World on Fire: I Discuss Gaza, Climate Collapse and the Collective Derangement of Western Politicians with Andy Bungay

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If you have an hour to spare, and want to listen to the kind of political analysis of current events that is completely absent from mainstream media, I hope you’ll listen to me discussing the situation in the Gaza Strip, climate collapse and the collective psychic derangement of our politicians in the west with Andy Bungay, recorded last weekend and broadcast on Andy’s show on Riverside Radio, a community radio station in Wandsworth, in south west London.

Andy has interviewed me numerous times over the years, in connection with a variety of topics including Guantánamo and London’s housing crisis, and in July we spoke at length about the UK General Election, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the right to protest and the release of Julian Assange, leading to a new arrangement whereby, once a month, we’ll discuss topic of concerns in a new hourly slot on Andy’s show.

In this first monthly interview, posted below via YouTube, and featured as part of Andy’s whole show here, we began by discussing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which allowed me to discuss at length the “genocide within a genocide” that has been taking place for the last month in northern Gaza, via a truly abhorrent new plan that mixes starvation with extermination, the destruction of hospitals and efforts to displace the surviving population through ethnic cleansing, prior to Israeli colonization. 

I’ve been writing extensively about Israel’s new assault, which has, shamefully, been largely ignored in the west, since it first began, via my articles, As the World Turns Away, Israel Renews Its Genocidal Assault on Northern Gaza, Don’t Look Away From the Inferno of Extermination in Northern Gaza, Where Will It End? The Limitless Depravity of the Renewed Assault on Northern Gaza and Gaza: The Normalization of Genocide Through the Complete Complicity of the West and Its Colonization by Israel.

We also spoke about the recent report by a UN Commission of Inquiry, which, in particular, analyzed and provided evidence for Israel’s “war” on Gaza’s hospitals, and its shameful and lawless prisons, where, currently, around 20,000 Palestinians are held in deplorable conditions, and which I have previously written about in my articles, UN Report Confirms Israel Guilty of War Crimes and “Extermination” in Attacks on Gaza’s Hospitals and UN Report Condemns Unparalleled Violence, Including Torture, Rape and Murder, in Israel’s Unaccountable Prisons for Palestinians.

We also spoke about the unprecedented peril we all face from catastrophic climate change, which provided me with an opportunity to explain how, I believe, our leaders have suffered a collective derangement since the Covid lockdowns, and the reality of climate collapse (which only the most stupid amongst them deny in its entirety), and which have revealed how the very basis of our supposed civilization over the last 40 years of neoliberalism is based on a completely self-destructive lie, with all our so-called “progress” — involving, fundamentally, insanely accelerated global over-consumption — making the planet uninhabitable, and doing so much quicker than almost any scientific experts expected just a few years ago.

Unable to accept this, as I discussed in an article in September, If We Should Live, Our Scribes Will Record 2024 As The Beginning of the End for Humanity, it seems to me that our leaders have, instead, suffered a psychic derangement, embracing endless war as the ultimate distraction. This is a process that began in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and that has become genocidally super-charged since last October, in the exterminating fury of Israel’s response to the attacks by Hamas and other militants, supported, unconditionally, by most of the governments of the west.

This, of course, completely contravenes the fundamental bases of international humanitarian law, forged in the crucible of outrage regarding the Holocaust that followed the Second World War, when the United Nations was established, in part to try and make sure that such atrocities never took place again.

In the show that was broadcast, Andy also promoted ‘Songs of Loss and Resistance’, the new album by my band The Four Fathers, and also played my 2017 song ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’, in which I first assessed that, for the US, one western life was regarded as equivalent to the lives of 200 Muslims, based on a conservative assessment of the death tolls on 9/11 and in the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a ratio that is now being repeated in Gaza.

You can listen to ‘How Much Is A Life Worth?’ below, on Bandcamp, where you can also, if you like, buy it as a download.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here, or you can watch it online here, via the production company Spectacle, for £2.50).

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here.

To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, The Complete Guantánamo Files, the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.

Please also consider joining the Close Guantánamo campaign, and, if you appreciate Andy’s work, feel free to make a donation.