I saw a post on X by a Palestinian reporter. A video on a massacre in Nuseirat Refugee Camp, south of Wadi Gaza: supposedly a safe zone as claimed by the Israeli Occupation. A random user, from a Western country, in response to calling it a massacre, said: ‘It is not a massacre. Just move south.’ It is one thing for a statement like this to come from (an elite) a politician, or even a corporation or a CEO, for opportunism in their class definition is enough to induce a state of denial or manipulation. But in my opinion it requires a deeper dig to understand the tendency that makes some people (non-elite) to make a statement that defies logic on many levels. More importantly, to dive into the strategy of naming (ignorant, racist, etc) in this case would preach more about the subject of the question of understanding than the object. In one word: lazy. For naming serves mystification, and to mystify is to abolish thought.

In this context an enclave is of concern. 2.2M in population, over 365 square kilometers (6027 residents per square kilometer). Of which 77% are refugees. Surrounded by an ‘occupying’ army consisting of 465,000 soldiers (25% of the size of the population of Gaza). Without addressing the historic, economic, scientific, moral, and human elements of the situation, one thing is for certain, ‘move south’ is a manifestation of a tendency that defies humanity and the thought within. But regardless of the context, or even this user particularly, what is it that makes a person develop such a tendency ? The short answer is ‘identity crisis’. 

History can be conceptualized as the art of story-telling, so long as the following is imposed on the reception of such art. A story, any story, is not a reflection of a truth. Conversely, every story holds an abstraction of the truth, albeit with variability in the degree of abstraction. The truth, to me at-least, lies within a perpetual struggle: the struggle to resolve the contradiction between the sensible, and the whole beyond it. But that is yet to be a definition of the truth. 

One can take a perverted attempt at the definition, and base it solely on the sensible: the truth is causality. Then if we consider that any given locality in time is a midpoint between two opposing extremes of the infinite, the beginning and end of time, then causation becomes itself an abstraction of multiple causation: where the first event in time now branched out to an infinite network of events leading up to the time-locality of concern. In other words, the causes leading up to the event within this locality itself now lie within the infinite. 

A problem then arises. The struggle between the individual’s finitude and the comprehension of the infinite: a contradiction. Causality then took us a full circle back to where we started. For causality itself is the language of the sensible. The individual then must liberate thought from causality, must counteract against the conflation of intelligence with the sensible, in order to transcend with it to the whole. This is done by complimenting thought from without the sensible through the acknowledgment of the limitations within.

Consequently, treating the truth as that to be attained through thought, thereby abstracting it to the comprehensible, ceases to be the methodology, and instead thought is now a machinery of correction for the shortcomings of the individual, thereby transcending to the infinite, where the truth lies. For without such acknowledgement the individual is dead, prisoner of the past, forever in the moment just before, forever falling short from now: prisoner of causality.

Here is a story then. In a society driven and governed by privilege, and strives for order to perpetuate privilege, the state is merely a crystallization of the will of the privileged. Consequently, if society consists of an infinite network of processes, and itself an abstraction of the whole of humanity beyond it, the state, imposing and enforcing order within society, then is the penetration of the will of the privileged into the various processes within society. The state machinery being itself from within the sensible, society, now dictated by it, becomes itself a representation of an infested, rotten individual. By this token, if imperialism is then defined from within such penetration, then it is too within the definition of the state.

Under capitalism for instance, the metropolis manifests the penetration of the economic state machinery in the cultural process, where the geographic locality, in terms of accessibility (ports, railways, etc), history, demography, etc from an economic outlook dominate the evolution of the cultural process itself. And similarly, as the penetration spreads across all processes, the economic construct spreads with it. Now the state machinery penetrates to the individual in the society through said individual’s struggle to conform to this construct induced by the state’s struggle to enforce order. Now the state becomes the individual, and the individual becomes the state: the intelligence of the underprivileged conflated with the state (the will of the privileged). 

But, in this view, capitalism and imperialism should not be conflated. For capitalism is merely a developed stage of the society of privilege. And the imperialism addressed here so far is a capitalistic one. Consider a different example. In the context of Arab society for instance, the state machinery was engendered from where the cultural process had left off. Particularly, in the Umaweyyeen’s era, who’s dynasty (Umayyad state) could be hypothesized as the first ‘Arab’ state (under our current definition of state), the state machinery was engendered from the cultural struggle between thought and revelation (prophecy). Specifically through neutralizing the struggle all together: compromising thought, and centralizing around revelation, thereby engendering religious privilege in the build-up to the dynasty. 

That’s why when Western colonialism saturated in the Arab colonies, from a capitalistic outlook, and capitalistic parasitism imposed the extension of Western (capitalistic) imperialism in these colonies, the first item on Sir Sykes’ and Monsieur Picot’s agenda was to find a descendant of the Prophet to lead the Great Arab Revolt. By doing so hijacking the state machinery, and the entire society with it, and marking a fusion between capitalistic and religious state machineries. 

Nonetheless, we arrive at a construct manifesting the struggle between doubles, the privileged and underprivileged: king-citizen, civilized-barbaric, bourgeois-proletaire, and so on. But here’s the thing about this world of doubles. The privileged is the state by induction, but so is the underprivileged (under imperialism innate in the state). And now, the struggle within this order of privilege became a struggle of turning tables, and switching roles, for both sides of this double now have the tendency to not acknowledge the state machinery at all. For to do so is, now under this construct, an identity crisis! 

Perhaps now the need for a proletaire with a magic wand is more necessary than ever. Not because liberation lies within their magic, but simply because the magic wand now allows the proletaire to escape the construct all together by finding an identity from without the construct itself: a magician.