George Galloway – important monologue

This is an extract from the monologue on Moats 8 November. The complete and full piece can be watched here.

The old world is dying, and it is very clear to all of us across all of these indices and many, many more.

But I need to turn to the shortcomings of the new world. It’s been oversold, including by me. It’s been oversold, this tectonic shift in the balance of power in the world. The BRICS, has been oversold. The rise and rise of China and Russia and Iran have been oversold.

They are able and have adjusted their narrative, their rhetoric, very significantly indeed. China in particular, what it’s saying now about the massacres in Gaza are leagues away, leagues ahead of what they would have said only three or four years ago, the last time, in fact, that this happened. But China is not able to decisively influence what’s happening on the ground. It is not able to tell the United States that it must tell its client state that it arms and funds and shills and propagandises for, vetoes for, in every international fora. China is not yet strong enough to be able to tell the United States halt and desist.

Russia, with its hands still full in the Ukraine, is certainly prepared to defend the sovereignty territorial integrity of Syria, but it is not yet able to allow and for facilitate Syria to take back its own sovereign territory that was stolen from it back in 1967 when the Beatles, were top of the hit parade. The Golan Heights remains in the iron grip of Israeli occupation, and Russia is not able to do anything about that.

Iran, which has, of course, a vastly enhanced military capability and will, if attacked, answer in kind, is not able to go on the offensive. That much is now clear. If it were, it would not have allowed 10,000 civilians in the Gaza Strip to be systematically slaughtered. 5000 of them, counting those still under the rubble. 5000 of those children, infants and babies.

If anybody in the world had been able to decisively intervene. Military, politically, economically, they would already have done so. And so we witness today a scene that will live in infamy, a scene redolent of the Nakba, the catastrophe in 1948, a scene redolent of the second world war itself. A column of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees marching yet again into exile. Refugees for the second time, the first time in 1948, the second time in 2023. Headed from their homes, from the little patch of bitter earth called the Gaza Strip to God knows where? Certainly not a home. Certainly not safety.

Everybody that Israel has sent from the north of Gaza into the south is equally at peril of being killed, as they were in the north. But they have stampeded tens of thousands of human beings, marshalled by soldiers, heavily armed. It was redolent to me of the people headed for the cattle trains and the death camps of Treblinka and of Auschwitz, and of the killing fields of the European Nazi Holocaust against the Jews and against other “subhumans”, as designated by the German Reich.

Pages that will live in infamy have been fleeting past us, like through the window of a train. All of this week. Images of horror and macabre that most of us, at least, wish we had never seen. Images of small children with their head a cavity and no brain left within it. Images of twin babies being carried stone dead. Images of people tearing at the sheets, the shrouds covering their mothers, their fathers, their brothers, their sisters, their sons and their daughters, their husbands and their wives. People wailing, people rending their garments. People entirely helpless, being murdered like fish in a barrel while the world remains either silent or cheering on those committing the massacres. Supplying the weapons with which the massacres are being conducted. Paying the money which the massacres require to fill the hole in the economy of Israel, which has fallen 13 billion in just four weeks.

The old world is dying. The new world is struggling to be born. And thus we are living in the time of monsters.