The ruthlessness of the Israeli genocide machine in Palestine, and the direct complicity of the U.S., U.K., and other Western governments are two key pillars in the horrors being perpetrated against the Palestinian people (and in the attacks on human rights defenders around the globe). But there is an essential third pillar: the role of complicit Western media corporations knowingly…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
During a week of action focused on UN potential to end Israel’s genocidal attacks, I was part of a coalition that met with twelve different permanent missions to the United Nations. We urged that if countries that are parties to the Genocide Convention or the Geneva Conventions stop trading with Israel as international law demands, (cf. the July 19th advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice), the genocide will end quickly.
In each encounter at a Permanent Mission to the UN, its staff asked if we, as U.S. citizens, have addressed our government’s unwavering support for the genocide against impoverished and forcibly displaced people.
It was a deeply meaningful moment when the Irish Ambassador to the United Nations showed our delegation a miniature replica of John Behan’s poignant statue depicting the Irish exodus – it showed weary, hungry people disembarking from a boat after a stormy ocean voyage.
“You have to see each one of these as a human being,” he said.
My mother was an Irish indentured servant first in Ireland and then in England. As things go, she was among the more fortunate. She never endured being chained day and night in the Middle Passage of a slave ship carrying captives here, or in a human trafficker’s overcrowded, lethally airless truck container. Nor did she have to cling to the remains of an overcrowded ship to keep from drowning after it capsized in the Mediterranean.
Life in Gaza is a desperate moment-to-moment ordeal of clinging to such wreckage, trying to stay above water, to stay alive, while both major U.S. political parties struggle to push you under.
In an article published by The Guardian, Israeli-American Omer Bartov, an eminent Holocaust historian and expert on genocide, lamented the unwillingness of many Israelis—some of whom are his friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even former students—to see Palestinians as human beings. He comments: “Many of my friends…feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out…it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price… This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October.”
Is it futile to ask Israelis to reconsider this vengeance – avenging hundreds of civilians with several hundred thousand, half of them children – while the U.S. continues to arm Israel for the task?
Bartov continues: By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that …Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. … the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, … as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, … Israel was acting ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part’, the Palestinian population in Gaza, ‘as such, by killing, causing serious harm… inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction’”.
How can United States citizens cope in a nation not just gone mad on war, but gone mad on genocide? We do not have to cope with lingering, state-enforced starvation or the memory of our lifeless children pulled from under rubble. But we must cope with our complicity.
When we can, we must act.
We cannot say we did not know. The United Nations member states watch the entire edifice of international law crumble as a genocide is broadcast across our screens. Israeli military forces may have killed close to 200,000 Gazans although only 40,000 bodies have been recovered for counting. The Israeli government’s siege is starving Palestinian children and has brought Gaza to the brink of a full-blown famine. Meanwhile, polio has made a return.
From September 10 – September 30, World BEYOND War, Code Pink, Veterans For Peace, Pax Christi and other coalition partners will leaflet, demonstrate, and nonviolently act to expose and oppose Israeli and U.S. actions which flout international law. We will gather before both the United States’ U.N. Mission and the Israeli consulate demanding both nations desist from further massacres, forcible displacement, and the use of starvation and disease as weapons.
We will remind people that Israel possesses thermonuclear weapons but refuses to acknowledge this fact and thereby avoids any assessment or safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Association and any involvement in the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
We will express earnest concern both for Hamas’ prisoners and the more than a thousand Palestinians incarcerated without charge by Israel, many of them women and children.
Currently, the United States and Israel have effectively decided on death for the remaining hostages rather than a settlement that would free Palestinian women and children. In a reckless bid to spark a U.S.-Iran war, Israel recently assassinated, in Tehran, the chief Hamas negotiator for a hostage release.
And still the U.S.’ arms flow continues.
Last week, the world watched as the Democratic Party leadership, at its convention, squelched voices of the uncommitted delegates. DNC speakers repeated the lie that their party was seeking a ceasefire, while flatly refusing to stop replacing the guns and missiles Israel has used to shed blood and destroy infrastructure.
We all should rely on the covenant virtues of traditional Judaism, those virtues celebrated as essential for survival: truth, justice, and forgiving love. We should appeal to secular and faith-based people across the United States as we face precarities of nuclear annihilation and ecological collapse. Securing a better future for all children requires bolstering respect for human rights, searching always for ways to abolish war.
The U.S. government is complicit in genocide, and we, in whose name it is acting, are also complicit if we remain silent.
It is time for the United Nations to liberate itself from a Security Council structure giving five permanent, nuclear armed members a vise-like grip on the world’s ability to counter the scourge of war. We must join with the call of the South African government which bravely upheld international law. We must clamor for the General Assembly to enact the “uniting for peace” resolution.
As the forthright Jewish delegate at last week’s DNC, after he and two others unfurled a banner “STOP ARMING ISRAEL”, said, “Never again means never again!”
We invite you to join us. https://events.worldbeyondwar.org/
• A version of this article first appeared on World BEYOND War’s website. https://worldbeyondwar.org/hanging-on-with-gaza/
The post Hanging On with Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
As an observer of foreign affairs, I’ve often written about the hypocrisy of Liberal and Conservative governments’ failure to uphold “an international rules-based order” despite claims of its importance. In the case of Israel, the duplicity is even more glaring. Our governments, past and present, repeatedly fail to uphold Canadian law.
Activists have long shown how arms sales and military recruitment to Israel violates the law. But Global Affairs, Minister of Justice, RCMP and other government agencies have generally ignored their legal responsibilities when it comes to the genocidal apartheid state.
Issuing arms permits to Israel contravenes Canada’s Export and Import Permits Act. According to the law, Canada shouldn’t export arms to a country if there is “a substantial risk” they would undermine peace and security or be used to violate international law. As a signatory to the UN Arms Trade Treaty Canada is also obliged to not transfer arms to a country responsible for grave human rights violations. Two recent International Court of Justice rulings strengthen the legal case against Canadian arms sales to Israel. Still, Global Affairs allows arms transfers.
The Minister of Justice and RCMP have also failed to apply the law regarding Israel, refusing to enforce the Foreign Enlistment Act and Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. In 2020 a formal legal complaint and public letter signed by numerous prominent individuals were released calling on the federal government to investigate individuals for violating the Foreign Enlistment Act by inducing Canadians to join the Israeli military. The Trudeau government effectively ignored the public letter and legal complaint even though it was published on the front page of Le Devoir. Then Justice Minister David Lametti responded by simply saying it was up to the police to investigate. For their part, the police refused to seriously investigate. Partly in response to the police’s unwillingness to take the matter seriously, a case was launched through a private prosecution against Sar-El Canada, which brings Canadians to volunteer on Israeli military bases. A Justice of the Peace agreed the evidence warranted a hearing, but the Crown interceded to dismiss the case against Sar-El. They clearly didn’t want a court to adjudicate the matter.
More recently, Canadians fighting in a force that’s slaughtered tens of thousands should be investigated under Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. Highlighting reports of Canadians in the Israeli military, a Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East letter to Justice Minister Arif Virani called on him to “Issue a warning to Canadian nationals that serving or volunteering with the Israeli military may make them criminally liable under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act”. CJPME’s January letter also requested the minister “launch an investigation under its War Crimes Program into the participation of Canadian nationals involved in Israel’s military offensive.”
Thousands messaged the minister calling on him to investigate Canadians committing war crimes in Gaza. Following up on this push, I asked Virani directly if he’d investigate those killing Palestinians under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. He refused to answer, walking down the wrong hallway to escape my questioning.
While staying mum on Canadians killing Palestinians, the Trudeau government actually interceded to block a bureaucratic move to properly label wines from illegal colonies. After David Kattenburg repeatedly complained about inaccurate labels on two wines sold in Ontario, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) notified the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) in 2017 that it “would not be acceptable and would be considered misleading” to declare wines produced in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as “products of Israel”. But, immediately after the decision became public the government reversed the advisory and then appealed a judge’s ruling to block accurate labelling of wines produced in the occupied West Bank.
In a major form of Israel-focused criminality, dozens of registered charities violate the Income Tax Act by supporting the Israeli military, racist organizations and West Bank colonies. In a bid to press the CRA to uphold the law, formal complaints have been submitted to the revenue agency detailing a dozen charities’ – with over $100 million in annual revenue – violating the rules. That campaign contributed to the recent revocation of the charitable status of Canada’s second most powerful Zionist charity, the Jewish National Fund of Canada (as well as the Ne’eman Foundation). While its recent revocations restore some confidence in the CRA’s ability to act independently, a law-abiding revenue agency would do far more to curtail illegal subsidies to Israel.
To press the CRA to revoke the charitable status of other Israel-focused organizations violating the law, actions will be held at CRA offices across the country on International Day of Charity. On September 5 join one of the many protests calling on the CRA to stop subsidizing war crimes and apartheid.
One has to wonder why we must take to the streets to convince our government to uphold Canadian law.
The post Israel supporters flout Canadian law with impunity first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This blog originally appeared here on Proof That I’m Alive.
A couple of weeks ago, I plunged into Lake Michigan. Unlike usual, the water felt warm. It was easy to run all the way in and easy to float over the waves. Montrose beach was crowded with families, pitching tents to keep out of the sun. Children played, laughed, and cried. Midwesterners who still hadn’t made it out into the sun crisped their pale shoulders. It would have been a perfectly relaxing day, but fighter jets circled above everyone’s heads — doing dives and turning every which way. Mothers plugged their children’s ears and I saw a baby wearing noise canceling headphones.
It was the Air and Water show — an annual proud display of American military capabilities. They are the same jets that fly over the shores of Gaza, dropping bombs on families. That’s what I thought about — it was just by happenstance that we were there watching these planes as a performance rather than in Gaza as a weapon of mass slaughter. The more places I travel to, the more I realize how much the world looks the same. People everywhere are really kind and generous — the only thing that separates us is if the stars align to have us born under the boot of the United States or not.
As the jets flew over our heads I felt my stomach sour. In two weeks, the Democratic National Convention would come to Chicago and it was a present opportunity to make clear the contradictions that kept me up at night. Once months and months away, the DNC was finally around the corner.
This week, members of the Democratic Party came from all parts of the country to convene in Chicago. They were coronating Kamala Harris as their presidential nominee, a woman no one really voted for. Even in the face of this blatant lack of democracy, the party members were elated to choose her. They carried signs with her husband’s name and applause erupted from the tens of thousands of people in the United Center when she declared that the United States would have the “most lethal military” in the world under her leadership. To the people well aware of the millions of people the United States killed in the last twenty years alone, her statement was a threat.
The week was marked by the obvious gaps between the people going into the United Center and the people outside of it.
There was a young woman that sat outside the exit of the Democratic National Convention on its third night reading the names of the children Israel has killed in the last ten months. She did it for hours, until her speaker battery died. She did it alone, taking care to pronounce every child’s name correctly and to say their age at the time of their murder. Without her, many of the DNC guests wouldn’t necessarily be confronted with the carnage members of their party is carrying out.
Outside the gates of the DNC I saw a young woman making sure the children of Palestine weren’t just numbers, and I saw people laughing at her for doing so. They laughed loudly and mocked her voice. They mocked the names of the dead babies. They yelled at her to leave them alone. They left the coronation ceremony livid that they had to even hear about Gaza.
That night was demoralizing, and it’s something I will remember for the rest of my life.
Democrats laugh at the names of dead children. They openly refuse to let a Palestinian speak for two minutes at their four day long event. They order riot cops on people protesting a genocide. They have their parties, fundraisers, and happy hours while bodies pile up. If they really didn’t think the genocide was so bad, they wouldn’t get so mad at us for reminding them. They knew that the people they were rallying behind are cheering on mass slaughter — they’ve just weighed their fun, their careers, and their vanity against the lives of 180,000 Palestinians and decided that nothing could be more important than themselves. I don’t care what they said to me, or my friends, but I hope our faces and our presence made them feel even an ounce of discomfort. In the best case scenario, I hope they went to sleep hearing the echoes of the martyrs’ names. I still foolishly hope they turn a corner at some point.
There’s a lot to be said about the Democratic National Convention. It happened in the city with the largest Palestinian population in the United States. Plenty of our neighbors here have lost dozens and dozens of their immediate and extended families and Kamala Harris took to the stage to promise her ironclad support to their executioners. Riot cops filed into the streets, prepared to use the kettling tactics they used from the Israeli military. All of a sudden, the place I call home felt unrecognizable. The air of the coronation felt heavy — it didn’t feel like home. There were points where I was with thousands of other people, chanting in unison, but still felt so lonely. Luxury SUVs carried important people into important buildings for important events. And between us and the importance, there were police with rifles strapped to their chests.
But there were also good people. Like the girl outside the convention. And the thousand of people that marched with us. And the Shake Shack worker that joined us because he had 15 minutes before his shift started. And the security that had to kick us out to keep their job but told us how much what we were doing meant to them.
In the lead up to the DNC, we spent so much time thinking about the last DNC that happened here in 1968. Protests against the Vietnam war took to the streets in small numbers, demanding an end to the war. They were met with horrible police brutality, and mass arrests with long legal battles in their wake. Our mentors from ‘68 urged us not to be nostalgic for those days. I still admire them for going face to face with the Chicago riot cops, but I’ve also taken their reflections of ‘68 very seriously — they didn’t end the war on Vietnam. Many of them feel like they could have focused more on building a sustainable movement that people could join for the long haul. The 2024 DNC in Chicago presented us a unique opportunity — we had to take this huge moment of mass mobilization and make sure our efforts and organization doesn’t get washed away when all the balloons on the United Center floor are popped, and the important people fly out of O’Hare. When the dust settles and the most powerful people in the world leave our city, how will we keep fighting? I was happy when so many people asked us what was next, because it meant we were thinking long term.
In our own discourses on the left, the week was consumed by the discussion of tactics – what works and what doesn’t. An organizer I know reminded us about our responsibility to be a movement people want to join. There are plenty of people who are sympathetic to our cause but haven’t figured out how to be part of it. There’s millions of people without a movement home. Our cause is already popular, it’s already growing every day. Are we doing what we can to make sure people know where to go? Are we keeping our eyes on the prize or are we getting so wrapped up in nostalgia that we can’t see what we will be capable of a year from now if we move strategically? We are nothing without the people. Our responsibility is to the people —not to our egos, not to our careers, not to the vanity of our organizations, and not to our impulses. As a movement we generally have to be better at unlearning instant gratification and also embracing a diversity of tactics. But that’s something for another day.
It is easy to stand on a police line. It’s easy to yell at politicians. It’s easy to say things and do things by yourself. It’s hard to organize your neighbors and talk to new people about things they don’t immediately understand — my hope comes from the idea that once we get really good at that, the light at the end of the tunnel will be as clear as day.
Chicagoans are loud, principled, and good people and because of that there are 2.6 million reasons to love this city. For a few days Chicagoans made certain democrats couldn’t walk around our city without seeing and hearing about the people of Gaza. It’s my hope that we see that as a small success, and also my hope that we saw the week of mobilizations as a jumping off point for building the world we want to see.
Lake Michigan is connected to the ocean through narrow waterways along the northern border of the United States, and someone mentioned at a protest that it’s not unfathomable that the waves crashing onto the shores of Gaza were once here in Chicago, and vice versa. Even if we don’t have skies that are absent of fighter jets in my lifetime, every second spent moving us towards that kind of life was worth it. As long as we don’t throw in the towel, we are closer than ever to that reality.
The post You Will Hear the Names of the Dead: The DNC in Chicago first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
For months, Lebanon has been on edge as cross-border strikes between Israel and Hezbollah rattle the country. On October 8 of last year, Hezbollah fired rockets into Israel to show its support for Hamas; in the months that followed, its objectives changed to pressuring Israel to end the war on Gaza. Israel has bombarded Lebanon with greater ferocity, turning the south of Lebanon into a war zone…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israel has embarked on its largest raid of the occupied West Bank in decades, launching attacks from the land and air against areas home to 80,000 Palestinians as Israel’s foreign minister is pledging “war” using the same genocidal tactics the Israeli military has used on Gaza. Israel has attacked the West Bank with drone strikes and deployed military vehicles on the ground…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Nazi Hunters was a US television docu-drama miniseries in 2009, that described the exploits of Zionist (mostly Mossad) pursuers of Nazi criminals post-WWII. It was made into a film in 2022.
We have all seen films and read books about Nazis and the holocaust. Sometimes they went too far, such as the fanciful stories of human skin lampshades and victims made into soap, but the long (semi-permanent) and extensive public awareness campaign was immensely successful in creating not only a widely shared awareness, but also a strong revulsion against genocide. To that end, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide committed nearly all of the world’s nations to the pledge “Never Again”, on the assumption that the Nazi holocaust was and should be an exceptional aberration in human history.
Of course, genocide is unfortunately not exceptional. It has happened again and again, both before and after the Nazi holocaust and the creation of the Genocide Convention and throughout human history (and probably prehistory). In fact, the coiner of the term, Raphael Lemkin, originally created it in 1943 to describe what happened to the Armenians in the early 20th century, not to the Nazi holocaust. Since WWII, we have had genocides in Guatemala, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and Myanmar, as well as the current Palestinian genocide. Some are disputed and others are possibly eligible, but the point is that genocide is hardly exceptional.
But neither is revulsion to genocide nor the attempt to make the crime accountable. Long before the Genocide Convention, the Hamurabi code and many religious traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and the Abrahamic religions, incorporated many of the same laws, principles and prohibitions. Nevertheless, it is proper to credit the mainly Zionist holocaust remembrance efforts with a profoundly successful mobilization to instill horror of genocide in the minds of the public through a wide array of media and public commemorations, including museums and monuments of the holocaust.
It was, however, neither the United Nations nor other international bodies that hunted down the Nazis who fled or escaped in order to avoid the fate of those brought before the Nuremberg trials. By and large, this task was left to Zionist individuals and organizations, including the state of Israel and Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal, as well as the center which bears his name. Wiesenthal’s most celebrated success was to find Adolf Eichmann, a major Nazi administrator of the extermination project, whom the Mossad then captured and brought to Israel for trial and execution.
Oddly enough, the successful effort to publicize the Nazi genocide has not necessarily carried over to other genocides, presumably for lack of organization and influence among the survivors. Furthermore, the Nazi holocaust is largely remembered as being directed only against Jews, even though a total of roughly 17 million noncombatants were systematically exterminated, mainly Slavs but also Roma (“gypsies”), and other populations. Jews were a major target, of course, but the fact that they are often remembered as the only one is a tribute to the success of the Zionist narrative. It is a lesson and an example to other populations targeted for genocide.
Palestinians are clearly learning this lesson, although they are handicapped by having to overcome the biases created by the Zionists, the experts par excellence in creating a narrative, one which is unfortunately and for obvious reasons in stark contrast to that of the Palestinians. Sadly, the same Zionists that taught us to be horrified of genocide are now using their capabilities and organization to justify and enable Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
But those Zionists also taught us that it is possible to make the criminals who commit the “crime of crimes” pay the price. The Nazis paid the price at Nuremberg, and they continued paying long afterward, thanks to the Nazi hunters. So too did the criminals of the Bosnian genocide, the Rwandan genocide and many others. Do the Zionist criminals murdering and starving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, as well as their complicit enablers in Washington, London and yes, Berlin, not realize that they will be in the crosshairs of their victims for the rest of their lives?
If they delude themselves otherwise, I advise them to read the following, which is only a small taste of what is to come.
The post The Zionist Hunters first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Nazi Hunters was a US television docu-drama miniseries in 2009, that described the exploits of Zionist (mostly Mossad) pursuers of Nazi criminals post-WWII. It was made into a film in 2022.
We have all seen films and read books about Nazis and the holocaust. Sometimes they went too far, such as the fanciful stories of human skin lampshades and victims made into soap, but the long (semi-permanent) and extensive public awareness campaign was immensely successful in creating not only a widely shared awareness, but also a strong revulsion against genocide. To that end, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide committed nearly all of the world’s nations to the pledge “Never Again”, on the assumption that the Nazi holocaust was and should be an exceptional aberration in human history.
Of course, genocide is unfortunately not exceptional. It has happened again and again, both before and after the Nazi holocaust and the creation of the Genocide Convention and throughout human history (and probably prehistory). In fact, the coiner of the term, Raphael Lemkin, originally created it in 1943 to describe what happened to the Armenians in the early 20th century, not to the Nazi holocaust. Since WWII, we have had genocides in Guatemala, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur, and Myanmar, as well as the current Palestinian genocide. Some are disputed and others are possibly eligible, but the point is that genocide is hardly exceptional.
But neither is revulsion to genocide nor the attempt to make the crime accountable. Long before the Genocide Convention, the Hamurabi code and many religious traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and the Abrahamic religions, incorporated many of the same laws, principles and prohibitions. Nevertheless, it is proper to credit the mainly Zionist holocaust remembrance efforts with a profoundly successful mobilization to instill horror of genocide in the minds of the public through a wide array of media and public commemorations, including museums and monuments of the holocaust.
It was, however, neither the United Nations nor other international bodies that hunted down the Nazis who fled or escaped in order to avoid the fate of those brought before the Nuremberg trials. By and large, this task was left to Zionist individuals and organizations, including the state of Israel and Nazi hunters like Simon Wiesenthal, as well as the center which bears his name. Wiesenthal’s most celebrated success was to find Adolf Eichmann, a major Nazi administrator of the extermination project, whom the Mossad then captured and brought to Israel for trial and execution.
Oddly enough, the successful effort to publicize the Nazi genocide has not necessarily carried over to other genocides, presumably for lack of organization and influence among the survivors. Furthermore, the Nazi holocaust is largely remembered as being directed only against Jews, even though a total of roughly 17 million noncombatants were systematically exterminated, mainly Slavs but also Roma (“gypsies”), and other populations. Jews were a major target, of course, but the fact that they are often remembered as the only one is a tribute to the success of the Zionist narrative. It is a lesson and an example to other populations targeted for genocide.
Palestinians are clearly learning this lesson, although they are handicapped by having to overcome the biases created by the Zionists, the experts par excellence in creating a narrative, one which is unfortunately and for obvious reasons in stark contrast to that of the Palestinians. Sadly, the same Zionists that taught us to be horrified of genocide are now using their capabilities and organization to justify and enable Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
But those Zionists also taught us that it is possible to make the criminals who commit the “crime of crimes” pay the price. The Nazis paid the price at Nuremberg, and they continued paying long afterward, thanks to the Nazi hunters. So too did the criminals of the Bosnian genocide, the Rwandan genocide and many others. Do the Zionist criminals murdering and starving hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, as well as their complicit enablers in Washington, London and yes, Berlin, not realize that they will be in the crosshairs of their victims for the rest of their lives?
If they delude themselves otherwise, I advise them to read the following, which is only a small taste of what is to come.
The post The Zionist Hunters first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
China’s promotion of tourism in the far-western region of Xinjiang, where Beijing has sought to hide its persecution of the 11 million Uyghurs who live there, has parallels to the Nazis’ practice of “genocide tourism,” a Swedish anthropologist and former diplomat writes in the online current affairs magazine The Diplomat.
After Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and its herding of Jews into concentration camps, a popular German travel guide in 1943 offered tours of the Wilder Osten, or the Wild East, the article by Magnus Fiskesjö recounts.
It spelled out a vision of Lebensraum, or living space, and new resources for Germans after forcing out Jews, Slavs and other undesirables from Central and Eastern Europe.
And even as the Nazis set up death camps to murder Jews, the Warsaw Ghetto became an attraction on orchestrated tours, writes Fiskesjö, who teaches anthropology and Asian studies at Cornell University in New York state.
Likewise, in China’s efforts to promote Xinjiang as a tourist destination, it has sought to cover up its human rights abuses against the Uyghurs by sprucing up buildings, installing new infrastructure and constructing fake historical sites, Fiskesjö writes.
It’s all meant to promote China’s narrative that Uyghurs are living happy, prosperous lives and and benefiting from China’s development, when in fact about 1.8 million of them have been detained in concentration camps and thousands have been sent to prison, often on flimsy charges — behavior that United States and some Western parliaments have labeled a genocide.
China denies those accusations and claims the camps were training facilities and are now mostly closed.
Tourists are flocking to Xinjiang — mostly from within China — and tend to see a sanitized version of life there. Last year, 265 million tourists visited the region, the state-run Xinhua news agency said.
Beijing has arranged for dozens of diplomats and journalists, mainly from Muslim countries, to visit Xinjiang to take orchestrated tours of the region — without letting them freely roam around or talk with local residents.
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Chinese officials have adopted similar practices embraced by the Nazis, who allowed tourists to go to an “occupied zone … under the military and police control so they can channel tourists to safe places where they only see what the government wants them to see,” Fiskesjö told Radio Free Asia.
“It was their attempt to present the situation as normal,” he said. “The Nazi government would say, ‘We have everything under control. There is nothing to worry about, and you can be a tourist.’”
Resettlement strategies
There are other similarities, Fiskesjö says.
Beijing’s strategy of settling Han Chinese in Xinjiang and the forced assimilation of Uyghur children into Chinese culture also mirrors the Nazis’ relocation of people from Germany to occupied territories and their forcible assimilation policies for children taken from their parents to be raised as German, he said.
“Both of these aspects are equally happening in Xinjiang today,” he said.
Fiskesjö and Rukia Turdush, an independent Uyghur researcher from Canada, published a report in July titled “Mass Detention and Forced Assimilation of Uyghur Children in China,” which provides evidence of Beijing separating children from their families, preventing them from being reunited with their parents, and restricting their use of the Uyghur language.
Fiskesjö also pointed to the ongoing arrests and detentions of Uyghurs, and Chinese settlers taking over farms and homes of those held in camps or prisons.
Most tourists on government-sponsored or designed trips to Xinjiang will stick to designated areas and stay in the same hotels, he said.
“It’s about inviting people and tricking and fooling them into [seeing] this as a normal area, controlled and safe,” Fiskesjö said.
Tourists who go to Xinjiang are convinced that the criticism of China’s mistreatment of the Uyghurs isn’t true, he added.
“This is what is encapsulated in the slogan ‘seeing is believing,’ which the Chinese government has been recycling again and again” with regard to Xinjiang, Fiskesjö said.
‘False narrative’
Experts on Xinjiang concurred with Fiskesjö’s assessment.
“By shaping the tourist experience either through what people see, what people read [and] who they can speak to, China believes that it can use individuals who come to the region to amplify its own narratives,” said Henryk Szadziewski, director of research at the Uyghur Human Rights Project.
When visitors go to Xinjiang, they feel safe and see Uyghurs dancing or participating in other performances; then, after they leave, they will tell others about their experiences, which are meant to counter the arguments of genocide, he said.
The Uyghur Human Rights Project, based in Washington, issued reports in August 2023 and a January 2024 about Western travel companies offering tours to sites in Xinjiang connected to the repression of religious beliefs, the destruction of Uyghur cultural heritage, surveillance, imprisonment, torture, sexual assault and deaths in custody.
U.S. columnist, author and lawyer Gordon Chang said some visitors are willing to whitewash the persecution of the Uyghurs and spread the Chinese government’s narrative that there is no genocide.
“They see what the Communist Party wants them to see, and they know what is occurring,” he told RFA. “Some foreign tourists are just naïve, but many are propagating a narrative that is false. We know that because there is evidence that shows that China is engaging in these crimes against humanity.”
Anders Corr, principal of the New York-based political risk firm Corr Analytics, compared the Xinjiang visits to Soviet propaganda “Potemkin villages” — selected sites designed to demonstrate a façade of success of the Soviet system to outsiders.
Beijing wants to promote ideological beliefs that there is no genocide, that everything is fine, and that the locals are happy and allowed to practice their religion and cultural traditions, he said.
“They’ll try out some Uyghur actors to act happy, and they will try out Uyghur dancers to look happy and tell them to smile, but if [they] don’t smile wide enough, [they] are sent to concentration camps.”
Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Uyghar for RFA Uyghur.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Ten months into its assault on Gaza, Israel has killed more than 40,000 people from the besieged strip and also demolished some of the main repositories of Palestinian cultural heritage, including the Central Archives of Gaza City, the Gaza Municipal Library and the Islamic University of Gaza Library — acts condemned by the American Library Association in January. As the United States funds Israel’…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The U.S. has sent nearly two shipments of weapons to Israel on average every day since it began its genocide in Gaza on October 7, according to new figures from the Israeli military. The Israeli military announced that it received its 500th shipment of weapons from the U.S. via aircraft on Monday since October 7, through the countries’ airlift partnership. The U.S. has also sent over 100…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Alaa Jamal’s pain and suffering is wound so tightly around her heart that it shields it from all the horrors she’s lived through. So even though she’s in the crosshairs of Netanyahu’s hatred’s sights, her heart beats unceasingly, in defiance of what the Occupation has done to her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to keep the remnants of her family alive: a one year old son named Eid and a three year old daughter named Sanaa. Alaa calls her daughter Princess, an apt nickname for Alaa’s life has always been a fairytale, just one punctuated by war every two to four years. Birth, war. School, war. Adolescence, war. Friendship, war. Family, war. University, war.
Then, when she was eighteen, Mohammed came, and Alaa forgot about the wars. Instead, she says, “A great love story arose.” Handsome, smart, and strong, Alaa knew they were meant for each other. He was a civil engineer, and she, a future architect. He proposed on Eid-al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice. Alaa’s parents agreed, and the lovebirds married. In photographs they’re the quintessential couple. He’s sharp in casual clothes, she’s dazzling demure in repose.
“I was so happy dressed in white,” she says, reminiscing about her wedding.
And for a moment, I could see Alaa, smiling with the groom in the midst of her fairytale. Two children later, it would end. Now, the only white garments worn in Gaza are shrouds for the dead.
When the war began, Alaa was at the hospital with her infant son. Eid had been born with an enlarged heart and needed close supervision whenever he was ill. Now, Alaa found herself trapped with him, as fighting raged on all around her. Israeli soldiers raided the hospital and dragged people out of their beds to kidnap or kill. Terrified, Alaa grabbed her son, ripped out the IV in his arm and ran out the back of the hospital, covered in his blood.
Alaa ran all the way home, but when she arrived, things got worse. The neighborhood children were playing in the street in front of her house. A missile landed on the next block, and a large piece of shrapnel was sent reeling from the resulting explosion towards the children, decapitating Mohammed’s 12-year-old cousin Badr as Alaa watched. Mohammed’s father was next.
Alaa was still in shock when the Israelis dropped leaflets ordering them to go south. She left first, taking the children. Mohammed was supposed to follow a few days later. In the meantime, their neighborhood was destroyed one block at a time. Dozens of Alaa’s friends and relatives were martyred—wedded to the land they loved in the ultimate sacrifice. Day-by-day, hour-by-hour, with each new message, Alaa learned of their deaths. And it was there, among the hordes of refugees walking south along the sea of Gaza, that Alaa’s fairytale life finally came to an end:
“My brother Bahaa was volunteering to drive refugees trapped in the fighting to safety. Mohammed was with him, when the Occupation shot up the car they were in. My brother was wounded, and Mohammed tried to drag him to safety. That’s when they shot my husband in the face. Somebody called an ambulance, but the Israeli soldiers wouldn’t let the paramedics through. They bled out for charity.”
Alaa began to weep.
“The Occupiers refused to let anyone collect the bodies for burial. My beloved husband and brother became food for stray dogs and crows.”
Alaa didn’t have time to properly mourn. Even after reuniting with her remaining relatives, things continued to get worse. As the days and weeks rolled by, they faced a lack of clean water, food and medical care. Winter came, and they had nothing to keep them warm. Everyone was malnourished and sick.
Eid and Sanaa went to the hospital to get treated for starvation with a nutrient IV drip. The elderly had no such luck. Three different times Alaa woke up on a cold morning to find one of her aunts dead. Their bodies simply couldn’t produce enough heat with so little food to eat. I wondered about her own health.
“How much weight have you lost since October 7th?” I asked.
“Thirty pounds,” she said.
I wanted to know more, but Alaa steered the conversation back to her children.
“My daughter Sanaa lost her ability to speak after her father died. She was in shock, depressed, and fell seriously ill. I tried to comfort her. Then one day she began to sing: ‘When I die, I will go to Heaven to be with my father.’”
Sanaa’s understanding of the afterlife allowed her to be a child again.
By April, when I met Alaa, the food situation had improved. But in May, Sanaa contracted hepatitis C and wouldn’t eat. The hospital fed her through another IV. In June, Eid got a bacterial skin infection on his face. Day-by-day I watched it spread in photographs Alaa sent me. The hospital in Deir al-Balah wanted one hundred dollars for the medication. One hundred more than what was reasonable. I used my connections in Gaza to get a charity to pay for it. But Alaa wouldn’t leave her children alone to retrieve the medicine. She was afraid she’d come back to find them dead. Her father went instead. Just in time too, because the skin on Eid’s face began to rot as it decayed. With all his other health issues, it could have been the end of him.
Eventually, Alaa realized that she needed to make a future for her children. She began to study online to finish her degree. She’s already started on her senior project: designing a rehabilitative mental health center for healing from PTSD. She wants to build it as soon as the war stops. It’s part of her overall plan: “I want to make Gaza beautiful again.”
In the meantime, she’s desperately trying to raise money to buy a tent. It’s crowded and unstable the way she lives, always shuffling around between her remaining relatives. Whenever I try to get a charity to help her, she asks if she can work for them. How can she simultaneously work, mourn, study, raise children and survive? Her life is one of incomprehensible contradictions.
“I hope God will compensate Alaa for her loss,” one of her relatives told me.
I concur, if things go well. If they don’t, Alaa tells me what will happen next: “I am an ambitious person, and I love life very much. But I know that one day my blood, and the blood of my children, will water this land.”
May God be pleased with her.
Alaa Jamal, Sanna, Eid with Mohammed
Alaa and her children
• You can learn more about Alaa Jamal here
• You can find more stories about Gaza at https://erossalvatore.com/
The post Gaza’s Last Fairytale first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Biden administration recently approved five major arms sales to Israel for F-15 fighter aircraft, tank ammunition, tactical vehicles, air-to-air missiles, mortar rounds, and related equipment for each. Though technically sales, most if not all of this matériel is paid for by U.S. taxpayers — Israel uses much of the military aid Congress approves for it effectively as a gift card to buy U.S.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The lives of millions of Palestinians are at risk as the UN has been forced to suspend its operations across all of Gaza after Israel’s mass evacuation orders and violence has made it nearly impossible for humanitarian groups to distribute or even access aid. The UN’s aid operations “ground to a halt” on Monday after the latest round of evacuations of Deir el-Balah, Reuters reported…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Patients, staff and families sheltering in the last remaining hospital in central Gaza are being forcibly displaced as the threat of a raid by Israeli forces looms large and Israel orders evacuations in the areas surrounding the crucial medical facility. In recent days, Palestinians have been fleeing al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital as Israel ordered evacuations in nearby neighborhoods of Deir el…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Just Stop Oil and was authored by Just Stop Oil.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) is slamming leaders of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) after they rejected the demands of the pro-Palestine uncommitted movement to have visibility at the convention — and are now lying about their meetings with campaign leaders. This week, DNC leaders denied the uncommitted campaign’s request for a Palestinian American to speak on the main stage of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israeli officials’ ceasefire demands show that they aren’t just using ceasefire negotiations to prolong their genocide of Gaza, but also to secure permission to further deepen their colonization of Palestine, a UN expert has said. In the latest ceasefire talks, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been insistent that Israel be able to maintain a permanent military occupation of Gaza’…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israel’s forced evacuations in Gaza are now so widespread that Palestinians are not only being almost completely separated from crucial resources like water, they are also being squeezed into a “safe zone” that has shrunk to a point where they are never more than a few blocks away from the frontline of Israel’s ground assault, humanitarian groups warn. According to the UN Relief and Works…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Israeli forces regularly use children as human shields in Gaza, a rights group finds in a new report shining a light on horrific stories of abuse faced by children detained by Israeli forces. As part of its genocide in Gaza, the military registered by the UN as a violator of children’s human rights is “systematically” detaining and torturing children, according to Defense for Children…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A number of countries and companies sending oil to Israel, which it is using to advance its mass slaughter and ethnic cleansing in Gaza may be legally complicit in genocide, new analysis finds. Countries like the U.S. and companies like Chevron and BP have been providing Israel with crude oil and other fuels amid the genocide, according to new findings by Oil Change International.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
On Monday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken blamed Hamas negotiators for causing the impasse in the latest ceasefire negotiations — but Hamas said that this is another of the Biden administration’s “misleading claims” aimed at “buying time” for Israel to continue its genocide in Gaza. In a press conference after a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In a speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Monday night, President Joe Biden said that “both sides” in Israel’s genocide of Gaza are experiencing civilian death — a blatant lie that ignores any semblance of reality on the ground in Gaza, where the Palestinian civilian death toll rises each day. “Those protesters out in the street, they have a point,” Biden said…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned on Monday that it may be the last chance for negotiators to achieve a ceasefire deal as Israeli leaders continued to reject a ceasefire and demanded that any deal allow them to exercise military control in Gaza. In remarks amid his visit to Tel Aviv, Blinken said that this round of negotiations is “the best, maybe the last, opportunity to get the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
It is farcical to suggest a distinction between settler and state violence: They are part of the same settler-colonial structure, and not only complement each other but depend on one another.
— Fathi Nimer, The West Bank: Settler Colonial Spillover of the Gaza Genocide
While Israel continues its brutal genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, armed Israeli settlers, backed by the Israeli government, continue to expand illegal settlements in the West Bank. Our new visual captures how the Israeli government has transferred hundreds of thousands of guns and other weapons to Israeli settlers since October 7, as settler violence against Palestinian communities skyrockets with impunity.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Ekecheiria, also known as the “Olympic Truce,” is a quaint notion dating to Ancient Greece, when three kings prone to warring against each other – Iphitos of Elis, Cleosthenes of Pisa and Lycurgus of Sparta – concluded a treaty permitting the safe passage of all athletes and spectators from the relevant city-states for the duration of the Olympic Games. The truce had a certain logic to it, given that many of those granted safe passage would have been serving soldiers or soldiers in waiting.
In 1894, the founder of the International Olympic Committee (IOC), Pierre de Coubertin, fantasised about the Games as a peace promoting endeavour which, when read closely, suggests the sublimation of humanity’s warring instincts. Instead of killing each other, humans could compete in stadia and on the sporting tracks, adoring and admiring physical prowess. “Wars break out because nations misunderstand each other. We shall have no peace until the prejudices which now separate the different races shall have been outlived. To attain this end, what better means than to bring the youth of all countries periodically together for amicable trials of muscular strength and agility.”
Panting over torsos, sinews and muscles, de Coubertin gushingly wrote his “Ode to Sport” in 1912. Sport was peace, forging “happy bonds between the peoples by drawing them together in reverence for strength which is controlled, organised and self-disciplined.” It was through the young that respect would be learned for “one another,” thereby ensuring that “the diversity of national traits becomes a source of generous and peaceful emulation.” Sport was also other things: justice, daring, honour, joy and, in the true spirit of eugenic inspiration, the means to achieve “a more perfect race, blasting the seeds of sickness”. Athletes would, accordingly, “wish to see growing about him brisk and sturdy sons to follow him in the arena and [in] turn bear off joyous laurels.”
The Olympic Charter also states that Olympism’s central goal “is to place at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”
In the 1990s, the IOC thought it prudent to revive the concept of such a truce. As the organisation explains, this was done “with a view to protecting, as far as possible, the interests of the athletes and sport in general, and to harness the power of sport to promote peace, dialogue and reconciliation more broadly.” In 2000, the IOC founded the International Olympic Truce Foundation, adopting the dove as a signature symbol of the Games. By the London Olympics of 2012, the 193 nations present had signed onto an Olympic Truce.
From such lofty summits, hypocrisy and inconsistency will follow. The IOC, hardly the finest practitioner of fine principle, has been prone to injudicious standards, rampant corruption and tyrannical stupidity. The IOC recommendation to ban Russian athletes took all but four days after the attack on Ukraine in February 2022 on the premise that Russia had breached the sacred compact of sporting peace. In the mix, Belarus, designated as arch collaborator with Russian war aims, was also added.
During the 11th Olympic Summit held on December 9, 2022, the IOC Executive Board noted that the Olympic Games would not “address all the political and social challenges in the world. This is the realm of politics.” Having advocated that platitudinous, false distinction, the Executive Board could still claim that the Games “can set an example for a world where everyone respects the same rules as one another.”
The IOC did make one grudging concession: Russian and Belarusian athletes could compete as Individual Neutral Athletes (AINs) subject to meeting eligibility requirements determined by the Individual Neutral Athlete Eligibility Review Panel. Each athlete’s participation was subject to respecting the Olympic Charter, with special reference to “the peace mission of the Olympic Movement”.
These statements and qualifications, intentionally or otherwise, are resoundingly delusional. The Games are events of pompous political significance, with athletes often being administrative and symbolic extensions of the nation stage they represent. Authoritarian regimes have gloatingly celebrated hosting them. They have been staging grounds for violence, notably in the killing of 12 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Games by the Palestinian terrorist group Black September.
They have also been boycotted for very political reasons. The United States did so in 1980 for the Moscow Games, along with 64 other nations, in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The Soviet Union returned the favour at the Los Angeles Olympics held in 1984, giving President Ronald Reagan a chance, in an election year, to speak of the “winning” American ideal and “a new patriotism spreading across our country.”
In keeping with the erratic nature of such a spirit, it was appropriately hypocritical and distasteful of IOC practice to permit the Israeli athletic contingent numbering 88 athletes to compete at the Paris Games. All this, as slaughter and starvation continued to take place in Gaza (at the time, the Palestinian death toll lay somewhere in the order of 39,000).
Permitting Israel’s participation prompted Jules Boykoff, an academic of keen interest in the Games, to suggest that “the situation is more and more resembling the situation that led the IOC forcing Russia to participate as neutral athletes.” The body’s “approach to ignore the situation places its selective morality on full display and throws into question the group’s commitment to the high-minded ideals it claims to abide.”
These ideals remain just that, a cover that otherwise permits political realities to flourish. Predictably, the Paris spectacle, both before and after, was always going to feature the tang and sting of resentment. Far from being apolitical exponents of their craft, various members of the Israeli Olympic team have been more than forthcoming in defending the warring cause. Judokas Timna Nelson-Levy and Maya Goshen have been vocal in their defence of the Israeli Defense Forces.
Palestinian participants have also done their bit. During the opening ceremony, boxer Wasim Abusal wore a shirt showing children being bombed, telling Agence France-Presse that these were “children who are martyred and die under the rubble, children whose parents are martyred and are left alone without food and water.” Such views are not permitted for Russian or Belarusian athletes, who must compete under the deceptive flag of neutrality.
The organisers of the Paris Games also found it difficult to keep a lid on an occasion supposedly free of political attributes. The Israel-Paraguay football march was marked by scornful boos as the Israeli national anthem was performed. Reports also note that at least one banner featured “GENOCIDE OLYMPICS”. Three Israeli athletes also received death threats, according to a statement from the Paris prosecutor’s office.
It’s such instances of political oddities that permit the following suggestion: make all athletes truly amateurish by abolishing their associations with countries. Most nation states, soldered and cemented compacts of hatred, based upon territory often pinched from previous occupants, are such a nuisance in this regard. If Olympism is to make sense, and if the ravings of the physique obsessed de Coubertin are to be given shape, why not get rid of the State altogether, thereby making all participants neutral, if only for a few weeks?
The post The Distasteful Nonsense of Olympism first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
If Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Kuzinski were the candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties, which one would you vote for?
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris both have more blood on their hands than either of these serial killers, and they promise to kill many more. Both of them supported the latest $20 billion to Israel, to keep the project to eradicate the people of Gaza on schedule. Voting for them means giving them permission and encouragement to keep the rivers of blood flowing, so I won’t do it. I might vote for Jill Stein or the Libertarian candidate, but I’m inclined not to play the game. It’s a personal choice — a symbolic one, you might contend.
But so is yours, if you are voting for a major party candidate. Did you select either of them to be a candidate? Can you think of a better one? Of course you can. In fact, every one of you is probably a better candidate yourself. That’s why your vote is symbolic. You don’t win either way. And either way, your vote says to the party or candidate, “Your support for genocide is not going to keep me from voting for you.”
What can we do about it? As Emma Goldman said, “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” That was a century ago, and it is more true today — with Citizens United solidifying corporate and special interest (e.g. AIPAC) control of our elections and our electeds — than it was then. Our only influence in government is with issues that have little interest for the powerful, such as women’s reproductive rights, other than to be used by the powerful to manipulate and deceive us into thinking that our vote makes a difference.
As individuals, we must take responsibility for our participation in this rigged game. Are we willing to vote for one mass murderer over another just for the opportunity to play? Daddy, what did you do during the Great Genocide?
Collectively, a voter strike might be in order. Vote None of the Above! Perhaps we need a new movement that defies the system rather than participating in it. Picket the polling stations and tell people not to vote, that doing so sends the message that they support genocide.
I have no illusions how difficult it is to create a mass movement, especially one that seeks to wrest control from those who rule us. But genocide puts special obligations upon us. Individually, at the very least, our integrity is at stake. Are you actually going to participate — and be complicit — in genocide? We all have choices. Let your conscience decide. Make yourself and your descendants proud of you.
The post Voting for Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
With a click, with a shock
Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch
Something’s coming, don’t know when but it’s soon . . .— “Something’s Coming,” West Side Story, lyrics by S. Sondheim, music by L. Bernstein.
Shock should not be the word, but when World War III breaks fully loose many who are now sleeping will be shocked. The war has already started, but its full fury and devastation are just around the corner. When it does, Tony’s singular fate in West Side Story will be the fate of untold millions.
It is a Greek tragedy brought on by the terrible hubris of the United States, its NATO accomplices, and the genocidal state of Israel and the Zionist terrorists who run it.
Tony felt a miracle was due, but it didn’t come true for him except to briefly love Maria and then get killed as result of a false report, and only a miracle will now save the world from the cataclysm that is on the way, whether it is initiated by intent, a false report, an accident, or the game of nuclear chicken played once too often.
Let us hope but not be naïve. The signs all point in one direction. The gun on the wall in the first act of this tragic play is primed to go off in the final one. Every effort to avoid this terrible fate by seeking peace and not war has been rejected by the U.S. and its equally insane allies. Every so-called red line laid down by Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinians, and their allies has been violated with impunity and blatant arrogance. But impunity has its limits and the dark Furies of vengeance will have their day.
“It is the dead, not the living,” said Antigone, “who make the longest demands.” Their ghostly voices cry out to be avenged.
I wish I were not compelled by conscience to write this, but it seems clearly evident to me that we stand on the edge of an abyss. The fate of the world rests in the hands of leaders who are clearly psychotic and who harbor death wishes. It’s not terribly complex. Netanyahu and Biden are two of them. Yes, like other mass killers, I think they love their children and give their dog biscuits to eat. But yes, they also are so corrupted in their souls that they relish war and the sense of false power and prestige it brings them. They gladly kill other people’s children. They can defend themselves many times over, offer all kinds of excuses, but the facts speak otherwise. This is hard for regular people to accept.
The great American writer who lived in exile in France for so many years and who was born 100 years ago this month, James Baldwin, wrote an essay – “The Creative Process” – in which he addressed the issue of how becoming a normal member of society dulls one to the shadow side of personal and social truths. He wrote:
And, in the same way that to become a social human being one modifies and suppresses and, ultimately, without great courage, lies to oneself about all one’s interior, uncharted chaos, so have we, as a nation, modified or suppressed and lied about all the darker forces in our history.
And lie and suppress we still do today.
Imagine, if you will, that Mexico has invaded Texas with the full support of the Russian, Chinese, and Iranian governments. Their weapons are supplied by these countries and their drone and missile attacks on the U.S. are coordinated by Russian technology. The Seven Mile Bridge in Florida has been attacked. The U.S. Mexican border is dotted with Russian troops on bases with nuclear missiles aimed at U.S. cities.
It’s not hard to do. That is a small analogy to what the U.S./NATO is doing to Russia.
Do you think the United States would not respond with great force?
Do you think it would not feel threatened with nuclear annihilation?
How do you think it would respond?
The U.S/NATO war against Russia via Ukraine is accelerating by the day. The current Ukrainian invasion of Russia’s Kursk region has upped the ante dramatically. After denying it knew in advance of this Ukrainian invasion of Russia, the demented U.S. President Joseph Biden said the other day when asked about the fighting in Kursk, “I’ve spoken with my staff on a regular basis probably every four or five hours for the last six or eight days. And it’s — it’s creating a real dilemma for Putin. And we’ve been in direct contact — constant contact with — with the Ukrainians.” Do you think Kamala Harris was kept in the dark?
Now how do you think the Russians are going to respond? How many red lines will they allow the U.S. to cross without massive retaliation? And what kind of retaliation?
Switch then to the Middle East where the Iranians and their allies are preparing to retaliate to Israel’s attacks on their soil. No one knows when but it seems soon. Something is coming and it won’t be pretty. Will it then ignite a massive war in the region with the U.S. and Israel pitted against the region? Will nuclear weapons be used? Will the wars in Ukraine/Russia and the Middle East join into what will be called WW III?
While the U.S. continues to massively arm Israel, Russian is arming its ally Iran and likely training them in the use of those weapons as the U.S. is doing in Ukraine. The stage is set. We enter the final act.
Natanyahu wants and needs war to survive. So he thinks. Psychotic killers always do.
The signs all point in one direction. No one should be shocked if the worst comes to pass.
“Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock, open the latch.”
If you have time.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.