Italy has understood the essential truth—peaceful marches are encouraged within the acceptable framework because they accomplish nothing. Photo: BettBeat’s Newsletter/file photo.
By Karim Bettache – Sep 24, 2025
More than a million peaceful marches could ever accomplish, ruling classes fear us breaking the chains of ‘learned helplessness’.
What we witness in Gaza is not merely the extermination of a people—it is a laboratory experiment in mass psychological conditioning, a blueprint for how ruling elites will subjugate populations worldwide when their time comes to be discarded.
The ruling class understands what most of us refuse to acknowledge: Gaza is not an aberration but a preview. The same forces that rain death on Palestinian children today will turn their weapons on any population that threatens power tomorrow. The silence of governments, the complicity of institutions, the careful neutrality of those who pride themselves on moral clarity—all of this serves a purpose beyond Palestine. It establishes the parameters of acceptable suffering.
The Escalation Doctrine
As the activist and writer Susan Abulhawa explains: The process follows a predictable pattern, one that has been refined through decades of implementation. First, commit an atrocity that shocks the conscience. Allow the outrage to build. Let millions march in the streets, let them believe their voices matter. Then escalate. Do something even more horrific, something that makes the previous atrocity seem restrained by comparison. Watch as the protests fade, as people retreat into private anguish, as the sense of powerlessness takes hold.
We saw this with Iraq, where millions flooded the streets in opposition to an illegal war. The machine ignored them and proceeded anyway. Then came Libya, Syria, Yemen—each intervention more brazen than the last, each met with diminishing resistance. By the time Gaza arrived, the conditioning was complete. The world had learned its lesson: nothing you do will make them stop.
This is not accident but design. The psychological principles underlying this campaign have been studied, tested, and perfected in laboratory settings. The concept of “learned helplessness” emerged from cruel psychological experiments where animals were subjected to inescapable electric shocks until they stopped trying to escape, even when escape became possible. The boiling frog syndrome—the gradual increase in temperature until the victim no longer recognizes the danger—has become statecraft.
A Window into the Future: The Technology of Subjugation
What makes the current moment uniquely dangerous is how technology amplifies these ancient techniques of control. Artificial intelligence doesn’t just guide the missiles that tear through apartment buildings in Gaza—it shapes the algorithms that determine what information reaches our screens, what narratives gain traction, what voices are amplified or silenced.
The same surveillance apparatus that tracks every Palestinian movement in the West Bank is being exported globally. The facial recognition systems, the predictive policing algorithms, the social credit scores—all tested first on a captive population that the world has agreed to treat as less than human.
When Abulhawa speaks of Gaza as “a window into the future,” she is not engaging in metaphor. The techniques of population control being perfected there—the destruction of hospitals and schools, the targeting of journalists and aid workers, the deliberate starvation of children—these will be the methods used on any population that dares to challenge the systems that enrich the few at the expense of the many.
“We restrain our righteous anger, moderate our resistance, police our own language—all out of moral concerns imposed by psychopathic murderers and pedophile rapists who feel no such constraints themselves”
How Psychopaths Police Our Morality
The most insidious aspect of this conditioning is how it transforms victims into accomplices. When we police our own language about genocide, when we moderate our anger at children being burned alive, when we accept the framing that resistance to annihilation is “terrorism“—we become agents of our own subjugation.
The demand for civility in the face of extermination is not etiquette but psychological warfare. It trains populations to accept the unacceptable, to normalize the abnormal, to find reasonable explanations for the inexplicable. When we are told that our natural rage at injustice is “divisive” or “unhelpful,” we are being programmed to surrender our humanity.
The cruelest irony is that our humanity becomes the weapon used against us. We restrain our righteous anger, moderate our resistance, police our own language—all out of moral concerns imposed by psychopathic murderers and pedophile rapists who feel no such constraints themselves. They exploit our capacity for conscience, our instinct for decency, our reluctance to abandon civilized discourse, while operating with complete moral impunity.
Genocidal maniacs dictate the terms of acceptable outrage while feeling no obligation to honor those same terms. They tell us what to think, how to feel, which emotions are permissible—and we meekly comply.
The condemnation of October 7th, demanded even two years into an active genocide, reveals the power of this moral policing. Those who drop white phosphorus on refugee camps lecture us about violence. Those who deliberately starve children demand we respect the rules of engagement. Those who film their own war crimes insist we moderate our language about their actions.
This is not hypocrisy but strategy—the deliberate exploitation of human decency to paralyze resistance to inhumanity.
“Any group that threatens the established order will find themselves subjected to the same dehumanization, the same violence, the same global indifference now on display in Gaza”
The Global Laboratory
Gaza serves as proof of concept for a new model of governance—one where any population can be designated as disposable and eliminated with impunity while the world watches and does nothing. The message being sent is not just to Palestinians but to every population that might one day find itself inconvenient to ruling class interests.
Climate refugees will discover this when rising seas and deadly heat make their lands uninhabitable. Working populations will learn it when automation makes their labor unnecessary. Indigenous communities fighting to protect their lands from extraction will face it when corporate profits demand their removal. Any group that threatens the established order will find themselves subjected to the same dehumanization, the same violence, the same global indifference now on display in Gaza.
The president of Colombia understood this when he warned that Gaza shows “what rich nations will do to us if and when we step out of line.” This is not about religion or ethnicity or ancient hatreds. This is about power demonstrating its reach, its ruthlessness, its total impunity.
Breaking the Conditioning
Yet conditioning can be broken. The psychological principles that create learned helplessness can be countered by equally powerful forces that restore agency and hope. Understanding the mechanism is the first step toward resistance.
The bystander effect—where individuals fail to act because they assume others will—dissolves when someone breaks the spell by acting first. The diffusion of responsibility that paralyzes crowds can be shattered by a single person willing to step forward. The escalation that creates helplessness can be met with counter-escalation that demonstrates the limits of power.
This requires abandoning the comfortable illusions that the system can be reformed through proper channels, that justice will eventually prevail through existing institutions, that moderation and compromise will somehow restore moral balance. The system is working exactly as designed. Gaza is not a malfunction but a feature.
The Price of Clarity
Seeing clearly comes with a cost. Once you understand that Gaza is not an exception but a preview, that the violence visited on Palestinian children today will be visited on others tomorrow, that the silence of institutions reveals their true nature—you cannot unsee it. The comfortable certainties that make daily life bearable dissolve.
But this clarity also offers something precious: the possibility of meaningful action. When you understand that your own liberation is bound up with that of the most vulnerable, when you recognize that today’s victims are tomorrow’s allies, when you see that the forces destroying Gaza will eventually come for you—resistance becomes not just moral but imperative.
We are already witnessing this awakening. In Italy, workers launched a nationwide strike for Palestine, understanding that solidarity with Gaza is solidarity with their own future. The Global Sumud flotilla—fifty boats strong—sails toward Gaza’s shores, carrying not just aid but a rejection of the acceptable bounds of action. These are people taking matters into their own hands, operating outside the parameters set by the same institutions that have proven their moral bankruptcy.
Such actions signal a recognition that the traditional channels of power—the votes, the petitions, the carefully worded statements—have been revealed as elaborate theater designed to channel dissent into harmless ritual. When the machinery of official politics fails so completely, people create new forms of resistance that bypass the gatekeepers entirely.
Breaking the Chains of Learned Helplessness
The machine depends on our isolation, our despair, our learned helplessness. It requires us to believe that nothing we do matters, that resistance is futile, that the best we can hope for is to keep our heads down and hope that it won’t be our children the billionaires gleefully select to rape or slaughter.
Gaza teaches us otherwise. In the tunnels beneath the rubble, young fighters with homemade weapons face the most powerful military alliance in history and refuse to surrender. They understand what the rest of the world has forgotten: that you die standing or you die on your knees, but either way, you die. The only choice is whether your death has meaning.
The Global Sumud Flotilla.
Their resistance is not just for Palestine. It is for all of us—a demonstration that the machinery of oppression, no matter how sophisticated, how well-funded, how technologically advanced, can be challenged by human beings who refuse to accept their designated role as victims.
The question is not whether the current system can be reformed or whether justice will eventually prevail through existing channels. The question is whether we will break free from our conditioning before the techniques perfected in Gaza are turned on us all.
The laboratory experiment continues. The results so far suggest that populations can be trained to accept any level of brutality as long as it is introduced gradually and justified with the right language. But experiments can fail. Subjects can break free from their conditioning.
The choice, for now, remains ours.
