Israel, without any qualms, took a leaf from its apparent former tormentors. Religion and race became the cornerstone of Zionist ideology. Judaism replaced Paganism while the Jewish race took over Aryanism. The rest is the continuation of the same syndrome. Horkheimer succinctly states: “The idea of national community first set up as an idol can eventually be maintained only by terror.” Hence, terror became the second nature of Zionism. A minority with a masochist past, with sadistic aims and expansionist designs, neither wished to restrain itself to peaceful means nor was created by capital in this spirit. Hence, the tyranny of the minority became the law of survival. The Darwinian principle, already in vogue, was time and again reinforced. How the survival of the fittest became divine gospel was evident by the statement of David Ben-Gurion. In May 1948, this Israeli godfather explicitly stated his aggressive hegemonic intentions in the following words: “We should prepare to go over to the offensive with the aim of smashing Lebanon, Transjordan and Syria…The weak point in the Arab coalition is Lebanon [for] the Moslem regime is artificial and easy to undermine. A Christian state should be established…When we smash the [Arab] legion’s strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan, too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo.” Another father figure of Zionism, the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin, an unequivocally proclaimed terrorist, as suggested by Ben-Gurion, expressed his disdain for humanity as a whole. In June 1982, this megalomaniac described his contempt for the rest of the human species in the following words: “Our race is the master race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves.” To recall the memories and reverberations of the Fuehrer’s speeches in the past, one need not travel too far back in history. One may marvel how swiftly a nation/group of people that in their recent past had suffered the scourges of the holocaust, by adopting the same tricks of the trade have somersaulted into an outright predator. To understand this phenomenon, one needs to revert yet again to Horkheimer. He says, “Man’s avidity to extend his power in two infinites, the microcosm and the universe, does not arise directly from his own nature, but from the structure of society. Just as attacks of imperialist nations on the rest of world must be explained on the basis of their internal struggle rather than in terms of their so-called national character, so the totalitarian attack of the human race on any thing that it excludes from itself derive from inter-human relations rather than innate human qualities.” Capitalism, during its historic evolution, ultimately culminates into imperialism. Among capitalist nations, the inevitable clash of interests irrevocably leads to an involvement of lesser nations. No nation, especially one having strategic significance and/or potential resources, can escape this horrendous inevitability. It is no secret that for imperialism the oil and mineral wealth of the Middle East and North Africa were always a tremendous source of attraction. Both Roosevelt and Eisenhower in their respective eras had alluded to imposing the hegemony of the US over these areas of vital interest that included East Asia as well. The means to this end was the creation of a state, the very foundation of which was based upon usurpation, pillage and devastation of ‘another’ people. According to Noam Chomsky, in 1998, Ben-Zvi mentioned a memorandum of the national security council that advised, “If we choose to combat radical Arab nationalism and to hold Persian Gulf oil by force, its necessary, logical corollary would be to support Israel as the only strong pro-west power left in the near east.” Since then, lots of water, including blood and tears, has flown down the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates. The intervention of global capitalism has gone direct and equally berserk. Both the master and its poodles are not shy of showing their blood-soaked claws in public. The terror of capital is dancing to the tune of death, misery and agony. From Libya to Syria and from Ukraine to Palestine, the inexhaustible fire of insatiable greed is conflagrating. To annihilate humanity, al Qaeda, ISIS, al Nusra and other prototypes are being created. For the domination of capital, religion has always remained its most handy tool. While insisting upon a primitive lifestyle, it unconditionally conforms to its established norms. In human history, “The principle of domination based originally on brute force acquired in the course of time a more spiritual character. The inner voice took the place of the master in issuing commands” (Horkheimer). Emerson bitterly observed this fact when he stated: “Religious institutions…have already acquired a market value as the conservators of property; if priests and church members should not be able to maintain them, the chamber of commerce and the president of banks, the very inn-holders and landlords of the country, would muster with fury to their support.” That is precisely what is happening today. In tragedy, history is repeating itself.“The child,” says Horkheimer, “who knows Santa Claus as an employee of a departmental store and grasps the relation between sales figures and Christmas may take it as a matter of course that there is an interaction between religion and business as a whole…The pattern of thought and action that people accept readymade from the agencies of mass culture act in their turn to influence mass culture as though they were the ideas of the people themselves.” The media, the fourth estate of capital, is most dextrously performing the job of engaging people to the triad of surrealism, conformism and consumerism. Un-freedom is presented as freedom and war as the guarantor of peace. There is no escape from this onslaught. The process of dehumanisation of thought seems to have no end. The jugglery of the media is so profound that the hapless, unarmed Palestinians merely striving to survive are painted as terrorists while the real perpetrator of genocide is sympathised with and portrayed as the victim of a pernicious and deadly aggression. The entire world is forced to contradict its own norms. (To be continued) The writer is based in Australia and has authored books on socialism and history. He can be reached at saulatnagi@hotmail.com. He blogs at saulatnagi.com