“I start from the supposition that the world is topsy-turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power.”

Howard Zinn

Things are all Wrong

This article, my first for 2025, was meant to be about something else. I researched and interviewed, read transcripts and fact checked, like so many times before. However long I spend writing, I spend three times as long preparing. It’s a familiar pattern that has been drummed into me until it has become second nature – a little like breathing.  And yet on this occasion, something kept pulling me away.

I listened and found myself descending into the dungeons of our age, where I met the most macabre individuals, witnessed the hollowing out of justice and fairness and inclusion, and met the dying corpses of morality and decency. These dungeons are our parliaments and congresses and presidential palaces, they are the battlefields and boardrooms where authority (no longer deserving of the label ‘government’), the military and big business are re-architecting humanity.

Be under no illusion – what we are experiencing is a hostile takeover that seeks to profoundly reduce our agency, dilute our rights, and shrink our existence. It is a zero-sum assault delivered in small, day-to-day increments – a restricted march, a censored social media post, threats of anti-terrorism legislation, an overly restrictive bail condition, an inappropriate custodial sentence. The national conversation goes unchecked, with the corporate and state media financially, and ideologically, invested in the re-ordering of people and places into a planetary-wide pyramid scheme – a global Ponzi scam where the few, the very few, prosper at the expense of the many. I didn’t need to write a story today – I needed to sound an alarm. 

Four Hundred-and-Sixty-Three Days

Source: Doctors Without Borders

Today marks the 463rd day of the genocide in Ghazzah. Four hundred-and-sixty-three days of butchery and murder, of sadistic violence and wanton destruction – and we couldn’t stop it. We are left wondering who would be alive today if we had been more effective in ending the genocide – the mothers and daughters, the fathers and sons, the grandparents and great-grandparents.

In part we failed because we were naïve about democracy, which turned out to be no more than a facade for winner-take-all capitalism. The disguise sat well until a small stretch of land five-and-a-half thousand miles from Washington and two-thousand miles from London resisted. It turns out they resisted for all of us.

©2025 Sul Nowroz

Ghazzah is the epicentre of two struggles. The first is a very real struggle of the territory’s two million residents to simply stay alive. The resilience and determination needed to do this – while the world passively watches on – is huge.  The second struggle is a meta struggle against the neo-capitalist project, which requires Indigenous lands to be nullified and assumed into a world order that creates lop-sided rights and uneven prosperity. Puppet regimes have been installed across the Middle East and north Africa, and the garrison state of Israel polices the non-conformers with the hefty stick of periodic air raids.    

©2025 Sul Nowroz

But for Palestinians it was different. In the West Bank they were occupied, in Ghazzah they were besieged. For them, there was no illusion of freedom, so they sought self-determination through defiance, and it is that free will that troubles the seats of capitalist power and their puppet states. In dealing with Palestine, and specifically the Ghazzah genocide, the West’s mask of democracy slipped. Politicians and officials patronised us with half-truths and polite lies while they colluded in mass murder. We objected, and they curtailed our liberty in ways deemed implausible only months earlier. Democracy didn’t die in 2023 (it died years earlier) but the lie of democracy did.  

The New CEO of Capitalism

©2025 Sul Nowroz

That was then, fifteen months ago, at least 46,000 Palestinian deaths ago (seventy percent of which are reported to be women and children). A new guard is about to take the helm of the neo-capitalist project, and this cohort isn’t even feigning the slightest concern for human rights or civil liberties, for decency or truth or fairness. Gunboat diplomacy is about to be replaced with gunboat commerce. Ghazzah, a piece of land six miles wide and twenty-five miles long, is where we realised the fight for our own freedom was incomplete. We are all resisting the same source of oppression, a rabid economic system principled on extraction, exploitation, and exclusion. When the system is challenged the response is intimidation and violence, and if you’re Palestinian – death.  

On January 20th Donald Trump will be sworn in as the new CEO of the capitalist project. He is surrounded by one of the most hawkish cabinets and troop of crooked advisers, who appear determined to ransack and loot untold wealth from the bottom of the pyramid. Social media firms will monitor and shape our discourse, privatised healthcare will get us hooked on forever medical bills, digital vampire bots will drain us of our private data, and e-commerce platforms will hypnotise us into uninterrupted consumption. But all that works only if we conform, if we submit and are subjugated.

As early as 1997 the US fantasised about controlling the world. The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) hypothesised that if the US was the ‘world’s pre-eminent power,’ it could and should ‘shape a new century favourable to American principles and interests’.  The Middle East was singled out for particular attention. Jump ahead to 2020, Trump’s first stint as US president, and the infamous Abraham Accords were signed into existence. The Accords were designed to normalise relationships in the area, readying the region for trade and cross-border commerce. The price – the denial of self-determination for six million Palestinians, and their continued brutalisation. The Accords are in effect an open bribe for Arab states to look the other way and abandon the Palestinian people. Bahrain and the UAE did just that. Sudan followed after the US removed it from an international terror list, and Morocco signed on after its suspect claim to resource-rich Western Sahara was recognised by the US.

Trump is now seeking a more twisted form of ‘normalisation’ in the region, and he has promised ‘hell’ on Ghazzah (as if that’s not the situation today) if he doesn’t get it. What his garrison state of Israel has failed to achieve, Trump is threatening to deliver.  

Dark clouds hang over us all.

©2025 Sul Nowroz

Saturday January 11th was considered a quiet day in Ghazzah. Twenty-eight people were murdered as a result of Israeli air strikes. Based on current statistics twenty of them will have been women and children.  

©2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer