2024 – The Year we Collectively Failed (with one tiny silver lining)

2024 was the Year of Collective Failure.

In Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s immoral genocide continued with gruesome efficiency. The moment IDF soldiers pack raped a teenage Palestinian prisoner in front of other teenage Palestinian prisoners to psychologically torture them AND THEN have the Israeli electorate back those tactics is a true marker of how evil the Israelis themselves have mutated into because of the Occupation.

When you commit terrible evil to cement into place your legitimacy, then you become terrible evil.

That we allow the IDF to holiday in NZ to help them chill out from committing war crimes is deeply insulting to everything we as Kiwis stand for.

The death toll stands at 44.835 (including 17, 492 children), 106 356 injured, 11 000 dead trapped under rubble and 186 000 killed by indirect violence.

When you are knocking on quarter of a million dead in 1 year, how is that not genocide?

Does ‘active ethnic cleaning war crime’ sound better?

Our collective refusal to reign in Israel and America should shame us and our pretence at Western Morality forever.

The collapse of the repugnant Assad regime in Syria highlights the twisted regional influences at play. All of a sudden we have woke Taliban running things and that’s a far better preference.

Lebanon and Iran have been dangerously destabilised all because Israel refused to end their illegal and brutal occupation of Palestinian land.

The impact of watching Palestinian children blown to pieces on TicTok will generate animosity towards America and Israel in ways that will make 9/11 look mild.

In the Ukraine, the terrible friction of Putin’s monstrous war continued unabated. Putin played the long game and waited until Trump’s re-election.

Putin has killed and maimed over 700 000 of his own soldiers and the American Military Industrial complex will fight Russia until the last Ukrainian.

The stresses from the Ukrainian war are being felt throughout Europe as a new shadow war erupts.

The environment collapsed with tipping points now clearly breached, we are seeing more catastrophic weather events and the speed of the warming has shocked scientists.

This is now the age of climate consequences harvested from broken environmental promises and empty emissions pledges.

This year research claimed there was a more than 50% chance of the AMOC failing before 2050.

It could happen as early as 2037.

Most have no idea what the AMOC is or what happens if it fails.

We are so fucked.

The woke identity politics clique suddenly realised they had cancelled all the voters with their pure temple politics and had made the Left as appealing to working class males as a cup of cold sick while the Trans activists went very quiet after the Cass Review painted the movement out as little more than a middle class cult.

It was the year of adult diagnosis of ADHD.

A Venn diagram of woke activists screaming that you are transphobic alongside adults who suddenly declare they have ADHD would be a perfect circle.

Despite the belief of the woke, not one family in poverty was sitting around the kitchen table cancelling each other for misusing pronouns, they were trying to work out how to pay the bills and when they turned to the Left for solutions to their pain, they found flakey word salad feelings instead of actual policy.

The woke are great at organising free the nipple protests with militant kink friendly mommy blogger vegans on bikes, not so good at challenging the neoliberal hegemonic structure.

China’s economy continued to fall while the West locked into importing inflation from just-in-case supply chains replacing just-in-time supply chains.

This never ending inflation burns the working classes in the West and that pain leads them to elect authoritarian figures.

Trump’s landslide win played to this global dynamic of economic anxiety.

Those who claim Trump has a mandate and the ‘majority’ misunderstand what that means.

Just because you have the majority, doesn’t mean you are right, it just means you have power.

Look at what Trump is doing with that power.

He is appointing the most Ghoulish Cavalcade of Political Circus Freaks, this is a Rogues Gallery of Supervillains, people, who are acolytes and loyalists before they are intelligent people.

They are cogs in his machine.

A terrible, terrible, terrible machine.

America was always a Military Industrial Complex death machine but now Trump’s United States of Wounded Masculinity has elected a naked Plutocracy.

Trump’s brand of Orange Fascism has used the UNDERmensch to empower the UBERmensch.

That’s a very clever joke.

The ‘majority’ aren’t right just because they are the majority and we are seeing that in NZ.

Majoritarianism is not Democracy!

The NZ Political Right have mistaken anger at Labour as a mandate for culture war vengeance!

2023 wasn’t an election, it was a  grudge fuck against Labour by an embittered post Covid electorate who were economically insecure, alienated by woke dogma and heart broken that all Labour could do with a once in a generation MMP majority was ‘good first steps’ rather than transformational leaps.

It has resulted in a Hard Right Racist Government bound together only by a shared glee in bashing beneficiaries, workers, renters, prisoners, the environment, gang members, drug addicts and the disabled.

They all have a particular dislike for Māori and have used attempts at co-governance to fulfil the promise of the Treaty (which is our collective obligation) as a weapon with which to cement into place 19th Century White Settler Privilege and call that ‘democracy’.

They are doing this fundamentally for their donor’s interests who want to be able to rape the environment without consulting with da Maaaris.

In a modern liberal democracy, you acknowledge the power imbalance created in society and you resource to ensure those power imbalances are compensated for!

In a liberal progressive democracy, it doesn’t matter what role you play in the complex super structure of our society and economy.

It doesn’t matter of you are a garbage collector, a dr, a nurse, a drain layer, teacher or tradie – if you all stopped doing your jobs the system can’t work.

Everyone deserves to share the collective harvest of civil society with public services and policies focused on the public good enshrined in the intrinsic civil liberties each individual has.

Wealthy individuals who become mega rich thanks to the landscape generated by those values are required to pay more back into the system they have benefited from beyond the bare necessity of ruthless accountancy practices.

The Political Right are screaming that imposing Qanon talking points as social policy, destroying workers rights, Tobacco deaths for tax cuts and taking $555million from the poorest families are all acceptable because they have the Majority so fuck everyone else!

That’s why on the first day of the Government there were nationwide protests. That’s why in the first week of the new Government global headlines were attacking our u-turn on gas and oil exploration and smoking policy.

That’s why 84 000 protested in Wellington last month

That’s why their resistance is the silver lining to a year of collective failure!

More Kiwis see the Treaty as a source of hope than a means for division, that alone saved 2024!

Dismantling the values of a liberal progressive democracy to cement into place 19th Century White Settler privilege using culture war vengeance as social policy IS NOT Democratic, it’s majoritarianism without any of the values of a true Democracy.

You can’t shit on Renters, Māori, the Environment, Workers, Beneficiaries and Prisoners while pretending to be democratic.

That’s the zeal of the Lynch mob, that’s not Democracy!

Look at how this hard right Government have traded the common good for their donor mates interests FFS!

Majoritarianism is the whip of the autocrat masquerading as legitimacy. It has none of the soul or wisdom that a Democracy requires to be meaningful.

2024 was the Year we Collectively Failed.

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