Imagine that LA had been blockaded since 2007, and had repeatedly been bombed since then. Now imagine that the current fires took place, and that the response was to bomb, maim, and starve the survivors for the next fourteen months, on the premise that doing so was a favor to them, and proof of the superiority of our civilization. That’s what we’ve done to Gaza and Lebanon. The enormity of that crime—series of crimes—can barely be imagined. Neither can the scale of the retribution that its survivors will have in mind for us for the foreseeable future.

Everyday I run into people who don’t really get that. We inhabit a civilization that incentivizes, even valorizes, not getting it. But there’s only so long that you can feign incomprehension of something before the consequences overtake you as if by surprise.

LA was an unplanned disaster. The fate of Gaza was planned—not in 2023, but in 1948 (if not before). Try to imagine the mentality that would have brought LA about by planning it, then intensifying it, then bragging about it. That’s the mentality of the civilizational ruling class of “the West.” It may be in bad taste, but what I really wish is that LA and Gaza had both been planned for them.