Empire of desperation

Matt Kennard on exposing the rot of the powers that control our world, the corruption of the media, art's role in politics, and the extermination of Gaza

This interview was conducted by Jana Voykova who spoke to journalist and author Matt Kennard of Declassified UK. It has been substantially condensed to meet Substack’s email length requirements. You can read the original interview in full here:

Empire of desperation

Please follow and support Matt Kennard’s work on Twiiter/X, and if you only read one book in your lifetime, let it be The Racket.

The interview was edited for clarity.

Matt, your book The Racket tells the story of a popular illusion, which a lot of countries have been told for decades, including my home country. And I think it makes sense to open with a quote from the book. I think it captures the essence of the message very well. So if you don't mind, I would like to read an excerpt from it. It goes like this:

“Unlike previous superpowers, the United States is a “moral” power, driven by principles and values, as opposed to domination and greed. America is “exceptional” we are told — not exceptionally violent, which is the truth, but exceptional to the extent that it has a “higher calling”; it is a “shining city upon a hill”. A brief foray into the world with eyes open teaches you quickly that this is the opposite of the truth. But keeping your eyes open will always be harder than seeking solace in your own divine moral superiority and the turpitude of your enemies. And so the myth takes hold. Repeat after me: when the US does it, Terror is Peace-seeking; Domination is Partnership; Fear is Stability. It's easy”.

Can you please explain who the racketeers are, what is the racket and how does it operate?

Matt Kennard: Essentially, the racket is an international system with lots of different players, mainly private concentrations of power in banking, in insurance, in mining, in all these different private sectors which are working at all times and have an infrastructure which is global to enforce their power and extract resources from the developing world. But they have to have a backup essentially, and that backup is the United States and also, the system I described whereby these private interests can go around the world making money, is a system which was essentially set up by the United States and allies after the Second World War. It existed before but it was British power before, which basically governed the global system.

So you have this system of extraction of wealth from the poor world to the rich, which is enforced through different organisations like the World Bank, IMF, which is headquartered in Washington, D.C. And if they need to, as a last resort, they can bring in the US military, which is the biggest military in human history. Its budget is over a trillion dollars, the Pentagon's budget. It has the same budget as the next 10 countries combined, and it has bases all over the world.

So it's an enforcement mechanism: if different countries or different movements get out of line and impinge on the ability of these private interests to continue making profit around the world. So it's a mafia system, essentially. And the title — The Racket, actually comes from a speech by General Smedley Butler, who died the most decorated Marine in US history. He signed up to the Marines in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, which interestingly, is when the American empire is seen as beginning in terms of its external empire. Some people argue that the United States has been an empire from the beginning because, obviously when the British colonists landed, they started expanding westward and taking native American land close to immediately, and then spent hundreds of years doing that.

But in terms of it outside the national territory or what became the national territory, 1898 when they beat the Spanish, was when they took on a load of Spanish imperial possessions like Puerto Rico, Philippines and others. And so he signed up to the Marines during that and then fought in lots of wars in the early 20th century in places like Honduras, China even. And so he was like one of the major, major military figures of the era. But he had an awakening when he left and realised that all the myths that you mentioned at the beginning about what America stands for and also what the US military is for, which is we're told it's about national security and defense, you know it's called the Department of Defense — he realised it wasn't about defense, it’s about offense and it's about offense for the 1%. He actually compared what he was doing inside the U.S. military to what Al Capone was doing in New York. And he said: “Al Capone could operate in four districts. I operated on four continents. I was a high-class muscle man for big business and a racketeer”.

And that speech that the title comes from basically, backs up what I was saying at the start, you know, that the US military is about enforcing private interests, corporate interests around the world and was back then and it's still like that now. And as you mentioned, obviously, it's never, ever presented like this in the Western media. It's never represented as a racket, as a mafia system, the US military is never represented as an arm of corporate power. And instead, you get fed all these myths that you talked about, like freedom, democracy, national security, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it's endless. And in fact, interestingly, you can’t work in the mainstream media or most elite parts of academia as well, if you don’t believe these myths.

And it's quite interesting to me because you have all these people who talk about religion, and I'm an atheist, but I'm not like a Richard Dawkins-style atheist who thinks that religion is the major problem we have in the world. That's what he says. But he and others abide by this religion which is that America is a shining city on a hill. I think that American exceptionalism is like a secular religion, it’s a religion that is basically devoid, it has no evidence to support it. And in fact, not only doesn't it have evidence to support it, like religion has a lot of evidence which shows it's complete rubbish. It's all discarded and avoided.

And it's prevalent. What I'm saying to you is completely verboten in the mainstream media, and most of academia, as well. But it's not unique to American power. Every single empire in history has basically run along the same lines about extracting wealth and resources from the rest of the world and bringing them back home, and not actually to the people back home but bringing them back to a very narrow elite back home. They've all come up with nice theories to justify what they're doing. None of them said: “We're going X place because we want to ransack and take all their money and take all their resources”. They said: “We want to civilise them, we want to spread freedom, we want to spread Christianity”, whatever it was, they always had a noble mission. So the United States follows in that line.

And actually, it began even before the external empire, after the Spanish American War that I mentioned. When they were taking native American land, the same language, in fact, that phrase you mentioned — city upon a hill, came from a journalist earlier in the 19th century. And that was an excuse, basically, for massacring and exterminating and transferring the native population. American exceptionalism started much earlier, even than the external empire. So it's always had these religious-style justifications for what they do.

And I mentioned the mainstream media, but I actually think that these kind of mythologies are prevalent in wider society because the wider society consumes the mass media and the mass media constantly indoctrinates them with all this rubbish. So here in England, I don't know if it's the same in Bulgaria, but most people believe that the United States is this noble power that has higher values than previous empires or that it's not even an empire at all. It's just a neutral arbiter of a global system that is founded in rule of law and fairness, which is all complete rubbish.

So yeah, you have this whole imperial system, which is basically the governing dynamic of international affairs, which is unmentionable in the mainstream of any kind of intellectual industries, which for me is preposterous. And actually, I found this to be the case in the Financial Times. I didn't have too much of a different opinion of global affairs even before I went into the Financial Times, but I thought, well, it's an opportunity to have a look at how it works on the inside and also test the boundaries. And I found out pretty quick that, if you start testing those boundaries and putting in information that reveals the truth about America's role in the world and allies, because obviously the British is no different, European powers are no different, then you'll be out of a job.

There was no way I could stay at the Financial Times, even though I was a trainee and I was doing good stories, I was doing stories. There was no actual specific reason that I wasn't allowed to stay, although I didn't want to stay, anyway. But just interestingly, I was told I wasn't an FT journalist now; what that meant was, I hadn't imbibed and absorbed all the convenient mythologies, which you need to, to ascend the ladder of the corporate media.

So I was let go. It wasn't a verdict on my abilities as a journalist. In fact, the editor of the FT said to me: “You're a good journalist, but you're not an FT journalist”. So that's a quite telling thing. What does that mean? That means you're a good journalist, but you're not willing to become part of the system and become part of the institutionalised thinking. And that's an extremely explicit version of something that you assume exists on a much more implicit level across the media and does exist on an implicit level. But if you start pushing the boundaries, they have to become explicit about how it works.

You've mentioned before that the FT and outlets like the FT do factual journalism, they're very meticulous with the facts, but they do reporting by omission. I wanted to ask you to explain the term “resource nationalism”, and “foreign aid” and what mechanisms the racket uses to submit other countries.

Matt Kennard: Yes, it’s interesting. The main way that resources are extracted is through the mining industry, right? And oil industry. And they have to, because they're Western companies mainly, but there's also obviously Chinese companies and Russian companies doing it as well, but they have to have an excuse for why they're there. Because if you have loads of lithium in Bolivia, which they do — second highest proven reserves, a normal president who was representing his country would be like: “Okay, well, let's extract that and gain the wealth and build up industry within Bolivia to produce whatever products are being produced on that lithium”. And that's true.

That should be how it works. But the whole system, you need an excuse why they need a foreign company to come there. And that excuse is: "Well, they don't have the expertise. They don't have the potential for investment”, blah, blah, blah. There's loads of different justifications. But those justifications basically become this ideology that you have to attract foreign investment to be a successful economy.

And you have to allow the experts and the big companies to come and produce that for you. And what that means is, they come in, they take the lithium, they pay very little taxes because they've installed the government, which is basically working for the corporation rather than the people. They pay very little royalties, as well.

Even the taxes that they're meant to pay, they have very high-powered accountancy firms, which can do clever accounting and are huge companies that have thousands of people working for them, more than probably the country has in their own tax institutions. So there's a massive imbalance of power there. And then, they take those resources, basically paying very, very little royalties.

They say: “Okay, well, we're doing these nice corporate social responsibility things. We'll build a school”, which they sometimes do, or a hospital. And usually you find they're badly run and don't have much investment.

And also, it just means that you have these very, very localised versions of development. So there might be some development around a mine, but then the rest of the country is a wasteland because there's no money going to the central reserves of the actual government of the country. So there's nothing for the rest of the people.

And those resources go abroad. The lithium goes to Britain, Germany. And then what happens there? They build the batteries that the lithium produces in that country. So what does that mean? They build up industry within Britain and Germany. They create jobs. They create secondary industries from the other facets of building a battery. So you build up the industry, you get the resources. And then that's why there's been such uneven development across the world. And if any kind of leader tries to do something different, they say, well, they come up with the term called “resource nationalism”, which is one that I learned about when I was at the FT actually, which was quite funny because anyone I talked to in the mining industry, that was like a pejorative. It was something they'd say as kind of an attack on any government. They'd say resource nationalism is a bad thing. But what is resource nationalism? All that means is that the countries want to produce their own minerals and get their own minerals out of the ground and build up industry themselves.

And it's constantly poo-pooed by the international finance industry, the mining companies. And the other part of it is that most countries, you realise, have governments which are working for the corporations. And that is one of the major, major takeaways I had from, not writing The Racket actually, from the last book or the previous book called Silent Coup, which is about corporate power.

When I was going around the world and I was talking to peasants or workers or activists that were getting killed by paramilitaries hired by different companies who are unhappy with their dissent against a certain corporate project, I'd say to them: “Okay, I understand that the corporation is doing this bad stuff, but you have got a government. Why isn't the government supporting you”? And they all thought that was a ridiculous question. They would say, and I'm not just making this up.

They would say: “Don't be stupid. The government works for the corporation”. The government in most of the world is just a body which greases the entry of the corporation into that country and works for that corporation once the corporation is there. So you have not only, obviously the two power centres in a society — the state and the corporation, and the corporation is much more powerful in many places than the state, but even the actions that the state is taking itself, are often done in the interest of the corporation. So it's just a massive imbalance of power. And it's a hugely, hugely important thing because this is why we have a world which is so unequal.

Latin America is a good example. Since the Spanish arrived, nearly all the wealth for 500 years, all the wealth of that region was taken back to Europe, and then the United States. And you have such high levels of poverty in Latin America. I've been there quite a lot, in places like Brazil, which should be hugely rich. It's got huge resources. It should be one of the richest countries in the world. You just see that there's street kids everywhere who can't feed themselves. And that's not a mistake. That's a system running as it should. That's the system spending 500 years extracting that wealth, or corporations extracting that wealth, backed by their governments and building up industry at home. And resource nationalism is what you need. And Bolivia is actually a good example. So lithium — Evo Morales, who was elected president of Bolivia in 2005 — first indigenous president, democratic socialist. He nationalised a whole host of companies and renegotiated contracts, which is important, as well, because, as I mentioned, a lot of these contracts had hugely... the corporation got a much higher percentage of any profits than the government itself, which is preposterous.

And he changed all that. He started something that he called value-added. He said, we're not going to do what we did for example for 500 years, which is allow these materials to go out back to Europe to build up industry there. We're going to build the batteries in Bolivia. And they started doing it. And what happened in 2019? There was a CIA, UK/US-backed coup, which deposed him. And that's what happens.

This is what I said about the hidden fist. If you start stepping on the toes of corporate power and actually trying to use the resources of your country for your own people and to take a fair share of those resources for your own people, they'll take you out. And we see that again, and again, and again. So resource nationalism is a propaganda construct, basically. What it describes is a country taking control of its own resources and taking power away from corporations to ransack those countries. It's a very, very good thing. And I would advise anyone who is in the developing world to practise resource nationalism because these companies are not there for charity. They're there to exploit and to extract. And that's all they care about. Anything they do that they say is beneficial for the country, like bring jobs or build a school, is all just ways of them getting what they call a “social licence” because they know that they're unpopular because of what they're doing.

So they try all this corporate propaganda. But it's all rubbish. And I'll finish with this, that the whole system is undergirded by the main international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF, who promote the policies that I've described. And it's very, very hard when you come up against that whole ecosystem to go another way in development because you get all your credit lines pulled from the IMF if you're in a crisis. You get your credit lines pulled from the World Bank just in terms of your development projects. All the money is going towards people who just basically open up their economies to be ransacked.

And it's a tragedy really. But things are changing. Obviously, there's the BRICS bank, which is still young, but there's a move towards trying to build an alternative to what's called the Washington Consensus. But it's basically just a Washington and Europe consensus of the 1% that we can continue to ransack the world how we want.

Right, and in that sense, there is this asymmetry, I think, at least that's my impression, that as you mentioned, most people in Britain, let's say, they don't see the US as an empire. And I would argue that people in developing countries and countries like Bulgaria, they don't live under the illusion that America is here to save us or corporations are really good. I would argue that there is a specific social group which has a good income and they are actually benefiting from the system, and that's why they are conditioned to believe that it's not this insidious system that you are describing.

So your book was first published in 2015 and it was just republished last year, last summer. And it seems to me that the interest for the book took off more recently. I tried to find some reviews of it. I did find a review in The Guardian and a couple of other places. And I found it funny that the reviewers attacked your book in the sense that you wrote it from a very subjective leftist perspective and you provided a rather simplistic explanation of how the world is governed. And I found it funny because they conveniently omitted the fact that you based all your argumentation and conclusions on on-the-ground reporting in a couple of continents. And as you mentioned earlier, you spoke to local people, you interviewed local and international officials, government officials, business leaders.

And you are an investigative journalist, so you base your reporting on official documents, like FOIA documents and a great deal of it was based on the WikiLeaks revelations. So I wonder whether you have had anybody trying at least to provide a more substantive counter-argument towards your book and your reporting, other than the usual accusations of conspiratorial thinking?

Matt Kennard: Well, it's interesting that you mentioned that Guardian review, because, firstly, that's the only mainstream outlet that touched it. And I was quite shocked that they actually even reviewed it because a lot of people say that the best way to kind of suppress information is just to ignore it.

If you create, even if you do a hit piece like The Guardian did, it generates interest in itself. And actually at the time, there was quite a lot of pushback against The Guardian online, basically saying this is a hit job quite clearly. So firstly, that was a surprise.

Secondly, I wasn't that surprised by how they covered it because firstly, I don't think, and this isn't me being rude, but I don't think the guy really understands the issues at play from reading it. I don't think he really had, he wasn't a guy that had had any history in writing about international affairs or international politics. And secondly, it was quite clearly he went out with the goal to kind of just destroy the book.

And what I thought was the most telling way that he did that was related to what you mentioned, which is that he went through this whole line of it's a conspiracy theory, it's simplistic, but he didn't once mention in that review, that the book was based on reporting I've done at the Financial Times, which is how the whole book is framed. And that's because clearly, it wouldn't have made sense to people reading it if you said “This guy's a mad conspiracy theorist, but he did all this reporting at the Financial Times”, which is this respected institution.

So it was quite interesting. I mean, the review in itself is interesting as a kind of analysis of how the left liberal corporate media attack people to their left. That's what I think is interesting because The Guardian is, and actually this was in the afterword that I wrote. The Guardian, and it's not just The Guardian, the left liberal mainstream papers in most of Europe and America, their role is to kind of guard the left flank for the establishment and stop any kind of systematic analysis of the system, from being allowed into the mainstream. And that's what that is about.

And that's what all those phrases are meant to do. And it's quite successful in that sense. If you constantly call anyone who has a systematic analysis of power and actually tells truths about powers we're told are the good guys, it's very, very effective to call them conspiracy theorists because people don't want to be called conspiracy theorists. And to call them cranks or whatever, there's a whole list of different words you get called. And what it does is, it makes people who say these things outside of the kind of realm of respectability, you're not going to be seen as a serious journalist or as a serious thinker, if you say things like: “Well, the United States is a major, a rampant, violent empire”. And that's why you'll never read that in The Guardian.

But there has been some interesting reviews. There was one recently in Middle East Eye. But as I say, and it goes to what you mentioned in the question, as well, about propaganda by omission. The best way of propagandising the public is just to leave out information, and even if you, as I mentioned, even if you write a hit job, it's not leaving out information and it will pique people's interest. It introduces ideas into the mainstream, which, even if you're poo-pooing them, people might explore a bit further, people who haven't been exposed to those ideas.

So it's much, much more effective to just completely ignore them. And that's what happened apart from that Guardian review. And that's what I found with all my work. Silent Coup, the book we released in 2023, not a single word about that book has ever appeared in a mainstream publication in the English language anywhere. Which is amazing, really, because it did sell quite well and did create quite a buzz, but it was completely ignored. And that's a very effective way, and it was published by Bloomsbury. So you see that there's a massive blackout of these ideas that question the fundamentals of the system and the fundamentals of what interests are guiding and moving the system, because that's really what is the red line.

You can have interesting stories in the FT about certain corporations doing bad things or certain governments doing bad things or certain politicians in the West. That's fine. If you start saying it's not just a bad egg, it's not just a scandal about this one company, the whole system is a mafia racket, well, yeah there's no way you're gonna get a hearing. And in fact, it's been really exposed by Gaza, you know. I think the most brain-dead propaganda organ in Britain is the BBC and obviously I've never, well, I've been invited on the BBC once after my first book was published, which was about extremists and other groups in the US military and they invited me in. And I don't think they realised what the book was about or who I was. I think they probably just got an email and were like: “Okay, let's do it”. And then I did an hour-long interview where they talked to me about the book, I was talking about the neo-Nazis that had been recruited by the Pentagon to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And then I waited, and waited, and waited, and they never aired it. And that goes to the same thing as, they just thought: “Well, this guy's way out of the respectable realm of opinions”. Even though it was straight investigative journalism. It was all backed up by rafts of evidence. And they just completely excised it from the record. And that's how it works.

It's the same with Declassified, where I worked until recently. We did loads and loads of stories. This is not on the American empire, but on the British role. It's a bit of a conceptual mistake to think of them as two separate countries really. In terms of foreign policy, they're basically the same entity. And we did, I personally did a bunch of stories which caused huge diplomatic incidents in places like Bolivia, Venezuela, in Cyprus, and not a single word about any of it ever appeared in any UK newspaper.

I'll tell you what surprised me, is when I was doing the stories about the role of the UK bases in Cyprus in the genocide in Gaza, and it caused such a storm there, that there was protests there every week. And the president on both sides of the Cypriot border had to make a comment. They were asked about it at press conferences. And I was thinking, if presidents are talking about it, you would think that the newspapers would have to just mention it maybe, but still nothing happened. So there's a complete blackout and it's extremely effective because it's a sophisticated form of propaganda because it's not bludgeoning people over the head. It's not like the Soviet Union and Pravda where people go into work knowing they're writing the party line and people read it knowing they're receiving the party line.

This system has a whole illusion of freedom of thought and freedom of information. But actually, the best way to do that is to just leave out what people need to have an understanding and leave anything that isn't conducive to the state narrative or to the corporate narrative. It just doesn't exist effectively. That is the principle. And that's why what we did at Declassified was so easy in some ways, because a lot of the stuff we were doing was open source. And it was just that you could read a document from the UK government and write an article, and then look at the same article that had been written on that document by The Daily Telegraph, and there'd be literally two completely different articles because The Daily Telegraph journalist, not even consciously by the way, is reading that document and just taking all the information that fits with their understanding of the world, which they adopt from the state, whereas we were looking for information that told the truth about what was going on, and you can get two completely different readings of it.

There was quite an interesting case, actually, on the declassified files where my colleague Phil Miller did a story about Nelson Mandela and an oil company, and the BBC did an article on the same documents, and literally they were completely different. The BBC one just showed the image of Britain as this kind of benign power or even benevolent power, whereas Phil's article showed that Britain was working for oil interests against governments or movements that were trying to fight oil interests. So that's how it works.

And it's funny that it's not talked about as much as it should be. And I have to say, it really crystallised, this idea of propaganda by omission really crystallised for me working at Declassified when I was just seeing again, and again, and again that we were just being ignored. Firstly, we were being ignored. Secondly, I was reading the articles in the mainstream media and I was seeing that actually they weren't lying a lot of the time, interestingly. They just weren't putting in loads of information. And I was like: “Okay, well then that's a very clever way of doing it, people are gonna know if they're being lied to but it's much harder to know you're being propagandised if you're being told the truth but you're just not being told the whole truth”.

I wanted to ask you about Gaza and Israel. You've said this before, that Gaza has exposed the racket like never before, just because the whole world is witnessing what Israel is doing, it’s very visual. Do you think that the Israeli government overestimated their ability to maybe play with the Holocaust guilt, in the sense that they saw this opportunity to obviously realise the Greater Israel project and they went really, really wild in Gaza, so do you think that they miscalculated how the world is going to look at them?

Matt Kennard: Yeah it's interesting I don't know. I don't know, I don't know, they probably did think that they wouldn't get the pushback they have. Although, having said that, they've got zero pushback from the United States and Europe basically, very little, I mean there's been a few arm suspensions here and I think France actually did suspend arms. But in terms of actually denouncing it as a genocide and talking in those terms it's been very little governmental…but in terms of the popular pressure on them, yeah maybe they are surprised, maybe they are surprised but essentially it's not had any impact on them carrying out the genocide and receiving the backing of the West in terms of weapons and intelligence and the rest of it.

Another element is popular attitudes towards Israel and Zionism, as well, because Zionism has been a kind of protected ideology for a long time, partly because of European guilt about the Holocaust and partly because of the Israel lobby itself just like working overtime to capture the governments of the United States and Britain, and others.

But people are talking much more freely now about Zionism because they're seeing the endpoint of Zionism really, it's a colonial genocidal project […] which is similar to what the Spanish did in Latin America and in the Americas, and what the British did in the Americas, as well. It's not very different. And I think that the genocide in Gaza has really revealed that. And it's very, very hard now for these liberal Zionists who basically dress up this rancid ideology which is a supremacist ideology and racist ideology. It's very hard for them to do that now because the truth is out. And it's not just about Netanyahu, that's the other thing.

Liberal Zionists try and do this now. They say it's all about Netanyahu and Ben-Gavir. But, you know, this is a sick society, a sick and racist settler society, which doesn't see Palestinians as humans or worthy of things that most humans need to survive, like water, electricity and food, which they withdrew.

So I think in the long term that's going to have a huge impact. I think Zionism is in terminal decline now because the younger generations have been traumatised by watching this. And I think, as you mentioned, by extension, it has exposed the United States and Britain and others because Israel's a little country, it doesn't have that much weight without the United States, specifically.

And bloody hell, man, I mean, anyone watching what's going on in Gaza, is traumatised, and yet they're watching the United States which they've been told since they were little kids is this […] shining city on the hill, this exceptional power. And they're watching Biden, this president who's got porridge for brains, going up on a podium every day, defending it all and saying he's going to send more weapons and repeating all the Israeli propaganda.

It's like, I think that people are shocked. There's been a massive […] meeting of the ideology and the reality in the destruction of Gaza with the United States. And hopefully, well, I think the left needs to push it, I push it all the time now, because I think this is an opening that might not come around again, because it's so clear what's going on. It's clear that the United States is a genocidal power, it's clear that most European governments are genocidal, and it's obviously clear that Israel is genocidal, so that's quite a revelation, you know. Even the war in Iraq — there [were] a lot of awakenings that were happening during that, but that wasn't a genocidal war, although it could have been a million [deaths]. They weren't bombing kids specifically. They weren't targeting children like they are in Gaza.

This is a straight genocide and everyone knows it. And yet the British, the Americans, Europeans, Germany, are all supporting it to the hilt and arming it and contributing to it and participating. So I think that's going to have a big impact, not just on Zionism and Israel, but also on the ideological infrastructure which justifies Western power.

It's kind of in tatters. And I'll finish with this. Just yesterday, the House of Representatives passed the bill to sanction the ICC officials that were involved in the arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. And it's like, bloody hell, that's very revealing, isn't it? That they've literally bullshitted us for so many years about this rule-based order and blah, blah, blah, blah, it was fine and it was great and we could celebrate as this great rule of law when it was being used against opponents of us, and the first time it's been used against us, they literally are saying we're going to sanction the officials that are doing it and… bananas, it's so obvious, so obvious. I don't think it's ever been this obvious, they've had to expose themselves to get this genocide done, and we really, really need to take advantage of that because there's an opening. It's our responsibility to really locate American power as the great evil, I think, in our world.

What do you think will happen with Gaza after they're done? They've pretty much bombed the whole place to shreds so I'm not even sure how there's anything left to bomb.

Matt Kennard: Yeah, I agree. My sense is that they have to get a victory because the other thing is that they killed enormous amounts of people and maimed and mutilated huge amounts of children, but they haven't actually achieved much, they haven't got all the hostages back. They haven't really ended the resistance attacks on them, soldiers are still getting killed by the resistance, the resistance still exists. So, and they've got their asses whipped in South Lebanon, as well. So my sense is that in that context, what they're saying is we need a win to end this war. The win will be, we'll annex Northern Gaza from Jabalia camp upwards. And if you look at the extermination campaigns that have been happening in Northern Gaza, they want to clear it and they want to clear it so they can annex it.

I think there's even been people going into kind of prospect for settlements. So they'll annex Northern Gaza and then the rest of Gaza will just be this destroyed place that will probably be rebuilt with Gulf money, I guess, and will be put under the control of a Palestinian Authority-style institution, probably the Palestinian Authority itself.

And the Palestinian Authority works for Israel and was designed like that so it would just be under control, and there's a guy called Mohammed Dahlan who was involved in the attempted coup in 2006 in Gaza who's the CIA favourite that they wanted to install him then, I think they're probably trying to install him as the kind of president of, or at least some kind of leader in that rest of Gaza. Then the West Bank, who knows? There's apparently going to be an offensive now in the West Bank. Ideally, they'd like to move all the Palestinians out of the West Bank into Jordan, but I don't know how they'd do that without another genocidal campaign, which they might do, who knows? But yeah, I don't know. Who knows? Because then there's also Iran, they want to attack Iran. At the moment, they're in control. But these things, there's a lot of unintended consequences that they're not aware of. No one is. So they might lose control at some point.

Do you expect that the Trump administration will put any pressure on the Israeli government?

Matt Kennard: No. They'll be worse than the Biden administration in that sense. They'll just do whatever they're told, I think.

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Empire of desperation