The Silence of the Geckoes – Genocide Blog 86
16.08.2026
In Ragoo Lane the drama is low key. Remember the two dogs that a family left when they moved to a town flat and couldn’t take them, and then the whole of Ragoo Lane has taken care of the dogs for some 5 years? A mother-and-son of vague and somewhat fluffy Alsatian stock? Anyway, one has fallen ill, the mother one. So, one neighbour has bought “serum” and has been feeding the dog with a spoon for days, keeping it alive. Another neighbour yesterday called a vet in, and we chipped in. So, after an injection, and three medicines, the dog is now under professional treatment by the neighbour, who had been administering the serum. Not looking very hopeful to my amateur eye. But with all that tender, loving care, who knows? And her big boy-dog makes little crying sounds from time to time, from a distance.
And on a more ominous note, in the grand scheme of things, a couple of big green lizards have moved into almost everyone’s house. And they eat our indigenous little geckoes. We saw one, with our own eyes, eating one. So, we know.For sure. And our lizards have all gone completely neurotic. They used to be tame and laid back, taking our houses as their homes. Now they hide, and jump at the slightest movement near them. They peep, and scuttle away. And they have learnt not to make the sounds they usually make when they are having a tiff with another of their species. The silence of the geckoes. The rate of the increase of the green dragons, and the rate of disappearance of our little geckoes means the threat of extinction. Foreshadowed by the silence.
And there is an even more ominous note, at the whole of mother-earth scale of things.
The Israeli genocidal maniacs have gone even more berserk. In full view, they act out their cruelty, their slaughter. The Israelis are out of all social control. They are now strangling Gazans into less and less land, moving the infamous yellow line, killing all the while, tightening the throttling of supplies into Gaza, causing starvation and death from curable and preventable disease, and now going for the kill, 1948-Nakba style. They intend to push all, or most, of the Palestinians in Gaza into the Egyptian desert.
It was not months but years ago when I ran out of language to describe the bravery, the suffering, the steadfastness, the martyrdom, of the people of Palestine. When I quoted “Worst, there is none”, it has remained true. The Israeli state is a bottomless pit of sadism.
Their criminal Government, their wanted-for-war-crimes Prime Minister, the criminal-in-chief, has just publicly refused to withdraw from Gaza. They never having respected the ceasefire, or any ceasefire, or even the appalling Trump “deal”, but only pretended to. And in the West Bank, colonial settlers just go in and beat Palestinians up, literally kicking them off their land, burning down their homes, the worst pogroms seen in modern times. Olive trees hundreds of years old, set alight. On purpose. While the “civilized West” continues to arm Israel even as it goes on and on with its massacres, and this same “civilized West” continues to suppress its own people in its own respective countries that bravely rise up against these Israeli crimes, and their Government’s complicity. The Mauritian Government, too, is complicit. It has stood by and tried to make money out of Diego Garcia from the UK-USA criminals, instead of forbidding them from using the base at all. It wants to grab an “opportunity” by drawing in the notorious criminal finance capital from the Gulf States.
Iran, however, has named peace in Palestine now, as one of its explicit conditions for re-opening the Straits of Hormuz to allow oil shipments to re-open. Good. And Iran, bravely, has announced, it will go on the offensive in order to enforce all the other conditions of the “Memorandum of Understanding” that Trump personally put his ridiculous, pointy signature to on TV, namely that the war will stop on all fronts, by not only the signatories the USA and Iran, but also by all their allies. Since it is a war of aggression, the aggressor has to withdraw. And that already included in the signed Memorandum, withdrawal from Lebanon (mentioned three times) and “on all fronts”. Iran now demands clearly that the USA retreat from all its already crippled or destroyed bases in the Middle East. Asian nations are preparing the ground to look after their own security now. Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkiye have signed a Pact of sorts that is both pregnant with meaning, the Mecca Pact signed not at the capital city but at Mecca, but also potentially meaningless, being vague and secretive. Its importance is that the USA is not in it. The USA may even have been blind-sided by its closest of allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Turkiye. It would seem to be a Pact against Israel. But here, I am guessing. And remember, Pakistan is a nuclear power. Remember, Turkiye is a NATO member, NATO’s second biggest military after the USA. So, whatever the Pact is, it is important.
And Iran has said it will re-open the Straits of Hormuz on other conditions, already in the Memorandum of Understanding, now in clear language: No more vulgar threats and vile language, please, the return of the funds that the USA has “stolen” from Iran – it hardly needs the quotation marks around “stolen|, because the funds have effectively been stolen from Iran. Iran also demands the end of all economic sanctions and blockades that have been put up against it in various forms over the past nearly 50 years.
All this going on now in 2026 is showing us, as if proof were needed, that colonization is far from over. Israel still colonizes Palestine. Iran is still suffering from the CIA-UK coup-d’etat against its elected Mosadeq Government in 1953. The Gulf States were only set up for the USA-UK after decolonization was well on its way, some even as late as in the 1970s, to control the oil and to funnel the petro-dollars to the USA to maintain its survival despite mortal debts. And Diego Garcia, as part of Chagos, is still colonized by the UK-USA in a new colony set up in the middle of decolonization, just like Palestine and the Gulf States.
So, the West has had its mask pulled off its hideously fascist face. To keep on colonizing, the West will destroy its own “international law”, even its own “rule of law”, the most meagre of its show of democracy. First the USA renamed “international law” by calling it not “international law” anymore, but baptizing it “the rules-based international order”, meaning rules made up by the USA as it goes along. No longer the rule of law. Now the rule of rules. Making no sense. Even grammatically.
Luckily Iran has won the first two rounds of the war of aggression that the USA and Israel inflicted upon it. The 12-day war last year, and the 40-day war this year – a war that is not yet over. And now the Iranians are united as a people against the imperialist aggression. The USA got caught in what is called an escalation trap, one of its own making. It upped the ante, and then Iran did. Each time the USA acted, Iran acted symmetrically. Except Iran has not bombed civilians. When the USA attacked Iran, Iran destroyed US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, even Oman, and finally, when the USA retreated all the way to Jordan, even parking its planes in Jordan, Iran bombed them there, too. Now, the USA has retreated to Israel.
And of course, Iran blocked the Straits of Hormuz. And has worked out a plan, within the 60 days of the “Memorandum of Understanding”, with Oman, the other littoral state on how to run the Straits and on how much to charge for “innocent passage”, according to international law.
As if Trump is not humiliated enough losing the war so far, and to a country as humble as Iran, it has now been made public that Trump was tricked by false Israeli intelligence about a plot on his life, and put in the ridiculous position of being carted out of Air Force One, his impregnable airplane, by a side opening, crouching down in one of those catering carts that get put on ordinary airlines for serving meals and removing food scraps, and smuggled into a smaller airplane. Meanwhile, his Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others in the Trump team, as well as the entire press corps, were left on the plane that was due to be exploded, or whatever Israel said was to happen! The coward of all cowardly leaders is he who saves his own life and gets his minions and his mouth-pieces killed. Of course, the Iranian team that creates the beautiful LEGO videos, have had a field day with the most important man on the planet being smuggled out in the left-over food-scraps cart. Do watch the videos if you haven’t yet.
And talking about food carts, the huge American air-craft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln has been at sea for over 8 months without its 5,000 imprisoned sailors, the sons and daughters of the poor, being able to put a foot on solid earth. And they have been fed bad food, insufficient food, polluted water, and seen their toilets and laundry dis-functional. All this is causing the military to suffer serious mental health issues, even attempted suicide. All this is in addition to the military personnel not knowing what on earth the war is even FOR. To attack Iran? Why? To break Iran up? Why? Because Israel says so? To stop Iran making an atomic bomb? It was not ever making one, even the USA’s own intelligence says that. It did not want one. Anyway, there was the Obama agreement that forbad it, and Trump just shredded it. Or did they attack Iran hoping for regime change in four days? With a few hundred Mossad agents causing terror around small real demonstrations? Well the USA has killed two sets of entire Iranian “cabinets” and the Government of Iran came out stronger. The people angrier. Their spiritual leader killed in a cheap assassination? And now, their huge big air-craft carriers have to skulk a couple of hundred miles off the shores of Iran because Iran’s missiles will blow them up if they get any nearer. So, why are they even there? Now, they are there, it seems, so that they Straits of Hormuz get opened. But they were open before the US-Israel war of aggression against Iran even began. And now these same Straits are part of a US blockade! Can you believe all this?
And meanwhile Britain, worse than the USA on this issue, has become a country with no more free speech at all, with three thousand people – mainly old ladies – being arrested and then gradually charged with saying, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine action” or writing it on a bit of bristol. And now the mighty, the “Great” Britain, too, has also been humiliated by its own judiciary on the free speech issue. Its own Industrial Court of Appeal, has found that Dr. David Miller, who was sacked from his University post for analyzing the Israeli state as a Zionist, colonial and Apartheid State and for supporting the Palestinians who had been hounded out, has to be re-instated, and paid back-pay and all. In fact, the Industrial Court had already decided that his dismissal was wrongful, but the DPP, under the usual pressure from the rabid Israeli lobby, appealed against this judgment, and now David Miller has won at the Supreme Court level appeals tribunal. It is important to note that the University of Bristol that illegally fired him in 2021, which was before the renewed and accelerated genocide even began after 7 October 2023, had made Dr. Miller sign bit of paper silencing him all these years, as his case dragged on through the Courts. These kinds of NDA’s (non-disclosure agreements) must be banned in democracies from now on! They are a mortal attack on free speech. The precedent now set by the Appeals Tribunal, will set in motion hundreds of cases for unjust dismissal from academic institutions, schools, newspapers and media outlets, even hospitals! Long live the on-going struggle for free speech and academic freedom, linked to the FREE PALESTINE struggle.
So, the lesson is that the world is against the Israeli genocide in a big way. But the Governments of the dying Western imperialist states still support the genocide – as do their “appendages” some states turn themselves into, like the Mauritian State is turning itself into before our eyes. This way they all lose their moral authority. This way they all go faster towards the fall of the entire rotten empire, eaten away as it already is by its own cannibalistic “financialized” economy. Yes, finance capital and the rentiers, which “data capital” represents, are killing capitalism’s own imperial self. The people inside these rotting imperialist countries begin to rebel, too, joining whole countries that try to escape the old colonial yoke still coking us all.
So, while the USA has lost the first two rounds of the war of aggression it started against Iran, the USA is also beginning to see that it has lost the other war it kicked off by a coup coup-état not unlike the one against Iran in 1953: I refer to the coup-état organized by the Obama-Biden-Victoria Nuland team in February 2014 against the democratically elected leader of Ukraine, President Viktor Yanukovych. The Ukrainian war is a war of NATO against Russia. It is now clear that is what it is. Ukraine is the poor battering ram. The Ukrainian people are the victims of this Western machination aimed at encircling and finally breaking up Russia. It is the Ukranians and their country that will lose. They trusted the USA and Europe. They have merely made themselves into the West’s cannon fodder.
So, a new world is trying to be born. Governments all over the world are trying to free themselves from the 500 years of Western imperialism. Economically, China is beginning to free itself from the US dollar. People within the imperialist countries are trying to free themselves, too. Iran is taking on the USA militarily. Hezbollah, the Ansar Allah Houthis are, too, the rebels in Iraq. And Russia is forced to, however strong its oligarchs, by NATO’s encroachment and belligerence, combined with Trump’s tearing up of nuclear arms treaties. Something like BRICS is trying to be born. Something like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is, too. In Africa, the French colonists have been kicked out. But Israel makes inroads – it even carves up Somali, taking out Somaliland, which only Israel recognizes. Israel and the USA have aided and abetted the fragmentation of Libya, provoking an immense immigration flow from Central Africa into Europe, all those millions who worked in Libya before Obama and Hilary Clinton raped the country, and the fragmentation of Sudan. Israel brooks no big country nearby. It wants the USA and its minions to break up any big country nearby.
By contrast the European leaders follow their own capitalist class into the downward spiral of the USA, as does Japan. Germany allowed the USA to explode its billion-dollar pipe-line for Russian gas, and to become dependent on USA imports at over twice the cost. And, of course, eager-beaver Mauritius, too, like a number of South American extreme-right wing Governments in Argentina, now Columbia, Guyana, Chile, where their bourgeoisies, too, are tied like our oligarchs to the US empire – they drag their state apparatus in. This may even be happening in Venezuela after the kidnapping of the President and his wife, on trumped drug charges, now apparently abandoned without it being clear what the charges even are. The new President has even recognized Israel. But it is not yet clear if the Bolivarian revolution had gone far enough to be hard to overturn, as Cuba has been – because it did away with its oligarchs altogether during its revolution.
So, we have our day-to-day concerns, food prices rise and fuel prices rise because of the USA’s and Israel’s aggression. A dog gets very ill, and everyone gets together to try and save it. Our geckoes are being eaten alive by big green lizards.
And the genocide has still not been stopped. On the contrary, it has spread to Southern Lebanon. And if we do not stop it, it will spread further.
Lindsey Collen for LALIT
