Newspaper: Democracy.
The case of death is not at all the cause of the dead, it’s the cause of the living.
— Ghassan Kanafani, from the novel Men Under the Sun
My people are fearless and the gallows to each person among us is the instance that precedes the dawn of a new day for all of us … Prosecutor! Understand that when one of us enters the nation’s battle of destiny, he takes into consideration all possible results. But above all, he places his confidence in the determination of the people to win victory.
— Ghassan Kanafani, from the story “A Heroine from My Country”
They tell you this is a “conflict.” A “complex issue.” A tragedy happening “over there.”
They are lying.
What is happening in Gaza, in Palestine, is the logical, bloody conclusion of a global system of exploitation—a system sustained not by monsters, but by the convenient, daily complicity of those who benefit from it most: the citizen-consumers of the West.
This complicity is masked by a grand, soothing lie: the lie of democratic citizenship.
The state and its subjects have entered a symbiotic pact of bad faith. The theory goes like this: in a democracy, the citizen is sovereign. The government’s actions are an expression of the popular will. Therefore, the citizens are responsible. This is the idealistic shell. Let us crack it open and examine the actual, pathetic reality inside.
The state, functioning as the capitalist class’s executive committee, depends on this lie as its foundational fiction. It is the democratic alibi that launders imperial violence into policy. The weapons shipped to fuel genocide are stamped with the seal of “democratic principles,” their bloody purpose blessed by the hollow ritual of the ballot. This is the dictatorship of the elite, a regime of class power wearing the convincing mask of popular consent—a specific apparatus designed to vaporize the accountability of the capitalist and imperialist classes, dispersing it as a fine mist of collective guilt over the populace.
But why do the masses accept this lie?
Because it is an anesthetic.
Having already swallowed the primordial myth of capitalist democracy—that freedom is consumption and power is a ballot—this smaller lie of passive citizenship is the necessary sedative that numbs the pain of their own powerlessness and the horror conducted in their name.
Here we must be Kanafanian in our clarity. To be a “citizen” of the metropole is, in practice, to be a consumer. And the consumer’s paradise is built on the graveyards of the Global South. Your stability, your cheap energy, your endless stream of goods, is subsidized by the control and immiseration of others. To truly confront this would shatter the consumer’s world. The cognitive dissonance would be unbearable.
And so, the lie administers the necessary anesthetic. The recited alibis of impotence (“What power do I have?”) are the superstructure of a material bargain. This is the highest stage of false consciousness: the willed surrender of agency for the comforts of the labor aristocracy. It is a transaction: the consumer trades their revolutionary potential for moral oblivion, outsourcing conscience to the state and NGOs—the very managers of the crisis—who, in return, guarantee the sanctity of the shopping aisle.
This is the “citizenshipness” we are sold: a hollowed-out identity, a safety valve for dissent. Protest, write your representative, cast your vote—then return to your consumption. The system allows you to perform concerns without ever threatening the foundations of your comfort. It is a brilliant, cynical management of dissent.
Thus, the genocide and the ongoing Nakba in Palestine are not an aberration. It is the system working as intended. The bombs falling on Rafah, Occupied Palestine, are funded by the taxes of the Western citizenry. The diplomatic cover is provided in their name. Their silence—or more accurately, their fragmented, ineffective noise—is the permission slip.
The connection is not metaphorical; it is material. The luxury lifestyle and the genocide are two outputs of the same machine. One is the direct, concentrated violence of imperialism. The other is the diffuse, structural violence of an exploitative global order. They require each other.
To the real socialists among us, the conclusion is clear: Spontaneous protest is not enough. Moral outrage is not enough. The working classes of the imperial core have been bought off with crumbs from the colonial plunder. They will not achieve revolutionary consciousness on their own. The task falls to an organized political party—those who see through the lie—to break the hypnotic spell of consumer citizenship. To organize, not to plead. To expose the comfort, to make the machinery of complicity grind to a halt.
And to the Palestinians, the path is one of steadfast, rooted resistance. The Palestinian struggle is not a plea for Western sympathy. It is an anti-colonial/imperial war. It is the absolute negation of the lie. Every act of resistance, from the stone to the slogan, is a truth-telling, exposing the brutal reality that the capitalist West so desperately masks with its talk of “complexity” and “citizenship.”
The question is not whether the Western citizen is complicit. The question is whether they will continue to choose the convenience of the lie over the difficult truth of their own justice—a justice that is inextricably linked to the justice and liberation of Palestine. To end the genocide there, they must first kill the complacent consumer within themselves.
There is no other way.
The lie is convenient.
The truth is justice.
Choose.
The post The Convenient Lie first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Amel-Ba’al.