Why Don’t We Call Sieges ‘Sieges’?
One of the curious things about the Hypocritical Hegemon (America) is that it never declares war and never uses the word ‘siege’. But it’s always at war, and always besieging people!
Right now, to take just one example, Gaza is under siege. That’s a simple historical fact, buried in the news. What else do you call cutting off a population from food and water, launching missiles at them, and slaughtering them in the streets? This is what the proxy ‘Israel’ is doing, and what they could not do without full imperial backing. The Embarrassed Empire, however, doesn’t like the word ‘siege’. They call it self-defense, among other mendacities. But it is what it is. It’s just a siege.
All that is happening in Gaza is a ‘medieval’ siege of a walled city. Invaders would surround a city, cut off and/or poison food and water supplies, hurl projectiles over the walls, and wait for the population to submit, starve, or die of disease. Ideally all three. Once you got in the walls, you could go door to door, slaughtering men, women, and children. This is precisely what ‘Israel’ is doing, only with modern weapons. The imperial media use the fact that we live in modernity to imply that a ‘medieval’ siege simply isn’t possible, even though it’s obviously happening. A modern siege is the same as a medieval siege, just with more technology and hypocrisy.
Gaza has, in fact, been under siege since 2007. It has been walled in, blockaded by sea, and anyone that tried to break the blockade was boarded and killed. For decades, ‘Israel’ tightly controlled inputs into Gaza to provide the bare caloric minimum for human life. After people broke out of this open-air prison in 2023, however, ‘Israel’ abandoned that pretence and is openly trying to kill everybody. The long, slow siege became a rapid genocide, as the invaders streamed over the gates (they put up) in F16s.
In its bombing of everything, ‘Israel’ has paid special attention to water supplies, food stores, hospitals, and human shelter. Classic siege warfare, just with modern technology. The point of a siege is to make a place so unlivable that people either sicken, die or surrender (preferably all three). All of ‘Israel’s’ modern siege machinery comes from the America the colonial White Empire at large. They are nor merely complicit, they are the causal factor behind both ‘Israel’ and the genocide it necessarily causes. These carbon crusaders are not passively ‘supporting’ a genocide, they’re doing it. They’re the active party, ‘Israel’ is just their dog on a long leash.
The even more pointy end of a siege is armed men going into the walled city and slaughtering everybody. Since ‘Israel’ built the walls, they can come and go (generally) as they please, and they have been executing, kidnapping, torturing and simply killing people in the streets. Their troops have continued the secondary siege work of destroying hospitals, homes, pharmacies, water supplies, and food stores, and also simply killed and maimed people en masse. Entire ‘engineering’ crews are devoted to blowing up civilian homes, universities, public records, etc. They’re stealing gold and savings, old-fashioned looting and pillaging. Snipers are shooting people through hospital windows.‘Soldiers’ are tying men up and murdering them in front of their families, then throwing grenades at their families. It’s as brutal as any medieval siege, but we somehow don’t see it that way because they’re not using knives and bare hands. But to the people dying, what’s the difference?
This is a classic ‘medieval’ siege in that ‘Israel’ is razing the place, and they’ve been quite open about it. Israel’s Prime Monster has called the Palestinian people “Amalek,” meaning a biblical population that was killed man, woman, and child. He has also said that they’ll reduce Gaza to rubble, which is precisely what they’ve done. This is historically very simple and only complicated by the ‘news’. It’s just a brutal siege, using all the industrial might of modernity, backed by the largest empire in human history, and all of its treachery.
One of the most brutal modern siege weapons is bureaucracy. ‘Sanctions’, blockades, starvation by writ, sieges without moving a ship. Now for example, America and its vassals have cut off funding the the refugee agency (UNRWA) serving the Palestinians, just as most of the population of Gaza has become refugees. They continue ‘Israel’s’ work of killing these people, just with benign bureaucracy, and bullshit ‘investigations’.
This is all made to seem very complex in the news but, again, just look at it historically. A population is being starved and infected into submission and providing aid to those people necessarily breaks the siege. So the people providing the aid must be broken. This is again the White Empire’s direct participation in the siege of Gaza. Their hands are not clean and, indeed, their hands are pulling the strings. The deeply cynical fact is that the White Empire pushes the Jews in front of them to do the dirty work of colonizing the Middle East, and taking all the heat. They can bloodlessly direct the siege of Gaza from far away, but make no mistake, they are directing the whole bloody scene.
This is the nature of the Hypocritical Hegemon. Ancient Empires were proud of conquering, slaughtering, and enslaving people. Sieges were just another weapon in their arsenal, and they often advertised their brutality. They wanted the next city to see, and see clearly. This Empire, however, likes to hide in plain sight, or behind pliant proxies, or in a constant fog of ‘debate’. The first casualty of war is truth, and this Empire has been at war throughout colonization. Truth hasn’t had a chance to breathe for centuries. That’s why we don’t talk about ‘sieges’ anymore. Not because they don’t happen. Because words themselves are under siege.
This Empire calls conquest ‘intervention’, they call slaughter ‘self-defense’, they call slavery ‘freedom’, and they expect us all to believe and repeat. They call ‘sieges’ sanctions, and punish rebellious provinces for generations. If you piss off the hegemon, they’ll make sure your children’s children don’t have medicine. This bashful hegemon nonetheless bashes in brains and starves children to death worse than anybody in human history. They have merely industrialized siege warfare and applied modern marketing to it but it’s the same damn thing.
At this point, their lies are falling apart, but it’s still a challenge to name what you see. But just look and apply words logically. ‘Israel’ and Empire itself are cutting a population off from food, water, and medicine, throwing missiles over the wall, and sending in armed men to kill them. A siege by any other name would still reek, and that’s all that’s happening in Gaza, and all the places the Empire is ‘sanctioning’.
Empire is always at war and always besieging people. The words are nowhere, but the facts are everywhere. This should be obvious, but it actually takes quite an effort to break out of the wall-to-wall news cycle and see that our minds themselves are besieged.Thus the first thing to break is this wall of wrong language and endless detail that they put around our eyes, to keep us from seeing what we’re seeing. Men, women, and children, walled in, being slaughtered by swords, starvation, and deprivation. On purpose, by Carbon Crusaders who have no business in that place or any place, besides their filthy business of looting and pillaging.
This is the modern siege of Gaza that we are living through, and that they are dying in. It all seems very complicated in the news, but it’s quite simple historically. It’s a just a siege.