the Israeli side which is a peaceful nation going about its affairs without harmful intent. Israeli citizens were living in peace or so they thought. But they were invaded by a hostile neighbor intent on inflicting terror through mass civilian deaths. The invaders were not warriors, but murderers, rapists, torturers, kidnappers, and killers of babies. They attacked the most defenseless of the Israeli population killing some 1400 and taking 200-250 hostages, many of them children. They did so because that creates the most terror and the most rage and desire for revenge among the true warriors of the Israeli military.

The Gaza side

Is that what happened and what provoked this war.? Many people think so. If it is what happened then I would certainly understand the Israeli desire for revenge and to sacrifice to prevent it from happening again. Sometimes when your sworn enemy sows the wind, he must be forced to reap the whirlwind. But is that what really happened? The Palestinians and those who support them see the struggle differently.

The Israelis, or the Jews as they prefer to call them, stole the land from Palestinians in 1948. They were and are colonialists and therefore completely illegitimate residents of the land they occupy. These Israelis forced the Palestinians into a tiny sliver of land called Gaza but what is in reality an open-air concentration camp. The Israelis periodically bomb Gaza for no reason killing civilians at will. The attack of October 7^th was an act of legitimate self defense because the people of Gaza had all they could take and sooner or later an explosion had to happen. It’s true that the Iranians planned, funded, and partially staffed the attack for two years before it happened. But after all we are all in this worldwide struggle against the Jews together.

Antisemitism at the heart of this war

Let’s just be honest about this struggle. It’s the Jews. They are intent on committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Those 9 million Jews in Israel together with their American lap dog supporters are going to kill all 2 million Palestinians unless they are stopped. We are not the only ones who see the truth in this struggle and we are, therefore, not alone. People around the world from the faculty and students at the richest and most powerful college in the world, Harvard, to the Irish parliament and the men and women on the streets of Europe they support our struggle against the Jews.

Yes, at Harvard they are very anti-Jew. But for those who think it is bad form in polite society to be anti-Jew, they are anti-Israel. Harvard is oh so prestigious and it has an endowment of $52 billion which generated revenue of $11 billion last year all tax free since its an endowment. Harvard, The educator of presidents, having given birth to 8 of them, apparently sees its Jewish students and faculty along with other Jews worldwide as enforcers and enablers of white supremacy. Thirty-four student groups on campus banded together to send a letter condemning the Jews – oh excuse me, I mean the Israelis – for the war in Gaza.

Blame Israel for everything

The letter said they hold the Israeli Regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence in Gaza. The letter did not place any blame on the Palestinians at all. Instead it said it rested entirely on the Israelis despite what Hamas did to initiate the war. The letter condemned Israel for its retaliation for what Israel claimed was murder, rape, torture, kidnapping of the very young and the very old without placing any blame on the Palestinians. I can look back through history and conclude that the firebombing of Dresden with over 100,000 civilian deaths was a bad idea. But at the same time I remember the terror bombing of London and the camps.²

To illustrate the madness of it all the president of the United States calls himself a friend of Israel. Then I see reports that indicate that Israel and the United States might be planning a joint strike against Iran. Senator Lindsey Graham told the Iranians in no uncertain terms “we are coming for you if you launch missiles.” If the president is really a friend of Israel, why is he trying to get limited sanctions relief so he can release $10 billion to Iran? Why would the president fund the enemies of his friends while threatening them in other ways?

Stay out

Does all that mean that I am a friend of Israel? I prefer to think of myself as an enemy of war. This war, like all the others at least since WW ll, would be a good one for the United States to stay away from. Why do American leaders constantly stick the noses of their military into every rattlesnake nest they find around the world? War which never ends and the endless saber rattling cannot benefit many but those who profit do so enormously.

There is the mass media funded and owned by the permanent state who manipulate the minds of the people to arouse anger so they will do the bidding of their masters. There is always some bad guy who is the new Hitler out there to be fought. The money people, the central bankers, profit no matter who wins the war. But they profit the most when nobody wins and the war is perpetual. The arms dealers are more than happy to do their part and ramp up production. If the stockpiles of weapons start to grow a little bit, then a new war might require all those stockpiles to be given to one of our friends fighting one of the really bad regimes out there.

Against the concept of war

The whole concept of war is absurd. It is absurd that we the people allow the fabulously wealthy to manipulate us into war where possibly millions will die for some cause they are convinced of through propaganda services owned by the same rich men. The rich do it to maintain and increase their already enormous wealth, power, and control of the people of the earth. President Eisenhower who knew something about war said it well.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired , signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Finally, folks, the U.S. and the West in general is crumbling and advances made over two thousand years are being rolled back. Free speech, religious freedom, individual rights, free and fair elections are all threatened. Along with those threats we have open air drug use, filthy streets, homeless everywhere, crumbling infrastructure, crime more and more blatant and unaccountable everyday and no desire or money to fix it except with debt which only makes it worse. Endless war, however, we always seem to have plenty of.

At least that’s the way I see it.

I will talk to you again on Friday, December 1^st.

Until then this is Darrell Castle.

Editor’s Notes:

This article appeared first at CastleReport.us and appears her by permission of the author.

1 Not to mention the journalistic “stringers” of highly dubious honor and honesty, “embedded” with the Gazan “Army.”

2 Auchwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Sobibor, Treblinka, and others too numerous to name.