DEATH OF PUBLIC OPINION IN TIME OF A BLOODY WAR

HANNAH Arendt's immortal phrase, "the banality of evil", is widely employed to describe the now-axiomatic belief that evil is neither operatic nor grand-it is quotidian, everyman and blasé.

- KAJAL BASU

"A central logic of the democratic peace theory claims that public opinion acts as a powerful restraint against war," wrote Steve Chan and William Chafran in a paper, Public opinion as a constraint against war'.

But the ongoing Gaza genocide seems to have put paid to both these observations.

Public opinion no longer matters, to the degree that it no longer recognises evil as particularly banal-just commonplace.

Kofi Annan once said, "Information is liberating". The quote is an indicator of the sheer power of information information as the plinth of freedomism, the realpolitik of suppressing information, the cleverness of using information as a ligament for the manipulation of public opinion.

The Gaza genocide says to hell with this, too. Information means nothing when faced with belief in the catharsis of mass bloodletting: Gazans must be wiped. So, what has changed in the world's cognisance? "The history of battle", wrote Paul Virilio in War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, "is primarily the history of radically changing fields of perception." While the terabytes of information leaving Gaza every day in the most publicly playedout of all anthropophagic brutalities in recent memory have provoked some huge rallies around the globe, it is telling that not a single one has swayed political support against Israel's hyper-aggression. It is changing nothing on the ground, or in the political war-rooms of the largely Western Israelist coalition, or in the designer studios of the news media.