Episodes

  • Episode 13: We Need To Talk About Venezuela

    Episode 13: We Need To Talk About Venezuela
    Jan 17 2026

    I'm not an expert on Venezuela but I feel a need to address some things that are not being properly addressed and draw links between certain things and certain other things. That sounds a bit mysterious, but I think the reason I feel the need to record this is because we have people trying to talk to anti-imperialist leftists who are saying not to support the Venezuelan government. What bothers me is that the whole thing has an air of “do you condemn Hamas?” about it. The choice of bringing this up at this particular time, whether it is intended to or not, serves to blunt and dissipate opposition to the imperial aggression when the aggression should be our only current concern.

    Venezuela has been under a very real and unrelenting attack for quarter of a century and that attack has involved armed violence, including a mercenary incursion, systematic misinformation and disinformation, and brutal economic warfare. No worthwhile opinion or analysis of the issues can omit this fundamental truth.
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    1 hr and 30 mins
  • Ep12: We Need to Talk About Iraq

    Ep12: We Need to Talk About Iraq
    Jun 6 2025
    Everything happening in Gaza is linked to what was done by the US and UK to Iraq. Technologies and techniques of urban warfare, of occupation, of psychological warfare, of oppression, of destruction, of torture and of propaganda were developed and shared between Israeli and the Coalition forces occupying Iraq. Each was used as a training ground and laboratory for the other. Like Gaza the nature of the violence in Iraq was genocidal. The people were the target. Educators and schools were targeted. Doctors and clinics and ambulances were targeted. Local officials were targeted. The fabric of society was targeted. Nothing that happened was the byproduct of different acts aimed at only the regime or its military force. Like the Israeli government of today the US lied and deceived so it could wipe out whole families; they schemed so they could destroy water infrastructure and spread disease, and they fought tooth and nail for years to ensure that thousands upon thousands of children would slowly die of easily preventable causes. Iraq and Palestine are linked through thousands of years of history, and sorrowfully linked as targets for the same imperial project. Of late people who want to highlight the suffering happening now in Gaza have sought to suppress or misrepresent what happened in Iraq. They want to increase the sense of urgency by making the Gaza Holocaust seem unprecedented, as if the human suffering is not enough in itself. This can only harm the cause of the Palestinian people and others. Isolating the current events from the broader sweep of imperialist history (and the absolute necessity of genocide in modern imperialism) plays into the hands of those who are already trying to control the narrative of the Gaza Holocaust. People like Piers Morgan are trying to co-opt anti-genocide sentiment to their own abominable political project. They openly say that the problem is one of excess, not of fundamental injustice. They believe that Israel has the right to kill innocent people, they just think they have crossed the line in terms of numbers. Likewise Bernie Sanders and innumerable others of his ilk are trying to frame this orgy of genocidal slaughter and the slow starvation of a captive population as the product of the right-wing regime in Israel, when in reality it is the product of a global system that is absolutely reliant on the willing participation of many millions, not least people like Bernie Sanders who vote to send arms to Israel. Palestinians will never be safe if we cannot accurately understand why such monstrous violence is visited on them. Genocide is a strategy and the Palestinian people are the target. If we accept any analysis that frames the genocide as provoked by hatred or excessive zeal in prosecuting a war then we are dooming the Palestinians to suffer further genocidal violence either through slow strangulation or the swift brutality that arrives after Israel finds the next pretext for "defending" itself. We need to lift the scales from our eyes about the US empire, its practice of genocide, and its relationship to Israel. The victims of genocide in different times and places are only separate in our minds because it suits the purposes of the perpetrators. We have no choice but to develop a sense of solidarity as an ethos, as a powerful emotion, and as an intellectual conviction. We are not separate. That is not just sentiment, it is the key to understanding the worst violence of the modern world. Imperial genocides are just as pervasive as class antagonisms, and even more likely to be misrepresented as discrete unrelated phenomena. In reality these events often feature the same personnel (maybe decades apart in time and thousands of kilometres removed in space) committing the same forms of violence and destruction against the same parts of society, but each time with a completely different story of why, Iraq always had too much potential for strength and development. Its light oil provides far higher profit margins than heavier oil such as that found in Venezuela. Moreover Iraq's potential for nationalistic sentiment is 7000 years deep. The Iraqis were first targeted to exploit their oil, but then were targeted to control how they could use and profit from their own oil. The US would bait Saddam Hussein into two destructive deadly wars leading to hundreds of thousand of lost lives, then impose sanctions killing hundreds of thousands more, then invade causing around a million or more deaths. Most died directly at the hands of the US-led Coalition, but many would die from a civil war that the occupation unleashed. The true losses to Iraq and Iraqis are incalculable because there is no baseline to work from. There is not time when Iraq was left alone to its own affairs to make use of its own wealth. The past can not be undone. We must look to the future and that begins with refusing to lie about the past and refusing to turn away.
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    2 hrs and 45 mins
  • Ep 11: We Need To Talk About the US Role in the Gaza Holocaust

    Ep 11: We Need To Talk About the US Role in the Gaza Holocaust
    May 16 2025

    I speak here off the cuff about the centrality and culpability of the US in the Gaza Holocaust. I start by explaining why I use "Gaza Holocaust" as terminology.

    The US is not merely supporting Israel's genocidal slaughter in Gaza, it is a direct participant.

    In this video I depart from my usual format and the result is much briefer. "Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." ― Aldous Huxley.
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    23 mins
  • Ep 10 We Need to Talk About Nazis

    Ep 10 We Need to Talk About Nazis
    Apr 17 2025

    In this episode I build on and take a different approach to things that I have written and spoke about in the past. Our vision of Nazis as the ultimate expression of political evil is not wrong in that Nazism is morally unsupportable, but exceptionalist views of Nazism blind us to dangers of Nazism returning. Obviously as a particular movement of a particular time it is unlikely (though unfortunately not impossible) that an overt self-identified "National Socialist" movement will become the ruling party in any contemporary state. That being understood, it is clear that all of the important and dangerous aspects that went into making Nazism what it was are on the rise in world politics, particularly the US and Europe.

    Soon after Trump's 2016 election I wrote of the "straw Nazis", the street thugs, whose alarming presence was useful but ultimately expendable (https://ongenocide.com/2016/12/15/trumps-straw-nazis-a-horror-story/). I won't say I was brilliant to predict that things would become more fascistic under Trump - anyone could see that. Looking back though I wrote a segment on how fascism would also have deepened had Clinton won with a less street-thuggish and more war-crimesy tone. I think Biden's term in office bore out that point.

    The truth is that Nazism was significant, but the individual Nazis weren't any different than the other shitty people around the world. As Nazi ideas take hold more and more people become Nazis until it is just you random run-of-the-mill hairdresser or barista. It isn't even about what these people believe either, it is about what they consent to be part of.

    As long as we keep looking for straw Nazis we will be looking the wrong way when the actual Nazis take over.
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    2 hrs and 11 mins
  • Ep 09: We Need to Talk About the Fact that Kenneth Roth is Still an Imperialist Warmonger

    Ep 09: We Need to Talk About the Fact that Kenneth Roth is Still an Imperialist Warmonger
    Mar 5 2025

    In which I discuss Kenneth Roth's return to form as a military interventionist who loves the idea of US military involvement as a way of solving problems. Despite everything this implies he still gets treated as a humanitarian hero by the likes of Democracy Now!

    I stuffed up the video capture so that my face is covering Roth most of the time. I am new to the software and had preview screen showing a very different view. Sorry :-(

    NB: I do not know why YT won't let me post the links below, but you can find them at my blog: https://ongenocide.com/

    The recent DN! segment used is here: https://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/3/ukraine_russia_trump_vance_putin

    My 2014 article on HRW and Amnesty International is here: https://ongenocide.com/2014/06/20/why-blocking-the-revolving-door-wont-fix-human-rights-watch/

    Here is an older and longer but more hard-hitting piece I posted about Amnesty International and liberal imperialism: https://ongenocide.com/2012/11/21/amnesty-international-and-liberal-imperialism-video-audio-illustrated-hypertext-transcript/

    And here is the DN! debate between Keane Bhatt and Reed Brody: https://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/11/debate_is_human_rights_watch_too
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    1 hr and 25 mins
  • Ep 08: We Need to Talk About Fascism Pt 2

    Ep 08: We Need to Talk About Fascism Pt 2
    Mar 3 2025

    In the second of two parts I discuss how contemporary fascism doesn't announce itself; how creeping fascism has come to predominate in the West and other countries; and how once fascism becomes normal normal people become fascists. Eventually society will be one in which the only people who aren't fascist are the conscious antifascists. Liberals and conservatives, for example, are by no means immune from being fascists.
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    1 hr and 11 mins
  • We Need to Talk About Fascism Pt 1

    We Need to Talk About Fascism Pt 1
    Feb 25 2025

    In the first of two parts I discuss how contemporary fascism doesn't announce itself; how creeping fascism has come to predominate in the West and other countries; and how once fascism becomes normal normal people become fascists. Eventually society will be one in which the only people who aren't fascist are the conscious antifascists. Liberals and conservatives, for example, are by no means immune from being fascists.
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    1 hr and 16 mins
  • Gaza: What is Genocide?

    Gaza: What is Genocide?
    Jan 9 2025
    [NOTE: This was originally delivered as a speech at a vigil in Wakatū/Nelson but footage of the speech was lost so I re-recorded it and appended text below] What is genocide? Legally it is described in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which tells us “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” The convention does not mention complete extermination, it does not mention Nazis nor gas chambers, and it does not mention special intent. These things are not intrinsic to genocide. Being focused on criminal acts, the convention reflects the concept of genocide, but it does not describe its nature. This has allowed a vacuum into which people have poured their prejudices in order to demonise those they hate and wash clean the blood from the hands of they support. The convention defines genocide in legal terms but it does not define it in terms of meaning. This has made the concept and the law vulnerable to political power and manipulation. The way we discuss genocide is fraught with double-standards. People who know nothing about the concept are the keenest to police its usage. They proclaim, as Piers Morgan recently did that it is not “technically” a genocide unless a million people die. Yet we accept as uncontroversial the finding that Australia committed genocide when it took Aboriginal and so-called “mixed-race” children from their families. In contrast it is desperately controversial to suggest that the 76 year-long co-ordinated multifaceted unrelenting and often savagely violent programme by Zionists to cleanse Palestinians from the land of Palestine is genocidal. So, to understand the law, we need to ask – what is genocide? Raphael Lemkin created the word and the idea. He was a lawyer, but most importantly he was a driven humanitarian. Ethnically Polish and Jewish, he grew up in what is now Western Ukraine. From a young age he developed a deep abhorrence for mass violence against people because of their identity. Pogroms against Jews; historical instances of persecution and massacres of Christians; and the horrors of the Armenian Genocide (which happened when he was 15) all shaped him profoundly. In 1939 Lemkin was forced into a gruelling and dangerous flight when Germany invaded Poland, leaving behind his life as a prosecutor in Warsaw. When safe, he devoted himself to trying to understand the unprecedented brutality unleashed on the world at that time. He came to realise that violence against people because of their group identity (which he had previously termed “barbarism”) was not in fact distinct from the destruction of the cultural, social and political institutions of that group (which he had previously termed “vandalism”). Combining these two concepts he coined the term “genocide” and said it denoted “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups….” If there is one sentence that Lemkin wrote that captures best the meaning of genocide it is that genocide is war directed against subjects and civilians not against sovereigns and armies. The key word is war, and Lemkin made clear that he knew that those who commit genocide do so as a form of warfare. He wrote that “the Germans prepared, waged, and continued a war not merely against states and their armies but against peoples. For the German occupying authorities war thus appears to offer the most appropriate occasion for carrying out their policy of genocide.” Genocide can sometimes occur in other forms, but it is almost always portrayed by perpetrators as armed conflict. Genocide is a policy, it is a strategy. Violent hatred is less a cause of genocide than it is a consequence of it. The dehumanisation and demonisation of the victim group is a top-down process that seeks to shape the minds of the ordinary men and women who carry out acts of violence so that all members of the victim group are seen as a threat, and as a target. The key to getting people to commit acts of genocide is not getting them to hate it is getting them to believe that their genocidal violence is an act of warfare, an act of defence. IDF soldier Guy Zaken was a bulldozer driver who testified the he had “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.” Why does he call them “terrorists”? In the context, it is not a meaningful descriptive term. These people cruelly mangled (to death or in death) would mostly have been non-combatants if...
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    8 mins