“the weakening of the population through the twin plagues of disease and political violence”:
In addition to the military violence Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians, it has succeeded, by cutting off all the basic physical necessities of human existence from Gaza, in bringing polio back to Gaza. Soon, as almost always happ…
“the weakening of the population through the twin plagues of disease and political violence”:
In addition to the military violence Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians, it has succeeded, by cutting off all the basic physical necessities of human existence from Gaza, in bringing polio back to Gaza. Soon, as almost always happens in war, more Gazans will die of disease and malnutrition and outright starvation than from US-Israeli bombs, missiles, artillery shells, drones, and bullets. But even that isn’t enough for the Israeli government. The notorious Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich has suggested that it is “just and moral” to commit the war crime of starving two million Palestinians by depriving them of food and water—as Israel is now doing in any case.
“the oligarchic plunder of the environment”:
The basic purpose of a settler-colonial project is to steal the land of the “natives.” In the West Bank, the land on which the illegal settlers live is well-supplied with water and other necessities, while the diminishing land on which Palestinians are permitted to live is deliberately reduced to state of privation. Turning Gaza into a pile of rubble that it will take decades to clear is a deliberate and malicious act of ecocide.
“the reversal of economic prosperity”:
For more than two decades, Israel has carefully calibrated the amount of food and other supplies allowed into Gaza in order to keep the Gazans in a state of hunger and destitution.
“the targeting of critics for prison and perhaps execution by firing squad”:
As is well-documented, Israel has long used indefinite detention, in conditions ranging from squalor to torture, imposed both arbitrarily and as retaliation against Arab critics, to suppress and terrorize the Palestinians.
“the possible use of the military against protestors and for mass deportations”:
One example of this among many is the Israeli response to the Palestinians’ Great March of Return in 2018-2019. Palestinians protested near the Gaza-Israeli border to demand the right-of-return for Palestinian refugees and the Israel blockade of Gaza (which was similar to but less extreme than the current blockade). In response to these demonstrations by unarmed demonstrators, the IDF killed more than two hundred Palestinians and injured more than 35,000, including nearly 10,000 children. Israeli snipers deliberately aimed at the extremities of thousands of protestors, thereby inflicting injuries that required the amputation of the limbs of more than one hundred protestors. A signal to any Palestinian who thought of protesting. These protests obviously posed no military threat to Israel. Israelis were not defending themselves but their settler-colonial project. The Israeli response to the protests was condemned internationally, of course to no effect. Israel has made no secret of its wish to send all those Palestinians it cannot exterminate into exile in Arab countries or out into the ocean.
“aggressors . . . advertise their plans . . . often . . . as . . . intimidation and conditioning. Treating extreme ideas and acts as normal . . . by calling for the repression of targeted groups [which] makes the exceptional and unthinkable into the expected and familiar, helping those cruelties and repressions to be accepted in the future”:
Netanyahu and Israeli cabinet ministers have a history of echoing, in regard to Palestinians, the views and intentions that Nazis held with regard to the Jews. Except that the Nazis had the decency to mostly express their worst views and intentions in private, and did not proudly advertise and flaunt them to the whole world, as the Israelis are now doing. No one bothers to pretend that the Israelis are now merely “joking.” There is a catalog of such statements by Israeli officials, which are of course rarely if ever reported in the US mainstream media. One Israeli, when asked about the consequences Israel would eventually suffer because of the crimes it is now committing, replied that it will never suffer any consequences, because in the future the rest of the world will be routinely committing far worse crimes, and then Israel’s crimes will seem like nothing. Considering the fact that the US autocracy has succeeded in effectively eliminating protest against these crimes, one must wonder whether he is right, and this is the insane future we are being groomed to live in.
“‘a kind of . . . program for sociopaths’ . . . the mass conditioning to cruelty [including the use of] campaign rituals. . . . undercutting their own power as Trump competitors. . . . a campaign that has trotted out powerful Republican elites to lie for and about Trump on command, rehearsing the kinds of party-leader dynamics that mark autocracies around the world. . . . TINA (There Is No Alternative). . . . Elections, of course, are all about giving people alternatives and choices regarding their political leaders.”:
The entire Democratic 2024 campaign is a ritual that has conditioned the US population to the cruel barbarity of genocide by forcing us to celebrate and try to elect the genocidal Democratic nominee in order to defeat the fascist Republican nominee. This undercuts, or rather destroys, our own power as voters in a democracy in 2024. It is not possible that there are not multitudes of Democratic Party politicians who are fully aware that Israel is committing monstrous crimes. Yet they all must “lie for and about” the Biden-Harris administration’s participation in and support of these crimes, as is characteristic of “autocracies around the world.” This is the Democratic Party’s form of TINA: There Is No Alternative to our genocidal candidate, because The Only Alternative Is Even Worse. We are solemnly and grimly lectured, like children, that we must never, ever even think of voting for a third-party candidate who is not practicing genocide and actually opposes it, because that would be to vote for Trump. So much for “giving people alternatives and choices regarding their political leaders” in democratic America.
Americans are well-indoctrinated in the fantasy that America is altruistically dedicated to democracy, human rights, and the peace and prosperity of the world. If we are forced to think about it for a moment, we do consider it regrettable that since WWII this project has resulted in the slaughter of millions of people around the world, the immiseration of dozens of nations, and the subjection of many nations to US-sponsored tyrannies. (Thus Palestine.) But these evils are the result of the hard reality that there so many evil people in the world who prevent America from leading the world to democracy, peace, and prosperity. (People like the Palestinians.) Because of these evil people, America must, as Harris declared, have the most “lethal” military in the world. (“Lethal” is the adjectival form of the Latin word for “death.” This perfectly expresses the American establishment’s subjection and dedication to the death instinct.) Because of these evil people, America has no choice except to spend half its federal government’s discretionary budget on its national-security military-industrial complex while children go hungry. We have no choice, according to the Biden-Harris administration, except to spend $1.7 trillion in the coming decades to “modernize” our nuclear weapons, because it is not enough that anyone who happens to be sitting in the Oval Office now has the capacity to extinguish all life on the planet in the next twenty minutes. America has no choice except to continue to wage endless, unsuccessful, and pointless wars whose purpose cannot even be defined, and which result in the death and immiseration of millions of people under tyrannical regimes. But whatever the outcome, America’s intentions are always noble. We follow Kantian, not consequentialist, morality.
Early in his first administration, Ronald Reagan asked his CIA director, William J. Casey, what the most important thing he had learned in government was. Casey replied it was that the federal government’s psyops (“psychological operations,” meaning propaganda—domestic in this case) would only be successful “when everything the American people believe is false.” Our government has been extremely successful in this project. Despite the fact that enough news does come through that Americans are quite aware of the massive and monstrous evils the American Empire continually commits, they psychically split the reality of the American Empire’s evil actions from their fantasy of the nobility of American democracy. Despite the fact that American foreign policy is made and conducted in secret by people Americans have never heard of—despite the fact that Americans have absolutely no control over foreign policy, war, or the budget or practices of the national security state or military-industrial complex—and despite the fact that Americans rightly do not trust their politicians when it comes to policies that affect Americans themselves—Americans nevertheless accept our exceedingly malign and stupid military and foreign policies, which continually destroy the lives of millions of foreigners, as being developed and implemented by intelligent people for noble purposes.
Some might consider the present comment to be an inappropriate intrusion into a discussion of the election in which domestic freedoms are at stake. Such a judgment would be an example of the success of the imperial national-security-military-industrial-complex in creating the mentality that keeps Americans subject to their tyranny. RGB writes little about American foreign or military policy, but I have the impression that she believes it is possible for a country to be both a democracy and an empire. Therefore when we talk about American democracy we should talk about American democracy, and when we talk about the American Empire we should talk about the American Empire. Somehow if we vote the right way the US government will never inflict on Americans the repressive policies it inflicts on foreigners. Somehow the monstrous evils we are inflicting on Palestinians will never affect us. How can that be? The people who through imperial rule inflict monstrous evils on others, like the Palestinians, are the same people who govern Americans. (We acquired an acute awareness of how “corrupt” and “callous” our rulers are after 2008, when Bush and Obama rewarded the financial criminals who almost destroyed the world economy with freedom from prosecution, from effective regulation, and with billions of dollars and increased control of the economy and every aspect of our lives, while Obama abandoned the millions of Americans whose lives those criminals had destroyed. The essential accomplishment of the Obama administrations was saving the neoliberalism that has done so much harm to the entire world and has lost all legitimacy. And like every president after Carter, Obama has personally monetized his presidency with spectacular success. If Harris is elected, it is certain that she too will become extremely wealthy in the coming years.) Why should the ruling class hesitate to treat Americans as it treats other peoples like the Palestinians, if it finds it expedient and profitable? Both the Republican and Democratic parties have been bringing creeping fascism to America for decades, and the crisis of the last eight years is the result of “the boomerang effect”--the ruling class now rules America on the model of its rule over other nations in its empire. The way the American people allow their nation to treat other people is the way Americans are now being treated. That is why so many Americans have turned to Trump in desperation. In a real sense, if Trump is elected, it will be because we deserve him. “In the long run, people get the government they deserve.” Karma.
Finally, it is essential to state explicitly that to criticize Israel (and Zionism) is not antisemitic. To the contrary, one must weep for Jewish Israelis and the Jewish diaspora, as for the Palestinians and other Arabs. You cannot harm or destroy someone else without harming or destroying yourself, because we are all one. Israel is destroying itself as well as the Palestinians. The Israeli government has no geopolitical strategy. The only thing Netanyahu and his Israeli accomplices know how to do is to kill, and to escalate and expand the killing, because, except for a tiny minority, Israel is incapable of imaginatively conceiving living in peace and amity with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors.
Alexander, you have some great details here, but let me help you with the root of all this - American Business using the government power to "protect" American "interests" - theirs. It seems that the property rights of the Constitution is also at the root cause.
US imperialist action has long been a problem that has been swept under the rug for decades. Our CIA actions in Chile, Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, Panama, Indonesia, El Salvador, The Congo, etc have reflected the wishes of our Power Elite. They do not answer to the electorate. They exist at a level above our politicians, so both major parties are subservient to them. If we look at the type of governments our Elites have installed via the CIA, we see that nearly all are quasi-fascist. This is a reflection of who our Power Elites are. They prefer fascism abroad and at home. Prescott Bush tried to install it here, circa 1933 but that failed. I believe that our Power Elites favor tRump because he promotes what they like; fascism.
We can use the ballot box to stop tRump but we can't use it to stop our Power Elites' agenda.
PART THREE
“the weakening of the population through the twin plagues of disease and political violence”:
In addition to the military violence Israel is inflicting on the Palestinians, it has succeeded, by cutting off all the basic physical necessities of human existence from Gaza, in bringing polio back to Gaza. Soon, as almost always happens in war, more Gazans will die of disease and malnutrition and outright starvation than from US-Israeli bombs, missiles, artillery shells, drones, and bullets. But even that isn’t enough for the Israeli government. The notorious Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich has suggested that it is “just and moral” to commit the war crime of starving two million Palestinians by depriving them of food and water—as Israel is now doing in any case.
“the oligarchic plunder of the environment”:
The basic purpose of a settler-colonial project is to steal the land of the “natives.” In the West Bank, the land on which the illegal settlers live is well-supplied with water and other necessities, while the diminishing land on which Palestinians are permitted to live is deliberately reduced to state of privation. Turning Gaza into a pile of rubble that it will take decades to clear is a deliberate and malicious act of ecocide.
“the reversal of economic prosperity”:
For more than two decades, Israel has carefully calibrated the amount of food and other supplies allowed into Gaza in order to keep the Gazans in a state of hunger and destitution.
“the targeting of critics for prison and perhaps execution by firing squad”:
As is well-documented, Israel has long used indefinite detention, in conditions ranging from squalor to torture, imposed both arbitrarily and as retaliation against Arab critics, to suppress and terrorize the Palestinians.
“the possible use of the military against protestors and for mass deportations”:
One example of this among many is the Israeli response to the Palestinians’ Great March of Return in 2018-2019. Palestinians protested near the Gaza-Israeli border to demand the right-of-return for Palestinian refugees and the Israel blockade of Gaza (which was similar to but less extreme than the current blockade). In response to these demonstrations by unarmed demonstrators, the IDF killed more than two hundred Palestinians and injured more than 35,000, including nearly 10,000 children. Israeli snipers deliberately aimed at the extremities of thousands of protestors, thereby inflicting injuries that required the amputation of the limbs of more than one hundred protestors. A signal to any Palestinian who thought of protesting. These protests obviously posed no military threat to Israel. Israelis were not defending themselves but their settler-colonial project. The Israeli response to the protests was condemned internationally, of course to no effect. Israel has made no secret of its wish to send all those Palestinians it cannot exterminate into exile in Arab countries or out into the ocean.
“aggressors . . . advertise their plans . . . often . . . as . . . intimidation and conditioning. Treating extreme ideas and acts as normal . . . by calling for the repression of targeted groups [which] makes the exceptional and unthinkable into the expected and familiar, helping those cruelties and repressions to be accepted in the future”:
Netanyahu and Israeli cabinet ministers have a history of echoing, in regard to Palestinians, the views and intentions that Nazis held with regard to the Jews. Except that the Nazis had the decency to mostly express their worst views and intentions in private, and did not proudly advertise and flaunt them to the whole world, as the Israelis are now doing. No one bothers to pretend that the Israelis are now merely “joking.” There is a catalog of such statements by Israeli officials, which are of course rarely if ever reported in the US mainstream media. One Israeli, when asked about the consequences Israel would eventually suffer because of the crimes it is now committing, replied that it will never suffer any consequences, because in the future the rest of the world will be routinely committing far worse crimes, and then Israel’s crimes will seem like nothing. Considering the fact that the US autocracy has succeeded in effectively eliminating protest against these crimes, one must wonder whether he is right, and this is the insane future we are being groomed to live in.
“‘a kind of . . . program for sociopaths’ . . . the mass conditioning to cruelty [including the use of] campaign rituals. . . . undercutting their own power as Trump competitors. . . . a campaign that has trotted out powerful Republican elites to lie for and about Trump on command, rehearsing the kinds of party-leader dynamics that mark autocracies around the world. . . . TINA (There Is No Alternative). . . . Elections, of course, are all about giving people alternatives and choices regarding their political leaders.”:
The entire Democratic 2024 campaign is a ritual that has conditioned the US population to the cruel barbarity of genocide by forcing us to celebrate and try to elect the genocidal Democratic nominee in order to defeat the fascist Republican nominee. This undercuts, or rather destroys, our own power as voters in a democracy in 2024. It is not possible that there are not multitudes of Democratic Party politicians who are fully aware that Israel is committing monstrous crimes. Yet they all must “lie for and about” the Biden-Harris administration’s participation in and support of these crimes, as is characteristic of “autocracies around the world.” This is the Democratic Party’s form of TINA: There Is No Alternative to our genocidal candidate, because The Only Alternative Is Even Worse. We are solemnly and grimly lectured, like children, that we must never, ever even think of voting for a third-party candidate who is not practicing genocide and actually opposes it, because that would be to vote for Trump. So much for “giving people alternatives and choices regarding their political leaders” in democratic America.
PART FOUR
Americans are well-indoctrinated in the fantasy that America is altruistically dedicated to democracy, human rights, and the peace and prosperity of the world. If we are forced to think about it for a moment, we do consider it regrettable that since WWII this project has resulted in the slaughter of millions of people around the world, the immiseration of dozens of nations, and the subjection of many nations to US-sponsored tyrannies. (Thus Palestine.) But these evils are the result of the hard reality that there so many evil people in the world who prevent America from leading the world to democracy, peace, and prosperity. (People like the Palestinians.) Because of these evil people, America must, as Harris declared, have the most “lethal” military in the world. (“Lethal” is the adjectival form of the Latin word for “death.” This perfectly expresses the American establishment’s subjection and dedication to the death instinct.) Because of these evil people, America has no choice except to spend half its federal government’s discretionary budget on its national-security military-industrial complex while children go hungry. We have no choice, according to the Biden-Harris administration, except to spend $1.7 trillion in the coming decades to “modernize” our nuclear weapons, because it is not enough that anyone who happens to be sitting in the Oval Office now has the capacity to extinguish all life on the planet in the next twenty minutes. America has no choice except to continue to wage endless, unsuccessful, and pointless wars whose purpose cannot even be defined, and which result in the death and immiseration of millions of people under tyrannical regimes. But whatever the outcome, America’s intentions are always noble. We follow Kantian, not consequentialist, morality.
Early in his first administration, Ronald Reagan asked his CIA director, William J. Casey, what the most important thing he had learned in government was. Casey replied it was that the federal government’s psyops (“psychological operations,” meaning propaganda—domestic in this case) would only be successful “when everything the American people believe is false.” Our government has been extremely successful in this project. Despite the fact that enough news does come through that Americans are quite aware of the massive and monstrous evils the American Empire continually commits, they psychically split the reality of the American Empire’s evil actions from their fantasy of the nobility of American democracy. Despite the fact that American foreign policy is made and conducted in secret by people Americans have never heard of—despite the fact that Americans have absolutely no control over foreign policy, war, or the budget or practices of the national security state or military-industrial complex—and despite the fact that Americans rightly do not trust their politicians when it comes to policies that affect Americans themselves—Americans nevertheless accept our exceedingly malign and stupid military and foreign policies, which continually destroy the lives of millions of foreigners, as being developed and implemented by intelligent people for noble purposes.
Some might consider the present comment to be an inappropriate intrusion into a discussion of the election in which domestic freedoms are at stake. Such a judgment would be an example of the success of the imperial national-security-military-industrial-complex in creating the mentality that keeps Americans subject to their tyranny. RGB writes little about American foreign or military policy, but I have the impression that she believes it is possible for a country to be both a democracy and an empire. Therefore when we talk about American democracy we should talk about American democracy, and when we talk about the American Empire we should talk about the American Empire. Somehow if we vote the right way the US government will never inflict on Americans the repressive policies it inflicts on foreigners. Somehow the monstrous evils we are inflicting on Palestinians will never affect us. How can that be? The people who through imperial rule inflict monstrous evils on others, like the Palestinians, are the same people who govern Americans. (We acquired an acute awareness of how “corrupt” and “callous” our rulers are after 2008, when Bush and Obama rewarded the financial criminals who almost destroyed the world economy with freedom from prosecution, from effective regulation, and with billions of dollars and increased control of the economy and every aspect of our lives, while Obama abandoned the millions of Americans whose lives those criminals had destroyed. The essential accomplishment of the Obama administrations was saving the neoliberalism that has done so much harm to the entire world and has lost all legitimacy. And like every president after Carter, Obama has personally monetized his presidency with spectacular success. If Harris is elected, it is certain that she too will become extremely wealthy in the coming years.) Why should the ruling class hesitate to treat Americans as it treats other peoples like the Palestinians, if it finds it expedient and profitable? Both the Republican and Democratic parties have been bringing creeping fascism to America for decades, and the crisis of the last eight years is the result of “the boomerang effect”--the ruling class now rules America on the model of its rule over other nations in its empire. The way the American people allow their nation to treat other people is the way Americans are now being treated. That is why so many Americans have turned to Trump in desperation. In a real sense, if Trump is elected, it will be because we deserve him. “In the long run, people get the government they deserve.” Karma.
Finally, it is essential to state explicitly that to criticize Israel (and Zionism) is not antisemitic. To the contrary, one must weep for Jewish Israelis and the Jewish diaspora, as for the Palestinians and other Arabs. You cannot harm or destroy someone else without harming or destroying yourself, because we are all one. Israel is destroying itself as well as the Palestinians. The Israeli government has no geopolitical strategy. The only thing Netanyahu and his Israeli accomplices know how to do is to kill, and to escalate and expand the killing, because, except for a tiny minority, Israel is incapable of imaginatively conceiving living in peace and amity with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors.
Alexander, you have some great details here, but let me help you with the root of all this - American Business using the government power to "protect" American "interests" - theirs. It seems that the property rights of the Constitution is also at the root cause.
US imperialist action has long been a problem that has been swept under the rug for decades. Our CIA actions in Chile, Honduras, Guatemala, Iran, Panama, Indonesia, El Salvador, The Congo, etc have reflected the wishes of our Power Elite. They do not answer to the electorate. They exist at a level above our politicians, so both major parties are subservient to them. If we look at the type of governments our Elites have installed via the CIA, we see that nearly all are quasi-fascist. This is a reflection of who our Power Elites are. They prefer fascism abroad and at home. Prescott Bush tried to install it here, circa 1933 but that failed. I believe that our Power Elites favor tRump because he promotes what they like; fascism.
We can use the ballot box to stop tRump but we can't use it to stop our Power Elites' agenda.