A comprehensive list of the non-lethal parts of my big death plane - The Shot

Like a toddler running from her own soiled nappy, petulant despite the stench, Penny Wong, Foreign Minister, this week unloaded on the ever-soggy halls of Australia’s Parliament, saying: “We are not supplying weapons or ammunition to Israel.” 

“As part of the global F-35 supply chain, we are supplying components and parts that are non-lethal in nature,” she clarified, using the lethal parts of her mouth.

With Wong’s raised eyebrow of condescending bullshit, I cannot help but feel the establishment is letting us know they’ll say whatever the fuck they want. Gaffes this grave don’t matter in a world of impunity for monsters. That might in fact be the point.

The non-lethal parts of an F-35? Fucked if I know, Your Honour.

After two years of fully conscious, unrelenting genocide enabling from this craven husk of a government, it is a slight to the dignity of time itself to need to waste any more of it unpacking Wong’s waffle. The Dr Doom class of hyper-wealthy ghoul that truly runs the world isn’t about being reasoned with, because this is self-evidently not reason. I half thought the headline would be enough and I could leave the article blank for an easy day at work, but instead, let’s just suffer through the evil of more twisted centrist logic together. If we all cast our HiveMindMegaBrain to Gravely Concerned, we will arrive at a destination where no one is ever responsible for anything at all. 

Your Honour, I, John Wayne Gacy, did in fact kill a whole bunch of people. But I did so using my right hand almost exclusively. I’d like to move that my feet, my torso, and indeed all the other non-lethal parts of my body, played no role whatsoever in the murders of all those people. 

The Western world perpetuates this conveniently applied myth that nothing is connected to anything else. Toxic individualism. “There is no society”. Detachment is fostered as a defence mechanism from the depravity all around us. And though the bones of kids may break the numbing spell, accountability to make it end is sorely lacking. 

If you haven’t heard, the F-35 is an expensive death plane used, most recently, to erase Gaza from existence. If your red T-shirt is cutting off oxygen to the brain and you were wondering, the F-35 did so lethally.  

Australia sells parts used in its construction, including the release mechanism that allows the bomb bay doors to open and rain death on playgrounds, schools, mosques, etc., whatever depravity this Nazified racist shithole is up to on any given day. Wong’s reasoning for why profiting from incinerating Palestinians isn’t in fact evil is such galling, barefaced bullshit that that in itself might be the meta point.

F-35s don’t have other purposes. F-35s don’t show up to soup kitchens and community gyms to play five-a-side football with disadvantaged kids. F-35s – inoperable without Australia’s contribution – have been used to blow up anything resembling life in Palestine. This means that if F-35s had cup holders they’d be lethal cup holders because keeping a genocidal dickweed hydrated is all part of it.

Further, under the principles of the boycott, divest and sanctions (BDS) movement, none of us should be selling fucking anything to Israel, yet alone F-35 parts. If dried apricots keep the genocidal project going, don’t sell them those either! 

Wong is applying the same specious neoliberal reasoning that “means” the coal Australia digs from the ground, sells, and burns elsewhere doesn’t count towards our global emissions. It might be “true” in the benignly villainous world of corporate bookkeeping, but in reality it is just homicidal hoodwinking. 

As the good Albanese, Francessca, details in her latest report, From economy of occupation to economy of genocide, imperial capitalism is itself complicit by design. Through a convoluted global network that allows for a veneer of deniability (while also ensuring much of the West is grossly complicit), these F-35 parts sometimes go to other countries for assembly before arriving in Israel and mass slaughtering trapped Palestinians.

This is the last remaining doctrine of the centrist: duck, dodge, dive, and duck again while oligarchical fascism swallows democracy and the decency of the species. And the slimy, squirmy, squibs that present as the “tory punchers”? No one has sold the working classes out harder than establishment Labor parties.

In an age when a global consciousness exists, when it’s easier than ever to have Muslim friends on the other side of the world, all this Western imperial conquest is truly sickening. It cannot be disguised any more, and in a better world everyone that played a part in the attempted murders of 2.3 million people would face harsh justice.

Under international law – and just common decency – we are all obliged to do everything we can to stop genocide occuring. That is the burden we find ourselves under, and only Yemen, Iran, South Africa, Greta Thunberg, a handful of Irish rappers, half of Pink Floyd, and squillions of activists – ordinary, heartbroken people – across this shattered world have met the moment. Our governments have failed us all. In Melbourne, tonight, students have called for a snap rally at 6pm. They are encouraging the city to bring pots and pans, to make the sort of noise that is hard to ignore. In Sydney, decent, good humans that want this to end, that need this to end, will march on the Harbour Bridge this Sunday. The state has said they are not allowed. The courts are weighing this up today. Whatever the outcome of this case, there is more at stake here than the right to protest on a bridge. The law doesn’t seem to matter to the elite, why does it matter to us, anyway? This is about domination of the masses, and to the degree that we can’t hurt them, they do not care what we say. The openness of today’s evil is by design debilitating. 

Do you want to live in a world where the powerful can murder the weak with impunity, steal anything, and then crush the ability for the rest of us to dissent with ever more murderous surveillance, policing and warfare technology? Absolutely nothing in this picture is non-lethal in nature.   

In Wong’s shirking of any responsibility, we hear her speaking aloud the type of internal logic that people complicit in atrocity use to detach so they can sleep at night. I was just following orders. There was nothing I could do. I only sold the peaceful parts of the big death plane. To normalise and be comfortable speaking such unrestrained garbage publicly, Wong must be surrounded by psychopaths and sycophants. To mistake this position for reasonableness is an indictment on everyone in Wong’s orbit. 

This siloing might work for her, but no one else needs to believe her crap. Hair-splitting in the face of genocide makes any person, from derpy weirdos on social media to a supposedly distinguished Foreign Minister, sound like a psychopath digging a hole for a war crime tribunal to later find you in.

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