My desk, after fall cleaning.

CounterPunch went online just in time for Clinton’s war on Serbia. Clinton’s war was premeditated; our transit to the World Wide Web was reluctant, at best. Alexander Cockburn’s relationship with computers was hostile. Mine was indifferent. I surfed the web, like anyone else, but had no idea how it would be useful for us. At the time, CounterPunch was a 6-page newsletter that we published fortnightly. We called it “fortnightly” because the word had a nice ring to it and no one was precisely sure how many days or even weeks a fortnight encompassed. But if we ran pieces online, who would pay to receive our newsletter? We remained stubbornly committed to print and our 5,000 or so subscribers. Where will the web be when the electromagnetic pulse wipes the slate clean?

The fact that we even had a domain name we owed entirely to the foresight of one of our tech-savvy donors, who told me that even though we were both too dumb to realize it now, we’d thank him for it one day. He reserved the CounterPunch domain in 1997. We didn’t start using it for another year when the cruise missiles started shattering the night in Belgrade. The war went on for 78 days and nights, roughly four fortnights. The web allowed us to cover Clinton’s war in real time. Cockburn said he was willing to try it as an “experiment,” fully expecting it to fail. He had just one condition: that he never had to learn how to post a piece. Thus management of the CounterPunch website fell into my hands by default. I used a primitive software program called Pagemill for the first few years and it looked primitive, like scribblings by Cy Twombley. There was no time to take any classes or seminars. “Just get it up as fast as you can, Jeffrey,” Cockburn said. “And no complaints.” I knew nothing then about HTML, hyperlinks, analytics or even how to load a photo. I still don’t know much. I’d loved my archaic Pagemill program. It was web design for simpletons. I threw a tantrum the day I was forced to give it up for the damnable Dreamweaver, which was far too complex for my sophomoric skill set.

Nevertheless, people came. Came by the thousands and then the 10s of thousands. They came from all over the world: Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, Iceland, South Korea, and India. By the 2000 presidential elections, CounterPunch had gone global. Even so, we had no idea how to make the website pay for itself or to help support CounterPunch. For years, we didn’t have a shopping cart or any way to take credit card orders or sell subscriptions online. We simply asked people to mail in a check to the office in Petrolia. In a couple of years, our readership had grown from 5,000 print subscribers to 150,000 viewers a day on the website.

But the funding base had remained pretty much the same. We were supported by our subscribers and by the extra money we raised from hitting them up once a year through a direct mail letter usually sent in November. Alex enjoyed writing the letters.

Cockburn, St. Clair and the Great Bear of the Mattole.

Cockburn told me once, he thought he could have enjoyed a great career in advertising or public relations, a fantasy fed by our friend and counselor Ben Sonnenberg, the longtime editor of Grand Street, whose father nearly invented the seductive art of public relations. And they were successful. Or successful enough to keep us afloat, though the coffers had usually been drained to a shallow tidepool by the time October rolled around.

Alex told me once that he was good at raising money because he’d spent so much time avoiding debt collectors. He said he learned the finer points of this art from his father, Claud, who like most writers of radical journalism lived close to the margin most of his life. It was from Claud that Alex inherited some of his favorite phrases: “the wolf at the door,” “pony up,” “begging bowl.” (Of course, Alex loved all canids, wild and domestic, and would have gladly left out a shank from one of his pal Greg Smith’s lambs for any wolf on the prowl.) We used to joke about Alex’s six phone lines, one for each creditor. He also had a different accent for each creditor, once pretending to be his brother Patrick, who was reporting on the siege of Mosul at the time. Listening to these calls was hearing a master at work, like a character from one of his favorite novels, The Charmer by Patrick Hamilton.

In those days, the CounterPunch staff was so small we could all squeeze into Alex’s Valiant, when it would start. After Ken Silverstein left for greener pastures, it was largely down to Alex, Becky Grant and me. We worked 11 months out of the year, taking August off, and a weeklong holiday during Christmas usually highlighted by a New Year’s Eve party at Alex’s house along the Mattole River. Those years can seem idyllic in hindsight. We worked hard and drank harder, often hard cider brewed by Alex and CounterPunch’s board chair Joe Paff. Still, we were fairly productive by almost any standard. We wrote three books together in four years, two of them (Whiteout and our scathing biography of Al Gore) were substantial works requiring months of research. We both wrote a column a week separately and one together (Nature and Politics). We wrote most of the copy for CounterPunch, 10 to 12 stories a month. We both had weekly radio shows, Alex in South Africa and mine on KBOO in Portland. We both wrote for the Anderson Valley Advertiserand occasional pieces for New Left Review, The Progressive, the New Statesman, and City Pages. I wrote for the Village Voice and In These Times and Alex had a bi-monthly column in The Nation. But CounterPunch was home base. It’s the journal that we felt the closest to and saved our best writing for.

Cockburn “dialing for dollars” in my office/garage in 1998.

Sometimes the bank accounts would evaporate even earlier. On September 11, 2001, for example. I was jolted from bed by an early morning wake-up call from Cockburn. “Jeffrey, turn on your TV and describe what you see.” He hadn’t paid his cable bill and they’d shut off his service. I spent the next several hours narrating the fall of the Twin Towers, the crash at the Pentagon, the panicky peregrinations of George W. Bush and Cheney’s tightening grip on the throat of the Republic. Our lives as journalists changed profoundly that day as well. From September 11 onward, we published nearly every day of the week, week after week, month after month, year after year. At first, we ran only two or three stories a day. (And to fill in those blank hours on the clock, we insanely decided to start a book publishing venture!) Now we publish 12 to 14 each day and 40 to 45 every Friday for our Weekend Edition. We were online for good, like it or not. No vacations, no holidays, no sick days. The web, we soon found out, waits for no one.

We were online, but we still had no idea how to make our web-based journalism pay for itself. We tried running Google Ads for a few months, but got banned for what Google imperiously declared was “clicker fraud,” even though we hadn’t been the culprits. Apparently, some over-enthusiastic CounterPuncher had repeatedly clicked on Google text links, for which we received a return of a nickel a click. We think it was a CounterPuncher. Of course, it might have been Alex’s cockatiel, Percy, who in addition to whistling the Internationale, took a fancy to Cockburn’s keyboard, battering it with his beak four or five times a day. At the time, a close friend of ours was dating a top Google lawyer, who to prove his devotion to her swore that he would have the ban reversed. He failed. She dumped him. But the verdict of the corporate algorithm is absolute. It tolerates no appeals.

Alex, a Luddite to the core, believed that every new feature of the cyber world was an evil manifestation to be shunned, shamed and exorcized. Thus he continued to refer to CounterPunch as a “Twitter-free Zone” for nearly a year after Nathaniel had set up the CounterPunch Twitter account, which now has more than 65,000 followers. No one had the heart to tell him the news.

Early on we tried writing a few grant proposals, but never got one we actually applied for-our position on Israel proving fatal to our aspirations for funding. It’s just as well. We weren’t going to dance to any master’s tune or be constrained by anyone else’s ideological strings. We weren’t going to saddle ourselves with ads, either. Partly this was owing to my own incompetence. I had no idea how to use Flash or any of the other plug-ins that ad companies demanded we deploy. But we also both deplored the way online ads intruded on our own reading experiences and didn’t want to inflict that on our readers, if we could help it. And so far, so good.

In the end, we’ve largely depended on the kindness of our readers to survive. And, though there have been some close calls, this simple and direct approach of appealing to those who know us best hasn’t failed in 30 years. Not yet, anyway. After Alex died, a woman approached me at the funeral and said rather smugly, “Well, I guess this is the end of CounterPunch.” I was angered at her remark and Alex would have been, too. This woman was part of the Nation magazine’s delegation to the funeral. My irritation with her was only partly about how dismissive she was concerning my own contribution to CounterPunch, which had been substantial even before Ken’s departure.

It stemmed more from the flippant disregard for our writers and tens of thousands of readers. CounterPunch was no longer merely a platform for our voices. It was now the home base for hundreds of different writers from across the country and around the globe. I checked this morning. Since going online, we’ve published more than 6,000 different writers. CounterPunch belongs to them, as much as it does to us. Still, Mrs. MoneyBags was right about one thing. We were more broke than we’d ever been the week that Alex died. But we published the day Alex died, the day he was buried and every day since. The readers came through, again and again and again.

We’ve grown in the 11 years since Alex passed. The online readership is probably twice what it was in August 2012. We’re publishing more pieces each week and adding new writers every day. The website has been completely revamped by Andrew Nofsinger into a more efficient and flexible WordPress design that even a Luddite like me can’t screw up too badly. It even works on smartphones, where the analytics say nearly half of the site’s visitors read CounterPunch. To keep up, our staff (still tiny by most standards) has doubled in size, from three to seven: Becky, Deva and Nichole in the business office, me, Josh and Nathaniel on the editorial side, and Andrew helming the website.

The CounterPunch team (Chelsea, Deva, Josh, Andrew, Becky and Nichole) on the “Don’t Jump Bridge” over the Pacific Highway in Oregon City. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

That means our costs have more than doubled. What didn’t double, however, were the number of print magazine subscribers who used to be the primary funders of CounterPunch. Everywhere, print was in decline, even here at CounterPunch. Then COVID hit, the printers shut down, Louis DeJoy took over the Post Office so magazines sent by mail were arriving later than ever, if they arrived at all. So we made the cruel decision to kill the magazine and now we’re dependent solely on the community of online readers who utilize CounterPunch for free: no clickbait, no ads, no paywalls.

I remember a conversation Alex and I had on the night before the last fundraiser we did together in October 2011. He was sick then, sicker than any of us knew, but not showing it. He was impish, excited and anxious, as he always was this time of year.

“Are you ready for another shot in the dark, Jeffrey?” he asked.

“What if we fail this time?”

“Well, we can always do something else.”

“Do we know how to do anything else?”

“Of course, we do. We know how to make cider, go trout-fishing and listen to Chuck Berry. What more do we need?”

And now another Fall Fund Drive has rolled around and the old wolf, perhaps loping past the spirit of Cockburn in the pepperwood grove in the Mattole Valley, is back at our door. We humbly put forth our begging bowl, confident that CounterPunchers will once again pony up…

The post The Room Where It Happens: My 32 Years at CounterPunch appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Image by NASA.

Kingston buzzed with feverish preparations and anxious alerts in the days before Melissa, a powerful Category 5 hurricane, made landfall earlier this week on the island of Jamaica. Supermarkets and hardware stores endured the crush of customers scrambling to stockpile water, food, and other supplies while residents boarded up windows and cut away vulnerable branches from hulking mango trees.

Even for a Caribbean capital city that is no stranger to the perennial threat of hurricanes, the alarming forecasts about Melissa’s steady approach and certain intensification put communities across the city on edge. Throughout the island, which has had its share of impacts from deadly tropical weather, including Hurricane Beryl just last year, there was a palpable feeling that Melissa might be a different kind of storm.

“All we can do is try to be prepared,” said Kevin, a local handyman who lives in Portmore, an urban center on Kingston’s outskirts. “We can only do so much to get ready for it. The rest is in God’s hands.”

Melissa made weather history as one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes to ever make landfall. As it moved into Jamaica’s southwestern coast, the storm’s 185-mph sustained winds and sub-900 barometric pressure left meteorologists in awe and Jamaicans under the dark howling shadow of a monster churning over their heads. Yet, as horrifying as Melissa’s fury was this week, its destructive strength follows a pattern that has become all too unsurprising on a planet subjected to entirely preventable climate chaos.

“This is actually a complete catastrophe, and it’s really quite terrifying,” Jamaican-British climate activist Mikaela Loach told Democracy Now! “And it also makes me quite angry that it doesn’t have to be this way. This has been caused by the climate crisis, by fossil fuel companies. I think it’s important that we’re not just devastated and sad about this, but also that we are angry and direct that anger towards the people who are responsible.”

While Hurricane Melissa may be called a natural disaster, the conditions that make super storms like Melissa possible are anything but natural. As Loach and just about every climate scientist on Earth point out, the unprecedented warmth of ocean waters act like fuel for tropical cyclones, supercharging them to the point that Melissa was able to double its wind speeds in under 24 hours. Such rapid hurricane intensification is almost unheard of and is the result of unnaturally warm seawater that extends deep below the surface – water temperatures that are themselves directly linked to the fossil fuel industry and an economic system built around its carbon emissions.

That system, rooted in the exploitation of natural resources and labor in the name of corporate profits, also requires grotesque levels of inequality, which could be seen both before and after Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica.

It was, of course, the wealthiest of communities that enjoyed the means and resources to prepare and weather the storm. From the gated communities of New Kingston where residents quickly summoned workers to close their built-in storm shutters and fuel up generator tanks to the high-end hotels and office buildings outfitted with hurricane-proof glass, there stood one end of Jamaican society girding for Melissa’s wrath. On the other end, representing a much larger portion of the Jamaican people, were the poor and working-class communities with far fewer means to prepare for the tempest. From Kingston and beyond, this included thousands of Jamaicans living in ramshackle housing, with corrugated tin roofs that turned into propeller blades thrown into the air by 130-mph wind gusts. It included the fishing villages of Port Royal and other coastal areas, scrambling to shore up boats and flee inland away from the devastating storm surge. It included the shanty neighborhoods on the edge of waterways and canals, prone to severe flooding, as well as hillside hamlets perched along the steep slopes of Jamaica’s Blue Mountains that were swept away by dangerous landslides. Then there are the many rural areas that are likely to remain without power and communications for many weeks, along with the farming communities whose crops have been wiped out by the storm.

All of these people were placed in the path of a storm whose destructive power was exacerbated by the climate emergency of the corporate elite and wealthy nations whose profit-obsessed industries have turbocharged the Caribbean’s hurricane season.

Just a few days removed from Melissa’s torrent of deadly rainfall and winds, the extent of damage and fatalities are yet to be known. In the western parishes of the island where the eyewall of Melissa came ashore, entire communities have been cut off from civilization, unreachable by destroyed telecommunications networks and roads that have been washed away. Many of these communities, lying near the southern coast from 60 to 120 miles west of Kingston, are dealing with widespread structural failure, including flattened homes and roofs sheared off many buildings. In addition to relief operations being mobilized by the Jamaican government, efforts are under way among residents on the east side of the island to gather and transport donated supplies to communities that bore the brunt of Melissa. And the urgency is building for those communities as the shock and hunger have set in, along with reports of looting, i.e., acts of basic human survival. While staying alive in the coming days and weeks is the preoccupation for survivors in these hard-hit areas, the daunting months of clean-up and rebuilding ahead compounds the crippling hardship they are carrying right now.

Back in Kingston, the economic and infrastructural disparities seen in the lead-up to the storm persist in its aftermath. While more than 70 percent of the island remains without electricity, some of the wealthiest parts of Kingston – those that were armed with generators and thus suffered less than a few hours or minutes without lights in their homes – seem to be among the first communities with restored grid power. On the other hand, many neighborhoods within the poorer sections of Kingston continue to have no power and, in many cases, no running water.

Such is the nature of capitalism and its attendant regime of climate disasters, bringing the devastation of extreme weather patterns – induced by the excessive greenhouse gas emissions of rich nations – upon the people of smaller nations who are the least responsible for global climate changes. The disparate impacts are felt on a global scale and at the local level among classes within affected regions.

Disasters like Hurricane Melissa have historically been used by business interests to remake entire cities into free-market dystopias, displacing poorer communities to make way for investment opportunities. The market vultures of what author and activist Naomi Klein calls disaster capitalism may soon be circling Jamaica, poised to prey upon the storm’s victims and profit from the wreckage.

In fact, climate capitalists are already watching post-Melissa Jamaica as a test case for bond markets. The Jamaican government was recently issued a $150-million “catastrophe bond” which appears set for a full payout to partially cover rebuilding efforts. These bonds may offer a temporary solution for climate-vulnerable countries but, as property insurers have increasingly pulled out of high-risk areas in the path of extreme weather and natural disasters, it seems likely that U.S. and European investors will become more reluctant to buy in to catastrophe bonds for hurricane-prone areas like Jamaica as such disasters inevitably become more common. In any event, the damage from Melissa will total far more than $150 million and Jamaica will need to take on more debt from global financial institutions to rebuild roads and infrastructure. This includes the more standard World Bank loans which have traditionally kept countries like Jamaica under the neocolonial boot of wealthy nations, with loans conditioned on exploitative trade policies, privatization, and gutted public services within poorer, indebted countries.

So, while Jamaica and Hurricane Melissa fade from headlines over the next week or so, the destructive forces of capitalism and Mother Nature’s vengeance will continue to collide over the island.

The post With Hurricane Melissa, Capitalism and Climate Chaos Bring Devastation to Jamaica appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In the wake of two years of the globally broadcast extermination of the people of Palestine, three distinct tracks of international response have emerged. One is grounded in justice, international law, human rights, and accountability. Two others are dedicated to impunity, the continued subjugation of the victims, and the normalization of the perpetrator regime.

In the diplomatic struggle that has ensued, the justice track is under sustained attack. Left to their own devices, most states — the directly complicit and the timid alike — will undoubtedly take the easy way out, opting for impunity and normalization. But a growing people’s movement from across the globe is mobilized to demand justice.

A Textbook Genocide

The roots of the genocide in Palestine run deep, through a century of racist colonization, the Nakba of 1947-1948, eight decades of apartheid, 58 years of brutal occupation, and generations of persecution.

Now, for the past two years, the world has watched in horror as the Israeli regime planned, announced, perpetrated, and celebrated the accelerated genocide of the Palestinian people. Adding to the horror of this historic atrocity has been the ruthless complicity of so many governments, media corporations, weapons and tech companies, and Israel proxy groups planted among the populations of the West.

The unprecedented nature of this genocide has been driven home by so many terrifying “firsts.”

The first live-streamed genocide, witnessed by millions around the world. The first hi-tech genocide, perpetrated with state-of-the-art weapons systems, killer drones, autonomous weapons, surveillance technologies, and artificial intelligence. And the first globalized genocide, perpetrated with the direct and enthusiastic participation of so many governments (foremost among them the U.S., U.K., and Germany), and the active complicity so many corporations and organizations across the globe. Zionist repression has extended far beyond the shores of Palestine, with complicit Western institutions using state power to oppress and silence all who dare to speak out against the genocide and their governments’ complicity in it.

At the same time, in just two years, the Israeli regime has shattered record after bloody record for the murder of several categories of protected persons, including medical personnel, journalists, aid workers, UN staff, and children, as well as one of the highest civilian casualty rates ever recorded.

And it has achieved the dubious distinction of creating the widest global consensus on the perpetration of the crime of genocide ever recorded, with declarations of genocide issued by the UN’s Commission of Inquiry, its independent human rights rapporteurs, leading international human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, leading Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, the leading association of genocide scholars, and international lawyers across the world.

This is quintessential genocide, its genocidal intent declared out loud by Israeli leaders from the start, followed by a horrific catalogue of genocidal acts carried out with a violence as ruthless as it is systematic. Neighborhood after neighborhood, town after town, hospital after hospital, school after school, shelter after shelter, church after church, mosque after mosque, field after field, food store after food store.

Two years of siege, blocking aid, food, water, medicine, fuel, and every essential of human life. A chain of massacres, mass abductions, torture camps, sexual violence, intentionally imposed disease and starvation. Palestinian toddlers shot by snipers for sport. Palestinian captives tortured to death. Gaza reduced to a moonscape.

The Justice Track

So blatant were its crimes that within months of the launch of its genocidal onslaught, the Israeli regime was on trial for genocide in the World Court (ICJ) and its leaders were indicted for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Indeed, experts had sounded the genocide alarm already in October of 2023. And since then, human rights monitors have collected volumes of evidence.

Even as complicit states worked to buttress the impunity of the Israeli regime, the global public demand for accountability grew ever louder. It would ultimately compel the government of South Africa to brings it historic ICJ case against the regime under the United Nations Genocide Convention in December of 2023. The Court found the allegations of genocide plausible in January of 2024 and issued what would be the first of a series of provisional measures binding on the Israeli regime. Months later, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity.

In July of 2024, the ICJ would also issue a landmark advisory opinion concluding that Israel was committing apartheid and racial segregation, that all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza are unlawfully occupied, that Israel must remove all settlements, settlers, soldiers, and occupation infrastructure, dismantle the apartheid wall in the West Bank, provide reparations to the Palestinians, and allow all those forced out to return home. The Court said that all states have a legal obligation not to recognize or assist the occupation and are obliged to help to bring an end to Israel’s occupation and other violations. And it found that all states must end all treaty relations with Israel that relate to the Palestinian territories, cease all economic, trade, and investment relations connected to the occupied territories.

Importantly, the Court rejected arguments by the U.S. and other Western governments that sought to claim that the Court should defer to post-Oslo negotiations between the occupier and the occupied, and to the politics of the Security Council, rather than the application of international law. The Court, in rejecting these claims, declared that such negotiations and agreements do not and cannot trump the rights of the Palestinians and the obligations of Israel under international human rights and humanitarian law. The Court found first that, in any event, the parties have to exercise any powers and responsibilities under those agreements with due regard for the norms and principles of international law.

Invoking article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Court then put the matter to rest for good, reminding states that, as a matter of law, “the protected population ‘shall not be deprived’ of the benefits of the Convention ‘by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power.’”

“For this reason,” the Court continued, “the Oslo Accords cannot be understood to detract from Israel’s obligations under the pertinent rules of international law applicable in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” With the bang of a gavel, the Court had ended decades of Israeli legal exceptionalism and launched a process for the dismantling of the Western constructed Israeli wall of impunity.

In the meantime, at the United Nations, international human rights investigators were issuing their own findings of Israeli regime apartheid and genocide. The UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine issued a series of powerful reportsdocumenting these crimes, followed by further reports from the UN’s thematic human rights rapporteurs, and, ultimately a UN-mandated Commission of Inquiry.

Outside the UN, international human rights organizations, as well as those in Palestine and Israel, joined the global consensus, as did prominent international lawyers and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, sealing the global consensus on genocide in Palestine.

Thereafter, the findings of the judicial and expert bodies of the international system finally broke through to the political bodies of the UN. On September 18, 2024, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a dramatic resolution effectively codifying the findings of the ICJ, declaring the occupation and apartheid unlawful, demanding an end to the entire occupation and the assault on Gaza, and setting a one-year deadline for Israeli compliance, after which the UNGA promised further measures.

For the first time in decades, the stage was set for real Israel regime accountability.

Global civil society activists, led by representatives of Palestinian civil society, seized on the unprecedented opportunity of the one-year deadline (violated entirely by the Israeli regime) to formulate an agenda for Israeli accountability and Palestinian protection. They developed a plan for adoption in the UNGA at the end of the deadline that would use the extraordinary power of the Assembly under the Uniting for Peace process to circumvent the U.S. veto in the Security Council and mandate concrete measures for accountability and protection.

This would include a UNGA call for sanctions, a military embargo, the rejection of the credentials of the Israeli regime, the establishment of a criminal tribunal, the reactivation of the UN’s anti-apartheid mechanisms, and the mandating of a UN protection force to protect civilians, ensure humanitarian aid, preserve evidence of Israeli crimes, and facilitate reconstruction. Importantly, the protection force would be mandated on the basis of Palestinian consent, with no Chapter 7 power to impose itself against the will of the indigenous people, thus obviating fears of a proxy occupation.

The initiative was subsequently embraced by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who, in his speech before the 80th Session of the UNGA, promised to introduce the proposal, as a draft resolution was prepared and diplomatic action proceeded to secure other co-sponsors.

The French-Saudi Track

But the unprecedented possibility for Israeli accountability presented by the UNGA resolution and deadline was not lost on Israel’s allies either, who worked feverishly to forestall any possibility of such accountability coming into force.

The tactics they adopted had become all too familiar during the decades of Oslo: divert attention away from accountability under international law and into a loose political process and the promise of a possible Palestinian state at some point in the future; compel Palestinians to negotiate for their rights with their oppressor; and work to normalize the Israeli regime as it consolidates its conquest of Palestine.

In sum, the true focus of these initiatives is not on saving Palestine, but rather on saving Israel and Zionism, even in the wake of a genocide.

French President Emannuel Macron made the intentions of his initiative clear in a letter to his Israeli regime counterpart in September of 2025. In it, he openly brags about his efforts in France to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism in order to punish dissent to his pro-Israel rule, and then tells Netanyahu that his actions at the UN (including recognizing an unarmed Palestinian Bantustan) are meant “to transform the military gains Israel has achieved on regional fronts into a lasting political victory, to the benefit of its security and prosperity…to [secure] Israel’s …full regional integration in the Middle East…its normalization…[and] the end of Hamas.”

In other words, the French-Saudi proposal is not about holding the regime accountable for its genocide and aggression in the region, but rather to shore up the Zionist project in Western Asia, to consolidate its unlawful gains, and to normalize it on the international stage.

The final product of the French-Saudi proposal was the New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, endorsed by the UNGA in September of 2025, just eight days before the expiration of the deadline for Israeli compliance set by Assembly. Notably, the declaration mentions neither the genocide nor the crime of apartheid and contains no accountability measures for the Israeli regime whatsoever. It was, in effect, a last-minute defensive maneuver to preserve the wall of Israeli impunity that the West had so carefully built up over eight decades.

In essence, the declaration reads like a blueprint for the further entrenching of the unjust status quo that existed before October of 2023, but with some extra rewards for Israel, and an amorphous promise of a limited Palestinian state somewhere down the road. Indeed, it promises to advance normalization and regional cooperation for Israel on trade, infrastructure, energy, and security. Ignoring justice and accountability altogether, the declaration instead dedicates itself to “peace, security, and stability,” reduces the genocide in Gaza to an armed conflict in which both sides are at fault, and declares yet another political process toward a “two-state solution” as the only way forward. Ignoring the U.S. role as a co-perpetrator in the genocide, it explicitly supports the role of the U.S. as a mediator (alongside Egypt and Qatar).

While it demands that Hamas free all Israeli captives, it only provides for the “exchange” of some Palestinian captives. And in flagrant disregard for the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, it purports to impose its own governance framework, with the Palestinian Authority (with “international support”) to be in charge of all Palestinian territory, and Hamas to be excluded from governance in Gaza. Eventual elections would be open only to those committed to respect the PLO (and therefore the PA) political platform.

Palestinian resistance groups defending their land and people against occupation, apartheid, and genocide are to be disarmed under the plan, while the Israeli perpetrator regime faces no such disarmament, and any eventual Palestinian state is itself envisaged by the plan to be a disarmed and defenseless entity. In other provisions, the plan would promote “deradicalization,” a dangerous concept born of the so-called “global war on terrorism,” in which populations are subjected to propaganda programmes (and often punitive measures) designed to discourage resistance to foreign domination and abusive regimes — despite the fact that such resistance is a right under international law.

The plan also proposes the deployment of troops to Palestine under a “stabilization mission” to be mandated by the UN Security Council. While the mandate of the mission would include civilian protection and security guarantees for Palestine, it would also be responsible for transferring “internal security responsibilities” to the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, disarming all other factions, providing “border security” (i.e., ensure no Palestinians escape from the Gaza cage), and for guaranteeing security for the (hyper-armed, nuclear capable, and thoroughly militarized) Israeli regime.

In other words, the mission would keep an eye on all Palestinian resistance and guarantee the impunity of the Israeli regime.

The Trump Track

Following up on his earlier King Leopold-esque promise to “own Gaza” and to build a colonized Riviera on the bones of its genocided population, Trump announced his 20-point plan at the end of September.

In the long-standing tradition of Western imperial arrogance in Palestine dating back to Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration, Trump’s 20 points were not negotiated with the Palestinians before he issued them. Indeed, Palestinians were not consulted or involved in their drafting. Rather, in a blatant act of 21st Century gunboat diplomacy, they were presented as a unilateral dictate from the U.S.-Israel axis, accompanied by violent threats of total destruction if they were not accepted.

The document was the product of an international rogue’s gallery of characters — which, in addition to genocide-complicit Trump and ICC-indicted fugitive Netanyahu, included notorious figures like Iraq war criminal Tony Blair and Trump’s billionaire son-in-law (and family friend of Netanyahu) Jared Kushner. The group did consult some of its complicit Arab and Muslim allies, but they subsequently complained that the document had been changed in fundamental ways by Trump and Netanyahu after their endorsement.

Netanyahu, who was allowed to make last-minute changes to the text before issuance, then stood with Trump to say he agreed to it — but within hours, was publicly renouncing elements of the plan and pledging that there would never be a Palestinian state, and that Israeli soldiers would not leave Gaza.

To be clear, this is not a peace plan or a plan for ending the Israel Palestine conflict. It provides no promise of Palestinian liberation, no restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people, and no guarantee of Palestinian statehood and self-determination. Instead, it provides a vague and hyper-qualified reference to “conditions” that “may emerge” sometime in the future, if Gaza re-development advances, and if the PA reforms to the satisfaction of the U.S. imperial overlords. Outrageously, the plan concludes with the U.S. arrogating to itself the role of mediator between Palestine and its Israeli occupier for any future political settlement, which would guarantee many more horrific decades of Palestinian persecution as they are forced to negotiate for their rights with their oppressor and that oppressor’s chief sponsor.

Tellingly, the 20 points contain not a word about the genocide, about apartheid, or about root causes. There is to be no accountability for the perpetrators. No redress for the victims. And the plan promises not the deradicalization of the regime perpetrating genocide, but rather of the Palestinian victims of that genocide. It is directed at ensuring that the exterminated people of Gaza “pose no threat” to its neighbors, with no guarantee that the Israeli regime, the perpetrator of the genocide, the occupier of three Arab nations, and the author of serial aggression against half a dozen neighboring countries and a spate of transnational assassinations will pose no threat. Palestinian security forces will be vetted by the U.S.-led stabilization force. There will be no such vetting of Israeli forces, the ranks of which are rife with perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

The roots of this plan in Trump’s earlier threat to “own Gaza” and to exploit a “Gaza Riveria,” are revealed in the text itself. Under Trump’s new plan, Gaza will be ruled by a colonial body headed by Donald Trump himself, with another prominent place on the body held by disgraced UK politician Tony Blair. The body, in typical Trumpian style, is dubbed “The Board of Peace.”

This body would set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza (through the “Trump Economic Development Plan”), positioning it to control all resources coming in from Gulf and European donors, with no oversight. The possibility of staggering levels of corruption would seem self-evident. The unchecked external control, extraction, and exploitation of Palestine’s economic resources would be inevitable. And note that there is no mention of Israel’s international legal obligations to provide compensation and reparations for the damage it has inflicted on Gaza.

While the plan usurps Palestinian agency by controlling Palestinian resources and designating Palestinian leaders, it also purports to exclude some Palestinians from the right to be involved in the governance of their own country. The role of Hamas, for example, should be a matter for Hamas and the Palestinian people to decide. Under this plan, Hamas is to be excluded not by decision of the Palestinian people, but rather by dictate from the U.S., which has decreed that Hamas (“and other factions”) will not have any role in the governance of Gaza, “directly, indirectly, or in any form.”

And in other provisions, the resistance is to be entirely disarmed, and its military infrastructure destroyed. Notably, the plan also provides for the destruction of Gaza’s tunnels, which have been essential not only for the defense of the territory, but also for the critical movement of persons and goods during the many unlawful Israeli sieges on the territory.

Reminiscent of the Eight Nation Invasion of China in 1900, the plan even proposes a multinational proxy occupation force led by the U.S. with the participation of “Arab and international partners” that will “stabilize” Gaza, impose “internal security,” secure the borders (i.e., ensure the continued caging of the Palestinians), and prevent the Palestinians from rearming, leaving them defenseless against Israeli aggression.

The plan provides no expectation of a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, only the possibility of a phased redeployment to the margins of Gaza and the maintenance of an Israeli “security perimeter” to remain indefinitely inside Gaza. And any partial withdrawal of Israeli regime forces that may occur is to be based on as yet undefined “standards, milestones, and time frames” that are linked to the disarming of Palestinians, and that will be determined by the U.S., by the stabilization force headed by the U.S., and by the Israeli forces that are armed, funded, and supported by the U.S. — yet another indicator of the proxy occupation nature of the plan.

While the plan provides for a significant increase in aid to the survivors of the genocide in Gaza, that aid is (unlawfully) conditioned on the acceptance by Hamas of Trump’s terms — and even then, aid quantities would be limited by the terms of the previous ceasefire of January 19, 2025. Similarly, opening of the Rafah crossing is to be subject to the same mechanism implemented under the January agreement, and thus will be still subject to continued restrictions. And it provides for the possible denial of humanitarian aid to certain areas of Gaza if Hamas is deemed to have delayed the process.

Where key details are scarce in the plan, there is also reason for worry, given that the document explicitly cites Trump’s 2020 peace plan (as well as the French-Saudi proposal described above) as part of the basis for subsequent stages in the process. Readers will recall that the 2020 plan included the further expansion of Israeli territory, the annexation of much of the West Bank, the renunciation of all Palestinian legal claims against Israel, the exclusion of Palestine from East Jerusalem, and the creation of an archipelago of Palestinian Bantustans surrounded by Israeli settlements, borders, and walls.

Even the more concrete elements of the plan are heavily weighted in favor of the Israeli perpetrator and against the besieged and persecuted Palestinian people.

For example, the release of all Israeli captives (of whom there are only a few dozen) is to take place within 72 hours. The release of Palestinian captives unlawfully held by Israel (of whom there are some 11,000) on the other hand, will only include a small proportion of those held at some unspecified time after all Israelis are returned. In all, less than 2,000 of the 11,000 Palestinian captives held by Israel are to be released.

Similarly, the remains of approximately 25 Israeli captives are thought to be held in Gaza, while the remains of some 2,000 deceased Palestinians are held by the Israeli regime. While the Trump plan stipulates the release of all Israeli remains, it only provides for the release of a portion of the Palestinian remains.

And some potentially positive provisions of the document are undercut by contradictory provisions elsewhere in the document.

For example, the document promises a ceasefire, amnesty, and safe passage for Hamas members; a commitment that no one will be forced to leave Gaza and that those who wish to leave will be free to do so and to return; that Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza; and that aid will flow through the UN and Red Crescent without interference.

However, while committing to the free flow of aid, it elsewhere implicitly imposes restrictions on aid. While promising no Israeli occupation, it also implies that Israeli regime forces will remain in Gaza indefinitely. And vague wording leaves unclear whether the essential role of UNRWA (which the U.S. and Israel have falsely claimed is associated with Hamas) will be allowed, and whether the genocide-complicit role of the perfidious GHF scheme (which the U.S. falsely claims is not associated with the Israeli regime) will be allowed to continue.

In parts, the Trump plan itself is unlawful. The conditioning of humanitarian aid, implicit threats of collective punishment if Hamas does not agree, the explicit denial of Palestinian self-determination, restrictions on political rights, the requirement that Palestinians negotiate for their inalienable human rights with their oppressors, and the failure to seek accountability for Israeli crimes including genocide, are all breaches of the international legal obligations of the United States.

For its part, Hamas seized on the practical and implementable elements of the first phase of the plan (ceasefire, exchange of captives, etc.) for negotiation while refusing to surrender the cause of Palestine or to submit to the remainder of the document. Hamas said that the rest of the issues in the document were to be “discussed within a comprehensive Palestinian national framework, in which Hamas will be included and will contribute with full responsibility.”

And the outright rejection of the plan by representatives of Palestinian civil society demonstrates the dignified steadfastness of Palestinian society in struggling for their freedom, even in the darkest of times.

The Struggle Continues

As this goes to press, moves are underway to effectively merge the French-Saudi plan with the Trump plan, and to have it blessed in the UN Security Council. But the colonial machinations of Trump, Macron, and others cannot obscure the fundamental reality confronting the world today: a single colonial regime planted in the heart of Western Asia is perpetrating apartheid, genocide, belligerent occupation, and serial aggression across the region and corrupting governments and institutions far beyond.

The unprecedented, Western-sponsored impunity of that regime is undercutting the very sustainability of international law, trampling on human rights, and jeopardizing peace and security across the region. Finally holding that regime accountable remains a vital, even existential imperative for the world.

In the meantime, for a people enduring genocide, any ceasefire is to be celebrated. But few are under the illusion that this ceasefire means a definitive end to the genocide, or the beginning of Palestinian freedom. No sustainable peace can be built on the weak foundation of Trump’s vanity and greed, Macron’s colonial nostalgia, or Netanyahu’s deceit and racist brutality.

Only justice can provide that foundation. And among the three tracks discussed in this article, only one travels toward justice.

Palestinian society has pointed the way, the UN human rights mechanisms, the ICJ, and the landmark UNGA resolution of September 2024 have joined the cause, and the world has risen up in solidarity. Now more than ever, that solidarity must be sustained, multiplied, and acted upon. The Israeli regime, its co-perpetrators in Washington, its proxies across the West, complicit governments, media companies that have supported the genocide, and corporations that have profited from it must all be held accountable if justice is to be done.

Normalization of the Israeli regime and its crimes must end. Genocide must be a red line. And Palestine must be free.

The post Terms of Surrender: the Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice in Palestine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In the wake of two years of the globally broadcast extermination of the people of Palestine, three distinct tracks of international response have emerged. One is grounded in justice, international law, human rights, and accountability. Two others are dedicated to impunity, the continued subjugation of the victims, and the normalization of the perpetrator regime.

In the diplomatic struggle that has ensued, the justice track is under sustained attack. Left to their own devices, most states — the directly complicit and the timid alike — will undoubtedly take the easy way out, opting for impunity and normalization. But a growing people’s movement from across the globe is mobilized to demand justice.

A Textbook Genocide

The roots of the genocide in Palestine run deep, through a century of racist colonization, the Nakba of 1947-1948, eight decades of apartheid, 58 years of brutal occupation, and generations of persecution.

Now, for the past two years, the world has watched in horror as the Israeli regime planned, announced, perpetrated, and celebrated the accelerated genocide of the Palestinian people. Adding to the horror of this historic atrocity has been the ruthless complicity of so many governments, media corporations, weapons and tech companies, and Israel proxy groups planted among the populations of the West.

The unprecedented nature of this genocide has been driven home by so many terrifying “firsts.”

The first live-streamed genocide, witnessed by millions around the world. The first hi-tech genocide, perpetrated with state-of-the-art weapons systems, killer drones, autonomous weapons, surveillance technologies, and artificial intelligence. And the first globalized genocide, perpetrated with the direct and enthusiastic participation of so many governments (foremost among them the U.S., U.K., and Germany), and the active complicity so many corporations and organizations across the globe. Zionist repression has extended far beyond the shores of Palestine, with complicit Western institutions using state power to oppress and silence all who dare to speak out against the genocide and their governments’ complicity in it.

At the same time, in just two years, the Israeli regime has shattered record after bloody record for the murder of several categories of protected persons, including medical personnel, journalists, aid workers, UN staff, and children, as well as one of the highest civilian casualty rates ever recorded.

And it has achieved the dubious distinction of creating the widest global consensus on the perpetration of the crime of genocide ever recorded, with declarations of genocide issued by the UN’s Commission of Inquiry, its independent human rights rapporteurs, leading international human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, leading Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, the leading association of genocide scholars, and international lawyers across the world.

This is quintessential genocide, its genocidal intent declared out loud by Israeli leaders from the start, followed by a horrific catalogue of genocidal acts carried out with a violence as ruthless as it is systematic. Neighborhood after neighborhood, town after town, hospital after hospital, school after school, shelter after shelter, church after church, mosque after mosque, field after field, food store after food store.

Two years of siege, blocking aid, food, water, medicine, fuel, and every essential of human life. A chain of massacres, mass abductions, torture camps, sexual violence, intentionally imposed disease and starvation. Palestinian toddlers shot by snipers for sport. Palestinian captives tortured to death. Gaza reduced to a moonscape.

The Justice Track

So blatant were its crimes that within months of the launch of its genocidal onslaught, the Israeli regime was on trial for genocide in the World Court (ICJ) and its leaders were indicted for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Indeed, experts had sounded the genocide alarm already in October of 2023. And since then, human rights monitors have collected volumes of evidence.

Even as complicit states worked to buttress the impunity of the Israeli regime, the global public demand for accountability grew ever louder. It would ultimately compel the government of South Africa to brings it historic ICJ case against the regime under the United Nations Genocide Convention in December of 2023. The Court found the allegations of genocide plausible in January of 2024 and issued what would be the first of a series of provisional measures binding on the Israeli regime. Months later, the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity.

In July of 2024, the ICJ would also issue a landmark advisory opinion concluding that Israel was committing apartheid and racial segregation, that all of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza are unlawfully occupied, that Israel must remove all settlements, settlers, soldiers, and occupation infrastructure, dismantle the apartheid wall in the West Bank, provide reparations to the Palestinians, and allow all those forced out to return home. The Court said that all states have a legal obligation not to recognize or assist the occupation and are obliged to help to bring an end to Israel’s occupation and other violations. And it found that all states must end all treaty relations with Israel that relate to the Palestinian territories, cease all economic, trade, and investment relations connected to the occupied territories.

Importantly, the Court rejected arguments by the U.S. and other Western governments that sought to claim that the Court should defer to post-Oslo negotiations between the occupier and the occupied, and to the politics of the Security Council, rather than the application of international law. The Court, in rejecting these claims, declared that such negotiations and agreements do not and cannot trump the rights of the Palestinians and the obligations of Israel under international human rights and humanitarian law. The Court found first that, in any event, the parties have to exercise any powers and responsibilities under those agreements with due regard for the norms and principles of international law.

Invoking article 47 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Court then put the matter to rest for good, reminding states that, as a matter of law, “the protected population ‘shall not be deprived’ of the benefits of the Convention ‘by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the Occupying Power.’”

“For this reason,” the Court continued, “the Oslo Accords cannot be understood to detract from Israel’s obligations under the pertinent rules of international law applicable in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” With the bang of a gavel, the Court had ended decades of Israeli legal exceptionalism and launched a process for the dismantling of the Western constructed Israeli wall of impunity.

In the meantime, at the United Nations, international human rights investigators were issuing their own findings of Israeli regime apartheid and genocide. The UN’s Special Rapporteur on human rights in Palestine issued a series of powerful reportsdocumenting these crimes, followed by further reports from the UN’s thematic human rights rapporteurs, and, ultimately a UN-mandated Commission of Inquiry.

Outside the UN, international human rights organizations, as well as those in Palestine and Israel, joined the global consensus, as did prominent international lawyers and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, sealing the global consensus on genocide in Palestine.

Thereafter, the findings of the judicial and expert bodies of the international system finally broke through to the political bodies of the UN. On September 18, 2024, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a dramatic resolution effectively codifying the findings of the ICJ, declaring the occupation and apartheid unlawful, demanding an end to the entire occupation and the assault on Gaza, and setting a one-year deadline for Israeli compliance, after which the UNGA promised further measures.

For the first time in decades, the stage was set for real Israel regime accountability.

Global civil society activists, led by representatives of Palestinian civil society, seized on the unprecedented opportunity of the one-year deadline (violated entirely by the Israeli regime) to formulate an agenda for Israeli accountability and Palestinian protection. They developed a plan for adoption in the UNGA at the end of the deadline that would use the extraordinary power of the Assembly under the Uniting for Peace process to circumvent the U.S. veto in the Security Council and mandate concrete measures for accountability and protection.

This would include a UNGA call for sanctions, a military embargo, the rejection of the credentials of the Israeli regime, the establishment of a criminal tribunal, the reactivation of the UN’s anti-apartheid mechanisms, and the mandating of a UN protection force to protect civilians, ensure humanitarian aid, preserve evidence of Israeli crimes, and facilitate reconstruction. Importantly, the protection force would be mandated on the basis of Palestinian consent, with no Chapter 7 power to impose itself against the will of the indigenous people, thus obviating fears of a proxy occupation.

The initiative was subsequently embraced by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who, in his speech before the 80th Session of the UNGA, promised to introduce the proposal, as a draft resolution was prepared and diplomatic action proceeded to secure other co-sponsors.

The French-Saudi Track

But the unprecedented possibility for Israeli accountability presented by the UNGA resolution and deadline was not lost on Israel’s allies either, who worked feverishly to forestall any possibility of such accountability coming into force.

The tactics they adopted had become all too familiar during the decades of Oslo: divert attention away from accountability under international law and into a loose political process and the promise of a possible Palestinian state at some point in the future; compel Palestinians to negotiate for their rights with their oppressor; and work to normalize the Israeli regime as it consolidates its conquest of Palestine.

In sum, the true focus of these initiatives is not on saving Palestine, but rather on saving Israel and Zionism, even in the wake of a genocide.

French President Emannuel Macron made the intentions of his initiative clear in a letter to his Israeli regime counterpart in September of 2025. In it, he openly brags about his efforts in France to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism in order to punish dissent to his pro-Israel rule, and then tells Netanyahu that his actions at the UN (including recognizing an unarmed Palestinian Bantustan) are meant “to transform the military gains Israel has achieved on regional fronts into a lasting political victory, to the benefit of its security and prosperity…to [secure] Israel’s …full regional integration in the Middle East…its normalization…[and] the end of Hamas.”

In other words, the French-Saudi proposal is not about holding the regime accountable for its genocide and aggression in the region, but rather to shore up the Zionist project in Western Asia, to consolidate its unlawful gains, and to normalize it on the international stage.

The final product of the French-Saudi proposal was the New York Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution, endorsed by the UNGA in September of 2025, just eight days before the expiration of the deadline for Israeli compliance set by Assembly. Notably, the declaration mentions neither the genocide nor the crime of apartheid and contains no accountability measures for the Israeli regime whatsoever. It was, in effect, a last-minute defensive maneuver to preserve the wall of Israeli impunity that the West had so carefully built up over eight decades.

In essence, the declaration reads like a blueprint for the further entrenching of the unjust status quo that existed before October of 2023, but with some extra rewards for Israel, and an amorphous promise of a limited Palestinian state somewhere down the road. Indeed, it promises to advance normalization and regional cooperation for Israel on trade, infrastructure, energy, and security. Ignoring justice and accountability altogether, the declaration instead dedicates itself to “peace, security, and stability,” reduces the genocide in Gaza to an armed conflict in which both sides are at fault, and declares yet another political process toward a “two-state solution” as the only way forward. Ignoring the U.S. role as a co-perpetrator in the genocide, it explicitly supports the role of the U.S. as a mediator (alongside Egypt and Qatar).

While it demands that Hamas free all Israeli captives, it only provides for the “exchange” of some Palestinian captives. And in flagrant disregard for the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, it purports to impose its own governance framework, with the Palestinian Authority (with “international support”) to be in charge of all Palestinian territory, and Hamas to be excluded from governance in Gaza. Eventual elections would be open only to those committed to respect the PLO (and therefore the PA) political platform.

Palestinian resistance groups defending their land and people against occupation, apartheid, and genocide are to be disarmed under the plan, while the Israeli perpetrator regime faces no such disarmament, and any eventual Palestinian state is itself envisaged by the plan to be a disarmed and defenseless entity. In other provisions, the plan would promote “deradicalization,” a dangerous concept born of the so-called “global war on terrorism,” in which populations are subjected to propaganda programmes (and often punitive measures) designed to discourage resistance to foreign domination and abusive regimes — despite the fact that such resistance is a right under international law.

The plan also proposes the deployment of troops to Palestine under a “stabilization mission” to be mandated by the UN Security Council. While the mandate of the mission would include civilian protection and security guarantees for Palestine, it would also be responsible for transferring “internal security responsibilities” to the security forces of the Palestinian Authority, disarming all other factions, providing “border security” (i.e., ensure no Palestinians escape from the Gaza cage), and for guaranteeing security for the (hyper-armed, nuclear capable, and thoroughly militarized) Israeli regime.

In other words, the mission would keep an eye on all Palestinian resistance and guarantee the impunity of the Israeli regime.

The Trump Track

Following up on his earlier King Leopold-esque promise to “own Gaza” and to build a colonized Riviera on the bones of its genocided population, Trump announced his 20-point plan at the end of September.

In the long-standing tradition of Western imperial arrogance in Palestine dating back to Sykes-Picot and the Balfour Declaration, Trump’s 20 points were not negotiated with the Palestinians before he issued them. Indeed, Palestinians were not consulted or involved in their drafting. Rather, in a blatant act of 21st Century gunboat diplomacy, they were presented as a unilateral dictate from the U.S.-Israel axis, accompanied by violent threats of total destruction if they were not accepted.

The document was the product of an international rogue’s gallery of characters — which, in addition to genocide-complicit Trump and ICC-indicted fugitive Netanyahu, included notorious figures like Iraq war criminal Tony Blair and Trump’s billionaire son-in-law (and family friend of Netanyahu) Jared Kushner. The group did consult some of its complicit Arab and Muslim allies, but they subsequently complained that the document had been changed in fundamental ways by Trump and Netanyahu after their endorsement.

Netanyahu, who was allowed to make last-minute changes to the text before issuance, then stood with Trump to say he agreed to it — but within hours, was publicly renouncing elements of the plan and pledging that there would never be a Palestinian state, and that Israeli soldiers would not leave Gaza.

To be clear, this is not a peace plan or a plan for ending the Israel Palestine conflict. It provides no promise of Palestinian liberation, no restoration of the rights of the Palestinian people, and no guarantee of Palestinian statehood and self-determination. Instead, it provides a vague and hyper-qualified reference to “conditions” that “may emerge” sometime in the future, if Gaza re-development advances, and if the PA reforms to the satisfaction of the U.S. imperial overlords. Outrageously, the plan concludes with the U.S. arrogating to itself the role of mediator between Palestine and its Israeli occupier for any future political settlement, which would guarantee many more horrific decades of Palestinian persecution as they are forced to negotiate for their rights with their oppressor and that oppressor’s chief sponsor.

Tellingly, the 20 points contain not a word about the genocide, about apartheid, or about root causes. There is to be no accountability for the perpetrators. No redress for the victims. And the plan promises not the deradicalization of the regime perpetrating genocide, but rather of the Palestinian victims of that genocide. It is directed at ensuring that the exterminated people of Gaza “pose no threat” to its neighbors, with no guarantee that the Israeli regime, the perpetrator of the genocide, the occupier of three Arab nations, and the author of serial aggression against half a dozen neighboring countries and a spate of transnational assassinations will pose no threat. Palestinian security forces will be vetted by the U.S.-led stabilization force. There will be no such vetting of Israeli forces, the ranks of which are rife with perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

The roots of this plan in Trump’s earlier threat to “own Gaza” and to exploit a “Gaza Riveria,” are revealed in the text itself. Under Trump’s new plan, Gaza will be ruled by a colonial body headed by Donald Trump himself, with another prominent place on the body held by disgraced UK politician Tony Blair. The body, in typical Trumpian style, is dubbed “The Board of Peace.”

This body would set the framework and handle the funding for the redevelopment of Gaza (through the “Trump Economic Development Plan”), positioning it to control all resources coming in from Gulf and European donors, with no oversight. The possibility of staggering levels of corruption would seem self-evident. The unchecked external control, extraction, and exploitation of Palestine’s economic resources would be inevitable. And note that there is no mention of Israel’s international legal obligations to provide compensation and reparations for the damage it has inflicted on Gaza.

While the plan usurps Palestinian agency by controlling Palestinian resources and designating Palestinian leaders, it also purports to exclude some Palestinians from the right to be involved in the governance of their own country. The role of Hamas, for example, should be a matter for Hamas and the Palestinian people to decide. Under this plan, Hamas is to be excluded not by decision of the Palestinian people, but rather by dictate from the U.S., which has decreed that Hamas (“and other factions”) will not have any role in the governance of Gaza, “directly, indirectly, or in any form.”

And in other provisions, the resistance is to be entirely disarmed, and its military infrastructure destroyed. Notably, the plan also provides for the destruction of Gaza’s tunnels, which have been essential not only for the defense of the territory, but also for the critical movement of persons and goods during the many unlawful Israeli sieges on the territory.

Reminiscent of the Eight Nation Invasion of China in 1900, the plan even proposes a multinational proxy occupation force led by the U.S. with the participation of “Arab and international partners” that will “stabilize” Gaza, impose “internal security,” secure the borders (i.e., ensure the continued caging of the Palestinians), and prevent the Palestinians from rearming, leaving them defenseless against Israeli aggression.

The plan provides no expectation of a complete Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, only the possibility of a phased redeployment to the margins of Gaza and the maintenance of an Israeli “security perimeter” to remain indefinitely inside Gaza. And any partial withdrawal of Israeli regime forces that may occur is to be based on as yet undefined “standards, milestones, and time frames” that are linked to the disarming of Palestinians, and that will be determined by the U.S., by the stabilization force headed by the U.S., and by the Israeli forces that are armed, funded, and supported by the U.S. — yet another indicator of the proxy occupation nature of the plan.

While the plan provides for a significant increase in aid to the survivors of the genocide in Gaza, that aid is (unlawfully) conditioned on the acceptance by Hamas of Trump’s terms — and even then, aid quantities would be limited by the terms of the previous ceasefire of January 19, 2025. Similarly, opening of the Rafah crossing is to be subject to the same mechanism implemented under the January agreement, and thus will be still subject to continued restrictions. And it provides for the possible denial of humanitarian aid to certain areas of Gaza if Hamas is deemed to have delayed the process.

Where key details are scarce in the plan, there is also reason for worry, given that the document explicitly cites Trump’s 2020 peace plan (as well as the French-Saudi proposal described above) as part of the basis for subsequent stages in the process. Readers will recall that the 2020 plan included the further expansion of Israeli territory, the annexation of much of the West Bank, the renunciation of all Palestinian legal claims against Israel, the exclusion of Palestine from East Jerusalem, and the creation of an archipelago of Palestinian Bantustans surrounded by Israeli settlements, borders, and walls.

Even the more concrete elements of the plan are heavily weighted in favor of the Israeli perpetrator and against the besieged and persecuted Palestinian people.

For example, the release of all Israeli captives (of whom there are only a few dozen) is to take place within 72 hours. The release of Palestinian captives unlawfully held by Israel (of whom there are some 11,000) on the other hand, will only include a small proportion of those held at some unspecified time after all Israelis are returned. In all, less than 2,000 of the 11,000 Palestinian captives held by Israel are to be released.

Similarly, the remains of approximately 25 Israeli captives are thought to be held in Gaza, while the remains of some 2,000 deceased Palestinians are held by the Israeli regime. While the Trump plan stipulates the release of all Israeli remains, it only provides for the release of a portion of the Palestinian remains.

And some potentially positive provisions of the document are undercut by contradictory provisions elsewhere in the document.

For example, the document promises a ceasefire, amnesty, and safe passage for Hamas members; a commitment that no one will be forced to leave Gaza and that those who wish to leave will be free to do so and to return; that Israel will not occupy or annex Gaza; and that aid will flow through the UN and Red Crescent without interference.

However, while committing to the free flow of aid, it elsewhere implicitly imposes restrictions on aid. While promising no Israeli occupation, it also implies that Israeli regime forces will remain in Gaza indefinitely. And vague wording leaves unclear whether the essential role of UNRWA (which the U.S. and Israel have falsely claimed is associated with Hamas) will be allowed, and whether the genocide-complicit role of the perfidious GHF scheme (which the U.S. falsely claims is not associated with the Israeli regime) will be allowed to continue.

In parts, the Trump plan itself is unlawful. The conditioning of humanitarian aid, implicit threats of collective punishment if Hamas does not agree, the explicit denial of Palestinian self-determination, restrictions on political rights, the requirement that Palestinians negotiate for their inalienable human rights with their oppressors, and the failure to seek accountability for Israeli crimes including genocide, are all breaches of the international legal obligations of the United States.

For its part, Hamas seized on the practical and implementable elements of the first phase of the plan (ceasefire, exchange of captives, etc.) for negotiation while refusing to surrender the cause of Palestine or to submit to the remainder of the document. Hamas said that the rest of the issues in the document were to be “discussed within a comprehensive Palestinian national framework, in which Hamas will be included and will contribute with full responsibility.”

And the outright rejection of the plan by representatives of Palestinian civil society demonstrates the dignified steadfastness of Palestinian society in struggling for their freedom, even in the darkest of times.

The Struggle Continues

As this goes to press, moves are underway to effectively merge the French-Saudi plan with the Trump plan, and to have it blessed in the UN Security Council. But the colonial machinations of Trump, Macron, and others cannot obscure the fundamental reality confronting the world today: a single colonial regime planted in the heart of Western Asia is perpetrating apartheid, genocide, belligerent occupation, and serial aggression across the region and corrupting governments and institutions far beyond.

The unprecedented, Western-sponsored impunity of that regime is undercutting the very sustainability of international law, trampling on human rights, and jeopardizing peace and security across the region. Finally holding that regime accountable remains a vital, even existential imperative for the world.

In the meantime, for a people enduring genocide, any ceasefire is to be celebrated. But few are under the illusion that this ceasefire means a definitive end to the genocide, or the beginning of Palestinian freedom. No sustainable peace can be built on the weak foundation of Trump’s vanity and greed, Macron’s colonial nostalgia, or Netanyahu’s deceit and racist brutality.

Only justice can provide that foundation. And among the three tracks discussed in this article, only one travels toward justice.

Palestinian society has pointed the way, the UN human rights mechanisms, the ICJ, and the landmark UNGA resolution of September 2024 have joined the cause, and the world has risen up in solidarity. Now more than ever, that solidarity must be sustained, multiplied, and acted upon. The Israeli regime, its co-perpetrators in Washington, its proxies across the West, complicit governments, media companies that have supported the genocide, and corporations that have profited from it must all be held accountable if justice is to be done.

Normalization of the Israeli regime and its crimes must end. Genocide must be a red line. And Palestine must be free.

The post Terms of Surrender: the Conspiracy to Obstruct Justice in Palestine appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House is more than just a serious renovation; it is a metaphor for his dismantling of traditional American governance and institutions. The East Wing, part of the 123-year-old symbol of American history – “the people’s house” – is being altered without the consent of the people, just as Trump has disregarded long-standing laws and traditions. Trump unilaterally decided that part of the White House had to go, just as he has decided that many American institutions have to go. Trump’s “renovation” is a declaration of contempt for the very architecture – literal and constitutional – of democracy. Framed as constructive destructive, his actions are destructive destruction.

The early twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter emphasized the importance of creative destruction for the success of capitalism. “[T]he fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, [and] the new forms of industrial organisation that capitalist enterprise creates,” Schumpeter wrote. Charles Koch, Chairman and CEO of Koch Industries, summarized the modern version: “Embrace change. Envision what could be, challenge the status quo, and drive creative destruction.”

What happens if there is nothing “new” in creative destruction? What happens if destruction becomes an end in itself, when there is only destructive destruction?

There is no question that DJT is a destroyer. Consider the separation of powers. He has appointed intensely loyal followers to key legal positions, often ordering them to act contrary to legal precedent. Over forty prosecutors have been fired and flimsy charges have targeted political opponents, including the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, and California Senator Adam Schiff. Trump is destroying the separation of powers and the objective rule of law.

His economic policies follow the same pattern. Tariffs on foreign goods have alienated traditional allies and undermined the multilateral trade system created at Bretton Woods after World War II with significant consequences for small and medium-sized American companies. Similarly, domestic initiatives like the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” threaten health care for millions of Americans without a meaningful replacement or safety net. Attacks on the education system, the Department of Education and foreign aid further illustrate dismantling without replacement, leaving millions vulnerable domestically and internationally.

One could argue that there have been previous alterations to the White House so that that changes to the East Wing were not without precedent. Politically, one could also argue that America’s governance was also dramatically transformed by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

However, for a short answer, Adam Gopnik noted in The New Yorker, “The act of [the East Wing’s] destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat.”

There is a very thin line between creative destruction and destructive destruction. How does one distinguish between creative destruction and destructive destruction?

Creative destruction is the dismantling of old structures or methods to make way for new systems, innovation or growth. Destructive destruction involves dismantling without meaningful replacement or improvement. It is often driven by ego or arbitrary power.

How can one judge what Trump is doing? The answers are process and long-term planning. In demolishing the East Wing, Trump did not consult the key institutions such as the National Capital Planning Commission, the Commission of Fine Arts, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, or the Society of Architectural Historians. When President Truman had the floors of the White House rebuilt, he created a commission with senators and congressmen to oversee the use of taxpayer’s money. Trump never went through the legal review process and taxpayers are in no way engaged.

Ben Rhodes summarized Trump’s behavior succinctly in the New York Times; “For Mr. Trump, the common thread weaving together so much of what he does — at home and abroad — is power. Whether he is seeking a cease-fire in Gaza or Ukraine, bombing boats off the coast of Venezuela or deploying troops to American cities, the desired result is his personal aggrandizement and the empowerment of his presidency.”

In addition to process, creative destruction involves foresight and long-term planning exemplified by the Allied powers during World War II. The Yalta, Potsdam, and Bretton Woods Conferences established what the political, economic and territorial situation would look like after the war. The Allies planned not only how to win, but also how to shape the future, including the United Nations.

In contrast, Benjamin Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza, with American complicity, and the Trump Peace Plan are ad hoc, improvised processes with no planning for the future. Too many questions remain regarding Gaza’s governance and reconstruction. Where is the transition roadmap? Remember Trump’s boasting about making Gaza the “Riviera of the Middle East”? Now we question whether the reconstruction of Gaza will even begin before Hamas disarms. There is no equivalent to a Marshall Plan or a structured post-war transition. Israel’s policies, with American complicity, constitute destructive destruction.

The differences between creative and destructive destruction are not linguistic games. Trump’s frequently uses the language to “reinvent” government and policy and the rhetoric of creative destruction, In fact, his policies are too often disruptive destruction without constructive outcomes.

Creative destruction can be a force for creativity, innovation and improvement, Trump’s destructive destruction leaves nothing but ruin with no progress, no hope for renewal, only chaos masquerading as spectacle. Trump the destroyer leaves wreckage in his wake. No gold-gilded ballroom or Oval Office can change that reality.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A New York City woman wearing a navy blue polka-dot dress has gone viral for her defiant resistance to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during a raid in lower Manhattan on October 21, 2025.

Appearing as though she was on her way from work—the woman wore a navy blue blazer and brown shoes and carried a large handbag—the “polka-dot dress woman” as she’s being called, took a powerful stand in the middle of the street. With a military tank rolling toward her, she stopped and flipped off ICE agents with both hands.

She appeared unafraid. She pushed back physically as ICE agents attempted to bully her and others. Her face, hands, and body exuded rage and resistance.

The aggressive noncompliance of the polka-dot dress woman and her fellow protesters is precisely what our dangerous march toward fascism calls for.

There are countless incarnations of such resistance in New York City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, and elsewhere. These resisters are refusing to go gently into the night of fascist dictatorship. They are fearlessly facing off against President Donald Trump’s deployments of immigration agents, National Guard, and other federal law enforcement and military personnel, and are refusing to accept the crushing of dissent, demographic diversity, and democracy itself.

One such activist is Leonardo Martinez, a volunteer and lead organizer with VC Defensa, an immigrant defense group and rapid response network based in Ventura County, California, who found himself on the receiving end of ICE violence on October 16, 2025.

While in the midst of community patrols, Martinez, who is a U.S. citizen, followed ICE agents in Oxnard driving an SUV. It was a routine action for volunteers like him who have been nonviolently confronting and intimidating federal agents away from their communities. But this time, the ICE agents seemed to have had enough. Street-level and dash cam videos show their SUV ramming violently into the side of Martinez’s pickup truck on a relatively empty street.

“I was definitely shocked when they initially hit me because the industrial area that we were in did not have a lot of traffic,” said Martinez. His quick thinking likely kept him safe. “Once they aggressively hit me, I knew that if I pulled over in the moment, that they were going to drag me out and beat me up.”

Instead of getting out of his truck, he continued driving for a few minutes—with the SUV following him—toward downtown Oxnard, where he knew there would be more street and foot traffic. At first, the ICE agents claimed Martinez hit them—not knowing there was video footage. After being arrested, Martinez’s wrists and ankles were handcuffed, but he demanded medical attention to document his injuries. After a stop at a hospital, he was eventually taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles and was later released.

“We’ve kind of already practiced a lot of these scenarios in real life and troubleshooted and figured things out,” said Martinez. His fellow VC Defensa activists quickly located him and posted the now-viral video footage of his truck being hit. The incident has drawn attention and admiration for the work of a highly effective organization that boasts 700 highly trained volunteers like Martinez.

Such sophisticated organizing is evident all over the nation. In Chicago, where ICE agents terrorized children in a military-style raid involving rappelling down from a Black Hawk helicopter to arrest adults and children in an apartment complex, similarly militant and organized activism has taken root. Like Ventura County’s VC Defensa, Chicago’s Patrulla Popular or People’s Patrol consists of organized volunteers who warn community members when ICE agents appear and help document ensuing abuses.

The Chicago activists use car horns or scream at agents while recording them on their phones. Now, brightly colored plastic whistles have become a formidable weapon in the nonviolent anti-ICE arsenal. Community patrollers are encouraged to whistle loudly when ICE agents are present. The city’s anti-ICE resistance includes teachers, delivery drivers, and even children.

In Portland, Oregon, activists have been protesting outside the local ICE detention center for months, wearing inflatable animal costumes—an effective way to inspire media attention and highlight the absurdity of Trump’s claims of the city being “war-ravaged.” Even ICE officials have been forced to address the costumes, with one Homeland Security official calling the protest “a bizarre effort to obstruct ICE law enforcement.”

In San Francisco, which Trump announced would be the next site of a massive military deployment, organizers braced themselves with training and rapid response plans. The call for federal law enforcement appears to have come from one of the Bay Area’s Trump-supporting tech billionaires, Marc Benioff. It’s wealthy elites like him who have fueled skyrocketing inequality in the San Francisco area and then complain about a scourge of unhoused people.

Eventually Trump, making clear exactly who he works for, called off the surge after conversing with his billionaire buddies.

The president is facing militant and organized opposition to his anti-immigrant war everywhere he turns. It’s a testament to the mixed-status immigrant communities that have infused American cities with their rich cultures, cuisines, and traditions, becoming an integral part of their functioning.

Women like the polka-dot dress lady are on the frontlines of this battle. According to VC Defensa’s Martinez, “It’s incredible how many mothers we have in this organization [who] take the lead on so many of the projects and are some of the most dedicated people that we have.”

Just days before ICE agents rammed his truck, they cornered a woman volunteer who was observing them. “They all got out with their guns drawn,” said Martinez, and “started banging on the window, boxed her in, and then after she didn’t open up for them, and didn’t do anything, they ended up getting back in their car and leaving.”

A Los Angeles area tech worker calling herself Kim showed up to the “No Kings” gathering on October 18 wearing an “ICE out of LA” T-shirt. She explained that as a “Chicana, second-generation American,” she was at the march “supporting immigrant communities across the board, not only the Latino community, but all immigrants because as we also know through history that’s what made this country.”

According to Kim, “we’re showing [Trump] we’re not afraid to stand up for our rights, stand up and defend our country.”

It’s clear that Trump is not going after “criminals” given that the vast majorityof people arrested by ICE either have no criminal record or have pending charges—in other words, they’re innocent until proven guilty. Further, ICE has arrested and detained nearly 200 U.S. citizens during the first nine months of Trump’s second presidency.

It would be easy for people to fold, to go about their business, keep their heads down, and not get involved. But, far too many are speaking up, pushing back, putting their bodies and lives on the line in the face of ICE deployment, as Trump enacts his agenda.

Such mass resistance is the answer to staving off full-blown fascist authoritarianism, especially when taken together with mass shows of force at organized, coordinated gatherings such as the latest “No Kings” protests that drew an estimated 7 million people. Anti-Trump protests are also spreadingto parts of the nation known as pro-Trump strongholds, and overall protest activity is at an all-time high, comparable to the historic racial justice protestsin summer 2020.

The icons of the movement who are trying to wrest control of the nation from fascist forces are everyday people, sometimes nameless, whose bravery and audacity are infectious. May the polka-dot dress woman inspire legions as she goes down in history as a symbol of necessary rage.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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Alger Hiss testifying before HUAC, 1950.

It’s one of the most rousing calls to conscience to come out of the 20th century. I’m thinking of Martin Niemöller’s “First they came for the communists.”

You know how it goes. It begins, “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a communist.” And it ends, “Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

It’s a powerful statement, and you’ll see it on T-shirts and posters and placards at demonstrations. But when you actually look at our history, it’s not just that good people didn’t speak out. It’s that many Americans threw other Americans under the bus.

The story of the Danish king who wore a yellow star in solidarity with Jewish Danes during World War II, is apocryphal. It never happened. So too, while our cultural memory about the McCarthy era romances the refuseniks, hundreds of Americans did comply with the Red Scare, identifying colleagues or associates as communists to protect themselves or preserve their careers. The Levin Center for Oversight and Democracy reports that of the more than 500 people who were called to testify in front of Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, only about 100 invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer questions on self-incrimination grounds. The rest went along.

This phenomenon was even more pronounced before HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), which paralleled McCarthy’s Senate investigations. The “Hollywood Ten” refused to testify, but Elia Kazan wasn’t alone in supplying the committee with lists of colleagues who had supposedly suspect ties. Their cooperation frequently allowed them to continue working in the film industry, while those who refused were blacklisted for years.

So too, in our time, when the press and the pundits, and the politicians, and the courts have come for the abortion providers, the anti-zionists, the teachers of critical race theory, and the non-conforming queers, many didn’t just stay silent. They actively participated in creating suspicion around those people and their principles.

Citing electoral calculus and political pragmatism, liberal “compromises” on abortion law, dating back to Roe v. Wade, contributed to the erosion of reproductive autonomy well before the 2022 Dobbs decision. After 2021, laws restricting “race-conscious instruction” spread to 45 states meeting minimal resistance.

LGBTQ rights have always been dispensable — depending on the political climate. Today, trans Americans, even kids, are isolated, afraid and at the nation’s highest risk for suicide.

Not just silence, but liberal “appeasement” of the Right has brought us here.

Now Donald Trump and his mob are trying to vilify “Antifa”, an entity that he thinks exists but really doesn’t. Are we going to allow “anti-fascist” to be made suspect?

Innumerable signs held by countless Americans at No Kings protests suggest it won’t be easy. From the older women carrying versions of “Auntie Fa’s cookies don’t crumble for kings” to the green-clad members of Amphifa (Amphibians Against Fascism), to the 76-year-old who walked in Washington, D.C., with a straightforward “I am Antifa” sign. When someone comes for the anti-fascists, the odds are that some will say, “Antifa is us.” But how many? Others will always seek refuge in cowardice and caving. Our history is brimming with both.

This first appeared on Laura Flanders’ Substack page. 

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Photograph Source: ProtoplasmaKid – CC BY-SA 4.0

Theodore Roosevelt, an advocate of ‘big stick diplomacy’, viewed Latin America as the United States’ backyard – a place where it could intervene at will. At the slightest threat to American interests, he would send in the marines – to Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Cuba. In 1903 Washington sponsored a separatist movement in Panama, then a province of Colombia, to secure control of the future canal. Three years later, having been lauded for mediating in the Russo-Japanese war, Roosevelt received the Nobel peace prize.

General George C Marshall was US army chief of staff in the second world war and approved the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When he became secretary of state in 1947, he set about containing Soviet influence. In Italy, he orchestrated one of the first interventions of the cold war: covertly funding the Christian Democrats, disseminating false information, mobilising Italian-American celebrities (Frank Sinatra, Joe DiMaggio, Rocky Graziano) and the mafia. A month before Italy’s April 1948 election, he publicly warned that if the communists won, the country would be excluded from the European reconstruction programme – the famous Marshall Plan. In 1953 the general too was honoured in Oslo.

Henry Kissinger, national security advisor from 1969 to 1975, was another enthusiast for destabilisation. ‘I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,’ he said of Chile in June 1970, where the socialist leader Salvador Allende looked set to win the presidency. When Allende was indeed elected, Kissinger saw only one solution: a military coup, ‘but through Chilean sources and with a low posture’. Allende was overthrown in September 1973 and replaced by a bloody dictatorship. Kissinger won the Nobel peace prize a month later for signing a ceasefire with Vietnam after having set all Indochina ablaze.

Barack Obama had merely lent tepid support to a coup against Honduran president Manuel Zelaya when he too received the honour in October 2009, shortly after arriving in the White House. But he soon gave his predecessors a run for their money, bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, and expanding a programme of extrajudicial executions – often based on mere suspicion and far from any declared theatre of war – in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia.

Donald Trump did therefore have legitimate hopes of receiving the 2025 prize. He too has deployed troops in the Caribbean. He too has practised blackmail via US aid, threatening to choke Argentina financially if Javier Milei lost the election. He too makes free use of (increasingly less) targeted assassinations in the name of combatting terrorism – as when he justified the killing at sea of Venezuelan citizens, whom he accused without evidence of drug trafficking. And he too plans coups against recalcitrant governments, as in Venezuela, where he authorised the CIA to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro.

But it wasn’t enough. The Norwegian committee instead picked María Corina Machado, a far-right Venezuelan opposition figure who has for 25 years called for foreign intervention against her own country, and who, soon after the Nobel announcement, congratulated Binyamin Netanyahu for his actions in Gaza. Trump quelled his disappointment by launching a fresh crusade – this time against Colombia. He’s burnishing his CV for the 2026 prize.

For 50 years, the Nobel committee has rejected the candidacies of dissidents from the Western world. Julian Assange and Edward Snowden have worked for peace in a different way from Machado. But they possess one unforgivable flaw: they expose our own dirty secrets.

Translated by George Miller.

This first appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

On 26 October, Caroline Willemen of Médecins Sans Frontières stated that Israel continues to use the need for humanitarian aid in Gaza as “means of pressure”. “The humanitarian situation in Gaza has not improved significantly”, she told the press, “as water and shelter shortages persist and hundreds of thousands of people continue to live in tents as winter approaches”. Israel’s armed forces have now annexed more than half of Gaza’s land and are dumping vast amounts of debris into that zone, turning it into a mountain of garbage. To move the rubble without experts and equipment is very dangerous, as about ten to twelve percent of the Israeli bombs dropped on Gaza have not exploded.

“Every Gazan person is now living in a horrific, unmapped minefield”, said Nick Orr of Humanity and Inclusion, a non-governmental organisation at work in Palestine. “The UXO [Unexploded Ordnance] is everywhere. On the ground, in the rubble, under the ground, everywhere”. As Palestinians dig through the hills of concrete, they risk triggering a dormant bomb —creating more casualties of the Israeli genocide.

Over the past two years, Israel has dropped at least 200,000 tonnes of explosives on Gaza, a tonnage equivalent to thirteen atom bombs of the scale dropped on Hiroshima by the United States on 6 August 1945. This is unimaginable, particularly given the fact that Palestinians have no air defence systems, no air force and no ability to defend themselves from high-altitude and drone bombing or to strike back in any comparable way. Genocides are, by their nature, asymmetrical. But to describe these past two years as asymmetrical is obscene: this was one-directional violence, the Goliath-like Israelis using their immense advantages against the David-like Palestinian resistance.

The opaqueness of official arms transfers  means we have no precise idea how much of this tonnage came to Israel from its major suppliers during the war: the United States, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. However, we have enough evidence to know that most of the bombs came from the United States, with smaller supplies from the other countries. A new report from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, entitled Gaza Genocide: a collective crime (20 October 2025), makes it indisputably clear that the countries supplying Israel with military equipment, or assisting it in any way —including through diplomatic support— are utterly complicit in the genocide.

In other words, the obligation to abide by the UN Convention on Genocide is not discretionary; the duty to do what they can to stop the genocide is mandatory. The participation makes them wholly culpable. The report notes that the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza makes this “an internationally enabled crime”.

The level of complicity is extraordinary. Take the case of the United Kingdom, whose Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, is a human rights lawyer and indeed wrote the textbook on European human rights law (1999). On 6 August 2025, Matt Kennard told Palestine Deep Dive about how UK military aircraft left RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus and escorted an unidentified plane over Gaza. Six days later, Iain Overton at UK Declassified revealed that amongst these planes was an RAF Shadow R1 surveillance plane flying alongside a Beechcraft Super King Air 350 owned by the Sierra Nevada Corporation (from the United States) with a call sign CROOK 11. What were these aircraft doing? Who had sanctioned them this work? Who is CROOK 11?

In December 2024, Starmer told troops at RAF Akrotiri: “There’s a lot of different work that goes on. I’m also aware that some, or quite a bit, of what goes on here can’t necessarily be talked about all of the time…We can’t necessarily tell the world what you’re doing here…because although we’re not saying it to the whole world for reasons that are obvious to you”. The obvious reason is that this is a genocide, and the UK is complicit, so they cannot talk about it.

The record for the United States is even more ghastly. One paragraph from the Special Rapporteur’s report is damning enough:

Since October 2023, the US has transferred 742 consignments of “arms and ammunition” (HS Code 93) and approved tens of billions in new sales. The Biden and Trump Administrations reduced transparency, accelerated transfers through repeated emergency approvals, facilitated Israeli access to US weapons stockpile held abroad, and authorised hundreds of sales just below the amount requiring congressional approval. The US has deployed military aircraft, special forces and surveillance drones to Israel, with US surveillance purportedly being used to target Hamas, including in the first raid on Al Shifa hospital.

In November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) filed a warrant for the arrest of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. Based on this recent UN report, the ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, should be obliged to file warrants against Rishi Sunak, Starmer, Olaf Scholz, Friedrich Merz, Joe Biden, and Donald Trump —at a minimum. Anything less makes a mockery of the rules-based international system, namely the United Nations Charter.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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Photograph Source: Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken – CC BY-SA 4.0

In the nine years since its founding in 2016, La France Insoumise (LFI) has become the leading left formation in France, with its current parliamentary representation at 71, ahead of the traditional parties of the left, the Socialist Party and Communist Party. The personality most identified with it is Jean Luc Melenchon, who has run for president three times, the last time in 2022, when he gathered 21.9 percent of the votes, finishing third after second-placer Marine Le Pen of National Rally and Emmanuel Macron.  La France Insoumise describes its orientation as democratic socialist and ecosocialist.

The following is a composite interview. When he visited Paris in July 2025, Walden Bello interviewed some of the leaders of LFI, including Nadege Abomangoli, vice president of the National Assembly; Aurelie Trouve, chairwoman of the Economic Affairs Committee of the Assembly; and members of parliament Arnaud Le Gall, Aurelien Tache, and Aurelien Saintoul. This was followed in September 2025 by an email interview with LFI leader Jean Luc Melenchon (JLM).

The Crisis of Macronism

Walden Bello: Can you give your assessment of the current political situation in France?

La France Insoumise: In terms of the strategic situation, we are at the end of Macronism. The Macronists     are very divided and in their desperation, they’re allying with the far right.

Let’s begin by pointing out that last year, when the National Rally won the European Parliament elections, Macron was willing to make a deal with them. He was going to appoint a prime minister from the National Rally. That was the plan.

That did not happen. But even if it did not, the reality is that, Macronism has already absorbed much of the ideology and slogans of the far right. The Macronists are in an alliance with the far right in the current government. The Republicans, the traditional right-wing party, is already, more than ever, positioned alongside the far right. The new head of this party, a man named Bruno Retailleau, is now minister of the interior, and therefore of the police. In a meeting, he said, “Down with the veil.” As you know, this a slogan of the far right. Also, as you probably know, during the colonial war in Algeria, the French colonial community, also shouted, “Down with the veil,” targeting Muslim women. So this is something very old but at the same time very worrisome given the current situation. Islamophobia represents a very real threat insofar as it provides the ideological glue of all the right-wing forces in our country.

Popular Protests and the Left

WB: What are the key challenges facing the left at this point?

Jean Luc Melenchon : The capitalists are getting behind the far right. Do you know why? Because there is intense social mobilization against the decisions stemming from the neoliberal program. There is a pre-revolutionary atmosphere in France, by the admission of analysts who are themselves favorable to those in power.In fact, all over the world, for many years now, there have been revolutionary situations. We call these events “citizen revolutions.” In my book Now the People, I try to analyze them, including the conditions that produce them. This situation is what has worried Macron and the establishment.

In France, there was a movement of the yellow jackets. In the beginning, the traditional left did not support them. They said the yellow jackets were fascists. It was only 10 days after it began that the left, the trade unions, and the alter-globalization movement made a declaration saying we support them. What was happening was that a new line of conflict was emerging: not left versus right, but the oligarchy versus the people.

As you know there were mass protests that took place in 2005 and 2023. The character of the two protests were different. Those in 2005 took place in the suburbs of big cities.  Those in 2023 were in smaller cities as well. They were very young people. Some sociologists said the 2005 and 2023 protests had the same causes, but we think the 2023 protests were different. The people participating in them were very young, and they felt very deeply what they were against, including the right of the police to kill them, the license to kill, especially young Arab men.

There was no spokesperson, but it was clear what it was against. It was a reaction to an extra-judicial execution. And the polarization was sharper in 2023, partly because of social media. There was this outpouring of anger from the right in reaction to the protests, with some people expressing that it was right for the police to kill these young Arab and Black men.

Capitalism and Racism

WB: Were the protests in 2023 linked as well to economic issues?

LFI: Yes, they were, and we pointed out that the events were caused by neoliberal policies.

These were people’s responses to neoliberalism’s impact on their concrete existence. All the other parties called them riots. We did not. The term used was very important for us. Those who are the victims of racism must also be seen as the victims of capitalism. They are the people who are also totally exploited by capitalism. So, contrary to the position of the head of the Communist Party and some in the Socialist Party, you cannot separate the fight against racism from the fight against capitalism.

We need to stress this, that racism is not just a moral issue. It is linked to economics. For instance, they say that we only have so much wealth to share, and sharing it with migrants will disadvantage our own people. So, this serves to divide people. You start with migrants, then you say the poor white people must also be excluded, and so on. So, the Macronists are trying to to normalize this division promoted by the far right. They find it desirable to frame it this way. That’s what they’ve started to do in Mayotte, to destroy the rights of migrants, and after Mayotte, they’ll bring this idea to France. So, Mayotte and other overseas territories of France are serving as laboratories. But there are also such efforts in many places, like the suburbs around Marseilles, where the National Rally, Marine Le Pen’s party, exercises some influence. They are creating many states of exception. For instance, there is now a bill, put forward by the National Rally, to put any arrested foreigner in jail for at least 200 days if he has been previously convicted and sentenced. That is a clear violation of basic rights: you cannot put anyone in jail if he has not been convicted and sentenced. Eighty-five percent of new laws in one year are sponsored or supported by the National Rally.

We’d like to add that we’re also trying to create a new anti-racism. One problem we have faced is that in the past, anti-racism was weaponized by the Socialists when they were in power to go after their enemies. So, people are now very, very suspicious of anti-racism, especially if those espousing it are leaders who are white men with political agendas.

We’re also combattng new forms of racism, like the allegation that non-white people are infiltrating society and government to get to high positions, and they’re doing it through special advantages provided by government. This is strange because in the past, their criticism was that Muslims don’t want to integrate. But now, when some non-white people get to high positions, like Comrade Nadege, who’s vice president of the National Assembly, they say it’s because of special benefits they enjoy.

WB: So, from what I can gather from what you’re saying, you don’t think other sections of the left are sympathetic with or really understand the plight of the migrants?

LFI: Yes, but this is not new for the communist leaders because 40 years ago, they already said there was a problem with immigrants. But our differences with the Communist Party go beyond just the labelling of protests as riots, but to different visions of society. It comes down to who are part of the people, and this is something that evolves with time. The Communist Party is dead because it is stuck with an obsolete view of who the ”revolutionary people” are. The working class has evolved so that Arabs and other non-white communities are now the majority in many sectors of the working class. You can see this in the hospitals, where even the majority of doctors are not white. So, it is very important to fight against racism, because if you don’t, you allow the people and the working class to be divided.

The Divided Left

WB: Shifting to a related topic, can you tell me what is the state of the left in France?

LFI: You can say that without France Insoumise there would no longer be a viable left in France. There are, of course, other parties, like the Socialist Party. But the Socialist Party does not confront the many challenges in the country. They do not fight racism, as strongly as they should. Specifically, the Socialist Party is divided. They have no agenda, they have no program. And the only question for them is to know how to win elected seats and whether they should ally with LFI or not. It is a difficult situation, but we must move forward even if we are accused of divisiveness. In terms of the strategic situation, we confront Macronism, which is very divided because it’s the end of Macronism, and there’s the far right. Of course, as in many other countries, you have the media, which is dominated by billionaires who very much favor a victory of the far right.

WB: So, when you are talking about the Socialists, are you saying they do not want an alliance with LFI?

LFI: The Socialists are divided into two groups. One group does not want an alliance with us under any circumstances. The other group does not want an alliance but would accept it in certain situations. However, they are focused on getting support from voters who support Macron in the next elections, and since they think an alliance would alienate these voters, these people don’t want an alliance with us at the moment. But they do not ask themselves whether voters would continue to vote for them in the second round of the elections. Their strategy is typical of the desire to place the people back under the authority of the petit bourgeoisie out of fear of the far right.

For us, the Socialists’ pursuit of the Macronist voters is an illusion, since the supporters of Macron are mainly conservatives and would not support socialists or social democrats, even if some of the media lump the Socialists and the Macronists in the same bloc. But given their project, the Socialists try their best to distinguish themselves from us. For instance, when it comes to the situation in Gaza, they still don’t want to use the word “genocide.” Then they say we are supporting Hamas and terrorism. What more can the far right ask for? It’s a gift to them. The established right party, the Republicans, have, in fact, asked for a parliamentary inquiry on our alleged links to terrorist groups. We are facing a true demonization. They have this label for us, calling us “Islamo-Marxist.” These people use these labels to frighten people and to divide them in the face of the crisis of neoliberalism. But for now, they are the most discredited when it comes to public opinion. Their opportunism disgusts ordinary people.

The Divided Center and the Divided Right

WB: There will be presidential elections in 2027 and general elections in 2029. Do you think the left will be able to unite to effectively contest these elections?

LFI : In other circumstances, things would be favorable for the left. The Macronists are very divided. If you look at those who voted for Macron in 2017 and those who did in 2023, you see a big difference. In 2017, his votes came mainly from older, centrist voters. In 2023, they came from younger voters who can be described not so much as centrists but as people interested in modernizing conservatism. You no longer have anyone who can unite these two groups. Macron is prohibited by law from running again. It is now clear that Macronism was a one-shot phenomenon. Most Macronists are now for allying with the far right, as we said earlier.

As for the right and far right, they are also divided. There’s Bruno Retailleau, the leader of the Republicans, the traditional conservative party. Then there’s the National Rally of Marine Le Pen. Because she has been convicted of embezzlement along with other leaders of her party, she has been banned from running for public office. Her protégé, Jordan Bardella, will be running in her stead. But Bardella  is not credible, he has a low cultural level, is very young, quite lazy, and is very inexperienced compared to Retailleau, who’s served in many positions and who’s been spouting the same rhetoric for the last 40 years. Between Bardella and Retailleau, Big Capital would likely favor Retailleau.

As we said earlier, in other circumstances, the situation would be favorable to the left. We’re open to talking with the Socialists, but the Socialists are pursuing the Macronists, which, as we said earlier, is an illusion, since the Macronists would rather side with the far right. The Greens, Socialists, and Communists are talking about an electoral alliance among themselves, and the only thing that unites them is to avoid talking to France Insoumise. But given the fact that each of them is just interested in increasing their number of seats, which can only come at the expense of the others, these talks won’t get very far.

Collectivism: La France Insoumise’s Program and Vision

WB: Assuming you, Comrade Melenchon, run for president in 2027, what would be the key elements of your program?

JLM : Yes, there will be an Insoumise candidacy. We will have a candidate to carry our program “L’Avenir en commun” (The Future in Common). The program comes from society itself: associations, trade unions, collectives, scientists. There are 831 measures to build a New France, breaking with the capitalist order. These measures are constantly updated, costed, and detailed in program booklets. They propose to start from the needs of society itself, to bring forth a new people.

To break with neoliberal mistreatment and move away from productivism, we will establish the “green rule:” not to take from nature more than it is capable of regenerating by itself. We propose to protect the commons and what we call the rights of the species. The right to silence, to healthy food, to breathe clean air and to drink water that does not poison. These measures are at the heart of our program, to profoundly transform society and build harmony among human beings and with nature. They also have a concrete application to guide the economy, replacing market logics with those of ecological planning. This method will make it possible to implement major projects in housing, energy, agriculture, and industry. Thousands of jobs will be created.

“L’Avenir en commun,” our program, is also a break with the government’s action plan and the presidential monarchy. That is why we will move to the Sixth Republic, with measures allowing popular intervention such as the recall referendum for any elected official or the citizens’ initiative referendum. In recent years, our country has been marked by powerful expressions of the authoritarianism of the Fifth Republic, as was the case with the raising of the retirement age to 64, without a vote in the National Assembly and despite a historic popular mobilization in our country’s history. We will restore retirement at 60, so that everyone can regain control over their free time.

WB: Comrade Melenchon, can you describe the kind of socialism that you propose for France?

JLM : I prefer to speak of collectivism. It is not only about resolving the social question, but also about addressing the question of the general human interest and the rights of living beings, which form a systemic collective.

We observe the emergence of a new world: an urban people, organized in networks. This new France already exists in itself, its people defined by their conflict of interest with the oligarchy. The latter has appropriated the collective networks on which daily life depends. We believe this world is coming to an end, and that only two outcomes are possible: collectivism or the law of the strongest.

Take the case of climate change, which is inevitable and irreversible. How do we rebound, how do we propose collectivist solutions? The choice of individualism, of the law of the strongest, means letting thousands of people be poisoned by forever chemicals just to keep the money cycle turning. It means failing to plan to prevent mega-fires from burning everything, because the budgets for Canadair planes have been cut.

The law of the strongest is expressed when there is no longer a logic of collective progress in France. When one in two French people is obese or overweight, when infant mortality has been rising for 10 years, when one in four mothers raises her children alone. When the fortunes of billionaires have doubled since Macron became president.

Collectivism is not a utopia but a necessity. Understanding the moment means taking reality with us, making ourselves masters of the situation. The dead end of the capitalist system can be good news, an opportunity to paralyze it, to push it to its limits. Each and every one of us is responsible for the outcome we will give to this rupture.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

It is striking that many people feel the need to claim that Donald Trump has some coherent economic plan for the country. It’s understandable that Trump’s team likes to pretend that his random ramblings and angry acts of revenge are all part of some grand strategy, but why would anyone not on his payroll play along with this obvious absurdity?

To anyone paying attention, it should be pretty clear that Donald Trump is clueless about the economy. Just to take an obvious example to make the point: Trump has repeatedly promised to lower drug prices by 800, 900, or even 1,500 percent. As he rightly says, no one thought it was possible.

It wouldn’t be a big deal that he got confused once or twice and forgot that you can’t lower prices by more than 100 percent, unless you envision drug companies paying people to use their drugs. But Trump has done this repeatedly, over many months.

This tells us two things. First, he really doesn’t have even a basic understanding of arithmetic and percentages. That would be bad in and of itself. After all the president is sometimes directly negotiating deals and it would be bad if he agreed to something and then had to call back his negotiating partner and tell them he didn’t understand what he had agreed to.

But the other issue is even more serious. Surely people like Treasury Secretary Bessent and Kevin Hassett, Trump’s National Economic Advisor, understand percentages. But apparently, they are too scared of Trump to explain how they work. Instead, they let him go out week after week and make a fool of himself by making nonsensical promises on lowering drug prices.

This fact is crucial if we are trying to assess whether Trump has a coherent economic strategy. The point is he is obviously confused about many things when it comes to the economy. He seems to think that other countries pay tariffs and send the U.S. checks. He also seems to think that wind and solar power are very expensive sources of energy. And he seems to think that the economy was collapsing when he took office.

All of these claims are 180 degrees at odds with reality, but it is extremely unlikely that his aides would be able to correct him on these or other absurd views that Trump seems to hold. Given how out of touch Trump is with reality and the inability of his aides to correct him on anything, why would anyone think that he has a coherent economic strategy?

As many of us have pointed out, even most hardcore free traders will concede tariffs can serve a useful purpose. They can be used strategically to build up important industries. This is what Biden tried to do when he used tariffs, along with subsidies and regulatory changes, to promote domestic production of advanced computer chips, electric vehicles, batteries, and wind and solar and other forms of clean energy.

But what is the coherence in a tariff policy when some of the highest tariffs, like Trump’s 50 percent tariff on imported steel, are reserved for intermediate goods that are inputs for other manufacturing industries? How does it make sense to impose an extra 10 percentage point tariff on imports from Canada because Trump didn’t like a television ad they ran during the World Series? And India got whacked with a tariff of 50 percent on its exports because its president would not support Trump’s drive to get a Nobel Peace Prize.

Anyone trying to weave together these and other tariff decisions by Trump, along with many other economic decisions he has made since taking office, is really stretching if they think they can find anything coherent. It is bad for the country and the world that policy in the United States is being determined by a man child who has no idea what he is doing beyond stuffing his pockets, but that is the reality.

There may be a market for thoughtful pieces describing the grand Trump strategy in major intellectual outlets, but that is yet one more example of market failure. There ain’t nothing there.

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Image: James Bovard.

President Trump is rattling his saber against Colombian President Gustavo Petro to punish him for accusing the U.S. government of murdering Venezuelan fishermen.  Trump has boasted of the killings by the U.S. military but claims all the targets were drug smugglers. Trump has threatened to suspend all U.S. government handouts for the Colombian government.  Trump  warned that Petro that he “better close up” cocaine production  “or the United States will close them up for him, and it won’t be done nicely.”

Tapping his own psychiatric expertise, Trump proclaimed that Colombia has “the worst president they’ve ever had – a lunatic with serious mental problems.”

Is anyone in the Trump White House aware of the long history of U.S. failure in that part of the world? In 1989, President George H.W. Bush warned Colombian drug dealers that they were “no match for an angry America.” But Colombia remains the world’s largest cocaine producer despite billions of dollars of U.S. government anti-drug aid to the Colombian government. 

The Clinton administration made Colombia its top target in its international war on drugs. Clinton drug warriors deluged the Colombian government with U.S. tax dollars to deluge Colombia with toxic spray.  The New York Times reported that U.S.-financed  planes repeatedly sprayed pesticides onto schoolchildren, making many of them ill.  Colombian environmental minister Juan Mayr publicly declared in 1999 that the crop spraying program has been a failure and warned, “We can’t permanently fumigate the country.”

As I wrote in the American Spectator in 1999:    “Colombia has received almost a billion dollars of anti-narcotics aid since 1990. Coca production is skyrocketing–doubling since 1996 and, according to the General Accounting Office, expected to increase another 50 percent in the next two years. Colombia now supplies roughly three-quarters of the heroin and almost all the cocaine consumed in the United States.”

The Clinton administration responded to the failure of its drug war by championing a far more destructive solution. As I noted in the Las Vegas Review Journal, Clinton officials “intensely pressured the Colombian government to allow a much more toxic chemical (tebuthiuron, known as SPIKE 20) to be dumped  across the land, which would permit the planes to fly at much higher altitudes, Kosovo-style. Environmentalists warned that SPIKE 20 could poison ground water and permanently ruin the land for agriculture. Even as the Clinton administration decreed clean-air standards severely curtailing Americans’ exposure to chemicals that pose little or no health threat, it sought to deluge a foreign land with a toxic chemical in a way that would be forbidden in the United States.” Dow Chemical, the product’s inventor, protested strongly that SPIKE 20 was not safe for use in the Andes and surrounding areas. Didn’t matter. 

Colombia at that time was wracked by a civil war – a fight between a corrupt government and corrupt leftist guerillas. The Dallas Morning News noted reports that “tens of millions of taxpayer dollars are going into covert operations across southern Colombia employing, among others, U.S. Special Forces, former Green Berets, Gulf War veterans and even a few figures from covert CIA-backed operations in Central America during the 1980’s.”

Like Trump’s attacks on Venezuelan boats, Clinton’s aid for Colombia was lawless. Congress in 1996 prohibited any U.S. foreign aid to military organizations with a penchant for atrocities. The Colombian army had a poor human rights record but almost nobody in Congress gave a damn. Democrats winked at illicit conduct by their president and Republicans didn’t care about any crimes committed in the name of eradicating drugs. 

In a Baltimore Sun piece in June 2000, I observed, “The war on drugs is as unwinnable in Colombia as it is in the hills of Kentucky, where natives continue growing marijuana despite endless raids by police and the National Guard.” I whacked the Clinton administration for “bumbling into a civil war.” Colombia’s ambassador to the U.S. vehemently attacked my piece, claiming that the Clinton administration aid package was carefully targeted to “strengthen law enforcement institutions and help protect human rights.” Alas, U.S. aid was diverted to “carry out spying operations and smear campaigns against Supreme Court justices,” the Washington Post reported, crippling the nation’s judiciary.

At the same time that the Clinton administration was sacrificing the health of Colombian children in its quixotic anti-drug crusade, top U.S. antidrug officials made a mockery of the entire mission.  Laurie Hiett, the wife of Colonel James Hiett, the top U.S. military commander in Colombia, exploited U.S. embassy diplomatic pouches to ship 15 pounds of heroin and cocaine to New York.  She pocketed tens of thousands of dollars in narcotic profits.  After she was caught and convicted, she received far more lenient treatment than most drug offenders – only five years in prison, “the same sentence a small-time dealer would get if he were caught with five grams of crack in his pocket,” I noted in Playboy.  Her husband – ridiculed as the “Coke Colonel” in the New York Post – received only six months in prison for laundering drug proceeds and concealing his wife’s crimes.     Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, explained the double standard: “If Colonel Hiett had been Mr. Hiett, he would have been charged with conspiracy to traffic in more than a kilogram of heroin, with a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years. He would possibly face life without parole… Mr. Hiett would, at a minimum, have been charged with aiding and abetting his wife’s money laundering, facing 20 years.”  

Most drug warriors pretended either that the Hiett case had never happened or that it didn’t matter. Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey shrugged off the scandal: “What a tragedy…. There are 3.6 million chronic cocaine addicts in America and every one of them produces that kind of criminality and tragedy.”  

“But when any of those 3.6 million is caught, they don’t get coddled,” as I wrote in Playboy. 

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election did not entitle him to micromanage every acre of land in this hemisphere.  The U.S. drug war has dismally failed in Colombia for more than a third of a century.  There is no excuse for Trump or any other U.S. government official to burn U.S. tax dollars by perpetuating Colombian pratfalls.

** An earlier version of this piece was published by the Libertarian Institute

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Still from Where the Buffalo Roam.

Even though I’ve been making these annual appeals for several decades now, I’m a terrible fundraiser. I was even let go as a canvasser right out of college for a Nader-raider environmental outfit working to save the Chesapeake Bay from being poisoned. I spent too long at the door proselytizing about the issue and not enough time hitting people up for cash and checks. I missed my quotas night after night.

Writing these letters should come easier. But it doesn’t. Here I go again, talking when I should be selling. I’m never quite sure the buttons to push, the heartstrings to pull, and financial alarums to broadcast.

I’ve been around some really talented fundraisers. I’ve seen it done smoothly and efficiently. Few people could refuse a call from Alexander Cockburn asking for an emergency infusion of cash. My old friend James Monteith saved the Oregon Natural Resources Council, one of the most potent grassroots groups of the 1980s and 90s, from financial ruin once every couple of years.

But by far the most gifted fundraiser I knew was the arch-druid himself, David Brower, who used his unexcelled persuasive powers to transform the Sierra Club from a mountaineering clique of Bay Area elites into the world’s most powerful environmental group. Cockburn, Monteith and Brower all had charm and charisma, which they ruthlessly exploited. I lack both. I’m not timid about asking for money, just inept at the craft.

Brower once told me that the secret was “letting the work speak for itself and not to fear the consequences.” Do the work without fear of reprisal and the people will support you when you need them.

Brower knew what political retribution felt like. In 1966, the Johnson Administration suspended and then revoked the non-profit status of the Sierra Club, citing its aggressive advertising campaign against a bill that would have authorized canyon-flooding dams on some of the West’s wildest rivers. One of the most impactful of the ads read: Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?”

The ad proved a dam killer and so infuriated the federal government that the letter informing the Club that their non-profit status had been suspended was hand-delivered by a federal marshal. “For dramatic effect, I suppose,” Brower later quipped.

This is, of course, the precise strategy Trump is apparently pursuing as part of his campaign to shut down non-profit groups he perceives as enemies of his administration. Some pundits have said he got the idea from Viktor Orban’s suppression of civic groups in Hungary, but the domestic precedent had been set 50 years earlier that bastion of napalming liberals, the Johnson Administration.

The Club lost its tax status, but saved the Grand Canyon and emerged from the battle an even stronger and more politically potent organization.

Lesson learned. Let the work speak for itself. Don’t fear the consequences.

With all respect to you Søren K., we’re not afraid, we’re not trembling and our objective as journalists remains the same as it was in the 1990s when the first CounterPunch newsletter went to press: to question the received wisdom, call out political cant and cliches, expose injustices and follow the money wherever it leads and into whoever’s pockets it stuffs. As CounterPunch founder Ken Silverstein, still one of the best investigative journalists around, said: “We’re journalists, not ideologues. Everyone is fair game.”

And that’s the way we’ve conducted our work for more than three decades. We haven’t shied away from putting liberal and progressive icons (including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Paul Wellstone, Obama and Bernie Sanders) to the same scrutiny we imposed on the right. This has sometimes engendered fierce blowback from our readers. My reporting on Sanders during the 2016 campaign so irritated a few of the more excitable Bernie Bros that I began receiving hyperbolic threats to do gruesome bodily harm not only against my own delicate person, but more outrageously, our family. So it goes in big-time journalism. My critique of Bernie rang true. Still does.

I got a note from Danny Warner from somewhere in the Swiss Alps with his Friday column saying that he’d attacked the same subject as Dean Baker did earlier in the week, but from a different approach. The more angles the better, as far as I’m concerned. I like the idea of CounterPunch writers playing off each other, even refuting each other, in a kind of polemical dialectic that will move us forward, or keep us moving at any rate, and not mired in an intellectual stasis. No one, I presume, wants to hear the same take day after day until the “last syllable of recorded time”. Or bankruptcy.

Becky’s set forth our tenuous financial situation. I encourage you to look it over. It’s dire, but salvageable, if only a small percentage of daily readers of CounterPunch pitch in $25 or $50. Joshua has laid out what’s at stake in the world we’re reporting on. It’s equally dire. A true existential crisis and by existential, I mean a matter of life and death. And not just for humanity.

We’re not so grandiose as to claim that we’re going to save the planet from climate change or stop a genocide. We don’t have the guts of the Palestinian reporters in Gaza. We’re not putting our lives on the line, except in the minds of some cyberbully couch potatoes who haven’t seen sunlight since Ye called himself Kanye.

But we’re not going to lie to you either. We’re not going to sugarcoat reality or feed you false hope. We’re not going to play political favorites. We’re going to call it like we see it, unbound by the dictates of foundations, advertisers, political parties, or big donors with an agenda to push.

In the early years of CounterPunch, we alternated between two mottos on our masthead: “Power and Evil in Washington” and “Tells the Facts, Names the Names.” We’re still telling facts in an age when facts are being adulterated, perverted and fabricated.

We’re still naming names in an age when thin-skinned billionaires finance site-killing libel suits capable of sinking you financially before you even get to depositions.

We’re still trying to be journalists at a time when journalists are an endangered species, targeted for extinction not only by the nabobs of MAGA but their own bosses, many of them Private Equity pirates, who want to replace reporters with AI scribes (See Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Newsweek or the article “summaries” in the Associated Press, the New York Times and CNN) or have them micromanaged and disciplined by the likes of Bari Weiss, the ultra-Zionist editorial dominatrix now running the once venerable CBS News for Trump’s billionaire pals the Ellisons.

How does CounterPunch fit into this strange new media ecosystem? Well, by continuing to expose “power and evil”, even when the powerful and evil are publicly exposing themselves daily like school-yard flashers and daring you to do something about it.

Our job as I see it is to present American history clearly and to highlight the continuities of power that have sustained forever wars, racial oppression, environmental destruction and gaping economic inequality across political affiliations.

You don’t have to swallow all of Michel Foucault’s philosophy to understand that a critique of power–who wields it, how it’s leveraged, who it harms and who profits from the damage done–is vital to understanding how we got to where we are.

Where we are? We’ve entered a time of shattered illusions: The illusion that there ever was such a thing as “political norms.” The illusion that the West ever operated under a “rules-based order.” The illusion that the power of our government is limited by checks and balances and the of separation of powers. The illusion that the US is a nation of laws enforced by an independent judiciary. The illusion that the Bill of Rights applies to all. The illusion that we’d entered a post-racial society. The illusion that we’d intervene to stop, not help commit a genocide.

I’ve been writing about Gaza every week for the past two years, including more than 100 entries in my Gaza diary. It’s a horror story that should frighten every American, a story of mass slaughter, child murders and starvation–a genocide that our government has armed, abetted, condoned and shielded over mounting disgust of most Americans, left and right. This is another lesson in power. Trump has proved who holds the dominant hand in the US/Israel relationship and he has used it to constrain Netanyahu more than once, if only for his own self-interest and glorification. Biden could have done the same at any point in his presidency. But never did. Not because Netanyahu bullied Biden, but because Biden supported Israel to the hilt and backed its policy of destroying Gaza as a livable environment and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Strip. There are vast differences between Trump and Biden, but the continuities are even greater. Both have used power in the service of evil. And it’s our job to probe and expose both.

So my appeal to you in these desperate hours for the Republic is an appeal to reason, an appeal to the importance of facts, an appeal to political independence and free thought, an appeal for the value of doing the work without fear of retribution, even though it may be coming.

If this is important to you, if independent journalism still means something to you, then now’s your chance to help sustain it, to keep it alive with a darkness descending.

A beneficent donor, who has supported CounterPunch for many years without asking anything in return except for us to continue what we’re doing, has promised to match every donation of $50 or more through the next week. That means if you contribute $50, it will become through the magic of mathematics: $100.

We’ll be here until they turn the lights out.

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Still from David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997).

So, here we are on the precipice. Not just CounterPunch, but the country, even the 30% who refuse to believe it. Indeed, we may well be off the precipice, suspended in air above the chasm, like Wile E. Coyote, as the icy grip of gravity takes hold, pulling us down into political darkness. 

Is that dark pit we’re being dragged into “fascism”? I’m reluctant to use that word to describe the retrograde policies and savage tactics of the Trump regime. There’s no reason to import a European ideology from the last century to explain a domestic political pathology that can be traced back to the origins of the Republic. 

In fact, what if we’re entering a dispensation that’s even worse than “fascism”?  Worse, you say? What could be worse than fascism? 

How about a face-to-face confrontation with America’s own history, come alive on the streets of our largest cities, like armed zombies emerged from musty graves thought long buried.

Trump’s malignant genius is that while he’s furiously trying to whitewash American history at the Smithsonian, Gettysburg and Stonewall, he’s forcing Americans into a live-fire reenactment of some of its most nightmarish episodes.

The political antecedents of Donald Trump aren’t to be found in Weimar, Germany or the nationalist movements of post-WW I Italy, but in the authors of the Constitution, a document that not only condoned the ownership of human beings, but, through the 3/5s clause, gave a political advantage to the states whose economies were driven by slave labor.  A constitution that doubled down on this ignominy in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, requiring the return of escaped enslaved people to their enslavers, even from states that had outlawed slavery. It’s hard to hide that from the kiddies. But the Constitution just set the stage for what followed…

+ The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in the Republic’s infancy (1798), outlawing “malicious speech” against the government and targeting immigrants as “enemy aliens.” (Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act as part of his program against immigrants.)  

+ Thomas Jefferson signed the Insurrection Act into law in 1808. It’s been invoked by 15 presidents and General Douglas MacArthur, who thought he outranked the president, to suppress domestic dissent. 

+ In 1831, Trump’s hero Andy Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act and began the forced relocation of 60,000 people from the so-called “civilized” tribes of the southeast, a death march that went on for 19 years known as the Trail of Tears. 

+ In the Dred Scott decision (1857), the Supreme Court not only upheld the Fugitive Slave laws but also effectively ruled that blacks were subhuman and not entitled to any rights under the Constitution. 

+ In the 1850s and a group known as the Secret Order of the Stars Spangled Banner (later known colloquially as the Know-Nothings) rose to political prominence through immigrant bashing, mainly of Irish Catholics, in the East who they slandered as corrupting the US political system. 

+ During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and oversaw the largest mass execution in US history, hanging 33 Lakota men for defending their homeland from white land thieves. 

+ Former Confederate officers, such as KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, waged a war of terror against blacks and Radical Republicans across the South for 12 years until Reconstruction was abolished and Jim Crow established, effectively eviscerating the “rights” of southern blacks that had been won under the 13th and 14th Amendments. 

+ In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese workers from entering the US and preventing Chinese residents of the US from becoming citizens. The law wasn’t repealed until 1943. 

+ In 1890, yes 1890!, the US Cavalry massacred nearly 300 wearing and near-starving Lakota people, including dozens of women and children, at Wounded Knee. Thirty-one of the murderers were awarded Medals of Honor for the slaughter, tributes recently reaffirmed by Pete Hegseth, who called the killers “brave soldiers” who “deserved their medals.”

+ The eugenics movement (backed by some of the nation’s leading corporations and tycoons) originated in the US in the late 1890s, first with laws prohibiting marriage by people the state considered “epileptic, imbeciles or the feeble-minded.” Then, in 1908, Indiana (then considered a progressive state) enacted the first forced sterilization laws for those the state deemed “mentally ill or retarded.” These laws became the template for the eugenics programs of the Nazis, as Hitler himself admitted, not the other way round.

In 1917, Mexican immigrants crossing the border at El Paso, Texas, were doused with the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon-B, more than two decades before the Nazis used it on Jews and other “undesirables” in the death camps of Eastern Europe.

+ In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson unleashed the Palmer Raids, targeting suspected pacifists, black radicals, socialists, communists, anarchists and basically anyone who might’ve objected to Wilson screening Birth of a Nation in the White House for mass arrest and deportation. The raids launched the career of J. Edgar Hoover.

+ All of these grim chapters of homegrown authoritarianism unfolded long before Mussolini ever dreamed of bundling his fasces into a political cudgel and calling himself Il Duce.

But the beat went on…

+ In 1939, at a time when Trump’s father was attending pro-Nazi rallies in the US, the MS St. Louis, an ocean liner of the Hamburg America Line, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Europe attempting to escape being rounded up by the Gestapo, was denied entry into the US by the Roosevelt Administration. The Coast Guard shadowed the ship to prevent the Captain from intentionally running it aground on the US coast. Ultimately, the MS St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, where an estimated 254 of its passengers were murdered in the Holocaust. 

+ FDR imprisoned 100,000 Japanese-Americans in 10 concentration camps, nearly all of them without warrants or any indication of subversive intent. The Supreme Court sanctified this massive violation of civil liberties and constitutional rights in the Korematsu decision. 

+ Truman nuked two civilian cities in Japan as the war in the Pacific was nearing its inevitable end, primarily to intimidate the Soviets, who responded by building their own arsenal of atomic weapons, thus putting the planet at risk of nuclear annihilation, which now, eight decades later, seems closer than ever.

+ The bipartisan Red Scare of the late 40s and 50s saw the government ignite (one of the chief arsonists being Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn) a nationwide hysteria over alleged communist infiltration that led to purges of government workers (many of them at the State Department), academics, and Hollywood.

+ COINTELPRO was established in 1955 to spy on, harass, infiltrate, smear and even assassinate leaders of leftwing movements in the US, unfettered by any Constitutional restraints. The plug wasn’t pulled on COINTELPRO until 1971…so they claim.

+ JFK, RFK, LBJ, and J. Edgar spied on the leaders of the civil rights movement, smeared many as communists, and even blackmailed and tried to encourage MLK, Jr. to commit suicide. When he didn’t, did they have him killed? There’s a case to be made. A strong one.

+ Nixon illegally bombed Laos and Cambodia and manufactured a repressive drug war that one of his chief henchmen, John Ehrlichman, later admitted was “all about the blacks.”

+ Carter secretly started the largest CIA-run war in US history in Afghanistan, a war that gave the young Osama Bin Laden the training and weapons he would turn two decades later against his infidel benefactors.  

+ Clinton declared the era of big government over, destroyed welfare, bombed Afghanistan to divert attention from sexual trysts, instituted the most punitive and racist crime laws (written by Joe Biden’s staff) in US history and blamed black popular music for America’s cultural decline.

+ Bush the Lesser stole an election and then lied the US into a still-reverberating war that Biden and HRC both backed.

+ John Kerry lost an election, which his backers claimed was stolen by Bush-friendly Diebold voting machines in Ohio. 

+ Obama, the OG Deporter-in-Chief,  bailed out Wall Street, executed a coup in Honduras, a regime change in Libya and droned American citizens, including at least two children, without any legal justification. 

+ Biden armed, justified, and prolonged a genocide in Gaza that Trump extended and is now poised to capitalize on. Biden’s auto-penned pardons of his own family and inner-circle have enabled Trump to use the White House as a billion-dollar giftshop to enrich himself, his family and his cronies. 

+ And, of course, this grisly history also includes, yes, an apparently undying obsession, one might even say fetishization, of the Nazis, from Sieg Heiling industrials like Henry Ford and Elon Musk to the smack-chatting leaders of the Republican Youth movement to the progressive Democratic from Maine, Graham Plotter, who even now is having Nazi tattoos lasered from his flesh.

Trump isn’t trying anything new. He’s not an original thinker, even in a Machiavellian sense. Instead, he’s sampling the most authoritarian measures from the American past and trying them out on everything, everywhere, all at once.

Excuse me for a second. I’ve just been reminded by Becky Grant that this is supposed to be a fall fund drive appeal and not another Friday morning, stream-of-consciousness rant. Right, sorry.

Even though I’ve been making these annual appeals for several decades now, I’m a terrible fundraiser. I was even let go as a canvasser right out of college for a Nader-raider environmental outfit working to save the Chesapeake Bay from being poisoned. I spent too long at the door proselytizing about the issue and not enough time hitting people up for cash and checks. I missed my quotas night after night.

Writing these letters should come easier. But it doesn’t. Here I go again, talking when I should be selling. I’m never quite sure the buttons to push, the heartstrings to pull, and financial alarums to broadcast.

I’ve been around some really talented fundraisers. I’ve seen it done smoothly and efficiently. Few people could refuse a call from Alexander Cockburn asking for an emergency infusion of cash. My old friend James Monteith saved the Oregon Natural Resources Council, one of the most potent grassroots groups of the 1980s and 90s, from financial ruin once every couple of years. 

But by far the most gifted fundraiser I knew was the arch-druid himself, David Brower, who used his unexcelled persuasive powers to transform the Sierra Club from a mountaineering clique of Bay Area elites into the world’s most powerful environmental group. Cockburn, Monteith and Brower all had charm and charisma, which they ruthlessly exploited. I lack both. I’m not timid about asking for money, just inept at the craft.

Brower once told me that the secret was “letting the work speak for itself and not to fear the consequences.” Do the work without fear of reprisal and the people will support you when you need them. 

Brower knew what political retribution felt like. In 1966, the Johnson Administration suspended and then revoked the non-profit status of the Sierra Club, citing its aggressive advertising campaign against a bill that would have authorized canyon-flooding dams on some of the West’s wildest rivers. One of the most impactful of the ads read: Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?”

The ad proved a dam killer and so infuriated the federal government that the letter informing the Club that their non-profit status had been suspended was hand-delivered by a federal marshal. “For dramatic effect, I suppose,” Brower later quipped.

This is, of course, the precise strategy Trump is apparently pursuing as part of his campaign to shut down non-profit groups he perceives as enemies of his administration. Some pundits have said he got the idea from Viktor Orban’s suppression of civic groups in Hungary, but the domestic precedent had been set 50 years earlier that bastion of napalming liberals, the Johnson Administration.

The Club lost its tax status, but saved the Grand Canyon and emerged from the battle an even stronger and more politically potent organization. 

Lesson learned. Let the work speak for itself. Don’t fear the consequences.

With all respect to you Søren K., we’re not afraid, we’re not trembling and our objective as journalists remains the same as it was in the 1990s when the first CounterPunch newsletter went to press: to question the received wisdom, call out political cant and cliches, expose injustices and follow the money wherever it leads and into whoever’s pockets it stuffs. As CounterPunch founder Ken Silverstein, still one of the best investigative journalists around, said: “We’re journalists, not ideologues. Everyone is fair game.”

And that’s the way we’ve conducted our work for more than three decades. We haven’t shied away from putting liberal and progressive icons (including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Paul Wellstone, Obama and Bernie Sanders) to the same scrutiny we imposed on the right. This has sometimes engendered fierce blowback from our readers. My reporting on Sanders during the 2016 campaign so irritated a few of the more excitable Bernie Bros that I began receiving hyperbolic threats to do gruesome bodily harm not only against my own delicate person, but more outrageously, our family. So it goes in big-time journalism. My critique of Bernie rang true. Still does.

I got a note from Danny Warner from somewhere in the Swiss Alps with his Friday column saying that he’d attacked the same subject as Dean Baker did earlier in the week, but from a different approach. The more angles the better, as far as I’m concerned. I like the idea of CounterPunch writers playing off each other, even refuting each other, in a kind of polemical dialectic that will move us forward, or keep us moving at any rate, and not mired in an intellectual stasis. No one, I presume, wants to hear the same take day after day until the “last syllable of recorded time”. Or bankruptcy.

Becky’s set forth our tenuous financial situation. I encourage you to look it over. It’s dire, but salvageable, if only a small percentage of daily readers of CounterPunch pitch in $25 or $50. Joshua has laid out what’s at stake in the world we’re reporting on. It’s equally dire. A true existential crisis and by existential, I mean a matter of life and death. And not just for humanity. 

We’re not so grandiose as to claim that we’re going to save the planet from climate change or stop a genocide. We don’t have the guts of the Palestinian reporters in Gaza. We’re not putting our lives on the line, except in the minds of some cyberbully couch potatoes who haven’t seen sunlight since Ye called himself Kanye. 

But we’re not going to lie to you either. We’re not going to sugarcoat reality or feed you false hope. We’re not going to play political favorites. We’re going to call it like we see it, unbound by the dictates of foundations, advertisers, political parties, or big donors with an agenda to push. 

In the early years of CounterPunch, we alternated between two mottos on our masthead: “Power and Evil in Washington” and “Tells the Facts, Names the Names.” We’re still telling facts in an age when facts are being adulterated, perverted and fabricated. 

We’re still naming names in an age when thin-skinned billionaires finance site-killing libel suits capable of sinking you financially before you even get to depositions. 

We’re still trying to be journalists at a time when journalists are an endangered species, targeted for extinction not only by the nabobs of MAGA but their own bosses, many of them Private Equity pirates, who want to replace reporters with AI scribes (See Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Newsweek or the article “summaries” in the Associated Press, the New York Times and CNN) or have them micromanaged and disciplined by the likes of Bari Weiss, the ultra-Zionist editorial dominatrix now running the once venerable CBS News for Trump’s billionaire pals the Ellisons.

How does CounterPunch fit into this strange new media ecosystem? Well, by continuing to expose “power and evil”, even when the powerful and evil are publicly exposing themselves daily like school-yard flashers and daring you to do something about it.

Our job as I see it is to present American history clearly and to highlight the continuities of power that have sustained forever wars, racial oppression, environmental destruction and gaping economic inequality across political affiliations. 

You don’t have to swallow all of Michel Foucault’s philosophy to understand that a critique of power–who wields it, how it’s leveraged, who it harms and who profits from the damage done–is vital to understanding how we got to where we are. 

Where we are? We’ve entered a time of shattered illusions: The illusion that there ever was such a thing as “political norms.” The illusion that the West ever operated under a “rules-based order.” The illusion that the power of our government is limited by checks and balances and the of separation of powers. The illusion that the US is a nation of laws enforced by an independent judiciary. The illusion that the Bill of Rights applies to all. The illusion that we’d entered a post-racial society. The illusion that we’d intervene to stop, not help commit a genocide.

I’ve been writing about Gaza every week for the past two years, including more than 100 entries in my Gaza diary. It’s a horror story that should frighten every American, a story of mass slaughter, child murders and starvation–a genocide that our government has armed, abetted, condoned and shielded over mounting disgust of most Americans, left and right. This is another lesson in power. Trump has proved who holds the dominant hand in the US/Israel relationship and he has used it to constrain Netanyahu more than once, if only for his own self-interest and glorification. Biden could have done the same at any point in his presidency. But never did. Not because Netanyahu bullied Biden, but because Biden supported Israel to the hilt and backed its policy of destroying Gaza as a livable environment and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Strip. There are vast differences between Trump and Biden, but the continuities are even greater. Both have used power in the service of evil. And it’s our job to probe and expose both.

So my appeal to you in these desperate hours for the Republic is an appeal to reason, an appeal to the importance of facts, an appeal to political independence and free thought, an appeal for the value of doing the work without fear of retribution, even though it may be coming. 

If this is important to you, if independent journalism still means something to you, then now’s your chance to help sustain it, to keep it alive with a darkness descending. 

A beneficent donor, who has supported CounterPunch for many years without asking anything in return except for us to continue what we’re doing, has promised to match every donation of $50 or more through the next week. That means if you contribute $50, it will become through the magic of mathematics: $100.

We’ll be here until they turn the lights out.

The post Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: an Appeal in a Time of Darkness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Still from David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997).

So, here we are on the precipice. Not just CounterPunch, but the country, even the 30% who refuse to believe it. Indeed, we may well be off the precipice, suspended in air above the chasm, like Wile E. Coyote, as the icy grip of gravity takes hold, pulling us down into political darkness. 

Is that dark pit we’re being dragged into “fascism”? I’m reluctant to use that word to describe the retrograde policies and savage tactics of the Trump regime. There’s no reason to import a European ideology from the last century to explain a domestic political pathology that can be traced back to the origins of the Republic. 

In fact, what if we’re entering a dispensation that’s even worse than “fascism”?  Worse, you say? What could be worse than fascism? 

How about a face-to-face confrontation with America’s own history, come alive on the streets of our largest cities, like armed zombies emerged from musty graves thought long buried.

Trump’s malignant genius is that while he’s furiously trying to whitewash American history at the Smithsonian, Gettysburg and Stonewall, he’s forcing Americans into a live-fire reenactment of some of its most nightmarish episodes.

The political antecedents of Donald Trump aren’t to be found in Weimar, Germany or the nationalist movements of post-WW I Italy, but in the authors of the Constitution, a document that not only condoned the ownership of human beings, but, through the 3/5s clause, gave a political advantage to the states whose economies were driven by slave labor.  A constitution that doubled down on this ignominy in Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, requiring the return of escaped enslaved people to their enslavers, even from states that had outlawed slavery. It’s hard to hide that from the kiddies. But the Constitution just set the stage for what followed…

+ The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in the Republic’s infancy (1798), outlawing “malicious speech” against the government and targeting immigrants as “enemy aliens.” (Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act as part of his program against immigrants.)  

+ Thomas Jefferson signed the Insurrection Act into law in 1808. It’s been invoked by 15 presidents and General Douglas MacArthur, who thought he outranked the president, to suppress domestic dissent. 

+ In 1831, Trump’s hero Andy Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act and began the forced relocation of 60,000 people from the so-called “civilized” tribes of the southeast, a death march that went on for 19 years known as the Trail of Tears. 

+ In the Dred Scott decision (1857), the Supreme Court not only upheld the Fugitive Slave laws but also effectively ruled that blacks were subhuman and not entitled to any rights under the Constitution. 

+ In the 1850s and a group known as the Secret Order of the Stars Spangled Banner (later known colloquially as the Know-Nothings) rose to political prominence through immigrant bashing, mainly of Irish Catholics, in the East who they slandered as corrupting the US political system. 

+ During the Civil War, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and oversaw the largest mass execution in US history, hanging 33 Lakota men for defending their homeland from white land thieves. 

+ Former Confederate officers, such as KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, waged a war of terror against blacks and Radical Republicans across the South for 12 years until Reconstruction was abolished and Jim Crow established, effectively eviscerating the “rights” of southern blacks that had been won under the 13th and 14th Amendments. 

+ In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese workers from entering the US and preventing Chinese residents of the US from becoming citizens. The law wasn’t repealed until 1943. 

+ In 1890, yes 1890!, the US Cavalry massacred nearly 300 wearing and near-starving Lakota people, including dozens of women and children, at Wounded Knee. Thirty-one of the murderers were awarded Medals of Honor for the slaughter, tributes recently reaffirmed by Pete Hegseth, who called the killers “brave soldiers” who “deserved their medals.”

+ The eugenics movement (backed by some of the nation’s leading corporations and tycoons) originated in the US in the late 1890s, first with laws prohibiting marriage by people the state considered “epileptic, imbeciles or the feeble-minded.” Then, in 1908, Indiana (then considered a progressive state) enacted the first forced sterilization laws for those the state deemed “mentally ill or retarded.” These laws became the template for the eugenics programs of the Nazis, as Hitler himself admitted, not the other way round.

In 1917, Mexican immigrants crossing the border at El Paso, Texas, were doused with the cyanide-based pesticide Zyklon-B, more than two decades before the Nazis used it on Jews and other “undesirables” in the death camps of Eastern Europe.

+ In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson unleashed the Palmer Raids, targeting suspected pacifists, black radicals, socialists, communists, anarchists and basically anyone who might’ve objected to Wilson screening Birth of a Nation in the White House for mass arrest and deportation. The raids launched the career of J. Edgar Hoover.

+ All of these grim chapters of homegrown authoritarianism unfolded long before Mussolini ever dreamed of bundling his fasces into a political cudgel and calling himself Il Duce.

But the beat went on…

+ In 1939, at a time when Trump’s father was attending pro-Nazi rallies in the US, the MS St. Louis, an ocean liner of the Hamburg America Line, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Europe attempting to escape being rounded up by the Gestapo, was denied entry into the US by the Roosevelt Administration. The Coast Guard shadowed the ship to prevent the Captain from intentionally running it aground on the US coast. Ultimately, the MS St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, where an estimated 254 of its passengers were murdered in the Holocaust. 

+ FDR imprisoned 100,000 Japanese-Americans in 10 concentration camps, nearly all of them without warrants or any indication of subversive intent. The Supreme Court sanctified this massive violation of civil liberties and constitutional rights in the Korematsu decision. 

+ Truman nuked two civilian cities in Japan as the war in the Pacific was nearing its inevitable end, primarily to intimidate the Soviets, who responded by building their own arsenal of atomic weapons, thus putting the planet at risk of nuclear annihilation, which now, eight decades later, seems closer than ever.

+ The bipartisan Red Scare of the late 40s and 50s saw the government ignite (one of the chief arsonists being Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn) a nationwide hysteria over alleged communist infiltration that led to purges of government workers (many of them at the State Department), academics, and Hollywood.

+ COINTELPRO was established in 1955 to spy on, harass, infiltrate, smear and even assassinate leaders of leftwing movements in the US, unfettered by any Constitutional restraints. The plug wasn’t pulled on COINTELPRO until 1971…so they claim.

+ JFK, RFK, LBJ, and J. Edgar spied on the leaders of the civil rights movement, smeared many as communists, and even blackmailed and tried to encourage MLK, Jr. to commit suicide. When he didn’t, did they have him killed? There’s a case to be made. A strong one.

+ Nixon illegally bombed Laos and Cambodia and manufactured a repressive drug war that one of his chief henchmen, John Ehrlichman, later admitted was “all about the blacks.”

+ Carter secretly started the largest CIA-run war in US history in Afghanistan, a war that gave the young Osama Bin Laden the training and weapons he would turn two decades later against his infidel benefactors.  

+ Clinton declared the era of big government over, destroyed welfare, bombed Afghanistan to divert attention from sexual trysts, instituted the most punitive and racist crime laws (written by Joe Biden’s staff) in US history and blamed black popular music for America’s cultural decline.

+ Bush the Lesser stole an election and then lied the US into a still-reverberating war that Biden and HRC both backed.

+ John Kerry lost an election, which his backers claimed was stolen by Bush-friendly Diebold voting machines in Ohio. 

+ Obama, the OG Deporter-in-Chief,  bailed out Wall Street, executed a coup in Honduras, a regime change in Libya and droned American citizens, including at least two children, without any legal justification. 

+ Biden armed, justified, and prolonged a genocide in Gaza that Trump extended and is now poised to capitalize on. Biden’s auto-penned pardons of his own family and inner-circle have enabled Trump to use the White House as a billion-dollar giftshop to enrich himself, his family and his cronies. 

+ And, of course, this grisly history also includes, yes, an apparently undying obsession, one might even say fetishization, of the Nazis, from Sieg Heiling industrials like Henry Ford and Elon Musk to the smack-chatting leaders of the Republican Youth movement to the progressive Democratic from Maine, Graham Plotter, who even now is having Nazi tattoos lasered from his flesh.

Trump isn’t trying anything new. He’s not an original thinker, even in a Machiavellian sense. Instead, he’s sampling the most authoritarian measures from the American past and trying them out on everything, everywhere, all at once.

Excuse me for a second. I’ve just been reminded by Becky Grant that this is supposed to be a fall fund drive appeal and not another Friday morning, stream-of-consciousness rant. Right, sorry.

Even though I’ve been making these annual appeals for several decades now, I’m a terrible fundraiser. I was even let go as a canvasser right out of college for a Nader-raider environmental outfit working to save the Chesapeake Bay from being poisoned. I spent too long at the door proselytizing about the issue and not enough time hitting people up for cash and checks. I missed my quotas night after night.

Writing these letters should come easier. But it doesn’t. Here I go again, talking when I should be selling. I’m never quite sure the buttons to push, the heartstrings to pull, and financial alarums to broadcast.

I’ve been around some really talented fundraisers. I’ve seen it done smoothly and efficiently. Few people could refuse a call from Alexander Cockburn asking for an emergency infusion of cash. My old friend James Monteith saved the Oregon Natural Resources Council, one of the most potent grassroots groups of the 1980s and 90s, from financial ruin once every couple of years. 

But by far the most gifted fundraiser I knew was the arch-druid himself, David Brower, who used his unexcelled persuasive powers to transform the Sierra Club from a mountaineering clique of Bay Area elites into the world’s most powerful environmental group. Cockburn, Monteith and Brower all had charm and charisma, which they ruthlessly exploited. I lack both. I’m not timid about asking for money, just inept at the craft.

Brower once told me that the secret was “letting the work speak for itself and not to fear the consequences.” Do the work without fear of reprisal and the people will support you when you need them. 

Brower knew what political retribution felt like. In 1966, the Johnson Administration suspended and then revoked the non-profit status of the Sierra Club, citing its aggressive advertising campaign against a bill that would have authorized canyon-flooding dams on some of the West’s wildest rivers. One of the most impactful of the ads read: Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Nearer the Ceiling?”

The ad proved a dam killer and so infuriated the federal government that the letter informing the Club that their non-profit status had been suspended was hand-delivered by a federal marshal. “For dramatic effect, I suppose,” Brower later quipped.

This is, of course, the precise strategy Trump is apparently pursuing as part of his campaign to shut down non-profit groups he perceives as enemies of his administration. Some pundits have said he got the idea from Viktor Orban’s suppression of civic groups in Hungary, but the domestic precedent had been set 50 years earlier that bastion of napalming liberals, the Johnson Administration.

The Club lost its tax status, but saved the Grand Canyon and emerged from the battle an even stronger and more politically potent organization. 

Lesson learned. Let the work speak for itself. Don’t fear the consequences.

With all respect to you Søren K., we’re not afraid, we’re not trembling and our objective as journalists remains the same as it was in the 1990s when the first CounterPunch newsletter went to press: to question the received wisdom, call out political cant and cliches, expose injustices and follow the money wherever it leads and into whoever’s pockets it stuffs. As CounterPunch founder Ken Silverstein, still one of the best investigative journalists around, said: “We’re journalists, not ideologues. Everyone is fair game.”

And that’s the way we’ve conducted our work for more than three decades. We haven’t shied away from putting liberal and progressive icons (including Bill and Hillary Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Paul Wellstone, Obama and Bernie Sanders) to the same scrutiny we imposed on the right. This has sometimes engendered fierce blowback from our readers. My reporting on Sanders during the 2016 campaign so irritated a few of the more excitable Bernie Bros that I began receiving hyperbolic threats to do gruesome bodily harm not only against my own delicate person, but more outrageously, our family. So it goes in big-time journalism. My critique of Bernie rang true. Still does.

I got a note from Danny Warner from somewhere in the Swiss Alps with his Friday column saying that he’d attacked the same subject as Dean Baker did earlier in the week, but from a different approach. The more angles the better, as far as I’m concerned. I like the idea of CounterPunch writers playing off each other, even refuting each other, in a kind of polemical dialectic that will move us forward, or keep us moving at any rate, and not mired in an intellectual stasis. No one, I presume, wants to hear the same take day after day until the “last syllable of recorded time”. Or bankruptcy.

Becky’s set forth our tenuous financial situation. I encourage you to look it over. It’s dire, but salvageable, if only a small percentage of daily readers of CounterPunch pitch in $25 or $50. Joshua has laid out what’s at stake in the world we’re reporting on. It’s equally dire. A true existential crisis and by existential, I mean a matter of life and death. And not just for humanity. 

We’re not so grandiose as to claim that we’re going to save the planet from climate change or stop a genocide. We don’t have the guts of the Palestinian reporters in Gaza. We’re not putting our lives on the line, except in the minds of some cyberbully couch potatoes who haven’t seen sunlight since Ye called himself Kanye. 

But we’re not going to lie to you either. We’re not going to sugarcoat reality or feed you false hope. We’re not going to play political favorites. We’re going to call it like we see it, unbound by the dictates of foundations, advertisers, political parties, or big donors with an agenda to push. 

In the early years of CounterPunch, we alternated between two mottos on our masthead: “Power and Evil in Washington” and “Tells the Facts, Names the Names.” We’re still telling facts in an age when facts are being adulterated, perverted and fabricated. 

We’re still naming names in an age when thin-skinned billionaires finance site-killing libel suits capable of sinking you financially before you even get to depositions. 

We’re still trying to be journalists at a time when journalists are an endangered species, targeted for extinction not only by the nabobs of MAGA but their own bosses, many of them Private Equity pirates, who want to replace reporters with AI scribes (See Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Newsweek or the article “summaries” in the Associated Press, the New York Times and CNN) or have them micromanaged and disciplined by the likes of Bari Weiss, the ultra-Zionist editorial dominatrix now running the once venerable CBS News for Trump’s billionaire pals the Ellisons.

How does CounterPunch fit into this strange new media ecosystem? Well, by continuing to expose “power and evil”, even when the powerful and evil are publicly exposing themselves daily like school-yard flashers and daring you to do something about it.

Our job as I see it is to present American history clearly and to highlight the continuities of power that have sustained forever wars, racial oppression, environmental destruction and gaping economic inequality across political affiliations. 

You don’t have to swallow all of Michel Foucault’s philosophy to understand that a critique of power–who wields it, how it’s leveraged, who it harms and who profits from the damage done–is vital to understanding how we got to where we are. 

Where we are? We’ve entered a time of shattered illusions: The illusion that there ever was such a thing as “political norms.” The illusion that the West ever operated under a “rules-based order.” The illusion that the power of our government is limited by checks and balances and the of separation of powers. The illusion that the US is a nation of laws enforced by an independent judiciary. The illusion that the Bill of Rights applies to all. The illusion that we’d entered a post-racial society. The illusion that we’d intervene to stop, not help commit a genocide.

I’ve been writing about Gaza every week for the past two years, including more than 100 entries in my Gaza diary. It’s a horror story that should frighten every American, a story of mass slaughter, child murders and starvation–a genocide that our government has armed, abetted, condoned and shielded over mounting disgust of most Americans, left and right. This is another lesson in power. Trump has proved who holds the dominant hand in the US/Israel relationship and he has used it to constrain Netanyahu more than once, if only for his own self-interest and glorification. Biden could have done the same at any point in his presidency. But never did. Not because Netanyahu bullied Biden, but because Biden supported Israel to the hilt and backed its policy of destroying Gaza as a livable environment and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the Strip. There are vast differences between Trump and Biden, but the continuities are even greater. Both have used power in the service of evil. And it’s our job to probe and expose both.

So my appeal to you in these desperate hours for the Republic is an appeal to reason, an appeal to the importance of facts, an appeal to political independence and free thought, an appeal for the value of doing the work without fear of retribution, even though it may be coming. 

If this is important to you, if independent journalism still means something to you, then now’s your chance to help sustain it, to keep it alive with a darkness descending. 

A beneficent donor, who has supported CounterPunch for many years without asking anything in return except for us to continue what we’re doing, has promised to match every donation of $50 or more through the next week. That means if you contribute $50, it will become through the magic of mathematics: $100.

We’ll be here until they turn the lights out.

The post Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: an Appeal in a Time of Darkness appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Mathias Reding

The United Nations has recently come under attack from the Trump Administration and, much as it goes against the grain, it’s difficult to argue with real-estate-developer-cum-ambassador-Representative for U.N. Management and Reform [sic], Jeff Bartos:

Over 80 years, the UN has grown bloated, unfocused, too often ineffective, and sometimes even part of the problem. The UN’s failure to deliver on its core mandates is alarming and undeniable.

Yet the problem isn’t really the UN. One notable symptom of its malaise is the Security Council and its five veto-playing permanent members—the US, UK, France, China and Russia—countries representing the world system that assist and cover up for their allies who commit human rights violations, war crimes, and genocide, and that also outsource such crimes. But lèse-humanité is the crime par excellence of the international system. It’s a basic principle of colonial “development”. So what follows isn’t about kicking the UN when it’s down, but about how the rulers of this system use any institution, democratic or otherwise, to achieve their own diabolical and white supremacist ends.

I’m sorry—in more ways than one—that this article is long.

It’s long because the list of UN (when I refer to the UN, I’m basically referring to the world system) offences against the people of West Papua is hideously long. Sadly, my list is by no means complete because there’s lots of “Classified” I don’t know about and many, many secrets, but I hope it gives a glimpse of how the international system works when it wants to get whole encumbering peoples out of its way.

I’m taking it as given that Indonesia is committing genocide in West Papua. It’s done stealthily but there’s plenty of evidence (for example, see here, here, and here) for it. However, the facts show that, in this six-decade-plus crime against humanity, Indonesia has been the tool of other interests, that the role of the United Nations (by which I mean some of its dominant powers and personalities) has been particularly egregious, and this is surely one of the reasons why the West Papua genocide has continued sub rosa, deliberately silenced, for more than sixty years. There are many aspects of the UN betrayal because they belong to big-power politics, and they’re convoluted because of the secrecy that surrounds them. 

This isn’t about an isolated instance of genocidal violence. It fits into a world system where white supremacist brutality, going back at least to the period of early modern European overseas expansion from the 15^th century, the so-called Age of Discovery (a quintessentially Eurocentric concept), turned into a “scientifically-based” system with the Enlightenment and didn’t end with decolonisation. I’d suggest, after reading documents from the time when West Papua was gifted to Indonesia, that the latter was less the West’s darling than a mere instrument unscrupulously used to favour the economic and geopolitical interests of white supremacy and its destructive notions of “progress and development”. It’s not only the various Indonesian regimes that are responsible for mass murder in West Papua, but also and especially their enablers in the international political system represented by the UN and the big powers.

I can only partially list the crimes committed against West Papua (and, here, I’m indebted to painstaking research by Julian McKinlay King, John Saltford, Greg Poulgrain, and others). But even an incomplete list gives an idea of the magnitude of this lèse-humanité, this core crime of international law. I’m not interested in “speaking truth to power” because I agree with Pankaj Mishra that this is a naïve exercise. Those in power know and control the truth. I studied Politics and am not an expert in international law so I hope I don’t misinterpret some aspects of it. In any case, the hard facts are enraging for any decent human being. Experts in international law are often too invested in, or too occupied with other aspects of the corrupt system to inquire into the evidence of Indonesia’s daily genocidal actions in West Papua, and too demoralised to try to stop them through the shoddy institutions at their disposal. Yet any non-expert person who cares to look at the documents can see quite plainly that, in the last almost 65 years of West Papua’s history, the UN has played a shameful role, not only allowing this to happen but deliberately colluding with it. The very forum that has the power to stop the genocide is complicit in it. 

It was only recently that the UN finally acknowledged that Israel is committing genocide in Palestine, and I can’t help wondering whether all this fudging about the word is somehow related with fear of disclosure of the UN’s active role in abetting and silencing the West Papua genocide. I list forty-three aspects of this below.

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1. RESOURCES: The scene was set by big power politics in the early 1900s. After the Dutch East Indies gained independence in 1949, Dutch New Guinea remained under Holland’s control until 1962. Greg Poulgrain details how Allen Dulles, CIA director from 1953-1961, aware of West Papua’s immense oil and mineral wealth before the Second World War, decided to bring the colony under Indonesian control, as part of a wider plan of directing Indonesian politics as well. From the early twentieth century, the U.S. Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil had been trying to take over Dutch oil interests in the Indies. After the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company was formed in 1935, Dulles, as official representative of Standard Oil group, was able to use alarmism about Japanese intentions to obtain a 60% US controlling interest in the company. US geologists remained in West Papua for another decade after the Second World War but their findings of vast mineral and oil resources were kept secret by Dutch Foreign Minister Luns and Dulles, so neither Sukarno, nor Kennedy, nor the second UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld (1953-1961) were informed. The chief concern of Dulles and the Dutch colonial authorities was to wrest control of the gold, copper and oil in the colony they said had no natural resources. In 1961, a Freeport director, Robert Lovett (“architect of the Cold War” and director of Freeport McMoran, which holds 48.8% of the shares in the world’s largest gold mine and one of its largest copper mines in Grasberg, West Papua), got his friend McGeorge Bundy appointed as national security advisor in Washington DC where he could influence US foreign policy, which included playing a significant role in transferring control of West Papua to Indonesia. After Hammarskjöld was murdered (see point 2), McGeorge Bundy and Co. persuaded Kennedy that the handover of West Papua was a necessary measure to save the world from communism. Ideological gloss covered up real motives.

2. MURDER: There’s more to the story than oil and mineral greed. Naturally, it’s also about big power politics. An important factor is the death in a suspicious plane crash in Ndola (then northern Rhodesia, now Zambia) of Hammarskjöld and fifteen other people, eleven of them UN employees, and its subsequent coverup. In those Cold War years, Hammarskjöld was trying to democratise UN workings and was, in Poulgrain’s words, “an outspoken advocate for the economic development of poorer countries”. His plan, which included a Special Fund for these countries, greatly irked leading players on both sides of the Cold War, including Dulles and Nikita Khrushchev, especially when it seemed that President Kennedy supported Hammarskjöld’s approach to decolonisation. This project of “speedy and unconditional granting to all colonial peoples of the right of self-determination” meant that, with the addition of 88 newly independent territories, he would create in the UN a counterweight to the neocolonially ambitious Cold War powers.

3. COVERUP: All this directly pertains to West Papua. Greg Poulgrain reports Hammarskjöld was committed to intervening in the dispute between Indonesia and the Netherlands over sovereignty of West Papua, and planned to declare Dutch and Indonesian claims to the territory invalid at the UN General Assembly in October or November 1961. Kennedy supported him because this saved him from having to decide whether to hand the disputed territory of West Papua to Indonesia or, in these times of decolonisation, to the colonial power, NATO ally the Netherlands, in a thorny situation where the Soviet Union and China supported the Indonesian claim. There seems little doubt that Hammarskjöld and the fifteen other passengers in the plane were murdered. On 20 September 1961, two days after the crash former US president, Harry S. Truman, was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “Mr. Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him. Notice that I said ‘when they killed him’.” The UN huggermuggery about the deaths of its Secretary-General and eleven other staff members in Ndola is suspicious to say the least. West Papua is almost certainly enshrouded in all that secrecy.

4. DUBIOUS CLAIMANTS: Indonesia’s right to negotiate West Papua’s future was questionable. When it was admitted as a sovereign nation to the UN, General Assembly Resolution 448 (V) stated, “Noting the communication dated 29 June 1950 from the Government of the Netherlands will no longer present a report pursuant to Article 73 e on Indonesia with the exception of West New Guinea [my emphasis]”. The UN didn’t recognise West New Guinea as part of Indonesia. Before officially joining the UN in September 1950 but having sworn to respect its principles, and ignoring the fact that West Papua was to be decolonised under the name “Netherlands New Guinea”, Indonesia’s President Sukarno, in his speech of 17 August on the fifth anniversary of Indonesia’s independence, was agitating for “national” unity with the slogan “From Sabang to Merauke” (from the northwesternmost tip of the country, an island off Sumatra, to the eastern town in West Papua). Indonesia’s designs on West Papua were clear from the very start.

5. DEFILING “SACRED TRUST”: As a UN member, Indonesia was obliged to respect the UN Charter and the basic principles expressed therein. Article 73 e, states, “Members of the United Nations which have or assume responsibilities for the administration of territories whose peoples have not yet attained a full measure of self-government recognize the principle that the interests of the inhabitants of these territories are paramount, and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the utmost, within the system of international peace and security established by the present Charter, the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories”. The interests of the West Papuans were clearly not remotely paramount and, indeed, when Indonesia dishonestly, and evidently dishonestly, agreed to these obligations, the stage was set for an internationally orchestrated coverup of its subsequent serious human right abuses, and even genocide in West Papua, because the UN’s complicity also had to be covered up.

6. WEST PAPUANS EXPUNGED: The New York Agreement between the Republic of Indonesia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands Concerning West New Guinea (West Irian) was signed at the New York headquarters of the UN on 15 August 1962. No representative from West Papua was present. Article I stipulates that “both Contracting Parties, Indonesia and the Netherlands will jointly sponsor a draft resolution in the United Nations under the terms of which the General Assembly of the United Nations takes note of [not “ratifies”] the present Agreement, acknowledges the role conferred upon the Secretary-General of the United Nations therein, and authorizes him to carry out the tasks entrusted to him therein.” Article II says, “the Netherlands will transfer administration of the territory to a United Nations Temporary Executive Authority (UNTEA) established by and under the jurisdiction of the Secretary-General upon the arrival of the United Nations Administrator appointed in accordance with article IV. The UNTEA will in turn transfer the administration to Indonesia in accordance with article XII.” The Agreement came into force on 21 September 1962 when it was acknowledged by General Assembly Resolution 1752 (XVII), which authorized the UN to oversee the transfer, as the basis for its implementation.

7. NAME SCAM: The title of the UN General Assembly Resolution 1752 (XVII – Agreement between the Republic of Indonesia and the Kingdom of Netherlands Concerning West New Guinea (West Irian)) of 18 September 1962 lets slip what was, in fact, a foregone conclusion. The word “Irian” in the name Indonesia gave in 1949 to its future colony (Irian Barat) comes from the acronym Ikut Republik Indonesia Anti-Nederland (To Join the Anti-Netherlands Republic of Indonesia). 

8. “STONE-AGE” STIGMA: The formula both Contracting parties is further evidence of how the West Papuan people were excluded from deciding their own fate. They were depicted as “stone-age” people when, in fact, they had already opted for and were ready for independence, with electoral rolls, and the establishment of the New Guinea Council in April 1961, complete with a national manifesto and the Morning Star flag. The Council’s work was callously cut short by the exclusively external, colonial and neocolonial New York Agreement. 

9. COMMUNIST FEARMONGERING: The crushing influence of big power considerations is clear in a 1962 U.S. State Department note, which makes no bones about the fact that, “The underlying reason that the Kennedy administration pressed the Netherlands to accept this agreement was that it believed that Cold War considerations of preventing Indonesia from going Communist overrode the Dutch case”. The fact that, from 1957 to 1962, the USSR had committed $900 million in military aid to Indonesia, reinforced the arguments. But the ideological considerations, as they so often do, covered up the other plan to exploit West Papua’s natural resources, of which Kennedy was unaware.

10. SECRET CRONY PROMISES: Only days after the inauguration of President Kennedy, U.S. Ambassador to Indonesia, Howard P. Jones, submitted a seven-point plan to prevent Indonesia from “falling under Communist control”. Key points were the resolution of the West New Guinea question, the promise to Sukarno that the territory would be reunited with Indonesia and “the creation of a personal relationship between Presidents Kennedy and Sukarno”. 

11. INSTRUMENTALISATION: For Sukarno, the UN was a mere instrument. When Kennedy raised the issue of the trusteeship, he replied, “we would be willing to borrow the hand of the United Nations [my emphasis] to transfer the territory to Indonesia.” The Department of State and the White House also sought to use the UN as a rubber stamp for their plans because, in fact, Sukarno was their instrument. The matter would really be decided outside the UN. In this process, the Department encouraged the Netherlands and Indonesia to hold secret bilateral negotiations.

12. REMOVING THE NETHERLANDS: Even before Hammarskjöld was murdered, White House and National Security Council staffer Robert Komer was pushing to “spell out for the President that trusteeship was not just a ‘graceful out for the Netherlands,’ but also ‘a cover for eventually giving WNG to Indonesia’”. Meanwhile, Kennedy’s Deputy Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, Walt Rostow, pressed him to “insist that the only resolution of the issue was one that ‘looks to Indonesian control’”, adding that “meaningful self-determination for ‘stone-age Papuans’ would take too long.”

13. FREEPORT DIPLOMACY: Freeport director Robert Lovett’s friend, McGeorge Bundy, “Freeport’s national security pick” and now Kennedy’s National Security Adviser, gave his support to Indonesia, emphasising that “no one in this town does not believe that, sooner or later, the Indonesia will get West Irian”, so the United States had to “work with this trend and not allow the Soviet bloc to exploit the issue”. Kennedy was persuaded and opted for active support of Indonesia. 

14. ANTICOMMUNIST PROMISES: In a secret letter to Dr. J. E. de Quay, Prime Minister of the Netherlands, dated 2 April 1962, Kennedy wrote, “If the Indonesian Army were committed to all out war against The Netherlands, the moderate elements within the Army and the country would be quickly eliminated, leaving a clear field for communist intervention. If Indonesia were to succumb to communism in these circumstances, the whole non-communist position in Viet-Nam, Thailand, and Malaya would be in grave peril, and as you know these are areas in which we in the United States have heavy commitments and burdens.” Persuasion of the Dutch “to turn over administrative control of the territory to a UN administrator” came with a promise that Kennedy’s key advisors knew would not be honoured: “The UN, in turn, would relinquish control to the Indonesians within a specified period. These arrangements would include provisions whereby the Papuan people would, within a certain period, be granted the right of self-determination. The UN would be involved in the preparations for the exercise of self-determination.”

15. THE CHIEF LEGAL ADVISOR’S “LIKELY OUTCOME”: Kennedy sent his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to Indonesia and the Netherlands for UN-supervised bilateral negotiations. Although the Law Boss “could give no assurances to the Indonesians that the Netherlands would agree to transfer WNG to Indonesia, he could say that the United States believed this was the likely outcome …” 

16. RACISM: Racism was a potent bargaining point. After Robert Kennedy’s visit, eight members of the New Guinea Council, wired the president: “We protest strongly Robert Kennedy’s humiliating statements on television concerning backwardness Papuan people and lack university trained workers, seemingly indicating advise [sic] to Indonesia to eradicate Papuan people … Independence and democracy can be understood and practiced by common people even if they have not seen Harvard and we have an unalienable right to such practicing …”. The message went unanswered. The State Department considered that “there is no advantage to be gained by replying to these persons”.

17. “CANNIBAL LAND”: In the name of “cold realpolitik” Robert Komer spoke of sacrificing “a few thousand square miles of cannibal land.” In one message dated 15 January 1962 and copied to Bundy, he referred to “that bit of colonial debris called West New Guinea”. His colleague Robert Johnson “considered self-determination [a] meaningless facade when applied to stone-age people almost totally lacking in contact with the modern world.” Robert Amory of the CIA said a plebiscite was “farcical … considering the stone-age level of the West New Guineans”. Press accounts shaped popular culture with lurid accounts of naked cannibals. The legacy endured. In 2014, Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, by Carl Hoffman, purporting to prove that Michael Rockefeller, son of New York Governor, Nelson Rockefeller (with Standard Oil connections of course), who disappeared in West Papua, was killed and eaten by cannibals, has the magic words Savage, Cannibals, and Primitive, while Quest covers what was really misappropriation of sacred works of art. Rockefeller’s father donated the products of this “Quest” to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which later had a Michael C. Rockefeller Wing where it is truly heartbreaking to see them displayed as mere collectors’ objects, so sterilely, so far from home.

18. “ONLY SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND”: For all his fine words immediately after Hammarskjöld’s murder (“That continuing tide of selfdetermination, which runs so strong, has our sympathy and our support”), President Kennedy, now wholly under the influence of his take-the-gloves-off national security advisors, still ignorant of West Papua’s oil and mineral wealth, unable to understand why the Dutch wanted to keep that “bit of colonial debris”, and swayed by the anti-communist argument, expressed a callous lack of concern about “those Papuans” a few months later. When the Dutch ambassador J. H. van Roijen, compared Papua to Berlin, Kennedy answered, “Oh, that is entirely different because there are something like two and a quarter million West Berliners where there are only seven hundred thousand of those Papuans. Moreover, the West Berliners are highly civilised and highly cultured, whereas those inhabitants of West New Guinea are living, as it were, in the Stone Age.”

19. MILITARY REALITY: On 11 March 1962, on US instructions, UN Acting Secretary General U Thant appointed businessman, diplomat, and hawk, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker as mediator for forthcoming Dutch/Indonesian talks. This was in violation of Article 100 of the UN Charter, In these talks (by which time Indonesia had already launched a small-scale invasion of West Papua shortly after Dag Hammarskjöld was killed), Bunker proposed that Indonesia should be given administration of West Papua and that the United Nations should be involved in the process of “self-determination” for its people. The transfer would take two years, with Indonesians replacing U.N. administrators in the second year. The United Nations would oversee a subsequent arrangement whereby West Papuans could exercise expression of free choice. However, “Indonesia wanted to minimize the role of the United Nations”, as well as recognition of “special status for their paratrooper forces which had infiltrated into WNG”. These forces were under the command of Major-General Suharto (soon to be President of Indonesia after one of history’s worst crimes against humanity, a U.S.-orchestrated military coup, in which between 500,000 and a million people were murdered and 1.7 million imprisoned for years without trial). Obviously this man, the US’s man in Indonesia, wouldn’t be permitting a free, democratic Act of Free Choice four years later.

20. BROKEN DUTCH PROMISES TO “CANNIBALS”: In 1961, after months of talks with American officials, the Dutch Foreign Minister Joseph Luns, who once facetiously remarked in an official conversation when asked how West Papuans responded to Indonesian infiltrators that “the natives either apprehended and reported these agitators to the local administration or they ate the agitators” although “there was only one variation to this latter practice and that existed among the more Christianized natives who would only eat fishermen on Fridays”, proposed a UN trusteeship for West Papua to the General Assembly. It went to the vote a few days after Hammarskjöld’s death but was rejected in the UN. Nevertheless, Dutch officials promised that, whatever happened, they would honour their promise to ensure that West Papua achieved independence in ten years, Dutch journalist Willem Oltmans, who had briefed President Kennedy’s national security staff in 1961, differed. The dispute was about “who will train the Papuans to eat with knife and fork”. In a confidential briefing of April 1961 to former US secretary of state Dean Acheson (Kennedy’s envoy), Dirk Stikker, Secretary-General of NATO, opined that “Dutch politicians and people… would be extremely grateful if the US will take leadership in pushing through an international trusteeship arrangement for NNG [Netherlands New Guinea]” and, more than once, Prince Bernhard also informed Kennedy via his foreign policy advisor Dean Acheson that the Dutch would accept the handover to Indonesia of West Papua.

21. “POLITICAL CAPITAL” OF INDONESIAN “INTEGRITY”: The UN debate on the future of West Papua at the 16^th General Assembly was slotted into wider discussion on granting independence to former colonial peoples in which Indonesia led a 38-country resolution that they should all be granted independence, that a Special Committee on Decolonisation should be formed, and that attention should be given to the fact that the integrity of some states, including Indonesia (with its claim to West Papua), Iraq and Kuwait, was being damaged by decolonisation, as if Melanesian West Papua was ever an integral part of Asian Indonesia. After consultation with West Papuan leaders, the Brazzaville group (Cameroun, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Dahomey, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Togo, and Upper Volta) drew attention to West Papua’s specific case as a country where decolonisation hadn’t yet occurred, calling for a UN Commission on West Papua, rejecting Indonesian claims to it, and emphasising the rights of its people. The resolution was supported by some western countries but Indonesia objected to its emphasis on self-determination, insisting that it wasn’t an issue because “Indonesia” (including West Papua, of course) had been independent since 1945. Threatening in at least one case to break diplomatic relations, Indonesia forced the vote against the resolution, which failed to reach the required two-thirds majority. Although it was clear that, against all odds, West Papua had significant support in the UN, the Brazzaville Initiative was completely ignored by the White House and, in the general plan of things, consigned to the dustbin of history. Kennedy’s national security staff now showed their true colours. Writing to Rostow, Robert Komer recommended “the time has come to take the gloves off, and adopt a frankly pro-Indonesian stance while there’s still time to get some political capital out of it.”

22. NO DEBATE: The Agreement, signed on 15 August 1962 was bulldozed through. A draft text for General Assembly consideration was presented to UN members a month later, the day before they had to vote and without debate. The government of Benin (Dahomey) objected that West Papuans hadn’t been consulted, Togo criticised the haste and, for the same reason, Senegal changed its vote three days later from affirmative to negative. They were ignored, and the vote was passed 89-0 with 14 abstentions (General Assembly Official Records, A/PV.1127, A/PV.1150). It’s also worth noting that, earlier that year, the United States had tried to prevent a visit to West Papua by the UN ambassadors of Dahomey and Upper Volta. 

23. BROKEN TRUST IN A “TRUST” TERRITORY: Ten days later, on 1 October, as administrator of West Papua, the UN (UNTEA) became responsible for the “interests and welfare of the people of the territory of West New Guinea (West Irian)”. Theoretically, with the New York Agreement, West Papua became a UN trust territory or colony for which the UN accepted legal responsibility, in accordance with Chapter 12 of the UN Charter, in which Article 77, part 1 (c) made it a territory “voluntarily placed under the [UN] system by states responsible for their administration” until the people of the territory are allowed to express self-determination by public vote. In practice, West Papua formally became a UN trust territory when, by means of General Assembly resolution 1752 (XVII), the UN authorised the deployment of UN troops from Pakistan to occupy the colony of West Papua when an “Act of Free Choice” took place. A further requirement is that the Agreement must be approved by the General Assembly. The conditions for these two requirements were not respected. The choice of 1,000 troops from Pakistan as the sole country represented in the UN Security Force, at the behest of U Thant himself, is significant because Pakistan had always voted in favour of Indonesian plans for West Papua.

24. MEANING OF “ANALAGOUS”: The document titled Summary of AG-059 United Nations Temporary Executive Authority in West Irian (UNTEA) (1962–1963)—written after 1973 and now on the UN website as “page not found”—gives another slant on the view of the Secretariat of the United Nations concerning West Papua’s legal status, suggesting that the Secretariat understands that West Papua is “administered” by Indonesia and not a “sovereign part” of it. However, before administrative functions were irregularly transferred to Indonesia, it was recognised by Article 81 of the Charter that, “Such authority, hereinafter called the administering authority, may be one or more states or the Organization itself.” In this case, with “the agreement of the two parties the functions envisaged would come within the competence of the United Nations”. Now-declassified documents show that U Thant’s legal advisors told him in 1962 that the proposed role of the United Nations was ‘analogous’ to Article 81 of Chapter XII governing the International Trusteeship System. If this is not an outright case of trusteeship, it is analogous. McKinlay King points out, however, that there is, “no other article within international law governed by the Charter that allows the ‘Organisation itself’ to take over a Non-Self-Governing Territory. Thus, Chapter XII governing the International Trusteeship System must apply.” 

25. U THANT’S DRAGOONED TRANSFER: Document 6312. Understandings between The United Nations and Indonesia and The Netherlands Relating to the Agreement of 15 August 1962 between the Republic of Indonesia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands Concerning West New Guinea (West Irian), states, “The transfer of authority to Indonesia will be effected as soon as possible [my emphasis] after 1 May 1963.” This contravenes the Agreement put to the General Assembly, which stipulates in Article XII only that, “The United Nations Administrator will have discretion to transfer all or part of the administration to Indonesia.” U Thant’s instruction of 15 August was never presented to the General Assembly for debate, so it never voted on this instruction affecting the fate of a Non-Self-Governing Territory. The Agreement was also clear that a second phase of an indeterminate period would begin after UNTEA Phase One ended on 1 May and, moreover, that the “freely expressed will of the population” had to be ascertained before 1969. In fact, UNTEA should have remained until this had taken place, especially because, since December 1961, “A strong Indonesian military presence has been a permanent fixture in Papua”. In fact, Indonesia was doing everything it possibly could to undermine the UNTEA mission.

26. UN LEAVES THE SCENE OF THE CRIME: The very night that administration of West Papua was transferred to Indonesia, all UN officers left the country. This breached Article XVI of the Agreement: “At the time of the transfer of full administrative responsibility to Indonesia a number of United Nations experts, as deemed adequate by the Secretary General after consultation with Indonesia, will be designated to remain wherever their duties require their presence…”

27. U THANT’S PERFIDY: This is clear in several instances. For example, a declassified “TOP SECRET” CIA document informs that, thanks to a letter from U Thant to President Sukarno of 28^th June 1962, Indonesia was ready to continue interrupted secret talks with the Dutch about the future of West Papua. The letter assured Sukarno that the Netherlands was willing to postpone a plebiscite until after administrative powers were transferred to Indonesia. U Thant was informed by Constantin Stavropoulos, the UN legal counsel, on 29 June that, according to the wishes of the people, “there appears to emerge a strong presumption in favour of self-determination … irrespective of the legal stands or interests of other parties to the question”. He ignored the message. These covert steps made him a priori complicit in the fake “Act of Free Choice” of 1969.

28. NO REPORTS: Declassified U.S. documents reveal that the Komer national security group planned illegal manipulation of the UN Trusteeship System, and thereby to invite Indonesia to assume control of West Papua. As administrator, the UNTEA was obliged to report to the Trusteeship Council on the welfare of the West Papuan people, and progress towards independence. Article VIII of the Agreement gets around this by stating that, “The United Nations Administrator will send periodic reports to the Secretary-General on the principal aspects of the implementation of the present Agreement. The Secretary-General will submit full reports to Indonesia and the Netherlands and may submit, at his discretion, reports to the General Assembly or to all United Nations Members.” At the “discretion” of the Secretary-General, reports, when supplied, were not made available to UN members. However, Article 103 of the UN Charter—“In the event of a conflict between the obligations of the Members of the United Nations under the present Charter and their obligations under any other international agreement, their obligations under the present Charter shall prevail”—obligations under the Charter can’t be waived by any undisclosed agreement. Article 85 of the UN Charter assigns responsibility for supervising all non-strategic trust territories to the General Assembly, and not to the singular fiat of the Secretary-General. What “Secretary-General” really meant was clear enough in the secret meetings between Indonesia, the Netherlands, and the UN in Huntlands, Virginia in March 1962, where Ellsworth Bunker, representing the US government, was allegedly acting for UN Secretary General U Thant.

29. BILATERAL AGREEMENT MEANS NO VALID REFERENDUM: Denying that the West Papuans had any right to self-determination, Indonesia understood the deal at Huntlands simply as a bilateral agreement with the Netherlands, and nothing to do with any UN trusteeship. Buckling under this pressure, the UN, against its own Charter and agreements, handed it West Papua, and denied that it had any obligation to organise a plebiscite in West Papua, except—secretly—as a face-saving device for all concerned, including the United Nations. Evidently there would be no valid referendum.

30. IGNORING DAHOMEY: Julian McKinlay King provides a lot of evidence of the manipulation, which wasn’t overlooked by all member states. Dahomey’s representative denounced the fact that, “[A] people of 700,000 is transferred from one Power to another … without previous consultation with the party chiefly concerned, the Papuan people … Not once—I repeat, not once—do we find in the text any mention of a “referendum” … and … the actual public expression of opinion will be organised entirely by the party which has the greatest interest in the yielding of results that are favourable to it.” The UN didn’t see fit to investigate these serious accusations by one of its members.

31. INSTRUCTIONS TO BLOCK DEBATE: McKinlay King also names the General Assembly president Muhammad Zafrulla Khan of Pakistan (which had consistently voted in Indonesia’s favour) as being responsible for “denying time for Members to review the draft, debate, and no doubt amend before proceeding to the vote”. He had thus blocked any debate before the vote, was literally “using his position to deny the West Papuan people’s right to self-determination, and was instead supporting Indonesia’s illegal claim to the Territory”. He was not censured for this. Moreover, U Thant, a personal friend of Indonesia’s President Sukarno, had waited five weeks before providing copies of the draft Agreement to UN Member states. His actions are arguably in violation of Article 100 of the UN Charter which states that: “1. In the performance of their duties the Secretary-General and the staff shall not seek or receive instructions from any government or from any other authority external to the Organization [my emphasis]. They shall refrain from any action which might reflect on their position as international officials responsible only to the Organization [my emphasis].

2. Each Member of the United Nations undertakes to respect the exclusively international character of the responsibilities of the Secretary-General and the staff and not to seek to influence them in the discharge of their responsibilities.”

32. NO QUESTIONS, NO ANSWERS: Article 88 of the UN Charter states, “The Trusteeship Council shall formulate a questionnaire on the political, economic, social, and educational advancement of the inhabitants of each trust territory, and the administering authority for each trust territory within the competence of the General Assembly shall make an annual report to the General Assembly upon the basis of such questionnaire.” This didn’t happen.

33. “TAKING NOTE OR TURNING A BLIND EYE TO EVERYTHING: Document 1752 XVII of 21 September 1962 between the Republic of Indonesia and the Kingdom of the Netherlands concerning West New Guinea (West Irian), simply “takes note” of the Agreement and “Authorizes the Secretary-General to carry out the tasks entrusted to him in the Agreement”. Only a year after Hammarskjold’s death, the attempt to install a trusteeship that should have reported to the Trusteeship Council failed. Taking note is not endorsing or ratifying, and bypassing the Trusteeship Council violated the terms of the UN’s own Charter.

34. THE UN MISLEADS ITSELF: As foreordained, the so-called Act of Free Choice, was a crude mockery of all the principles the UN purported to uphold. A meticulous account of UN chicanery in the lethal farce is given by John Saltford in The United Nations and the Indonesian Takeover of West Papua, 1962-1969: The Anatomy of Betrayal (2003). For example of (pp. 131-132) UN Secretary-General U Thant’s Representative for West Irian (UNRWI), Fernando Ortiz-Sanz, well aware of Indonesian crimes of murder, torture, and other forms of violence against West Papuans who called for an authentic referendum, spoke in his report to U Thant of “the possibility of peaceful democratic demonstrations by the population and evident good-will on the part of high ranking Indonesian military commanders”. Saltford’s well-founded conclusion is, “either Ortiz Sanz himself chose deliberately to mislead the UNGA or he was directed to do so his superiors in New York. Whoever was responsible, it is a clear illustration of the UN leadership’s collaboration with Indonesia to legitimise the latter’s takeover of West Irian.”

35. SEE NO EVIL: By the time the meagre UN team of just 16 people arrived in 1968 to assist in preparations for the Act of Free Choice the following year, West Papua had been under Indonesian rule for five years. Thomas Reynders, a US consular official who visited in March 1968 reported that, “The Indonesian government’s presence in West Irian is expressed primarily in the form of the Army” and (like almost all western observers, he notes) that, “Indonesia will not accept Independence for West Irian and will not permit a plebiscite that would reach such an outcome”. He also mentions the “antipathy or outright hatred believed to be harbored toward Indonesia and Indonesians by West Irians in the relatively developed and sophisticated areas”. Saltford (p. 92) adds that Reynders also reported that the Indonesians had “tried everything from bombing to shelling and mortaring, but a continuous state of semi-rebellion persists”. A consular official observes all this in a brief visit. But UN officials on the ground, we are supposed to believe, didn’t see any Indonesian repression. Meanwhile, the US Ambassador to Indonesia, Frank Galbraith, secretly reported in a telegram of 9 July 1969 that, “Military repression has stimulated fears and rumors of intended genocide among the Irianese”. Like the “referendum” results, genocide was also a foregone conclusion. 

36. THE UN OVERSEES INTIMIDATION OF HANDPICKED VOTERS: Declaring that the West Papuan people were too primitive to decide their own future, the Suharto military regime imposed, instead of the one man one vote system, the Indonesian decision-making process musyawarah to determine the votes. This was certainly not stipulated in the agreement. And it certainly wasn’t real musyawarah which means consensus decision-making. The 1,022 so-called “representatives” were selected, coerced, and terrified. Saltford, cites journalist Hugh Lunn, who witnessed the selection process in Biak: “…plain clothed Indonesian soldiers simply selected the representatives themselves from the small assembled crowd. They then arrested three peaceful demonstrators who had sat down at the front displaying placards calling for a direct free vote. Disturbingly, this was done even while UN officials, including Ortiz Sanz himself, looked on. A colleague of Lunn’s allegedly pleaded with Ortiz Sanz to intervene but he refused saying simply that the UN was just there to observe.” A Dutch journalist, Otto Kuyk, also reported on this experience. “In the next three days, all three UN observers under Ortiz Sanz came to me individually, distraught. They said there would be no free choice. They’d received a constant stream of pleading letters.” UN representatives witnessed the selection of only 195 of the 1,022 representatives and did not report on the brutal methods employed.

37. U THANT’S VERBAL SLEIGHT OF HAND: On the issue of musyawarah, the Secretary General’s official report to the UN General Assembly in 1969 tampered with the Agreement when it replaced, without comment, the phrase “international practice” with “Indonesian practice.” His report also infracted UN General Assembly Resolution 1541, December 1960, requiring that, “The peoples of both territories should have equal status and rights of citizenship and equal guarantees of fundamental rights and freedoms without any distinction or discrimination; both should have equal rights and opportunities for representation and effective participation at all levels in the executive, legislative and judicial organs of government”, and that, “The integration should be the result of the freely expressed wishes of the territory’s peoples acting with full knowledge of the change in their status, their wishes having been expressed through informed and democratic processes, impartially conducted and based on universal adult suffrage”.

38. EXTIRPATING A CANCEROUS GROWTH, UN-STYLE: In fact, the result of this supposedly consultative musyawarah had been decided well in advance. Everyone knew the West Papuans didn’t accept Indonesian rule. Saltford is clear on this point: “[As] early as 1963, the UN and the Dutch had privately advised Indonesia that they would accept an act of self-determination involving as little as 800 representatives and no direct voting by the general population. Both Ortiz Sanz and the Secretary-General also confidentially urged Indonesia to lobby other states to remain silent on the issue at the UN General Assembly. Specifically, Ortiz Sanz wrote to his superiors in the UN Secretariat informing them that he had urged Jakarta to privately seek assurances from The Hague that they “would not cast any doubt on, or challenge, the Act of Free Choice. This would prevent a heated debate in the General Assembly”. The UN was complicit. “As one British diplomat remarked at the time, UN member states wanted the issue: ‘cleared out of the way with the minimum of fuss. The UN Secretariat, he added; “‘is only too anxious to get shot of the problem as quickly as possible’.” The choicest quote of all comes from Ortiz-Sanz himself. He told journalist Hugh Lunn, “‘West [Papua] is like a cancerous growth on the side of the UN and my job is to surgically remove it’.”

39. TEARING OUT TONGUES: General Ali Murtopo, head of OPSUS, the Special Operations [Intelligence] Service used by Suharto for delicate foreign assignments but by no means a delicate operator, orchestrated the final act of the farce, consisting of eight assembly meetings “where the representatives would be required to publicly [my emphasis] make their choice. Several of them have since claimed that the authorities isolated them from their friends and families for several weeks before the vote and subjected them to a series of threats, insults and bribes. Some were then selected to speak at the assemblies and given instructions on what to say before being made to rehearse their lines in front of Indonesian officials. The man in charge of this was General Ali Murtopo who reportedly warned anyone thinking of voting for independence that they would have their “accursed tongues” torn out. At least one “representative” is alleged to have been taken away and killed for refusing to comply.” 

40. 100% WANTED TO BE INDONESIAN: The preposterous result was a unanimous vote in favour of becoming part of Indonesia, although the United Nations seemed to find nothing untoward about it. Rather, it more or less followed suit. Three months later, the Dutch, British and eighty-two other states voted in the UN General Assembly to “take note” of the result, acknowledging the fulfilment by the UN of its responsibilities under the Agreement, and congratulating U Thant for “his good work in fulfilling his responsibilities”. There were thirty abstentions, but no votes against.

41. “GREEK TRAGEDY”: Although some African countries led by Ghana protested, the international community wanted to “get shot of” the West Papuans (or, more like it, get them shot). It had all unfolded “like a Greek tragedy” as a US Embassy telegram of 9 June 1969 described it. A list of relevant US documents is available here. The prevailing cynicism is well summed up in a British Foreign Office briefing paper: “Privately, however, we recognize that the people of West [Papua] have no desire to be ruled by the Indonesians who are of an alien (Javanese) race, and that the process of consultation did not allow a genuinely free choice to be made.”

42. INTEGRATION WAS NEVER APPROVED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY: The Dutch, British and eighty-two other states voted to adopt the resolution “taking note of” the Act’s result and acknowledging the fulfilment by the UN of its responsibilities under the Agreement. Although Resolution 2504 claimed that the Secretary-General had duly completed his task, he hadn’t because Article XXI of Agreement (with annex) concerning West New Guinea (West Irian) of 15 August 1962 states, “After the exercise of the right of self-determination, Indonesia and the United Nations Representative will submit final reports to the Secretary-General who will report to the General Assembly on the conduct of the act of self-determination and the results thereof”. The Secretary-General did not report on an act of self-determination. Nowhere does the resolution say that General Assembly approves the integration of West Papua into the Republic of Indonesia. It only “took note”.

43. NO PETITIONS ALLOWED: Article 87 of the UN Charter states that the Trusteeship Council may “… accept petitions and examine them in consultation with the administering authority; provide for periodic visits to the respective trust territories at times agreed upon with the administering authority; and take these and other actions in conformity with the terms of the trusteeship agreements.” Since the Trusteeship Council was bypassed by the person of U Thant, in 2017, the United Nations continued with his deceit and refused to accept the real West Papuan plebiscite, a petition signed by 1.8 million people, an extraordinary achievement in a country where genocide is occurring. The petition asked for a UN special representative to investigate human rights abuses and to “put West Papua back on the decolonisation committee agenda and ensure their right to self‐determination … is respected by holding an internationally supervised vote”. The chair of the decolonisation committee, Rafael Ramírez, stated that he supports Indonesia’s claim that West Papua is an integral part of its territory. Indonesia’s representative to the UN, Dian Triansyah Djani, is a vice-chair of the Decolonisation Committee. And in October 2023, Indonesia was elected to the UN Human Rights Council for the sixth time.

+++

Yes, the UN has done a great job, not by its own lights but as a faithful servant of a world system that stoops to the most ignoble and malevolent skulduggery to achieve its own destructive ends, which are now visible on a planetary scale. The UN’s role in the awful fate of West Papua now raises the question: what do such crimes of lèse-humanité, committed by the system that supposedly protects humankind against them mean for all of humanity now, when genocide has also become ecocide?

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Two Left Hands, Clackamas Community College, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

There are enough problems in the world without getting into an intergenerational American dust-up. But if journalists like Emily Holzknecht and Binyamin Appelbaum and their recorded speakers want to go after their elders, this Baby Boomer from the Bronx is ready to tussle. If the New York Times columnists and interviewees want to pin the world’s problems on Baby Boomers like me in “Thanks a lot, Boomers,” they’d better be ready for some pushback. As Aretha Franklin sang: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me.” I’ll tell you exactly what it means to me.  

Dean Baker gave an economic explanation of why the article/video was wrong in CounterPunch, (Blame the Rich, Not the Boomers for Economic Inequality – CounterPunch.org); this response is personal.

In their Times’ three-minute, thirty-six-second Opinion video, “younger Americans from the New York region spell out the frustrations of the generations that followed the baby boomers.” (Already there’s a lack of respect in not capitalizing Baby Boomers.)

What do they want? “We’ve noticed that many of you are pretty upset about the state of the nation. And we get it. We really do. But do you ever stop and ask yourselves how we got here?” they challenge. “We have one simple request: How about an apology?” Apologize! And then they tell us to “Protest yourself.” 

“You were handed the world on a silver platter,” one speaker declares. “For the last several decades,” another says, “Boomer presidents” – from Bill Clinton to DJT – are to blame for the dire state of the world. “What is your legacy?” another demands.

An apology! Protest yourself? Legacy? Listen Gen X,Y,Z, and Millennials. (Notice the respect with the capitals.) First, lumping a whole generation together is a risky business. Tom Brokaw praised The Greatest Generation, those who survived the Depression and fought in World War II. Was he right to put so many people together? Brokaw lauded George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. What about Norman Thomas? The pacifist, democratic socialist ran six consecutive times for president between 1928 and 1948. Although he never won, many of his ideas were incorporated in Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Baby Boomers are the generation born between 1946 and 1964. Being “born with a silver spoon in their mouths,” as one speaker said, is an exaggeration. Those who grew up during that period will never forget Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD), the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sputnik, or the other horrors of the Cold War. (For Gen X.Y,Z, and Millennials: The Cold War was not a weather pattern before global warming.) Watch Dr. Strangelove, read Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War or Henry Kissinger’s 1957 strategic best-seller Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. We Boomers lived in fear that our silver spoons could become radioactive at any moment, and those childhood memories remain. 

As long as we’re doing generational history: What about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, all within a four-year period when we were at the height of our political/civic development and the country seemed close to chaos? Only sixty-two days elapsed between the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Our silver spoons risked more than just radioactivity.  

And what about war? You never experienced the intense anxiety of the Vietnam draft lottery. If your birth date was selected, you could find yourself in full combat after only six weeks of basic training. According to Defense Department records and birth-year distributions, roughly 70-75% of the Americans who died in Vietnam were Baby Boomers, about 40-44,000 people.

More generally, Holzknecht and Appelbaum raise the difficult question of collective responsibility. As indicated, the speakers in the editorial blame an entire generation – a collective responsibility that assumes all members of the Boomer generation had more in common than just their birth dates. Imputing blame to such a large group denies individual action; it is too broad, too general.

Personal examples of such generalization: In 1968, simply because of my American accent, I was spat on in Paris for “causing the war in Vietnam” even though I had never served in the military and had completed a four-year form of alternate service. At the other extreme, some years later, I was treated to champagne by an elderly gentleman at a restaurant on the beaches in Normandy because, as an American, I had “saved France and the world from the Nazis.” In fact, D-Day happened before I was born. Neither the insult nor the compliment reflected anything I had done.

Generational blame requires a moral community. Tribal responsibilities, perhaps, may apply if there is genuine collectivist thinking and feeling. But collective responsibility follows only from the existence of a true collective. Mere birth dates are not sufficient grounds for imputed blame. Baby Boomers are very diverse; they have little in common except shared birth dates and shared history. 

Blaming an entire generation separates actions from individuals. If the interviewees blame Baby Boomers, they should be prepared to be blamed as well – something I hinted at in CounterPunch. (“Mary Robinson and Elders: Where Are the Young Leaders in Today’s Progressive Movement?” – CounterPunch.org).

To return to my experiences as someone with an American accent: Although I have lived outside the United States for over fifty years, can I be held responsible for what the current government is doing? By blaming Baby Boomers for many of the world’s problems, the interviewees have reduced individual responsibility to a simplistic generational level. As Eugenia Cheng shows in Unequal: The Math of When Things Do and Don’t Add Up, generalizations in Math and life blur individual specifics.

I am fully aware of Mitch McConnell’s latest fall and Joe Biden’s debate performance. I am also aware of 83-year-old Bernie Sanders lighting it up with his Fighting Oligarchy tour, and of Mick Jagger still going strong looking for “Satisfaction.” This Baby Boomer accepts his age but challenges attacks on his moral responsibility. 

In the end, every generation inherits both the achievements and the failures of those who came before. We Baby Boomers have lived through wars, assassinations, and nuclear fears, but we have also fought for civil rights and created new forms of culture and technology. History will judge us not by our birth dates, but by our individual actions. Respect, as Aretha sang, runs both ways.

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“Columbia’s Easter Bonnet,” Puck. (1901). Library of Congress.

The US has been transformed into a mirror world, the mirror world of a pathological narcissist, a world of reverse images where victims are flipped into perpetrators, the poor portrayed as exploiters of the super-rich, the weak as persecutors of the strong and where the law is used to perpetuate lawlessness. The police conceal their faces behind the masks of thieves, while thieves loot the public estate unmolested. Public corruption has been legalized and exposing graft made a crime. 

The right of free speech has been rendered into an obligation to be obsequious in the face of power. The history of the country is being erased and rewritten to honor some of its most infamous villains and traitors and airbrush out defenders of liberty, diversity and equality. The sins of the past are promoted as virtues.  People are judged based on the color of their skin and the size of their portfolios. Domestic tranquillity has been supplanted by an atmosphere of fear and manufactured dread, where everything and everyone is suspect and no one is even sure what a citizen is or whether they are one. Not even the weather is to be believed. 

This mirror world’s aesthetic is the grotesque, the bloated, the cannabilistic and the country feeding upon itself is presented as a kind of cage match for the entertainment of the elite. Even the people’s house, built, maintained and served by the enslaved, has been  retrofitted into a gilt-fringed Versailles on the Potomac. 

This is, of course, the mirror world’s fatal weakness: a hollow hubris. Deep down a secret voice whispers to the narcissist that he’s not worthy of the power he holds. His crippling anxiety is that the people he despises the most will see through him to the fraud within, that his grip on power is maintained by an illusion of force–not real authority–and that once exposed, the mirror will crack and he will crumble by his own accord at the feet of those he tormented.

A shorter version of this piece was written for the fall issue of Ishmael Reed’s new magazine, Tar Baby, published by the Toni Morrison Foundation.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

A recurring theme in policy circles over the last three decades has been that young people should blame their economic problems on older people. The idea is that rather than being concerned about the massive upward redistribution of income, which has made people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg ridiculously rich, young people should blame their parents and grandparents.

The New York Times gave us the latest version of this story last week in a video segment titled “Thanks a lot boomers.” The write-up (sorry, I don’t have time to view the video) tells us:

Hey, boomers! Younger Americans would like a word.

We’ve noticed that many of you are pretty upset about the state of the nation. And we get it. We really do. But do you ever stop and ask yourselves how we got here?

In the Opinion video above, younger Americans from the New York region spell out the frustrations of the generations that followed the baby boomers. Like so many of us, they’re struggling with the high cost of education, a scarcity of affordable housing and a diminished American dream.

We live in communities that are still divided by race, in a nation burdened by debt, on a planet that keeps getting hotter.

We have one simple request: How about an apology?

Okay, let’s bring a little reality to the New York Times. First, the idea that the boomers lived through wonderful times is demented nonsense, not anything that corresponds to the real world.

There was, in fact, a golden age, but it predated the entry of most boomers into the labor market. The economy experienced a period of low unemployment and rapid real wage growth, which was widely shared, from 1947 to 1973. At the endpoint of this boom period, the oldest boomers were 27, and the youngest were 9.

After 1973, the economy took a sharp turn for the worst. The most immediate cause was the Arab oil embargo, which sent oil prices soaring. The economy at that time was far more dependent on oil than is the case today. Soaring oil prices sent inflation higher, which prompted the Fed to bring on severe recessions, first in 74-75 and then again in 1980-82.

The full story is more complicated and highly contested, but what happened to the economy is not. We had a period of far higher unemployment and stagnant real wage growth that lasted until the mid-1990s. The median real wage in 1996 was actually 4.4 percent lower than it had been in 1973.

The average unemployment rate for people between the ages of 20-24 over the years 1973 to 1988 (when the last boomer hit 24) was 11.3 percent. By comparison, it averaged 7.2 percent over the last decade, although it has been rising rapidly in 2025.

Real wages are substantially higher now than they were in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. The real median wage in 2024 was 30 percent higher than it had been in 1980.

Source: Economic Policy Institute. 

The increase should have been more. If the median wage had kept pace with productivity growth, as it had from 1947 to 1973, it would be more than 100 percent higher today than in 1980. The problem is that a larger share of income was diverted to high-end wages: CEOs, Wall Street types, successful STEM workers, and high-end professionals, like doctors, as well as an increased profit share since 2000, but 30 percent wage growth is not zero.

Anyhow, younger people should definitely have things better today than they do. But it is dishonest to say us old-timers are the problem, rather than the rich.

To start with, health care costs way too much. Suppose we got rid of patent and copyright monopolies, which redistribute over $1 trillion a year ($8,000 per household) from the masses to drug companies, medical equipment suppliers, software companies, and the rest. We can finance the development of drugs and medical equipment through upfront funding, like we do with the $50 billion a year we distribute through the National Institutes of Health. Then drugs and medical supplies are cheap, and healthcare costs far less.

We could also have universal Medicare, which would save us hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the administrative costs and profits of insurers. And, we could have free trade for physicians’ services, bringing their salaries in line with doctors in Germany, France, and other wealthy countries, saving us another $100 billion a year.

Boomers are not the reason we don’t have universal Medicare and free trade in prescription drugs and doctors. The lobbying groups for drug companies, insurers, and doctors are the reason healthcare is ridiculously expensive in the United States.

We also have the story of housing being extremely expensive, but here too we need to move beyond the lies. Housing costs had moved roughly in step with the overall inflation rate until the mid-1990s. Then we saw the take-off of a bubble, coinciding with the stock bubble, with house prices hugely diverging from rents and overall inflation.

While we built a huge amount of housing in the decade from 1996 to 2006, after the bubble burst and prices crashed, housing construction fell from a peak annual rate of almost 2.3 million to an annual rate of less than 500,000 at its low in 2009. Construction eventually picked up so that by the eve of the pandemic housing starts were running at 1.5 million annual rate, which was likely enough to meet new demand, but far below what was needed to make up a shortfall where we had seriously underbuilt housing for more than a decade.

NIMBYism surely slowed construction, but that could not have been the primary factor in the shortfall, since NIMBYism didn’t start in 2008. The main problem was the overreaction to the collapse of the bubble, with builders hesitant about new construction. This overreaction was what caused both rents and house sale prices to substantially outpace both inflation and wage growth. That is very clear in the data, but it is more popular in elite circles to blame boomers.

The best policy would have been to prevent the bubble in the first place. But the rich people who controlled news outlets were not anxious to say things about the housing bubble, even long after it should have been evident, because the financial industry was making money hand over fist pushing out bad mortgages. And when the mortgages went bad and the banks faced bankruptcy, they got the government to bail them out.

If younger people want someone to blame for high house prices, they should look to the financial industry and the failed regulators of the bubble era, most notably Alan Greenspan, but also Ben Bernanke, and Larry Summers. If they had taken steps to rein in the bubble, it likely never would have grown so large and led to such a disastrous fall in construction when it finally burst.

There is a similar story on climate. While many people, including boomers, can be blamed for driving gas guzzling cars and contributing to climate change in other ways, a big chunk of the blame surely must go to the executives of the fossil fuel companies. They deliberately misled the public about the dangers from climate change, pushing out false stories to hide the harm they knew they were causing. If the media, which is controlled by rich people, had been more effective in calling attention to these lies, perhaps there would have been more public support for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

The story goes on, but the point is that it is dishonest to blame a generational grouping for the problems facing younger people today. The whole generation of baby boomers did not have equal power to influence public policy. A tiny elite had a hugely disproportionate ability to determine public policy and control the course of debate.

It is long past time to recognize this obvious fact. As long as we fail to do so, we will never be able to address the problem. I would also propose, as does the NYT boomer blaming piece, an apology from the rich. But as the old saying goes, being rich means never having to say you’re sorry.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

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The Gaza, the one that existed on the morning of October 7 is gone, decimated by months of saturation bombing, shelling, bulldozing and controlled demolitions. All that was familiar when I worked in Gaza has vanished, transformed into an apocalyptic landscape of shattered concrete and rubble. My New York Times office in the center of Gaza City. The Marna boarding house on Ahmed Abd el-Aziz Street, where after a day’s work I would drink tea with Margaret Nassar, the elderly woman who owned it, a refugee from Safad in northern Galilee. On my last visit to Marna House, I forgot to return the room key. Number 12. It was attached to a large plastic oval with the words “Marna House Gaza” on it. The key sits on my desk.

Friends and colleagues, with few exceptions, are in exile, dead or, in most cases, have disappeared, no doubt buried under mountains of debris.

The daily rituals of life in Gaza are no longer possible. I used to leave my shoes on a rack by the front door of the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza, in the Daraj Quarter of the Old City. The white stone walls had pointed arches and a tall octagonal minaret encircled by a carved wooden balcony that was crowned with a crescent. The mosque was built on the foundations of ancient temples to Philistine and Roman deities as well as a Byzantine church. I washed my hands, face and feet at the common water taps, carrying out the ritual purification before prayer, known as wudhu. Inside the hushed interior with its blue-carpeted floor, the cacophony, noise, dust, fumes and frenetic pace of Gaza melted away.

The mosque was destroyed on December 8, 2023, by an Israeli airstrike.

The razing of Gaza is not only a crime against the Palestinian people. It is a crime against our cultural and historical heritage — an assault on memory. We cannot understand the present, especially when reporting on Palestinians and Israelis, if we do not understand the past.

There is no shortage of failed peace plans in occupied Palestine, all of them incorporating detailed phases and timelines, going back to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. They end the same way. Israel gets what it wants initially — in the latest case the release of the remaining Israeli hostages — while it ignores and violates every other phase until it resumes its attacks on the Palestinian people.

It is a sadistic game. A merry-go-round of death. This ceasefire, like those of the past, is a commercial break. A moment when the condemned man is allowed to smoke a cigarette before being gunned down in a fusillade of bullets.

Once Israeli hostages are released, the genocide will continue. I do not know how soon. Let’s hope the mass slaughter is delayed for at least a few weeks. But a pause in the genocide is the best we can anticipate. Israel is on the cusp of emptying Gaza, which has been all but obliterated under two years of relentless bombing. It is not about to be stopped. This is the culmination of the Zionist dream. The United States, which has given Israel a staggering $22 billion in military aid since Oct, 7, 2023, will not shut down its pipeline, the only tool that might halt the genocide.

Israel, as it always does, will blame Hamas and the Palestinians for failing to abide by the agreement, most probably a refusal — true or not — to disarm, as the proposal demands. Washington, condemning Hamas’s supposed violation, will give Israel the green light to continue its genocide to create Trump’s fantasy of a Gaza Riviera and “special economic zone” with its “voluntary” relocation of Palestinians in exchange for digital tokens.

Of the myriads of peace plans over the decades, the current one is the least serious. Aside from a demand that Hamas release the hostages within 72-hours after the ceasefire begins, it lacks specifics and imposed timetables. It is filled with caveats that allow Israel to abrogate the agreement, which Israel did almost immediately by refusing to open the border crossing at Rafah, killing a half dozen Palestinians and cutting in half the agreed upon aid trucks to 300 a day because the bodies of the remaining hostages have yet to be returned. And that is the point. It is not designed to be a viable path to peace, which most Israeli leaders understand. Israel’s largest-circulation newspaper, Israel Hayom, established by the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson to serve as a mouthpiece for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and champion messianic Zionism, instructed its readers not to be concerned about the Trump plan because it is only “rhetoric.”

Israel, in one example from the proposal, will “not return to areas that have been withdrawn from, as long as Hamas fully implements the agreement.”

Who decides if Hamas has “fully implemented” the agreement? Israel. Does anyone believe in Israel’s good faith? Can Israel be trusted as an objective arbitrator of the agreement? If Hamas — demonized as a terrorist group — objects, will anyone listen?

How is it possible that a peace proposal ignores the International Court of Justice’s July 2024 Advisory Opinion, which reiterated that Israel’s occupation is illegal and must end?

How can it fail to mention the Palestinian’s right to self-determination?

Why are Palestinians, who have a right under international law to armed struggle against an occupying power, expected to disarm while Israel, the illegally occupying force, is not?

By what authority can the U.S. establish “temporary transitional government,” — Trump’s and Tony Blair’s so-called “Board of Peace” — sidelining the Palestinian right to self-determination?

Who gave the U.S. the authority to send to Gaza an “International Stabilization Force,” a thinly veiled term for foreign occupation?

How are Palestinians supposed to reconcile themselves to the acceptance of an Israeli “security barrier” on Gaza’s borders, confirmation that the occupation will continue?

How can any proposal ignore the slow-motion genocide and annexation of the West Bank?

Why is Israel, which has destroyed Gaza, not required to pay reparations?

What are Palestinians supposed to make of the demand in the proposal for a “deradicalized” Gazan population? How is this expected to be accomplished? Re-education camps? Wholesale censorship? The rewriting of the school curriculum? Arresting offending Imams in mosques?

And what about addressing the incendiary rhetoric routinely employed by Israeli leaders who describe Palestinians as “human animals” and their children as “little snakes”?

“All of Gaza and every child in Gaza, should starve to death,” Rabbi Ronen Shaulov, Israel’s version of the Rev. Samuel Marsden, bellowed. “I don’t have mercy for those who, in a few years, will grow up and won’t have mercy for us. Only a stupid fifth column, a hater of Israel has mercy for future terrorists, even though today they are still young and hungry. I hope, may they starve to death, and if anyone has a problem with what I’ve said, that’s their problem.”

Israeli violations of peace agreements have historical precedents.

The Camp David Accords, signed in 1978 by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin — without the participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) — led to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, which normalized diplomatic relations between Israel and Egypt.

Subsequent phases of the Camp David Accords, which included a promise by Israel to resolve the Palestinian question along with Jordan and Egypt, permit Palestinian self-governance in the West Bank and Gaza within five years, and end the building of Israeli colonies in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were never implemented.

The 1993 Oslo Accords, signed in 1993, saw the PLO recognize Israel’s right to exist and Israel recognize the PLO as the legitimate representatives of the Palestinian people. Yet, what ensued was the disempowerment of the PLO and its transformation into a colonial police force. Oslo II, signed in 1995, detailed the process towards peace and a Palestinian state. But it too was stillborn. It stipulated that any discussion of illegal Jewish “settlements” were to be delayed until “final” status talks. By then, Israeli military withdrawals from the occupied West Bank were scheduled to have been completed. Governing authority was poised to be transferred from Israel to the supposedly temporary Palestinian Authority. Instead, the West Bank was carved up into Areas A, B and C. The Palestinian Authority had limited authority in Areas A and B while Israel controlled all of Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank.

The right of Palestinian refugees to return to the historic lands that Jewish colonists seized from them in 1948 when Israel was created — a right enshrined in international law — was given up by the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. This instantly alienated many Palestinians, especially those in Gaza where 75 percent are refugees or the descendants of refugees. As a consequence, many Palestinians abandoned the PLO in favor of Hamas. Edward Said called the Oslo Accords “an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles” and lambasted Arafat as “the Pétain of the Palestinians.”

The scheduled Israeli military withdrawals under Oslo never took place. There were around 250,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank when the Oslo agreement was signed. Their numbers today have increased to 700,000.

The journalist Robert Fisk called Oslo “a sham, a lie, a trick to entangle Arafat and the PLO into abandonment of all that they had sought and struggled for over a quarter of a century, a method of creating false hope in order to emasculate the aspiration of statehood.”

Israel unilaterally broke the last two-month-long ceasefire on March 18 of this year when it launched surprise airstrikes on Gaza. Netanyahu’s office claimed that the resumption of the military campaign was in response to Hamas’s refusal to release hostages, its rejection of proposals to extend the cease-fire and its efforts to rearm. Israel killed more than 400 people in the initial overnight assault and injured over 500, slaughtering and wounding people, including children, as they slept. The attack scuttled the second stage of the agreement, which would have seen Hamas release the remaining living male hostages, both civilians and soldiers, for an exchange of Palestinian prisoners and the establishment of a permanent ceasefire along with the eventual lifting of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

Israel has carried out murderous assaults on Gaza for decades, cynically calling the bombardment “mowing the lawn.” No peace accord or ceasefire agreement has ever gotten in the way. This one will be no exception.

This bloody saga is not over. Israel’s goals remain unchanged: the dispossession and erasure of Palestinians from their land.

The only peace Israel intends to offer the Palestinians is the peace of the grave.

History is a mortal threat to the Zionist project. It exposes the violent imposition of a European colony in the Arab world. It reveals the ruthless campaign to de-Arabize an Arab country. It underscores the inherent racism towards Arabs, their culture and their traditions. It challenges the myth that, as former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak said, Zionists created, “a villa in the middle of a jungle.” It mocks the lie that Palestine is exclusively a Jewish homeland. It recalls centuries of Palestinian presence. And it highlights the alien culture of Zionism, implanted on stolen land.

When I covered the genocide in Bosnia, the Serbs blew up mosques, carted away the remains and forbade anyone to speak of the structures they had razed. The goal in Gaza is the same, to wipe out the past and replace it with myth, to mask Israeli crimes, including genocide.

The campaign of erasure allows Israelis to pretend the inherent violence that lies at the heart of the Zionist project, going back to the dispossession of Palestinian land in the 1920s and the larger campaigns of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967, does not exist.

This denial of historical truth and historical identity also permits Israelis to wallow in eternal victimhood. It sustains a morally blind nostalgia for an invented past. If Israelis confront these lies it threatens an existential crisis. It forces them to rethink who they are. Most prefer the comfort of illusion. The desire to believe is more powerful than the desire to see.

As long as truth is hidden, as long as those who seek truth are silenced, it is impossible for a society to regenerate and reform itself. It becomes calcified. Its lies and dissimulation must be constantly renewed. Truth is dangerous. Once it is established it is indestructible. The Trump administration is in lock step with Israel. It too seeks to prioritize myth over reality. It too silences those who challenge the lies of the past and the lies of the present.

The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of an historical process. It is not an isolated act. The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project. It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel had to end up. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonialism. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967 — when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but all these measures – the killing of civilians, the ethnic cleansing, arbitrary detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation, destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.

The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the cover to implement its own version of the final solution. Oct. 7 marked the dividing line between an Israeli policy that advocated the brutalization and subjugation of the Palestinians and a policy that calls for their extermination and removal from historic Palestine.

Israel’s weaponization of starvation is how genocides always end. I covered the insidious effects of orchestrated starvation in the Guatemalan Highlands during the genocidal campaign of Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, the famine in southern Sudan that left a quarter of a million dead — I walked past the frail and skeletal corpses of families lining roadsides — and later during the war in Bosnia when Serbs blocked food and aid to Srebrenica and Gorazde.

Starvation was weaponized by the Ottoman Empire to decimate the Armenians. It was used to kill millions of Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. It was employed by the Nazis against the Jews in the ghettos in World War II. German soldiers used food as Israel does, like bait. They offered three kilograms of bread and one kilogram of marmalade to lure desperate families in the Warsaw Ghetto onto transports to the death camps. “There were times when hundreds of people had to wait in line for several days to be ‘deported,’” Marek Edelman writes in “The Ghetto Fights.” “The number of people anxious to obtain the three kilograms of bread was such that the transports, now leaving twice daily with 12,000 people, could not accommodate them all.” And when crowds became unruly, as in Gaza, the German troops fired deadly volleys that ripped through emaciated husks of women, children and the elderly.

This tactic is as old as warfare itself.

Israel methodically set out from the beginning of the genocide to destroy sources of food, bombing bakeries and blocking food shipments into Gaza, something it has accelerated since March, when it severed nearly all food supplies. It targeted the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — on which most Palestinians depended on for food — for destruction, accusing its employees, without providing evidence, of being involved in the attacks of Oct. 7. This accusation was used to give funders such as the United States, which provided $422 million to the agency in 2023, the excuse to halt financial support. Israel then banned UNRWA.

The near total blockade of food and humanitarian aid, imposed on Gaza since March 2, reduced Palestinians to abject dependence. To eat, they were forced to crawl towards their killers and beg. Humiliated, terrified, desperate for a few scraps of food, they were stripped of dignity, autonomy and agency. This was by intent.

The nightmarish journey to one of four aid hubs set up by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation was not designed to meet the needs of the Palestinians, who once relied on 400 UNRWA aid distribution sites, but to lure them from northern Gaza to the south. Palestinians were herded like livestock into narrow metal chutes at distribution points overseen by heavily armed mercenaries. They received, if they are one of the fortunate few, a small box of food. Most received nothing. And when the crowds became unruly in the chaotic scramble for food the Israelis and the mercenaries gunned them down, killing 1,700 and injuring thousands more.

The genocide marks a break from the past. It marks the exposure of Israeli lies. The lie of the two-state solution. The lie that Israel respects the laws of war that protect civilians. The lie that Israel bombs hospitals and schools only because they are used as staging areas by Hamas. The lie that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, while Israel routinely forces captive Palestinians, dressed in Israeli army uniforms and with their hands bound, to enter potentially booby-trapped tunnels and buildings ahead of Israeli troops. The lie that Hamas or Palestine Islamic Jihad are responsible — the charge often being errant Palestinian rockets — for the destruction of hospitals, United Nations buildings or mass casualties. The lie that humanitarian aid to Gaza is blocked because Hamas is hijacking the trucks or smuggling in weapons and war material. The lie that Israeli babies are beheaded or Palestinians carried out sexual assaults of Israeli women. The lie that 75 percent of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza were Hamas “terrorists.” The lie that Hamas, because it was allegedly rearming and recruiting new fighters, is responsible for the breakdown of ceasefire agreements.

Israel’s naked genocidal visage is exposed.

The expansion of “Greater Israel” — which includes the seizing of Syrian territory in the Golan Heights, southern Lebanon, Gaza and the occupied West Bank, where some 40,000 Palestinians have been driven from their homes and which I expect will soon be annexed by Israel — is being cemented into place.

But the genocide in Gaza is only the start. The world is breaking down under the onslaught of the climate crisis, which is triggering mass migrations, failed states and catastrophic wildfires, hurricanes, storms, flooding and droughts. As global stability unravels, industrial violence, which is decimating the Palestinians, will become ubiquitous.

Israel’s annihilation of Gaza marks the death of a global order guided by internationally agreed upon laws and rules, one often violated by the U.S. in its imperial wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, but one that was at least acknowledged as a utopian vision. The U.S. and its Western allies not only supply the weaponry to sustain the genocide, but obstruct the demand by most nations for an adherence to humanitarian law. They have carried out attacks against the only nation – Yemen – which has tried to halt the genocide.

The message this sends is clear: We have everything. If you try and take it away from us we will kill you.

The militarized drones, helicopter gunships, walls and barriers, checkpoints, coils of concertina wire, watch towers, detention centers, deportations, brutality and torture, denial of entry visas, apartheid existence that comes with being undocumented, loss of individual rights and electronic surveillance are as familiar to the desperate migrants along the Mexican border or attempting to enter Europe as they are to the Palestinians.

Israel, which as Ronen Bergman notes his book “Rise and Kill First” in has “assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world,” cynically employs the Nazi Holocaust to sanctify its hereditary victimhood and justify its settler-colonial state, apartheid, campaigns of mass slaughter and Zionist version of Lebensraum.

Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz, saw the Shoah, for this reason, as “an inexhaustible source of evil” which “is perpetrated as hatred in the survivors, and springs up in a thousand ways, against the very will of all, as a thirst for revenge, as moral breakdown, as negation, as weariness, as resignation.”

Genocide and mass extermination are not the exclusive domain of fascist Germany or Israel.

Aimé Césaire, in “Discourse on Colonialism,” writes that Hitler seemed exceptionally cruel only because he presided over “the humiliation of the white man,” applying to Europe the “colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India and the nègres d’Afrique.”

The near-annihilation of Tasmania’s Aboriginal population, the German slaughter of the Herero and Namaqua, the Armenian genocide, the Bengal famine of 1943 — then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill airily dismissed the deaths of three million Hindus in the famine by calling them “a beastly people with a beastly religion” — along with the dropping of nuclear bombs on the civilian targets of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, illustrate something fundamental about “western civilization.”

The moral philosophers who make up the western canon – Immanuel Kant, Voltaire, David Hume, John Stuart Mill and John Locke – excluded enslaved and exploited people, indigenous peoples, colonized people, women of all races and the criminalized from their moral calculus. In their eyes European whiteness alone imparted modernity, moral virtue, judgment and freedom. This racist definition of personhood played a central role in justifying colonialism, slavery, the genocide of Native Americans and First Nations people in Australia, our imperial projects and our fetish for white supremacy.

So, when you hear that the western canon is an imperative, as yourself for whom?

“In America,” the poet Langston Hughes said, “Negros do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

The Nazis, when they formulated the Nuremberg laws, modeled them on American Jim Crow-era segregation and discrimination laws. America’s refusal to grant citizenship to Native Americans and Filipinos, although they lived in the U.S. and U.S. territories, was copied by the German fascists to strip citizenship from Jews. American anti-miscegenation laws, which criminalized interracial marriage, was the impetus to outlaw marriages between German Jews and Aryans. American jurisprudence classified anyone with one percent of Black ancestry, the so called “one drop rule,” as Black. The Nazis, ironically showing more flexibility, classified anyone with three or more Jewish grandparents as Jewish.

The millions of victims of colonial projects in countries such as Mexico, China, India, Australia, the Congo and Vietnam, for this reason, are deaf to the fatuous claims by Jews that their victimhood is unique. They also suffered holocausts, but these holocausts remain minimized or unacknowledged by their western perpetrators.

The fact is that genocide is coded in the DNA of Western imperialism. Palestine has made this clear. The genocide in Gaza is the next stage in what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “a vast worldwide Malthusian correction” that is “geared to preparing the world for the winners of globalization, minus the inconvenient noise of its losers.”

Israel embodies the ethnonationalist state the far-right dreams of creating for themselves, one that rejects political and cultural pluralism, as well as legal, diplomatic and ethical norms. Israel is admired by these proto-fascists because it has turned its back on humanitarian law to use indiscriminate lethal force to “cleanse” its society of those condemned as human contaminants. Israel is not an outlier. It expresses our darkest impulses and I fear our future.

I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States. I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.

Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.

Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Naftali Bennett. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine. Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”

There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project, mirroring the strain of fascism in American society. Unfortunately, for us, the Israelis and the Palestinians these fascistic strains are ascendant.

“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”

The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of far-right Zionists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of the Nazi’s blood and soil. Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compares to the Biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelites. Euro-American settlers in the American colonies used the same Biblical passage to justify the genocide against Native Americans. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand.

Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque – the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army – to be demolished. The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will become a Jewish version of Iran.

There are over 65 laws which discriminate directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens of Israel and those living in the occupied territories. The campaign of indiscriminate killing of Palestinians in the West Bank, many by rogue Jewish militias who have been armed with 10,000 automatic weapons, along with house and school demolitions and the seizure of remaining Palestinian land is exploding.

Israel, at the same time, is turning on “Jewish traitors” – within Israel and abroad — who refuse to embrace the demented vision of the ruling Jewish fascists and who denounce the genocide. The familiar enemies of fascism — journalists, human rights advocates, intellectuals, artists, feminists, liberals, the left, homosexuals and pacifists — are targeted. The judiciary, according to plans put forward by Netanyahu, will be neutered. Public debate will wither. Civil society and the rule of law will cease to exist. Those branded as “disloyal” will be deported.

Israel could have exchanged the hostages held by Hamas for the thousands of Palestinian hostages held in Israeli prisons, which is why the Israeli hostages were seized, on October 8th. And there is evidence that in the chaotic fighting that took place once Hamas militants entered Israel, the Israeli military decided to target not only Hamas fighters, but the Israeli captives with them, killing perhaps hundreds of their own soldiers and civilians.

Israel and its western allies, James Baldwin saw, is headed towards the “terrible probability” that the dominant nations “struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which, if it does not bring life on this planet to an end, will bring about a racial war such as the world has never seen.”

The funding and arming of Israel by the United States and European nations as it carries out genocide has imploded the post-World War II international legal order. It no longer has credibility. The West cannot lecture anyone now about democracy, human rights or the supposed virtues of Western civilization.

“At the same time that Gaza induces vertigo, a feeling of chaos and emptiness, it becomes for countless powerless people the essential condition of political and ethical consciousness in the twenty-first century — just as the First World War was for a generation in the West,” Pankaj Mishra writes.

We must name and face our own darkness. We must repent. Our willful blindness and historical amnesia, our refusal to be accountable to the rule of law, our belief that we have a right to use industrial violence to exert our will marks, I fear, the start, not the end, of campaigns of mass slaughter by industrialized nations against the world’s growing legions of the poor and the vulnerable. It is the curse of Cain. And it is curse we must remove before the genocide in Gaza becomes not an anomaly but the norm.

Edward Said Memorial Lecture
University of South Australia in Adelaide

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Image by Kelly Sikkema.

The human condition includes a vast array of unavoidable misfortunes. But what about the preventable ones? Shouldn’t the United States provide for the basic needs of its people?

Such questions get distinctly short shrift in the dominant political narratives. When someone can’t make ends meet and suffers dire consequences, the mainstream default is to see a failing individual rather than a failing system. Even when elected leaders decry inequity, they typically do more to mystify than clarify what has caused it.

While “income inequality” is now a familiar phrase, media coverage and political rhetoric routinely disconnect victims from their victimizers. Human-interest stories and speechifying might lament or deplore common predicaments, but their storylines rarely connect the destructive effects of economic insecurity with how corporate power plunders social resources and fleeces the working class. Yet the results are extremely far-reaching.

“We have the highest rate of childhood poverty and senior poverty of any major country on earth,” Senator Bernie Sanders has pointed out. “You got half of older workers have nothing in the bank as they face retirement. You got a quarter of our seniors trying to get by on $15,000 a year or less.”

Such hardship exists in tandem with ever-greater opulence for the few, including this country’s 800 billionaires. But standard white noise mostly drowns out how government policies and the overall economic system keep enriching the already rich at the expense of people with scant resources.

This year, while Donald Trump and Republican legislators have been boosting oligarchy and slashing enormous holes in the social safety net, Democratic leaders have seemed remarkably uninterested in breaking away from the policy approaches that ended up losing their party the allegiance of so many working-class voters. Those corporate-friendly approaches set the stage for Trump’s faux “populism” as an imagined solution to the discontent that the corporatism of the Democrats had helped usher in.

While offering a rollback to pre-Trump-2.0 policies, the current Democratic leadership hardly conveys any orientation that could credibly relieve the economic distress of so many Americans. The party remains in a debilitating rut, refusing to truly challenge the runaway power of corporate capitalism that has caused ever-widening income inequality.

“Opportunity” as a Killer Ideology

The Democratic Party establishment now denounces President Trump’s vicious assaults on vital departments and social programs. Unfortunately, three decades ago it cleared a path that led toward the likes of the DOGE wrecking crew. A clarion call in that direction came from President Bill Clinton when, in his 1996 State of the Union address, he exulted that “the era of big government is over.”

Clinton followed those instantly iconic words by adding, “We cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.” Like the horse he rode into Washington — the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which he cofounded — Clinton advocated a “third way,” distinct from both liberal Democrats and Republican conservatives. But when his speech called for “self-reliance and teamwork” — and when, on countless occasions throughout the 1990s he invoked the buzzwords “opportunity” and “responsibility” — he was firing from a New Democrat arsenal that all too sadly targeted “handouts” and “special interests” as obsolete relics of the 1930s New Deal and the 1960s Great Society.

The seminal Clintonian theme of “opportunity” — with little regard for outcome — aimed at a wide political audience. In the actual United States, however, touting opportunity as central to solving the problems of inequity obscured the huge disparities in real-life options. In theory, everyone was to have a reasonable chance; in practice, opportunity was then (and remains) badly skewed by economic status and race, beginning as early as the womb. In a society so stratified by class, “opportunity” as the holy grail of social policy ultimately leaves outcomes to the untender mercies of the market.

Two weeks before Clinton won the presidency, the newsweekly Time reported that his “economic vision” was “perhaps best described as a call for a We decade; not the old I-am-my-brother’s-keeper brand of traditional Democratic liberalism.” Four weeks later, the magazine showered the president-elect with praise: “Clinton’s willingness to move beyond some of the old-time Democratic religion is auspicious. He has spoken eloquently of the need to redefine liberalism: the language of entitlements and rights and special-interest demands, he says, must give way to talk of responsibilities and duties.”

Clinton and the DLC insisted that government should smooth the way for maximum participation in the business of business. While venerating the market, the New Democrats were openly antagonistic toward labor unions and those they dubbed “special interests,” such as feminists, civil-rights activists, environmentalists, and others who needed to be shunted aside to fulfill the New Democrat agenda, which included innovations like “public-private partnerships,” “empowerment zones,” and charter schools.

Taking the Government to Market

While disparaging advocates for the marginalized as impediments to winning the votes of white “moderates,” the New Democrats tightly embraced corporate America. I still have a page I tore out of Time magazine in December 1996, weeks after Clinton won reelection. The headline said: “Ex-Investment Bankers and Lawyers Form Clinton’s Economic Team. Surprise! It’s Pro-Wall Street.”

That was the year when Clinton and his allies achieved a longtime goal — strict time limits for poor women to receive government assistance. “From welfare to work” became a mantra. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was out and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families was in. As occurred three years earlier when he was able to push NAFTA through Congress only because of overwhelming Republican support, Democratic lawmakers were divided and Clinton came to rely on overwhelming GOP support to make “welfare reform” possible.

The welfare bill that he gleefully signed in August 1996 was the flip side of his elite economic team’s priorities. The victims of “welfare reform” would soon become all too obvious, while their victimizers would remain obscured in the smoke blown by cheerleading government officials, corporate-backed think tanks, and mainstream journalists. When Clinton proclaimed that such landmark legislation marked the end of “welfare as we know it,” he was hailing the triumph of a messaging siege that had raged for decades.

Across much of the country’s media spectrum, prominent pundits had long been hammering away at “entitlements,” indignantly claiming that welfare recipients, disproportionately people of color, were sponging off government largesse. The theme was a specialty of conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, John Leo, and George Will (who warned in November 1993 that the nation’s “rising illegitimacy rate… may make America unrecognizable”). But some commentators who weren’t right-wing made similar arguments, while ardently defaming the poor.

Newsweek star writer Joe Klein often accused inner-city Black people of such defects as “dependency” and “pathology.” Three months after Clinton became president, Klein wrote that “out-of-wedlock births to teenagers are at the heart of the nexus of pathologies that define the underclass.” The next year, he intensified his barrage. In August 1994, under the headline “The Problem Isn’t the Absence of Jobs, But the Culture of Poverty,” he peppered his piece with phrases like “welfare dependency,” while condemning “irresponsible, antisocial behavior that has its roots in the perverse incentives of the welfare system.”

Such punditry was unconcerned with the reality that, even if they could find and retain employment while struggling to raise families, what awaited the large majority of the women being kicked off welfare were dead-end jobs at very low wages.

A Small Business Shell Game

During the 1990s, Bill and Hillary Clinton fervently mapped out paths for poor women that would ostensibly make private enterprise the central solution to poverty. A favorite theme was the enticing (and facile) notion that people could rise above poverty by becoming entrepreneurs.

Along with many speeches by the Clintons, some federal funds were devoted to programs to help lenders offer microcredit so that low-income people could start small enterprises. Theoretically, the result would be both well-earning livelihoods and self-respect for people who had pulled themselves out of poverty. Of course, some individual success stories became grist for upbeat media features. But as the years went by, the overall picture would distinctly be one of failure.

In 2025, politicians continue to laud small business ventures as if they could somehow remedy economic ills. But such endeavors aren’t likely to bring long-term financial stability, especially for people with little start-up money to begin with. Current figures indicate that one-fifth of all new small businesses fail within the first year and the closure rate only continues to climb after that. Fifty percent of small businesses fail within five years and 65 percent within 10 years.

Promoting the private sector as the solution to social inequities inevitably depletes the public sector and its capacity to effectively serve the public good. Three decades after the Clinton presidency succeeded in blinkering the Democratic vision of what economic justice might look like, the party’s leaders are still restrained by assumptions that guarantee vast economic injustice — to the benefit of those with vast wealth.

“Structural problems require structural solutions,” Bernie Sanders wrote in a 2019 op-ed piece, “and promises of mere ‘access’ have never guaranteed black Americans equality in this country… ‘Access’ to health care is an empty promise when you can’t afford high premiums, co-pays or deductibles. And an ‘opportunity’ for an equal education is an opportunity in name only when you can’t afford to live in a good school district or to pay college tuition. Jobs, health care, criminal justice and education are linked, and progress will not be made unless we address the economic systems that oppress Americans at their root.”

But addressing the root of economic systems that oppress Americans is exactly what the Democratic Party leadership, dependent on big corporate donors, has rigorously refused to do. Looking ahead, unless Democrats can really put up a fight against the pseudo-populism of the rapacious and fascistic Trump regime, they are unlikely to regain the support of the working-class voters who deserted them in last year’s election.

During this month’s federal government shutdown, Republicans were ruthlessly insistent on worsening inequalities in the name of breaking or shaking up the system. Democrats fought tenaciously to defend Obamacare and a health-care status quo that still leaves tens of millions uninsured or underinsured, while medical bills remain a common worry and many people go without the care they need.

“We must start by challenging the faith that public policy, private philanthropy, and the culture at large has placed in the market to accomplish humanitarian goals,” historian Lily Geismer has written in her insightful and deeply researched book Left Behind. “We cannot begin to seek suitable and sustainable alternatives until we understand how deep that belief runs and how detrimental its consequences are.”

The admonitions in Geismer’s book, published three years ago, cogently apply to the present and future. “The best way to solve the vexing problems of poverty, racism, and disinvestment is not by providing market-based microsolutions,” she pointed out. “Macroproblems need macrosolutions. It is time to stop trying to make the market do good. It is time to stop trying to fuse the functions of the federal government with the private sector… It is the government that should be providing well-paying jobs, quality schools, universal childcare and health care, affordable housing, and protections against surveillance and brutality from law enforcement.”

Although such policies now seem a long way off, clearly articulating the goals is a crucial part of the struggle to achieve them. Those who suffer from the economic power structure are victims of a massively cruel system, being made steadily crueler by the presidency of Donald Trump. But progress is possible with clarity about how the system truly works and the victimizers who benefit from it.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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For the first time in decades, the public in the United States and across the West has begun to see Israel’s wars and occupation for what they truly are: acts of systemic injustice driven by malevolence and impunity. Social media has removed the familiar whitewash of mainstream filters, revealing truths long concealed behind carefully managed narratives that presented Israel as a victim and Palestinians as faceless aggressors.

At first, the shift in public opinion was dismissed as a fleeting wave of online teenage outrage. Others within the Zionist establishment ignored it altogether, clinging to an arrogant chutzpah born of decades of unchallenged influence over Western media. Convinced that control over the traditional press and elected officials made public sentiment irrelevant; they believed their “sophisticated” propaganda could always bring people back into their corral. Israel-firsters failed to understand that this time something fundamental had changed: people now had direct access to unfiltered images, eyewitness testimonies, and voices from Gaza that no amount of spin could erase.

Recent polling confirms just how profound this shift has become. Citing new Quinnipiac and New York Times polls, CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten noted that where voters once sided with Israel by +48 points in October 2023, they now favor Palestinians by +1 point. It is, he said, “the first time ever” since polling began in the 1980s that Palestinians hold any advantage in U.S. public sympathy. The shift is most dramatic among Democrats, who moved from supporting Israel by +26 points to favoring Palestinians by +46—a seventy-two–point swing in just two years. Even among Republicans, deep generational divides are emerging, with voters under 50 far less supportive of Israel than their elders.

What the Zionist architects of managed consent failed to understand is that this transformation is not transient. It is generational and moral realignment. Younger Americans are examining Israeli actions with independent eyes, unburdened by the inculcated guilt narratives that shaped post-World War II Western politics. They belong to a global generation raised outside the rituals of the 5 o’clock news and cold war. A generation for whom information is open source, and real-time videos bypassing the curated messaging of traditional media.

By blocking international reporters from entering Gaza, Israel inadvertently fueled the demand for alternative news. Social media became a critical independent source, a great equalizer, exposing atrocities that legacy networks once obfuscated or filtered out. It allowed millions to witness war crimes through the eyes of the victims, not corporations. It shattered the monopoly of manufactured consent that shielded Israel from accountability for seventy-seven years. The raw images of destroyed hospitals, neighborhoods, universities, and starving children reshaped global consciousness. They exposed the real reasons why Israel murdered local journalists and was determined to keep the international press out of Gaza.

This reversal in public opinion helps explain the increasingly aggressive efforts by American Zionists to reassert control over both traditional and social media. As public sympathy for Palestinians grows, Israel and its allies are doubling down on narrative management, enlisting U.S. media insiders to “shift the story” and reestablish their influence within the world’s leading news organizations.

For example, a new journalism fellowship founded in 2025 by Jacki and Jeff Karsh —heirs to a Zionist billionaire and self-described supporters of Israel—openly seeks to “shift the narrative” back in Israel’s favor. Promoted as “the world’s only journalism fellowship solely dedicated to Jewish topics,” it features pro-Israeli mentors from CNN and The New York Times, including Van Jones, Jodi Rudoren, and Sharon Otterman. Behind its claims of “integrity and independence,” the fellowship represents a broader Hasbara campaign to rebrand Israeli propaganda as journalism.

As Gaza’s reality reaches global audiences through unfiltered social media, public opinion is shifting faster than any managed narrative can contain. No amount of media engineering can conceal war crimes. Social media has torn down Israel’s false moral façade. No billionaire’s funding, no standing ovation for Benjamin Netanyahu in Congress, can erase what people have seen, questioned, and now refuse to accept: the lies that sustained occupation and Jewish apartheid for generations.

The political ripple effects of this awakening are beginning to unsettle Washington. What was once an untouchable bipartisan consensus on Israel now shows visible fissures, especially within the Democratic Party. Two years ago, I could not have imagined receiving text messages from candidates pledging to reject AIPAC funding. Even within the halls of Congress, where AIPAC once silenced dissent, a quiet rebellion is taking shape. Lawmakers who once hesitated to utter the word “Palestine” now invoke it as a measure of moral integrity. Questioning AIPAC and Israeli policy has become part of mainstream political discourse.

Ultimately, in this generational divide, the shift reflects the erosion of fear that once intimidated many. The fear of speaking out, of losing funding, or of being labeled antisemitic is fading. In its place rises conviction, where young Americans, armed with truth and moral clarity, are rejecting the long-standing conflation of Israel with Judaism, along with the myths and manufactured guilt that sustained it.

The question is no longer if U.S. policy toward Israel will change, but when Washington’s politics will finally align with the public opinion.

The post The Crumbling Illusion: Why American Public Opinion on Israel Is Shifting appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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Counter-attack by Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces supported by T-34 tanks near Playa Giron during the Bay of Pigs invasion, 19 April 1961. Photograph Source: Rumlin – CC BY 3.0

The United States must not adopt the tactics of the enemy.  Each time we do so, each time the means we use are wrong, our inner strength, the strength that makes us free, is lessened.

– Senator Frank Church, 1976

The CIA has committed every crime there is except rape.

– General Walter Bedell Smith, former Director of Central Intelligence, 1949

The term “covert action” is a peculiarly American invention; it does not appear in the lexicon of other intelligence services.  Nor does the term appear in the National Security Act of 1947, which created the Central Intelligence Agency.  Covert action refers to secret operations to influence governments, organizations, or persons in support of a foreign policy in a manner that is not attributable to the United States.

Donald Trump has gone a step further than all other presidents by ignoring plausible denial; he announced the “secret” authorization to allow the CIA to conduct covert action in Venezuela against President Nicolas Maduro.  This represents the latest attempt to apply pressure on Venezuela.  It follows  authorization for the U.S. military to target boats that may or may not be carrying drugs.  Thus far, five boats have been destroyed and 29 Venezuelans (and some Colombians) have been killed.  Venezuela is a target even though it plays no role in the fentanyl trade, and accounts for little of the cocaine that enters the United States.

Trump’s use of the military has been even more threatening.  It involves the deployment of F-35 fighter planes and 10,000 troops in Puerto Rico, eight combatant ships, and an attack submarine.  More recently, elite Special Operations aviation has flown near the Venezuelan coast, and helicopters and even B-52 strategic bombers have been sighted.  Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are presumably hoping that U.S. military pressure will lead the Venezuelan military to overthrow its president.

In the wake of this buildup, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey, has announced his retirement, an apparent protest of this dangerous activity.  Holsey has privately complained that he wasn’t even consulted about some of the provocative actions that Trump, Rubio, and CIA director John Ratcliffe have engineered. It is highly unusual for a combatant commander to leave his post early.

U.S. covert action, which began under the Eisenhower administration, has been marked by incredible and often predictable failure.  The worst failures were in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Congo 1959, and Chile (1973), where leftist leaders were overthrown only to be followed by the accession to power of authoritarians and tyrants such as the Shah, Julio Alpirez, Mobutu, and Pinochet, respectively.  These authoritarians introduced brutal regimes and repressive military forces, many of whom received military training from the CIA.  When U.S. ambassadors in Central America protested this activity, they were ordered to stop reporting on such criminal activity, and some were forced out of the Foreign Service.

The CIA also trained and supported abusive internal security organizations throughout Central America, particularly in Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador.  In Honduras, death squads grew out of collaboration between the CIA and the Honduran military.  The CIA was closely involved in the formation and training of the notorious Battalion 316, and CIA operatives had exclusive access to their secret detention centers.

Revelations of assassination plots in Cuba, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam in the early 1960s—at the direction of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy—finally led to a ban on CIA political assassinations in the mid-1970s.  In 1984, however, the CIA displayed its contempt for the ban on assassination when it produced a manual for the Contras that discussed “neutralizing” officials in Nicaragua.

The nadir of the CIA’s covert action was the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, when U.S. and CIA ignorance of Fidel Castro’s popularity led the CIA to launch an ill-fated paramilitary operation.  Several Cubans, initially trained by the CIA for covert action, were involved in the break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s office in the Watergate complex ten years later.

Despite the failures of clandestine activity and covert action, the CIA has  received increased funding annually from a bipartisan congress.  The failure to address the problems associated with covert action has been compounded by the failure to address the problem of oversight.  Oversight needs to be strengthened and operational failures must be studied.  The Trump presidency ensures that laws will be ignored, congress will not be consulted, the Pentagon and the CIA will have free rein, and President Truman’s original conception of the CIA as an objective interpreter of foreign events will be breached.

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