#6 Godspeed You! Black Emperor: “NO TITLE AS OF 21 DECEMBER 2024 45,206 DEAD”

Or ‘”NO​ ​TITLE AS OF 13 FEBRUARY 2024 28​,​340 DEAD“‘ if you want the original title. I was just trying to update it a bit to help them out.

When GY!BE finally settled on that title in February (“NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?“), the Israeli authorities had been causing massive, deliberate forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in Gaza for around four months. Perhaps, knowing that the record would be released in October, GY!BE assumed that the massacre would have surely been brought to a halt by international operations by that point. Perhaps GY!BE named the album that way to ensure a moment in time, a gross period of humanity, was forever notified in the most matter of fact way possible. At their most cynical, the band might have thought that by the time of the album’s October release – close to to the one year anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel that set off the bloodshed in response – the international community were doing their best to sweep this tiny little genocidal snafu from everybody’s memories and attempting to rebuild Netanyahu’s image as a cuddly friend to imperialism and the West. They might not have dared to think that the slaughter was still continuing.

The Israeli government cannot claim to be keeping Palestinians safe when it kills them along escape routes, bombs so-called safe zones, and cuts off food, water, and sanitation. Israel has blatantly violated its obligation to ensure Palestinians can return home, razing virtually everything in large areas.

Nadia Hardman, refugee and migrant rights researcher at Human Rights Watch

A couple of weeks after the album was released, on October 17th, Israel (and later Hamas) confirmed that they had killed the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar. Phew! Maybe we can dial back on the ethnic cleansing now, yeah?! “Today we have settled the score. Today evil has been dealt a blow” Netanyahu claimed triumphantly.

But Netanyahu was quick to follow that gross ‘settling of scores’ with a caveat: “But our task has still not been completed”. While he said that, the Israeli military were already well underway bombing Lebanon’s major cities and especially those close to the Israeli border, in an apparent revenge for the Houthi’s support for the Palestinians and also a soft launch of more land they’re planning to take. So that they could… eliminated Hamas…? Israel are also keen on ramping up a war with Iran, as they know that America will be quick to support any operation against the US-wide accepted ‘bad guys’ without even considering the loss of life. So that they can… get those hostages back…? Because those horrific October 7th attacks were an absolute Godsend to Israel: they’re a free pass to basically do whatever you want to any Muslim nation you choose! A Get Out of Jail Free Card for human rights abuses! They saw how the USA acted in response to 9/11, and they want their own War On Terror! Their War On Antisemitism! Sure, Gaza is their little Afghanistan, that already impoverished state fucked up for reasons entirely the attacking force’s own doing, and bombing it to absolute fuck isn’t going to serve any sort of military strategy and is only going to cause utmost misery on innocent civilians to sate your own bloodthirsty revenge. But that’s getting a bit dull now, isn’t it?? Israel wants its Iraq! Its ungodly reach for domination over another Muslim country that is tangentially related at best to that initial terrorist attack! This isn’t about defeating Hamas. This isn’t about getting the hostages back (because raising every house that those hostages could have possibly been living in wouldn’t be the best way of going about that). It’s about the complete and utter destruction of Palestine so that there remains no living proof of it being anything before it was simply Israel’s latest state, and it’s about using this moment of heightened tensions to justify taking the aggression to other nearby states that you always fancied a bit of land from.

When I watched Al Jazeera’s (brilliant) documentary on Israel’s continued war crimes in Gaza a couple of months ago, a grim sense of déjà vu came over me. Yes, these were war crimes. Yes, these were human rights abuses on an astonishing scale. Yes, this complete disregard of life and refusal to consider certain groups of people as truly human is widespread and hideous. But although others were quick to compare it to Apartheid South Africa, or the Hutsi genocide in Rwanda, to me it most called to mind the gungho, smiling and cocky war criminals of the Mahmudiyah killings, or the tortures of Abu Gharib. It’s all very Americacoded. Like those war crimes and horrific abuses of the Iraq War, maybe they’ll be a few slapped wrists, maybe some people will go to jail, and maybe we’ll get some sort of “I really am truly very sorry for those entirely isolated bad apples” semi apology, but there will be no wider acceptance of the horrors that the state meted out or the atmosphere of racial hatred that inspired these acts. Nobody in power will pay for their crimes. Hey! And maybe they’ll be trotted out by the liberals later as an example of one of the good ones!!

As the occupying power, Israel is obliged to ensure adequate facilities to accommodate displaced civilians, but the authorities have blocked all but a small fraction of the necessary humanitarian aid, water, electricity, and fuel from reaching civilians in need in Gaza. Israeli attacks have damaged and destroyed resources that people need to stay alive, including hospitals, schools, water and energy infrastructure, bakeries, and agricultural land.

Israel is also obliged to ensure the return of displaced people to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area have ceased. Instead, it has left swathes of Gaza uninhabitable. Israel’s military has intentionally demolished or severely damaged civilian infrastructure, including controlled demolitions of homes, with the apparent aim of creating an extended “buffer zone” along Gaza’s perimeter with Israel and a corridor which will bifurcate Gaza. The destruction is so substantial that it indicates the intention to permanently displace many people.

Human Rights Watch: Israel’s Crimes Against Humanity in Gaza

In fact, it’s extra similar to the USA’s war on Afghanistan. In 2001, America’s stated aim of their blanket bombing of Afghanistan was the removal from power of The Taliban/Al-Qaeda. A group whose power came from millions of dollars of funding from the US so that the secular/leftist government of Afghanistan could be defeated during the Cold War. Israel stated aim of their genocidal slaughter of Palestinian people in 2023/24 was the elimination of Hamas. A group whose power comes from Israel financing them since the 1980s as a “counterweight” to the secularists and leftists of the Palestine Liberation Organization/PLO.

“In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas. Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza.”

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert speaking to POLITICO 23/11/23

In a 1994 book, ‘The Other Side of Deception’, Mossad whistleblower Victor Ostrovsky contended that aiding Hamas meshed with “Mossad’s general plan” for an Arab world “run by fundamentalists” that would reject “any negotiations with the West,” thereby leaving Israel as “the only democratic, rational country in the region”. The major difference between the two is that America kinda stopped funding these groups once they’d officially decided they were terrorists and totally not cool and by the way we’re at war with you now. Between 2011 and 2021, Israel approved a total of $1.8 billion to Hamas by Qatar, with Netanyahu saying in 2019 that “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank”. It’s worth noting that Israel was at ‘war with Hamas‘ in 2012, 2014 and 2021. So before you ask any of those people politely suggesting that the genocide stop “DO YOU CONDEMN HAMAS??” maybe ask Israel first? Because if they do condemn them, they’re going about it in a really odd way.

And yet this attack continues. An attack born of desperation, a raid on an occupying power from an impoverished territory held under inhuman siege conditions for 17 years. The daily bombing of a trapped people goes on; the outrages visited on the West Bank grow bloodier. I had so many more focused ideas on how to write this post, but once I started I just kept on adding random and angry spiels about anything concerning the horrors of Gaza these past 12 months that came to mind. I’m sorry.

And I’m sorry to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, as we’re now coming to the end of my piece on your incredible record, the scientifically proven sixth best of 2024, and I haven’t really said anything about it at all. I had no time to mention what a gloriously emotionally charged record it is, how it’s the best GY!BE album I’ve heard since 2000’s ‘Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven‘, and how your music seems to be doing far better than I am in finding small cracks of light in an altogether abominable situation. Sorry I didn’t have time for that, but I’m sure you understand.

Let’s just see how that chart has changed since my Efficax post:

Metacritic: 79

Album Title as AI Image