Deepest bow of respect and gratitude and love for Matthew Cooke and the sacred wisdom that flows through him. This is so excellent, so profound and wise! It is exactly these reflections of larger pictures and deeper wisdom which are illuminated here that empowers us to awaken from our illusions, our indoctrination, our ignorance. Hopefully these deep and sacred truths will continue to be recognized, absorbed, and shared far and wide. — Molly
No, of course not. People have rights. The concept of a state's right to exist is not recognized in any international law. The question “Does Israel have a right to exist?” is a little rhetorical trick designed to make the rights of certain people disappear, and we have an obligation to dispense with any concepts that deny universal human rights.
This applies not only to every nation, but to the entire nation‑state concept, which does not have a right to exist. It is an ideology we call nationalism that is brand new, invented less than 250 years ago, and instantly turned into a tool for denying people their universal human rights.
Albert Einstein, a Jewish scientist who gave us our most precise understanding of the entire physical universe, called nationalism a disease, the measles of mankind.
Erich Fromm, the Jewish psychologist who helped define our understanding of universal basic human needs, called nationalism idolatry and insanity.
Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher who survived the Nazi regime, explained that the expansion of European power into non‑European territory was not only the prelude to but the actual beginning of the totalitarian movements.
George Orwell, who wrote our textbook on the total loss of human rights, said: “Nationalism is not love of one’s country. It is the will to dominate others in its name.”
All of our greatest minds observed that at the moment organized religion and royalty ceased to work as a compelling story for the control of populations, a new religion was created that was even more effective for that purpose.
A good story has always been the most powerful weapon on earth. Using the revolutionary invention of the printing press, authorities could now mass‑produce a new story to capture humankind, and that was nationalism: an imaginary group identity based on a cartoonish version of history, glorifying conquerors as saints, turning political texts into holy scrolls, real estate into holy land, doubters into heretics, and replacing God with the state.
A state demands the standardization of language and the flattening of local cultures. It is an identity management system deployed to keep people kettled into zones and divided from each other, easily conquered and ruled by another aristocracy.
Like all new‑age religions, nationalism promises individual empowerment, cultural supremacy, safety, and protection from invasion and exploitation—and like every other cult, it delivers the exact opposite, which we can see because here we are at our third apex of nationalism in less than 100 years. Over 70 percent of our world now lives under oppressive regimes with record‑breaking inequality and a total collapse of any standards of ethics.
The followers of nationalism have reshaped their personalities to reflect their cult leaders and have lost everything of value: their connection to the outside world, their dignity, and any sense of reality. Cult propaganda teaches us that nationalism is as old as civilization. It is not. The word “nation” was born as an insult. It was first used by ancient Rome to describe foreigners as a monolith. If you were a nation, a natio, you were an outsider, removed from civilization, without any legal standing, without any civic identity. You were an undifferentiated mass, not really even a people, a horde.
The original concept of being a citizen did not refer to an amorphous nation, an undifferentiated mass thousands of miles wide. A citizen was, in reference to living in the city, a city dweller whose legal rights were guaranteed by a political structure—for example, a republic, a res publica, meaning a thing that is owned and operated by the public. In the year 2026, after 6,000 years of recorded history, with the whole record of human wisdom available to us, after having sifted through some really bad concepts and barbaric legal systems, we actually discover one principle. There is one legal right and obligation demanded by every wisdom tradition on every continent in every era since the dawn of time. The story of Jesus Christ calls it the greatest commandment of all: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” And that includes the foreigner, and the recognition that there is no such thing.
Now we have three cults whose members include a small number of fanatics who have flipped our greatest commandment on its head in their rush toward Armageddon, and these three cults use the ideology of nationalism as their favorite tool for indoctrination. The first cult is Christian Zionists, who think that Jesus is going to return once the Jews are restored to the Holy Land, triggering Armageddon and sending the Christians—well, not all of them, just the chosen ones—into heaven and everyone else into a lake of fire. So they are starting World War III to put themselves in control of the timeline, since apparently they are so chosen they get to tell God what to do.
The second cult are Jewish Zionists, an even smaller group who believe that they are the chosen people and that God promised them the most holy lands on earth because they, and only they, are the true descendants of Abraham, which gives them the right to determine who is a chosen person and who should have their houses stolen, bombed, hunted, killed, tortured, or worse. Never mind that the story of Abraham is a cultural myth to which half of the whole world claims descendancy—a story about a wanderer, a refugee who treated all strangers as welcome guests and who was willing to surrender all his earthly claims and possessions, everything, to God.
Not a man with a beard in the sky—God as an icon made in the image of Roman emperors—but that which is beyond concepts, forms, and idols: a first cause, one unfathomable reality that must precede all beginnings and endings, that is closer to us than the innermost and furthest outside of all that can be seen and cannot be seen. Abraham most likely used a word for God that sounded like the Aramaic word that Jesus most likely used for God, which was “aloha,” which sounds like “Allah,” because these words all share one linguistic root, all branches of one tree, all of which honor Abraham.
The story of Abraham, when seen as a metaphor for the temporary nature of the material world, is a metaphor for all humankind, because at the end of each of our journeys in this form, like Abraham, all of us will be called to surrender everything. This is like the word “Israel,” a name given in an ancient story to the character of Jacob because he wrestled with God, a struggle between surrendering his ego or being consumed by it. The struggle crippled him, as it cripples us all. “Israel,” he who struggles with God, is also the story of all humankind.
Israel is mentioned not only in the Torah but in the Christian Bible and in the Muslim Quran. In the story of Genesis, which was used as justification for the creation of a modern European‑style ethno‑nation‑state, back there in Genesis when God tells Abraham “I will make of you a great nation,” the original word in that story, later translated into “nation,” means a people, a family. It has no territorial, legal, or political meaning whatsoever.
Although the current concept of Israel the nation‑state sells itself with the PR strategy that it exists to provide self‑determination to the descendants of Abraham, in its practical application it is the determination that the stranger is the enemy, which cannot be the religion of Abraham, because Abraham represents humanity, of which we are all descendants. That brings us to the third cult, the most powerful of all: the worship of the golden calf. Its followers believe that money and power are the highest measure of human worth and that those who have captured the most are the world’s true chosen people.
This is the religion of all the leaders of our Fortune 1000s, a list that does not measure the value provided to humankind. It is a list of those who have taken the most from us, those who are profiteering from the crimes of the first two cults, bringing us all to the brink of global economic collapse and World War III. If the greatest commandment of humankind is to love thy neighbor as thyself, there can be no greater sin than desecrating our most sacred stories as justification for dividing humankind between those who are deserving of human rights and those who should be sacrificed on the altar of their idols.
When we zoom out of their delusions, we find we are not actually living on a flat earth of linear thinking. We are in a round, connected world where we cannot separate ourselves from each other. Oil, gas, and pharmaceuticals all go through a narrow strait that we named Hormuz, as well as helium, which we use for MRI machines, fiber optics, and semiconductors. Those semiconductors come from people we group together and call “Taiwan.” Then there are millions of people who export memory chips, and because we cannot keep track of more than maybe 150 people, we call everybody there “South Korea.”
“India” is a blanket name we use to describe a huge piece of land where many people are making vaccines. There is this huge part of a continent that is home to something like a thousand cultures, but we call that whole thing “China,” because our minds and language limit us to communication possibly a few ticks above a chimpanzee, but we cannot really be sure. Anyway, there are millions of people there who make stuff that we all use and need. Because so much of that stuff now relies on batteries, we have to get cobalt, which has to be mined in a place with millions more people, but because we cannot remember more than 20 names at a time, we just call all of those people “Congo.”
Not far to the south is home to one of our world’s oldest civilizations, the Kingdom of Kush, the Nubian Empire. We call that whole place “Sudan.” Under the ground there is gold and something called chromite, which European and Gulf state nationalists steal, while the people who live on that land are also being sacrificed. This is just a list of the global economic chokepoints that are currently under siege, at war, or under imminent threat of war, which hold resources that the entire population of planet Earth depends on.
To wrap this up, the founder of game theory, John von Neumann, showed that the most likely inevitable endpoint of a world like ours, organized around sovereign nations competing for global resources, was war—eventually nuclear war and mutually assured destruction. That is why our greatest modern minds called nationalism insane, a disease, a death cult. It is why our atomic scientists just moved the doomsday clock to 89 seconds to midnight. With the technologies that humankind has invented and grown entirely dependent on, we can no longer survive without global cooperation.
Not cooperation between nations—a concept that refers to formless hordes living outside of civilization—but cooperation between our cities, neighborhoods, and communities, the places human beings actually live. The word “nation,” from natio, means a people born together. For this concept to actually reflect reality, we have to recognize that the earth is the home of humankind. This world is our nation, where we are born together.
Our individual identities are a patchwork of interconnected cultures whose family lines trace back hundreds of thousands of years. They intersect over and over again. All of us are related: one bloodline. All the land holy. All the people chosen. All of them our people, with a right to exist.
So Israel, like every conceptual political framework on earth—the US, Saudi Arabia, Iran, China, Russia—must guarantee equal rights to all religions, ethnicities, all the tribes of humankind. We can never allow those rights to be conditioned by imaginary lines in ever‑moving sands. As long as we do that, rights will be reduced to permits, revocable at any time for any reason by those claiming to be the chosen people, and atrocities are guaranteed.
To properly care for our children, we must reclaim the basic tools of civilization. Our water, land, and essential infrastructure are all res publica, owned by the public. To reclaim them means taking the advice of that US president when the world was defeating the Nazis the first time—Roosevelt—who advised that bringing an end to fascism, the extreme result of nationalism, requires breaking up all the big corporations that claim ownership over this place, taxing wealth hoarding, redirecting the energy of our labor back toward our well‑being, and guaranteeing universal economic rights worldwide.
This would cost a fraction of what we waste today on endless wars and extraction enterprises that provide nothing in return but Armageddon. So this is our starting point. All of our world’s most pressing issues—poverty, healthcare, the toxification of our air, water, and soil—can be resolved by reminding ourselves that the purpose of our economic and political systems is to care for all humankind and our children. Anything less means the end of humanity, the species and the quality that makes us human. That quality is the holy grail. It is the only holy war worth fighting—the one that protects its flame.
Matthew Cooke has written, directed, edited, & filmed seven documentaries. His work has earned an Oscar nomination, a "Best Writing Award" from the International Documentary Association, & multiple audience & festival awards. He founded the Survivors Guide to Earth newsletter and resource website: https://www.survivorsguidetoearth.com/members
Please go here for the original transcript: https://www.filmsforaction.org/articles/no-state-has-a-right-to-exist-only-people-do/
More videos by Matthew Cooke: https://www.youtube.com/@MatthewCookeOfficial
Matthew Cooke's website: https://www.matthewcooke.com/
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