My wife’s uncle was killed last year. The family has spent almost a year fighting not for his life but for his death. For a murder verdict. He was killed by powerful people who used the corrupt police and press to try and cover the whole thing up, as suicide. I think about this as I watch the open genocide of Gaza. Whether it’s homicide or genocide, they try to cover it up and blame the victim. This is what the most powerful (and prolific) killers do. They take not just your life, but your death.

This is how it is when you face state killers. They have the power to ‘state’ things, so they state that you deserved it, or that you killed yourself, or that it didn’t happen at all. And the mass media happily plays the tune. They cover up murder and mass murder with equal gusto. In Sri Lanka, our uncle was murdered in broad daylight in a professional hit, and crooked journalists still call it a ‘mystery’. In Israel, American bombs and a professional military obliterate 10,000 people (and counting!) while the NYTimes buries them in verbal rubble. They shamelessly run headlines like “Explosion Gazans Say Was Airstrike Leaves Many Casualties in Dense Neighborhood.” WTF does this even mean? That story was Israel bombing a decades-old refugee camp. The image was a journalist holding the body of his dead child. All of the free press in the West are just privatized propaganda. They’re accomplices to mass murder, to state it plainly.

I’ve seen this real collusion happen in my personal life, and now we can all see it every day in the global news. Just as the mass media works with the homicidal police, they work with genocidal militaries too. This is how the powerful roll. They take your life and then they take your death too. They beat the pall-bearers at your funeral. Absolute ghouls.

Right now in Palestine, Genocide Joe Biden — some chickenhawk from Connecticut who should really focus on Palestine, Ohio— said he has “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” This is the world’s largest arms dealer lecturing people with their arms blown off. At that point, the number of Palestinian dead was 7,000. Now it’s 10,000. It’s only accelerating, as America sends generals, troops, warships, and gigantic bombs to drop on a a concentration camp. The openly genocidal Israeli state says 20,000 killed, nearly 1% of the Gazan population, because that’s what they’re trying to do and they’re proud of it. But the Americans are completely shameless. They send tonnes of bombs and then lie about it, like those bombs don’t drop. The powerful don’t just kill people. They murder language too.

The most vital task of western propaganda is not manufacturing consent, it’s manufacturing doubt. It’s asking so many stupid questions and taking up so much time that people either get confused or forget about it. It’s setting up a debate with ‘both sides’, like gladiators in a Colosseum, so the status quo of Empire can carry on undisturbed above. Or to put it more simply as Trump adviser Steve Bannon did, they simply ‘flood the zone with shit’. They bury the bodies twice, once in concrete rubble and then in abstract rubbish.

What is happening in Palestine is an obvious genocide, as genocide scholars are saying, as anyone with eyes and a heart knows. When you cut off food, water, and fuel to a population and bomb them in their homes, what else do you call this? Fighting terrorism? Every single child in Gaza is terrorized. The world is terrorized by watching and every single country except America, Israel, and the latest colony Ukraine voted for a ceasefire. White Empire is the terror. Forget what they say and just look at what they do. Unfortunately, as the still ruling power in the world, they still control the words we use.

So we must endlessly debate the word ‘genocide’, just as my family had to fight for the word ‘homicide’. We have to get killers to admit that they’re killers, and everyone has to pretend that these are serious people, and not just rogues that have captured institutions. And the sad fact is that much of the population, which still has some trust in these institutions, still takes these cold-blooded killers at their word. In truth the average citizen of your modern Democracy™ has no more wisdom power than a Roman in a Colosseum. They’re just watching some poor population getting trotted out for mass murder, and getting a transient thrill from putting their thumb up or down. It’s meaningless. The Empire decides who gets trotted out in the first place, and precisely what lies get told about them. These idiot populations endlessly debate who should live or die, like it’s any of their business, while their rulers make a killing above it all. Genocide is good business for these ghouls. As colonizers, it’s really the only business they know.

The liberals in the Colosseum — the ‘enlightened’ Romans — are in fact, the worst. They keep saying ‘it’s complicated’ and draw you into endless theoretical debates about words and meanings, only to give a thumbs down if you dare throw a rock. The openly genocidal people are at least openly genocidal, you know where they’re coming from. The tacitly genocidal people come to you as friends, and stab you in the back cause they’re still fundamentally Brutuses.

Western liberal democrats, who elected the latest ‘lesser’ evil in Joe Biden, have proven to be the worst warmongers of all. Just look at soulless husks like Samantha Power, winning a Pulitzer Prize for a book about genocide, then going on to commit it wholeheartedly for the US government. These ghouls waste precious time debating how many of you need to die — and precisely how — before they change a word on your tombstone. They’ll happily piss on your grave and say they’re watering the flowers.

It sounds like hypocrisy, but it’s not. It’s really about hierarchy. The only choice America has in its next selection is a focus on white supremacy at home or white supremacy abroad. It’s white supremacy no matter what, even with a black President. Yes, black and brown people can even climb the ladder of whiteness, as long as they follow the rule of kicking down. Colonialism has always been administered by the colored, as long as they preserve the hierarchy. Which is actually very simple.

The ‘rules-based order’ has just one rule: colonizers have the right to kill, and it’s right for the colonized to die. You can see this rule in the BBC style guide. They still report ‘Israelis were killed’ and ‘Palestinians died.’ You can see it in a CBS reporter moaning about the Ukraine War, saying, “This isn’t a place, with all due respect, you know, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades. You know, this is a relatively civilized, relatively European… city.” The only lesson the colonizers learned from World War II was never again for white people. Hitler’s only sin was applying colonial logic to Europe. The ‘rules-based order’ are just Nazis that won, who have gleefully continued killing colored people ever since. As I said, they control words, and it’s only a ‘World War’ if white people are involved. If they’re killing us, it’s just business as usual.

We can see this is stark relief in Palestine. It’s not a genocide because Muslims are dying, and don’t they deserve it? They’re not like us, and aren’t so violent? As one Aaron Bady said, “The basic (colonial) double standard of the Israel Palestine “conflict” is that any Palestinian violence justifies any Israeli violence, but no Israeli violence ever justifies any Palestinian violence, and once you see it, you’ll never stop seeing it.” As Maitreya Bhakal responded, “It’s not hypocrisy it’s hierarchy,” as I said (I got it from him).

The truth is the ruling White Empire has no objection to violence in general, it just wants a monopoly on it. Any threat to their monopoly is called terrorism and must be put down with total genocide, in any random direction; just as long as the darkies get the point and the arms dealers get their profits. The cruelty is the point, really. They show their power by regularly beating up on the powerless.

If you want to see their monstrosity in a microcosm, just watch the funeral of Shireen Abu Akleh. Israeli snipers assassinated the Palestinian journalist, blamed it on the Palestinians, and then beat up the pall-bearers at her funeral. They beat up the pall-bearers at the funeral. That’s how vicious the colonizers are, and how little they see the colonized as human. And just wait till you see what they do to the animals and the plants and the land. Genocide is really a continuum, and their genocidal violence extends to everybody that has genes. The whole natural world. It’s really one hierarchy of violence, with whiteness (a fluid category) at the top and every living thing crushed underneath that imaginary concept. It's so imaginary that it's not even white people at the top, it's white people with property, as it was in that accursed Declaration of Independence. At this point it's effectively just property, as corporations have been sentient (and malevolent) for centuries now.

Today, I sadly don’t have to point out examples to you. Every single day, Israel commits a thousand different war crimes, while America sends them a billion dollars, and Europe wags along. Colonizers stay colonizing, even as the Earth burns. The most brazen example of people dying and them lying is the bombing of Al-Ahli Hospital. Israel obviously bombed the hospital, they said they bombed the hospital, but then they lied about it because they could. So then people spend weeks debating this nonsense while Israel bombs even more hospitals and cuts off fuel to the entire population, killing everybody on dialysis and every baby in an incubator. What a waste of time and waste of words.

This is the same thing our uncle’s killers did, except much worse. With our uncle, they made us spend 11 months dismantling the obviously absurd idea that he killed himself. I was talking to a friend from America who said the cops did the same thing to her uncle. They said he just decided to kill himself, while they were chasing him. It’s no coincidence. It’s calculated. This is how the powerful do it. Remember, they kill you twice, and the media is their constant accomplice in the cover-up.

Now consider the Palestinians, where this injustice is happening every day, to thousands of people. We mourn our uncle so deeply, now imagine that mourning 10,000 times, across an entire population. Imagine entire families wiped out, imagine children crying alone on hospital floors, with no living relatives. Then imagine the hospitals running out of power, running out of medicine, running out of water, and being bombed. That’s what’s actually happening, and they broadcast it. They want you to watch. Again, this is how they communicate power. By brutalizing the powerless. And it’s not enough to kill people. They must also show that they can murder truth.

My wife’s uncle was killed last year and it still hurts. It hurts even more because they keep lying about it, they keep re-traumatizing the family and making us go over the details of his death, to ‘prove’ it. I think of this when I see Palestinian doctors holding the dead bodies of children, to ‘prove’ it. I think of this injustice happening a thousand times over, then happening again tomorrow. This is how the powerful kill. They don’t just take your life, they take your death. But our family fought for Dinesh Anna’s death. Just as people are fighting for the deaths of those Palestinians. For the deaths of those in the Congo, in Sudan, all those being killed and disappeared in colonial violence right now. And all those who died before, so thoroughly buried that Americans and Europeans walk around talking about ‘human rights’ and ‘freedom’ like they’re not land-eating zombies, genociding the whole ecosystem. We have to fight for all of these deaths, because the killers are still killing.

It’s a terrible thing to win, a death, but it means something. The verdict of homicide meant something to our family, as traumatic as it was. Calling genocide ‘genocide’ means something to the Palestinians. It means they can’t massacre the truth anymore. It means they can’t keep dismembering the dead, if we remember them properly. So death to Israel, death to America, and same to this Sri Lankan government, for both its past genocide and current homicides. So life everlasting to the martyrs, in our hearts if nowhere else. They can kill you once, maybe they can kill you twice, but if the living keep fighting, they can’t kill you forever, inshallah.