We have an unsolvable problem that is not going to disappear. History is terrible when ignored because it has mass. That mass grows over time until its gravitational pull seems to invisibly distort the present.
I see this as a major force leading to the collapse of civilizations. Yes, there are many factors in civilizational collapse, including external physical characteristics such as climate disaster, as we are currently experiencing.
The historical forces at work may be beyond our control, but at least we know what they are and can continue to try. Our planetary climate disaster is a result of the invention of capitalism and that pseudo-economic system being raised to semidivine status within one prosperous nation-state and its minions.
However, we know this, although a significant minority who have made fortunes for generations from this system refused to acknowledge the error. Failing to correct the economic and political disaster is a conscious failure and may yet be corrected.
Historical errors hidden or denied still distort reality, leading to irrational actions and growing confusion as their force builds in human society. Because of this, the accelerating collapse of the American Empire is partially understood, though denied, but is in a state of unexplainable confusion created by hidden/denied historical realities.
This confusion is an aspect of the planetary polycrisis. As if the identifiable variables were not bad enough, the hidden historical forces of past errors add absurdity, undermining confidence in our ability to analyze and describe our condition.
While those of us who spend the time and energy to follow the scientific analysis of our planetary climate disaster realize that we seriously underestimated it and have very little time remaining, the growing climate effects have not yet directly intruded on most humans.
Our problem is that there are too many concurrent and evolving disasters. We are not programmed to handle anything but immediate threats in close proximity.
Confusion results from increasing talk about social collapse caused by the climate disaster. For many people, this allows politicization, making discussion of the impending climate apocalypse fake news.
If it is not in their face, then it isn’t real. They are correct, as we are not yet at that level of climate apocalypse. That we will soon be there is meaningless to many people.
Yet, we face significant social and economic failures reflected in political fear and loathing. On the one hand, official media laud great economic success and the return of rapid growth, while that absurdity is mostly ignored.
These hidden and denied historical forces explain our growing social failures. We can no longer separate these historical influences, complicating our increasing range of disasters.
The expanding military technology is transformative and makes drone attacks available to ordinary people and not just high-level, billion-dollar governments. Yet the nuclear apocalyptic weapons are again proliferating among states that may become irrational.
And these are the issues that we have some knowledge of, even if portions of our population ignore them. The entirely ignored and denied history adds an equal set of forces distorting our society more each day. These distortions push us backward in time as people react with fear to unexplainable threats on top of those that are known.
This is the tradition of folk remedies and snake oil sellers. We have problems, and no one can explain or suggest cures for what is being experienced. This makes confidence (scam) artists like Donald Trump powerful as they will claim a cure for things they don’t understand.
The greater the confusion and chaos, the higher the risk to people with no confidence in what they know and in the leaders they have who seem equally confused. It is worse when things that were once known transform into something monstrous.
Too many changes and too many variables exacerbate the entire process. People opt to keep the monsters they know, even if that no longer makes sense.
Israel and the Gaza genocide is now one of the worst cases of human suffering and criminal action that is being covered by multiple layers of historical ignorance and denial, a form of planetary cognitive dissonance.
The United Nations created the Zionist state of Israel as a result of the Jewish Holocaust, addressing our shared guilt for the failure to stop that tragedy. But that state has become genocidal against the Palestinian people whose land was stolen to create that state in 1948.
Seventy-six years of conflict, terrorism, and counter-terrorism have created a historical black hole whose gravitational force can no longer be ignored and cannot be managed.
However, that problem is part of a regional climate disaster that will continue to reduce the sustainable population of much of the Middle East in the next ten years. The climate disaster scenario is well understood but is ignored. However, it is a significant factor in the Israeli decision to destroy the Palestinian population to complete the ethnic cleansing.
None of this is simple, and my point is that none of this can be simplified by ignoring the layered historical gravitational forces that are distorting all aspects of this tragedy.
America’s historically racist empire has distorted its politics so severely that despite mass international condemnation, nothing can stop America’s delivery of weapons of mass destruction to a criminal Israeli regime. This is complicated by America’s Jewish population of approximately seven million being the same as or larger than Israel’s Jewish population, depending on how that population is defined.
We are watching an American internal civil conflict evolving as the Jewish population increasingly feels forced to continue to support or abandon the criminal Zionist regime in Israel. This is at the core of a larger conflict between American university populations that are demanding the end of support for the Israeli genocide against a disconnected and dysfunctional national denial of reality.
But the genocide must be stopped and seventy-six years of destruction corrected. The growing climate disaster will worsen all such disasters rapidly and is already beyond any imagined compromise correction short of terminating support for the Israeli regime and concentrating support for the Palestinian population.
Hamas and related officials have announced that they will lay down arms with the establishment of a Palestinian state:
Basem Naim, an Istanbul-based member of Hamas’ political bureau, told CNN on Thursday that the group would agree to disarm if an independent Palestinian state was established.
“If an independent state with its capital in Jerusalem, while preserving the right of return for refugees, (is created) Al Qassam could be integrated into (a future) national army,” he said, referring to the group’s armed wing. [Source: CNN]
Will this solve the disaster? It is hard to say, but it will stop the killing and hopefully induce both the Israeli and Palestinian populations to rethink their existence as the climate disaster removes our options.
As of December 2023, Israel’s Zman magazine reported that 470,000 Israelis have emigrated from Israel, and it is not known if they will return at a later point. Perhaps this is part of the answer.
The Israeli government is also systematically contaminating the land and water in Gaza. They are doing it purposefully. I read this article in CounterPunch about it. I can't really put into words how disgusting this is to me.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/28/israels-cruelty-is-by-design-an-interview-with-joshua-frank/