The Shroud of Gaza: Nuclear Illusions and the Last Days of Empire, Resistance or Extinction

I recently read Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. It is a book that strips away illusions. It does not flatter, it does not comfort. It confronts us with a reality so unbearable that world leaders refuse to look or read it. Actually many of those leaders are not capable of reading such a book.

The presidents and prime ministers, the military advisors and intelligence chiefs, who toy daily with the lives of billions, have not read this book. Or if they have, they have buried it under the dirt and cement and their delusion that has marked every empire before its collapse.

The scenario Jacobsen outlines is not fantasy. It is the sober, researched unraveling of how quickly one miscalculation, one provocation, one misread signal can end the human experiment. Not with the grand drama of apocalyptic fire, but with the slow suffocation of a poisoned earth, a return to the Stone Age for the few who survive in remote outposts scattered across the Pacific.

The billionaires know this. That is why they buy fortresses in New Zealand and private islands, clinging to the delusion that their wealth can insulate them from the nuclear firestorm. They mistake retreat for survival, forgetting that in the ruins of civilization, their gold and wealth will be ash.

Meanwhile, the signs of impending catastrophe multiply. Russian drones breach European airspace. NATO commanders wait for the signal to escalate, to shoot them down, to ignite the spark of World War III.

North Korea announces, again and again, that it will never surrender its arsenal or its sovereignty. Trump, with the vulgar bluster of a real estate salesman, proclaims that BRICS does not exist, that the dollar is eternal, that those who defy American authoritarian decrees from Washington, DC will meet the fate of Gaza. He points, as though with pride, to the horror unfolding in Palestine, bombardment, ethnic cleansing, genocide, as if this is not an atrocity but a warning.

The American mask is gone. The empire no longer pretends to uphold international law, human rights, or peace. It rules by fear, by terror, by spectacle. It whispers to the world, Obey, or be annihilated like the Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East.

But history teaches us that domination breeds resistance. Nations and peoples across the globe, sickened by this imperial savagery, are beginning to resist, not from abstract ideology, but from the most primal human instinct, the refusal to be enslaved and slaughtered, the refusal to be exterminated.

The question that remains is stark, brutal, and inescapable: if the world does not resist, if it bows once more to American violence, who will be next to wear the shroud of Gaza?