Photograph Source: Aude – CC BY-SA 3.0

“Israel’s strike on Hamas’s political leadership in Qatar’s capital, aimed at forcing an end to the Gaza war, looks like a rare Israeli tactical mistake.”

– David Ignatius, “Doha attack narrows Israel’s options in Gaza war,” Washington Post, September 10, 2025,

With this singular sentence, the Post’s David Ignatius has demonstrated once again that he is unaware or prefers to ignore the numerous strategic and tactical mistakes that Israel has committed over the past eight decades since gaining independence.  Israel has pursued numerous confrontations in this period, and its decision-making has produced a significant number of strategic and tactical mistakes.

The Suez War in 1956.  Israel never should have been a secret partner in the Franco-British colonial war to depose Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and regain control of the Suez Canal.  Israel’s participation convinced many Arab leaders that Israel was nothing more than an extension of European colonial power in the Middle East.  Heavy political pressure from the United States and the Soviet Union led to the humiliating withdrawal of the British-French-Israeli forces from Egypt.  British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had to resign, and the crisis made it more difficult for the international community to deal with the Soviet invasion of Hungary at the same time.

The Six-Day War in 1967.  The Six-Day War was marked by two strategic lies that compromised Israeli credibility in the international community and should have compromised Israel’s standing with its only serious ally, the United States.  As a junior analyst at the CIA at the time, I helped draft the report that described Israel’s attack on Egypt, which Israelis described as a preemptive attack.  It was nothing of the sort.  We had access to sensitive communications intercepts that documented Israeli plans for the attack, and there was no evidence whatsoever of an Egyptian battle plan.  In fact, half of Egyptian fighting forces were engaged in Yemen’s civil war, and there was no sign of Egyptian readiness in terms of air or armored power.  The lack of readiness allowed the Israeli air force to destroy Egyptian fighter aircraft that were parked wingtip to wingtip on Egyptian air bases.

In addition to lying about the start of the war, the Israelis were even more deceitful three days later when they attributed their malicious attack on the USS Liberty to a random accident.  If so, it was a well-planned accident.  The ship was a U.S. intelligence vessel in international waters, both slow-moving and lightly armed.  It brandished a huge U.S. flag in the midday sun, and didn’t resemble a ship in any other navy, let alone a ship in the arsenal of one of Israel’s weak enemies.  The USS Liberty was providing excellent intelligence information on Israeli battle plans, which is why Israel wanted it out of the way.

Yet the Israelis claimed they were attacking an Egyptian ship.  Israeli boats fired machine guns at close range at those helping the wounded, then machine-gunned the life rafts that survivors dropped in hope of abandoning the ship,  Thirty-four American sailors died, but the National Security Agency’s official U.S. investigation of the disaster remains classified to this day.

The Lebanese Invasion in 1982.  Defense Minister Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon led to a siege of the capital city of Beirut, which had not been discussed with Prime Minister Menachem Begin, and which violated Israeli pledges to Arab states that it would not attack their capital cities.  The Israelis made this pledge because of the vulnerability of their own capital, Jerusalem.  The raid was designed to force the Palestine Liberation Organization out of Lebanon, which it did, but the PLO was replaced by a far more dangerous and lethal insurgency, Hezbollah, which brought Iran’s Revolutionary Guard into the picture.  Sharon believed his military forces would be in Lebanon for several weeks or months.  In actual fact, they were there for the next two decades…and Israeli military forces are back in southern Lebanon today.

The Gaza War.  There are too many Israeli strategic and tactical blunders to discuss in this short essay.  An intelligence failure allowed the Hamas attack in the first place, and Israel’s creation of an outdoor prison in Gaza twenty years ago certainly explains Hamas’s pursuit of revenge.  The war itself is genocidal in nature, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been appropriately labeled a war criminal by numerous international and human rights organizations.  The strike in Doha to kill Hamas’s lead negotiator certainly tells you all you need to know regarding Israel’s strategic and tactical blunders. (The intelligence failure that enabled the initial success of the Gaza invasion in 2023 was similar to the strategic intelligence failure that led to the initial success of the Egyptian-Syrian attack against Israel in 1973, when the Israelis had strategic warning from a well-placed Egyptian operative.)

Clearly, there was nothing “rare” regarding the Israeli blunder in Qatar.  It was part and parcel of a far larger picture of Israel reliance on military forces to achieve objectives that require diplomacy and negotiation.  Israeli hubris regarding its own capabilities and the lack of regard for Arab capabilities and coordination are key factors in its intelligence failures.  The genocidal campaign in Gaza has made Israel a pariah state, and U.S. complicity has turned the international community against the United States as well.

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The Palestinian armed resistance has defended Gaza for almost two years now, successfully preventing Israel from expelling two million people from their homeland. But, outgunned as they are by Israel’s technology and its unlimited supply of war matériel from the United States, the resistance fighters now need the world’s help—and soon—to drive out the Israeli occupation forces and end the genocide. There’s a realistic mechanism to make that happen under United Nations auspices, so a growing global movement is now demanding that the UN get off its butt and come to Gaza’s rescue. 

Palestine’s Armed Resistance Hasn’t Let Israel “Finish the Job”

At this stage of the Gaza genocide, the Israelis’ ostensible goals are (a) to free the captives who remain in Gaza, all of whom are soldiers (that is, prisoners of war) and (b) to “destroy Hamas.” But its leaders have repeatedly made clear their true intentions: to nix all ceasefire proposals as they proceed to completely empty the Gaza Strip of its Palestinian population through some combination of mass killing and expulsion. 

To “destroy Hamas,” as they put it, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) would have to fight the organization’s armed wing—the Al Qassam Brigades—and its allied resistance groups in person, on their turf. Instead, out of cowardice, the Israelis have largely avoided direct engagement, instead turning all their firepower on Gaza’s civilian population and its infrastructure for sustaining life and health.  

When Israeli troops have dared to enter Gaza and tried to occupy the camps and cities (instead of just bombing them into rubble), the resistance forces have inflicted heavy casualties on them and destroyed or disabled large numbers of their tanks, armored personnel carriers, and bulldozers. As recently as September 15, the Israeli military’s chief of staff admitted to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a cabinet meeting that “even after the operation to capture Gaza City, Hamas will not be defeated militarily and administratively.”

In all ceasefire negotiations, Israel has demanded that the resistance forces, whom they have failed to defeat militarily, must nevertheless surrender and be disarmed. All the while, in other venues, Zionist leaders are declaring their intention to continue bombing, shooting, and starving Palestinian civilians as part of a campaign to drive them south, herd them into concentration camps near the border with Egypt, and from there, forcibly remove them to various countries in Africa and Asia—in Zionist leaders’ terms, to “finish the job.”

That phase of the genocide would be much further advanced today had there been no armed Palestinian resistance doggedly thwarting IOF troops’ attempts to capture and hold large areas of Gaza. If the resistance forces were now to give up that struggle, IOF efforts to slaughter, starve, imprison, and expel Gaza’s civilian population could and would shift into overdrive. As the Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah has starkly put it, Western governments can demand that the resistance give up their weapons “till the cows come home,” but “they’re not going to, because they know that would ensure the ‘Final Solution’” for the people of Gaza. (at 2 hr 38 min) 

UN General Assembly to the Rescue?

While Palestine’s national liberation forces have succeeded in foiling the IOF’s attempts to steal and depopulate Gaza, the fighters don’t have the resources required to drive out a large, genocidal army, lavishly supplied with US weaponry, or to keep Israelis off their land and out of their airspace, let alone break the 18-year-long siege of the territory. But if enough nations, ones that are not complicit in the genocide, join forces, they could stop it.

When a genocide is in progress, nations have a duty under international law to try to stop it. So far, Yemen’s de facto government, Ansar Allah, with its missile attacks on Israeli ships, military installations, and airports, is the only one taking its duty to intervene in this genocide seriously. Although the Yemeni people are paying a heavy price for their humanitarian intervention, their solidarity with Palestine has grown even stronger. 

One such ally, of course, is not enough to end the genocide. The Palestinian people need a large international armed force to converge on Gaza by air, sea, and land, to join the resistance fighters in protecting the civilian population and putting an end to the genocide. And, as luck would have it, there’s a little-known, decades-old mechanism for doing just that: UN General Assembly Resolution 377 (V), adopted in 1950 under the title “Uniting for Peace.” 

Uniting for Peace authorizes the General Assembly to request that its member nations intervene in cases of military aggression when the Security Council fails to act (which the council always does when it comes to Israel, thanks to the US veto). By a two-thirds majority, the General Assembly (in which each member nation has one vote and there are no vetoes) can pass a resolution enabling the formation and deployment of a multinational military force to come to Gaza’s rescue. 

And that might just happen. Spurred by a clamor from global civil society, the UN may consider an armed-intervention resolution this month, during the 80^th Session of the General Assembly in New York City. 

A Uniting for Peace resolution can kick off a joint effort among nations to take any of a range of actions, such as imposing sweeping sanctions and military embargoes against Israel or even expelling it from the UN. Most importantly, the 1950 resolution authorized the General Assembly to make “appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

Experts urge that stopping the genocide requires adopting a resolution that mandates the deployment, at Palestine’s request, of a multinational protection force to Gaza. These troops would be empowered to “protect civilians, open entry points via land and sea, [and] facilitate humanitarian aid,” along with forcing Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza’s territory, coastal waters, and airspace, while preserving evidence of its war crimes, crimes against humanity, apartheid, and genocide.

Once such a resolution is passed, the UN Secretary-General is required to invite member nations to contribute troops, equipment, and supplies to the military force, which must then be quickly assembled and deployed.

Image: Priti Gulati Cox. See more such bookmarks at her resistance embroidery initiative, which supports The Sameer Project in Gaza. 

Prevailing Against US-Israel Obstruction

Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN official who resigned in October of 2023 while warning that genocide was coming to Gaza, is one of the most prominent advocates for a UN resolution to deploy an armed protection force. In a Middle East Eye article last month, he stressed that the genocide being wrought by Israel “requires intervention, the State of Palestine has invited intervention, and Palestinian civil society has appealed for intervention.” A multinational military force, he wrote, is necessary to help the Palestinian people out of this immediate crisis. But in the longer run, he added, “genocide (and apartheid) will only end through resistance against the Israeli regime, the steadfastness of the Palestinian people, the solidarity of the rest of the world, and the isolation, weakening, defeat, and dismantling of the Israeli regime.”

Mokhiber is optimistic that the resolution can get ‘Yes’ votes from the required two-thirds of General Assembly members. However, he warns,

The U.S. and the Israeli regime will use every available carrot and stick to try to
prevent the securing of the necessary two-thirds majority, seeking to water down the text, and bribing and threatening states to vote no, to abstain, or to be absent for the vote. The current lawless government in Washington may even threaten sanctions on behalf of the Israeli regime, as it has already done vis-à-vis the International Criminal Court and the UN’s Special Rapporteur. And they are likely to try to obstruct the protection force itself, once mandated.

Mokhiber doesn’t say so explicitly, but it seems to me that any US-Israeli attempt to “obstruct the protection force” could include a range of actions that might well lead to direct armed conflict with the protection force.

Alfred de Zayas, a former UN Independent Expert on International Order, explained in a recent CounterPunch article why “Israel has no authority, no sovereignty, and no rights in Gaza or in the West Bank,” while UN-approved troops would be in Gaza legally at the request of Palestine. But the occupiers have broken every other international law they’ve encountered, so it would be no surprise if they were to attack the UN’s protection force, which, I presume, would be authorized to fight back in defense of themselves and the civilian population. 

I haven’t seen anything in the various calls for a Uniting for Peace resolution regarding specific actions the protection force would be allowed to take. Mokhiber has said that the troops would be dispatched to protect Palestinians, not attack Israelis. It seems to me, though, that if they’re to carry out their protective mission, UN troops must be authorized to enforce a no-fly zone over Gaza and shoot down Israeli aircraft that violate it. 

I’m way out on a limb at this point, but if a no-fly zone is not permissible, I think it should be. As the Palestinian resistance has shown, the IOF are effective fighters only when they’re in the cockpit of a fighter-bomber or sitting safely back at their home base controlling a drone. They’re not good at fighting on terra firma. With a no-fly zone in place, therefore, the multinational force could be highly effective in protecting Gaza’s civilian population, pushing out the Israelis, and helping bring a surge of humanitarian aid, other supplies, and infrastructure into the territory. 

I’ve felt a little more optimistic that IOF troops can be purged from Gaza without setting off full-blown armed conflict since hearing Craig Mokhiber discuss prospects for a protection force on The Electronic Intifada’s livestream of September 11. He cautioned that with the General Assembly session starting soon in New York and the many possibilities being discussed, the creation and deployment of a protection force is far from guaranteed. But, he imagined, “if a force made up [hypothetically] of Spanish, Irish, Slovenian, South African, Namibian, Kenyan, Malaysian, and Indonesian contingents sailing under a UN flag” approaches Gaza, it is “not obvious that Israel would be in a position to attack such a force.” And if Israeli forces do attack the UN troops, he added, even more nations might be inspired to join the intervention.

Whatever the chances that an armed protection force can be successfully assembled and deployed, Mokhiber concluded, civil society around the world must demand as loudly as possible that the UN establish and deploy an armed protection force for Gaza. 

“If we ask for it and they don’t do it,” he said, “it’s their sin. If we don’t ask for it, it’s our sin.”

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Seven Days in May, John Frankenheimer, dir., Paramount Pictures, 1964. Screenshot.

Stephen Miller is trolling me

Like most other writers for Counterpunch, I’ve written my share of columns about the current president. I’m slightly embarrassed about that fact; attention for a narcissist is like heroin for a junkie, and nobody wants to feed an addiction. But Trump is as liable to read Counterpunch as he is The New England Journal of Medicine, so on that score, my conscience is clear. 

I’m less certain about his entourage. Stephen Miller, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff and very own Goebbels, is just perverse enough to read Counterpunch to buttress his claims that his boss’s opponents are “communist lunatics.”  And that possibility, however remote, gives me pause. Since I started writing for Counterpunch in 2018, almost every awful thing I predicted Trump would do, he did. Almost every cruelty he enacted, I anticipated. Has Miller been trolling me? Have I been feeding him and Trump ideas?  I therefore offer the following with trepidation.

A secret hidden in plain sight

Trump has sought to undermine every stabilizing institution of American political or civil society: Congress, the courts, federal agencies, universities, law and medicine. Were his goals not so corrupt and self-aggrandizing, we might call him a revolutionary.  Instead, he is simply a greedy bastard who has for reasons unfathomable, hoodwinked a significant minority of Americans into believing he will make them rich or redress their grievances. They are discovering the con, though far too slowly for it to matter. But just in case there’s a major erosion of popular support, or congressional opposition arises, Trump has a back-up plan – so well broadcast it might be called a “front-up” plan:  a presidential proclamation of national emergency and declaration of martial law. 

National Guard troops and ICE agents, the latter a veritable Gestapo, are already pre-positioned in Los Angles and Washington. They may be sent soon to Chicago, New York, Boston and Baltimore, though public opposition is growing and there is a chance Trump will hold-off for now. What will be the pretext for a declaration of martial law, followed by postponement of midterm elections? What will martial law look like? Can it be stopped? Here’s a brief primer on martial law and its prospects in the U.S.A. 

Definition

Martial law is mentioned nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. The nearest reference is Article I, Section 8, Clause 15: “The Congress shall have power . . . to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrection and repel Invasions.” There’s also Article IV, Section 4: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.” In each case, the coercive power of a militia is proposed as remedy to invasion, insurrection, or violence serious enough to threaten the central government or federated states. Only in extremis, in other words, may national armies be deployed within the nation, and then usually by congress. That prohibition was later codified in the marvelously named (shades of Wyatt Erp) Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 which forbids the use of the federal military to enforce laws within the U.S. 

Constitutional caution about the use of martial law is reflected in the subsequent body of Supreme Court decisions. In Ex parte Milligan (1866), the court forbade use of military courts while civilian ones were still functioning. In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase wrote that martial law could only be asserted “in time of invasion or insurrection within the limits of the United States…when the public danger requires its exercise.” A decade later, in U.S. v Dielkelman (1876), the Court again declared: “Martial law is the law of military necessity in the actual presence of war.”  

Since that time, there have been further limitations upon the power of the executive to suspend habeas corpus (the right to challenge unlawful arrest) and declare martial law, plus one significant expansion, the notorious Korematsu v. United States (1944) which allowed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Though the case was wrongly decided – an injustice that will forever stain the nation — the underlying rationale of the decision was the same as with previous cited cases: Suspension of due process and imposition of martial law is only permissible when danger from war, invasion or insurrection is extreme. 

If the internment of Japanese American is tragedy, the current dispatch of National Guard troops to halt a “migrant invasion” is farce. Far from representing a threat, immigrants have brought the U.S. prosperity. They take the hardest, lowest paying jobs that American citizens don’t want, pay federal and state taxes without receiving benefits in return, and stabilize population numbers at a time of very low birth-rates.  Immigrants exert little if any downward pressure on wages and contribute significantly to GDP growth. Nevertheless, President Trump has declared illegal immigration a national emergency and commanded the armed forces and national guard to prevent crossings at the Mexican border and apprehend “illegals” everywhere else. 

As always with Trump, motives are murky. It’s not clear if the declaration of emergency was pretextual for the expansion of ICE and increased deportations, or if it was an excuse for the nationwide deployment of non-civilian police forces and the eventual imposition of martial law. The result is the same either way: fascist authoritarianism. 

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22….”

In a recent column in Counterpunch, John Feffer wrote persuasively about what he called “slow-motion authoritarianism,” the idea that some elected leaders “gradually undermine democratic institutions and accumulate more executive power”, until they become full-blown autocrats, like Putin in Russia and Urban in Hungary. That may be the situation with Trump, Feffer argues, but I want to offer a cavil: authoritarianism can also happen, to quote Hemingway on bankruptcy, “gradually and then suddenly.”

Right now, the U.S. is speeding toward martial law.  The fuel is Trump’s narcissism and hunger for power, and congressional Republicans’ will to gratify both. Congress even provided enabling legislation in the form of the One Big Beautiful Bill and Recission Act. The first lowered taxes on the rich, paying for them with reductions in Medicaid and Food Stamps. The second cut 80% of funding for USAID, which mostly supports poor, hungry, and sick people abroad. The politics of both bills is transparent: further accrual of power and the crushing of potential political opposition. Hunger provokes activism and resistance; starvation prevents it. 

That martial law will be proclaimed sometime in the next year seems pre-ordained. ICE agents, assisted by state National Guard troops in Los Angeles, Washington, and other Democrat-led cities and states, will round up and arrest undocumented immigrants, dark-skinned and Spanish-speaking legal residents and citizens, and anyone who tries to hinder them. (Suspects may also include anyone holding a submarine sandwich.) If protests grow large or unruly, more troops will be sent, including U.S. Army forces, in direct contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act. In that situation, a national emergency will be proclaimed by executive order, and martial law declared in affected cities, and perhaps nationwide. In other words, absent resistance, city after city will be slowly, gradually governed by military force, as Feffer described. If urban populations offer significant resistance to ICE raids and federal policing, more military forces will quickly be called in, and martial law declared. That’s the national catch-22: Don’t resist and martial law will happen slowly; resist and it will occur quickly.

There’s another circumstance in which martial law may be pronounced, and it too presents itself as a catch 22. If congressional Democrats filibuster the stopgap budget bill to fund the federal government, Trump may declare a national emergency and instruct the treasury pay the nation’s bills anyway. The exercise of spending prerogatives, outside of congressional mandate, would constitute a coup, a de facto “state of emergency,” facilitated by the imposition of martial law.  If on the other hand, Democrats join Republicans in passing the budget – one containing recissions and impoundments — they will be complicit in their own disempowerment. They will have created de facto, a government ruled by executive decree. Any public protest will quickly be answered by troops and a declaration of national emergency or state of martial law. Administration officials are no doubt gaming out various scenarios to maximize the chance to postpone or cancel the 2026 midterm elections. If they do, 2028 will also be up for grabs.

And there’s one more situation in which martial law might be declared: political violence targeted against the right. The murder of conservative influencer and Trump-whisperer Charlie Kirk inspired a 4-minute verbal presidential fusillade against the “radical left.” Even in advance of the apprehension of any suspect in the killing, Trump vowed retribution against “each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and… the organizations that fund it and support it.” It is easy to imagine this shooting, or similar events (regardless of the predominance of far right political violence in the U.S.) triggering what may be called a “Reichstag moment.”  That’s when an arson fire at the German parliament in February 1933 was used by the Chancellor, Adolf Hitler as a pretext for an attack upon the political left and a presidential decree suspending civil liberties, in effect a declaration of martial law.

Can martial law be resisted? 

The short answer is yes. Despite extraordinary improvements in electronic eavesdropping, video surveillance, facial recognition software, and online tracking, a genuine mass movement to arrest the descent into fascism can succeed. There simply aren’t enough hounds to catch the vast number of foxes who will seek to challenge or undermine a nascent, fascist polity. No state, not even a police state, can govern without a population willing to do the millions of jobs required to keep it operating. No nation, not even one locked down under martial law, can coerce millions of its citizens to manufacture, trade, buy, repair, heal, teach, travel, or entertain if they don’t want to. A nation of consumers under martial law will slow their buying; a land of tourists will see travel grind to a halt. A country of investors and entrepreneurs will see profit levels plumet. In those circumstances, the government must fall.  

The only prophylaxis against fascism therefore, is an engaged and motivated mass. But for that to exist, there needs to be smart leaders as well as energized followers. To call the current Democratic Party leadership sclerotic is to say the least. But there are Democrats, including 84 y.o. Bernie Sanders and 35 y.o. A.O.C., who will help the new leaders that will inevitably emerge from the hundreds of thousands of people who are currently engaged in grassroots activism in support of environmental justice, union organizing, prison reform or abolition, gender rights, animal protection, and community health. All of those endeavors have been threatened or undermined by the Trump regime. A declaration of martial law will coalesce that opposition and loose a whirlwind. I hope Stephen Miller is reading this.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Trump’s obsession with violence is more than a grotesque fixation on power and cruelty; it is a commentary on politics as pathology, a grim theater in which authoritarianism reveals its inner logic. What he offers is not governance but the intoxication of destruction, the fetishization of cruelty, and the performance of violence as ritual. On the individual level, it is the grotesque display of a delusional mind that can only feel alive through the embrace of terror, that finds its emotional register only in the language of threat and annihilation. This is obvious in his AI-generated meme on Truth Social where he targets Chicago by threatening that he will go to “WAR” with the city. The image posted on September 6th “depicted him as Robert Duvall’s character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in Apocalypse Now.”

In the doctored image, Trump not only cast himself as a cinematic icon of militarized madness but paired it with a menacing caption. The post invoked his plan to unleash the National Guard on Chicago, echoing his earlier militarization of Washington, D.C., and underscored his desire to rebrand the Department of Defense as the “Department of War.” The caption’s most telling moment, however, was a grotesque parody of Duvall’s infamous line from the film. Transforming “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” into “I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” Trump collapsed cinematic war fantasy into his ongoing campaign of immigration terror, turning the language of mass suffering into a punchline of authoritarian bravado.

What emerges from this spectacle is more than a provocation; it is a declaration that cruelty is both pleasure and policy, a gleeful admission that state violence has become theatre, and that politics itself has degenerated into necropolitics: a regime in which sovereignty is measured by the power to decide who suffers, who is dispossessed, and who is left to die. This grotesque performance exposes the pathological core of an authoritarian war culture, where cruelty is transfigured into pleasure, violence becomes the grammar of belonging, and politics is reduced to a performance of derangement. In Trump’s hands, deportation is stripped of its bureaucratic disguise and reimagined as an ecstatic ritual of exclusion — a celebration of malignant aggression that reveals the fascist subject in its most naked form, finding joy only in the infliction of suffering. 

Let us be clear: Trump’s glee in the cruelty of deportation is nothing less than an unabashed celebration of white supremacy. His words are not incidental; they crown a long record of racist commitments. This is the man who has praised the Confederacy, vilified DEI initiatives, and weaponized ICE with Gestapo-like tactics overwhelmingly aimed at people of color–practices that echo the racial terror of the Klan. His assaults do not stop with bodies; they extend to culture itself. By targeting the ideas, books, and voices of critical Black figures, he advances a cultural purge that carries chilling resonances with Hitler’s campaign to erase Jewish, Marxist, and liberal intellectuals. In both instances, the logic is the same: to erase difference, to terrorize the vulnerable, and to secure power through the destruction of memory and the annihilation of dignity.

Trump’s racist obsession with mass deportations is inseparable from his militarized vision of politics. In his social media post, he invoked war against Chicago, threatened the deployment of the U. S. military to  Los Angeles and Washington D. C., and celebrated state violence as the solution to social problems. This is more than racist demagoguery. It reveals how authoritarian cultural politics operates as a spectacle of education—normalizing war, glorifying white Christian nationalism, and erasing democratic memory.

Trump’s war is aimed not only at immigrants, people of color, and all who refuse his vision of white supremacy, but also at history itself. Controlling memory—whether by intimidating the press, defunding public broadcasting, or rewriting historical narratives—undermines the public’s capacity to recognize and resist fascism. As Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley warn, Trump’s manipulation of memory is a deliberate fascist strategy: it disarms the public by making white supremacy appear natural and inevitable. Shea Howell underscores the stakes: in destroying the sources of our collective past that celebrate justice and equality, Trump rewrites history to elevate white Christian American men and render everyone else disposable. She writes: 

Over the last six months they have been systematically destroying the sources of our collective past that celebrate the best of our cultural aspirations.  Attacking universities, defunding public broadcasting, intimidating news sources, renaming battle ships, and making up statistics are all essential to rewriting history in ways that emphasize the importance of one group of people, white Christian American men, and the insignificance of everyone else.  

To grasp the deeper cultural and psychological appeal of Trump’s celebration of violence, it is necessary to situate his rhetoric within a longer history of critical reflections on the fascist personality and subject. The history of fascism produced a number of commentaries on the fascist personality and subject, notably by Wilhelm Reich, Theodor Adorno, and Freud. Reich wrote in 1933 The Mass Psychology of Fascism in which he  integrated Marxism and psychoanalysis. He insisted that fascism grows out of an “irrational character structure” in which repressed drives are transfigured into obedience, hatred, and a perverse pleasure in cruelty. Reich’s insights were later deepened by Adorno in The Authoritarian Personality, who noted that the fascist demagogue eroticizes violence, offering his followers the delusional notion that cruelty is a source of collective pleasure. Freud had already warned in Civilization and Its Discontents that aggression is woven into the very fabric of human drives, a force that seeks expression in humiliation, exploitation, and annihilation when left unchecked by culture and conscience. Trump’s photo and commentary make clear how his embrace of violence fuses cruelty with pleasure. Erich Fromm later sharpened this analysis with his concept of “malignant aggression.” Fromm suggests that such aggression was not defensive but ecstatic, a passion for annihilation experienced as intoxicating. Trump’s post embodies precisely this malignant aggression, turning state violence into a spectacle of pornographic pleasure and belonging, a ritualized performance in which militarized cruelty itself becomes the ground of agency.    

What emerges here is not the sober, if sometimes cruel, language of governance under gangster capitalism, but the delirious performance of spectacularized sadism, where violence becomes the end itself and the exclusive mode of state rule. Trump’s boast is more than a grotesque slip of the tongue; it is the utterance of a deranged mind for whom cruelty is the only register of feeling, and terror the only idiom of power. This is politics transfigured into pathology, a criminogenic mode of rule that normalizes lawlessness, and a necropolitical order that elevates the management of death and suffering into the very principle of sovereignty. Here, governance is reduced to the staging of annihilation, and the state is recast as an apparatus of terror whose legitimacy lies in its capacity to inflict pain, humiliation, and disposability.

Trump’s post reflects not only the brutality of the times but also the evolution of a distinctly American political madness. In his early public persona, he embodied the caricature of the greedy capitalist — a clownish, inflated version of Gordon Gekko from Wall Street, burnished through his performative role in The Apprentice. As president, his demeanor took on the cold, manipulative cruelty of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, obsessed with control and the spectacle of his own authority. Now, in his descent, he mirrors Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, Christian Bale’s deranged investment banker whose polished exterior masks a voracious appetite for violence and annihilation. Trump has morphed into something even darker: an unhinged Darth Vader of American politics, propelled by obsession, revenge, and cruelty, terrifying in his capacity to transform governance into a theater of sadism.

 The historical trajectory of genocidal violence from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its account of the Congo holocaust to Coppola’s Apocalypse Now with its vision of Vietnam as madness, to the rise of American fascism under Trump, makes clear a grim continuity. Across these histories, violence is not simply a tool of domination but a ritual of supremacy and subjugation, a performance that turns cruelty into destiny and annihilation into governance. At the center of this continuity lies culture itself. Too often it functions as a form of pedagogical terrorism, normalizing cruelty, shaping desires, and producing the formative conditions for demagogues to thrive. What unites these moments is the transformation of violence into both pleasure and policy, where terror is rendered ordinary and suffering becomes the currency of power. Trump’s boast about “loving the smell of deportations” situates him squarely within this lineage. It is the contemporary face of a necropolitical culture that manufactures the fascist subject, treating human beings as disposable and turning mass suffering into a spectacle of national strength.

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Several days after its absurd endorsement of renaming the Department of Defense to the Department of War and calling for a more aggressive posture against Russia’s war with Ukraine, the Washington Post stated that signing a follow-on to the New START Treaty was “reckless.”  New START is actually the last remaining nuclear arms-control treaty between the United State and Russia and it is due to expire in February 2026.  New START is the only stepping stone to pursuing deeper cuts in the U.S. and Russian strategic arsenals as well as to pursuing serious arms control negotiations with China, which is currently growing its strategy arsenal at a record pace.

Robert Peters, a senior fellow at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, falsely states in a Post oped (A new New START would only help adversaries”) that the growth of the Chinese arsenal portends that the United States will no longer have operationally deployed warheads to “cover—and therefore deter—both Russia and China simultaneously.”  Peters ignores two major facets of our nuclear inventory—our strategic submarines and our strategic nuclear bombers.  He argues that only a “more robust and credible nuclear deterrent” could “incentivize broth Russia and China to come to the negotiation table…to negotiate a more meaningful and effective agreement.”  It is more likely that continued expansion of the U.S. strategic arsenal would only lead to expansion of the Russian and Chinese arsenals as well. 

One of the best-kept defense secrets of the past seven decades hs been the high cost of producing and maintaining nuclear weapons (between $5 to $6 trillion—which represents one-fourth to one-third of overall defense spending.  Additional sums of money are in the budget for the Department of Energy, including huge investments in nuclear projects such as a nuclear-powered airplane, the Midgetman missile, and the Safeguard anti-ballistic missile system.  (Both the Midgetman and Safeguard systems have been retired.)  The military-industrial complex has argued that the huge investment in nuclear systems would be an overall saving because it would allow a smaller army and navy.  In actual fact, our army and navy have gotten larger and costlier.

Peters’ oped ignores the fact that our 14 Ohio-class strategic submarines that serve as the sea-based leg of the U.S. nuclear triad contains 875 nuclear warheads at sea, which represents a sufficient strategic deterrent.  Ten years ago, two U.S. Air Force officers wrote an authoritative essay that pointed specifically to 331 nuclear weapons as an assured deterrence capability.  Peters ignores the fact that the United States and NATO have a nuclear sharing arrangement that allows for U.S. strategic nuclear weapons to be stored in at least five European countries (Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey).  In return, Russia has begun storing tactical nuclear missiles in Belarus.

Nor did Peters mention that the U.S. fleet of more than 100 strategic bombers, including the B-52 and B-2 that are dual-capable for conventional and nuclear missions.  The B-21 is designed to replace both the B-1 and B-2 bombers, but there have been huge delays in the program.  The United States maintains a huge network of strategic bases that are closer to possible targets in both Russia and China, which have no comparable bases, let alone networks.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump has revived President Ronald Reagan’s belief in a national missile defense (the Strategic Defense Initiative or Star Wars) with a Golden Dome system that will force Russia and China to pursue additional offensive systems to overwhelm the U.S. defense.  The Golden Dome project would entail probably thousands of armed satellites that most likely would be a violation of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

The idea of the perfect defense that Reagan and now Trump are pursuing is a myth.  Anti-missile testing has always been rigged to hide the flaws in the system.  There is no bigger budget sink-hole than the pursuit of national missile defense.  Only Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid require more funding than the Pentagon.

The notion that hundreds of nuclear warheads are needed to provide strategic deterrence is particularly specious.  In actual fact, there are far more strategic weapons in the large inventories of Russia and the United States than there are strategic targets.  Moreover, the central aspect of deterrence is the threat to destroy the adversary’s urban areas.  Perhaps, we need to reread John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” to refresh our memories on the utter destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with weapons far less lethal than the ones in current inventories.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower pushed to reduce the strategic nuclear arsenal because he understood it created the possibility of annihilating the human race.

National missile defense, which is largely supported by the mainstream media, is an unlimited budget drain that repudiates the use of diplomacy and negotiation.  It will lead to placing nuclear arsenals on hair-trigger systems, and returns us to the earlier stage of the threat of thermonuclear war.  Anti-nuclear organizations must wake up to the current danger.

Returning the name of the Defense Department to the Department of War in this nuclear age, which finds the three major nuclear powers (China, Russia and the United States) unnecessarily bolstering their nuclear inventories, creates a far more threatening situation.  We have had nuclear close calls in the past, although the U.S. public is aware of few of them.  And we have the increasingly dangerous situation of artificial intelligence that could create false evidence of nuclear activity.  We need to return to the premise of a Defense Department to defend and deter, not to initiate offensive war.  The ability of Donald Trump to initiate war on his own as well as the bellicose and inexperienced nature of his national security team creates additional alarm.

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Belén Fernández in the Darién Gap, wearing a Palestinian soccer jersey. Photo courtesy of Belén Fernández.

What has been happening on the Darién Gap, one of the deadliest border crossings in the Western Hemisphere? Luckily, we have author Belén Fernández here to give us an in-depth rundown. Fernández has the unique ability to capture the absurdity, terror, and sorrow of a situation—often in the same sentence—and add a biting layer of sociopolitical and economic analysis on top of that. She accomplishes this in her new book, The Darien Gap: A Reporter’s Journey through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas, and she does it here with her answers in this interview.

Here, she discusses the Gap as an extension of the U.S. border, her own travel in it in 2024, the people she met—including the smugglers—and the testimonies she heard from people about the Darién Gap when she was locked up in an immigration prison in Mexico. Fernández is a prolific author, and her other work includes Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up inside Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center and Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World. She also writes a regular column for Al Jazeera.

Can you tell us what the Darién Gap is, who is crossing through it, and if you would consider it part of the U.S. border? If so, in what way?

The Darién Gap is the 106-kilometer stretch of territory straddling Colombia and Panama that constitutes the only roadless interlude in the Pan-American Highway linking Alaska to the tip of Argentina. It encompasses a deadly jungle through which hundreds of thousands of international refuge seekers have been forced to pass in recent years in the pursuit of eventual safety and economic stability in the United States, still some 5,000 kilometers to the north. The trajectory can take from days to weeks, and entails formidable mountains, rivers, armed assailants, and hostile wildlife. Although the Darién Gap is considerably less trafficked these days on account of Donald Trump’s decision to effectively shut down the U.S. border itself and do away with the right to asylum, no fewer than 520,000 people survived the crossing in 2023 alone. An untold number of refuge seekers have perished in the jungle, and it is next to impossible to speak to survivors of the journey without receiving a rundown of all the cadavers they encountered en route, from dead mothers lying next to their dead newborns to bloated corpses floating in the river.

As I discuss in my book, the Darién Gap has in fact functioned as an extension of the U.S. border; after all, it is entirely thanks to U.S. policy and the criminalization of migration for the have-nots of the global capitalist order that so many humans have been obligated to risk their lives in the hopes of a better life, enduring an odyssey that is not only physically punishing but also psychologically torturous. Rape and digital penetration, for instance, have been par for the Darién course.

Only the privileged of the earth can cross borders at will—in his own book Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the U.S. Border around the World, the Border Chronicle’s cofounder Todd Miller highlights the “enormous chasm between those who have freedom of movement and those who do not.” As a microcosm embodying the chasmic and fortified gap between haves and have-nots, then, the Darién Gap is as good an expanded U.S. border as any.

Map created by Milenioscuro, Wikimedia Commons.

One of the things I see in the Darién Gap is a brutal example of the prevention-through-deterrence strategy we see on the U.S.-Mexico border, the forcing of people into hostile terrain when they cross borders. What were some of the things you witnessed? And can you describe your experience in the Gap? And who were some of the people you met in your journey?

In the case of both the U.S.-Mexico border and the Darién Gap, the point has never been to entirely halt undocumented migration, without which the U.S. economy would naturally be up a creek. Rather, the aim has simply been to render the trajectory so absolutely hellish that the folks who eventually do make it to the land of the free are not tempted to expect too much in the way of basic rights.

Obviously, “prevention through deterrence” will never deter people who have nothing to lose—and whose lives are often at risk in their home countries, whether for political, societal, or economic reasons.

As for what I myself witnessed in the Darién Gap when I entered in 2024, I should emphasize that I did not fully complete the jungle crossing from Colombia to Panama; I entered via the Colombian village of Capurganá and later exited from the same side. There were various motivations for this choice of route—among them that I had not acquired press permission to enter the territory and, more importantly, that I suffer from a serious lack of balls and really, really, really did not want to be raped. Not long after my Darién Gap incursion, the New York Times would report that sexual violence against migrants on the Panamanian side of the Gap had reached a “level rarely seen outside war,” although the Times of course did not care to point out that this was in fact a war—and one in which the U.S. happened to be the chief belligerent, as imperial policy played out on vulnerable human bodies in the jungle. Armed as I was with a United States passport that automatically confers privilege, I was able to choose not to put myself in a situation in which I would forfeit control over the boundaries of my own body.

I entered the Darién Gap as a “migrant” rather than a journalist, which put me in a bit of a fix with the “guides” running the show in Capurganá, who operated under the auspices of the Clan del Golfo, Colombia’s dominant drug-trafficking organization that had quickly gotten in on the migrant-smuggling business as well. As part of the initial extortion process, I was asked for my national identifying document along with a payment of $280; since it was more than slightly sketchy for a U.S. citizen to be migrating to their own homeland via the Darién Gap, I claimed to have lost my ID and went on to plead Palestinian-ness, pointing to the Palestine soccer shirt I was wearing as proof. I entered as part of a group of more than 20 people, primarily Venezuelans, one of them an infant whose mother was visibly on the verge of fainting before we even set out. After scaling an imposing hill under the scorching sun, we set about slipping down muddy descents and navigating creeks, being scolded all the while for our slow pace by our guide, “Kelly,” a 28-year-old Afro-Colombian woman with two children who was studying to be a nurse; in the meantime, the trafficking gig was helping pay the bills. Indeed, while the U.S. establishment is forever bleating about the evils of human-smuggling outfits—who are relentlessly assigned the blame for whatever plight migrants might endure—it’s not the Kellys of the world who are the problem. Without America’s simultaneous criminalization of migration and drugs and demand for the very same things, organized crime would be definitively screwed.

Given the brevity of my Darién Gap experience, my book relies primarily on stories told to me by refuge seekers I have befriended and interacted with over recent years—the first occasion being when I was temporarily imprisoned in a migrant jail in Chiapas, Mexico, in 2021 for overstaying my allotted time in the country. It was in this jail that I first came into contact with survivors of the Darién Gap, most of them Cuban women who recounted both the horrors of their week in the jungle and the incredible solidarity that had been on display therein—as when some of their countrymen had rescued a group of other migrants from near-certain demise in a ravine.

In February 2023, I met a group of seven young Colombian and Venezuelan men when they exited the jungle in Bajo Chiquito, an indigenous Panamanian village on the edge of the Darién Gap, and would spend the next month and a half doing my best to assist them financially and logistically—all the while having a neurotic breakdown on their behalf—as they navigated the continuing horrors of Central America and then Mexico. I have spent time with families and individuals from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ecuador, Haiti, and Yemen, to name but a few of the people who have seen no other choice but to pick up and risk their very existence by traversing the Darién Gap—and to be criminalized for doing so.

And what did you discover about U.S. economic, military, and drug policy? Did it have anything to do about why people were migrating in the first place? And what do you think would be a way forward?

To be sure, U.S. foreign policy has for decades been a driving force behind migration to the United States—from the good old days of backing right-wing dictators, death squads, mass slaughter, and general terror in Latin America to more recent maneuvers like sweeping sanctions on Venezuela, which constitute a form of warfare in their own right. As of 2020 alone, coercive economic measures against the South American nation—whose greatest crime has been to defy imperial domination—had caused upwards of 100,000 deaths. This is to say nothing of the less lethal but still highly irritating effects of sanctions like shortages of water, electricity, and cooking gas, which do much to complicate daily life.

Of course, when speaking with individual migrants, they’re not generally going to give you a macro-level analysis of the reasons for their migration; for example, a Haitian person might cite high levels of violence and a dearth of economic opportunities but probably won’t delve into Washington’s lengthy history of fueling the violent panorama, cozying up to torture-happy dictators, backing coups, or agitating to block a raise in the minimum wage for Haitian assembly-zone workers beyond 31 U.S. cents per hour—as the Barack Obama administration charmingly did. A Yemeni will probably tell you that things are, you know, pretty bad in Yemen, without delving into the past two-plus decades of covert U.S. war on the country and massacres of Yemeni schoolchildren with U.S.-made bombs. Climate refugees probably aren’t going to sit down and analyze the role of the United States in their plight or cite Oxford University professor Neta Crawford’s book The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War, which exposes the U.S. Defense Department as the single-largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases on the planet.

And yet imperial fuckery is a consistent backdrop to what is often traumatic migration—while the U.S. wrests the role of victim from the refuge seekers themselves, hollering on about migrant invasions and so forth.

As for a way forward, it’s clearly not the current one. The Trumpian wet dream of shutting down the Darién Gap has been at least partially realized, with the number of arrivals from Colombia to Panama via the Gap plummeting since January. But a significant number of international refugee seekers stuck in Mexico have been forced to undertake the reverse journey south through the Darién region and environs, which by many accounts is even more perilous and extortion-ridden than the way up. From any non-sociopathic standpoint, the way forward would necessarily involve the abolition of militarized borders along with acute inequality and the punitive hierarchy of value assigned to human life. But that would be a deadly blow to capitalism—and so, for the moment, the Darién Gaps of the world remain alive and kicking.

This first appeared in The Border Chronicle.

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Image by Onur Burak Akın.

In the run-up to a special session of the UN General Assembly at which at least seven Western states have announced their intention to extend diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine, numerous respected and knowledgeable commentators are declaring that a “two-state solution” is no longer possible and that advocating and pursuing it is a waste of time. While, even more so today than ever before, it is virtually impossible to imagine achieving any measure of justice for the Palestinian people, the opposite conclusion regarding a “two-state solution” may be reached through an assessment of the prospects for realizing the three conceivable scenarios for the future of Palestine.

1. A continuation of the status quo — an aggravated apartheid state actively pursuing the ethnic cleansing or extermination of the indigenous population of Palestine.

2. A single fully democratic state with equal rights for all in all of historical Palestine.

3. Partition of historical Palestine into two states, as recommended by the UN General Assembly in 1947 but now essentially along the pre-June 1967 lines, with a special status for a shared Jerusalem.

While Scenario 2 would be the most morally, ethically and humanly satisfying scenario in the eyes of most people, it must be recognized that, according to recent polling, only 14% of Palestinians favor that scenario, that the percentage of Jewish Israelis favoring that scenario is likely to be even lower and that no foreign government currently advocates that scenario.

By contrast, Scenario 3 is at least rhetorically advocated by every foreign government except the U.S. government (which advocated it, if only rhetorically, for several decades prior to the first Trump presidency), with 147 countries having already extended diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine and more promising to do so this month.

Indeed, based on its compliance with the four criteria for statehood outlined in the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (with which Israel does not fully comply, since, unlike Palestine, it has never defined its borders) and its diplomatic recognition by more than three-quarters of UN member states encompassing the overwhelming majority of mankind, the State of Palestine already exists as a matter of international law. It does not yet effectively function on the ground because its entire territory remains under belligerent occupation by the State of Israel, an occupation which the International Court of Justice has declared illegal.

The challenge is thus to bring the current apartheid one-state reality on the ground into line with the two-state legality under international law by ending the illegal occupation.

Doing so will require not just rhetorical aspirations and more than mere diplomatic recognitions. It will require crippling, multi-faceted sanctions by Western governments, accompanied by pariah-status shunnings by Western societies and international sports federations, in order to convince a majority of Israelis that ending the occupation would enhance the quality of their lives, as, indeed, it would.

While nothing good should be hoped for from any American government, the leaders of European governments, who are being awakened from their moral slumber by the intensity of the quest for some measure of justice manifested by their citizens and who have proven themselves capable of some 20 rounds of sanctions against Russia for acts far less reprehensible than Israel’s ongoing genocide, might, if only to serve their own personal political self-interests, finally match their virtue-signaling rhetoric with serious, meaningful and effective action.

It is therefore incumbent upon decent European citizens to do everything in their power to inspire their governments to do whatever it takes to achieve the end of the occupation and the transformation of the existing two-state legality in international law into a functioning two-state reality on the ground.

Doing so will be extremely difficult and success may rationally be deemed unlikely, but the possibility of success must not be dismissed as inconceivable. Since Scenario 2 has become more inconceivable than ever since October 2023, giving up on Scenario 3 would constitute a default and submission to the inevitable continuation of Scenario 1 — apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and extermination.

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Over the past decades, the use of the Bible to justify what passes for “law and order” (and the punishing of the poor) has only intensified. Image by Marjhon Obsioma.

It was a moment somewhat like this, 30 years ago, that turned me into a biblical scholar. In the lead-up to the passage of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, political and religious leaders quoted scripture to justify shutting down food programs and kicking mothers and their babies off public assistance. Those leaders, many of them self-described Christians, chose to ignore the majority of passages in the Bible that preached “good news” to the poor and promised freedom to those captive to injustice and oppression. Instead, they put forward unethical and ahistorical (mis)interpretations and (mis)appropriations of biblical texts to prop up American imperial power and punish the poor in the name of a warped morality.

Three decades later, the Trump administration and its theological apologists are working overtime, using Jesus’s name and the Bible’s contents in even more devastating rounds of immoral biblical (mis)references. In July, there was the viral video from the Department of Homeland Security, using the “Here I am, Lord. Send me” quotation from Isaiah — commonly cited when ordaining faith leaders and including explicit references to marginalized communities impacted by displacement and oppression — to recruit new agents for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, a job that now comes with a $50,000 signing bonus, thanks to Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s former pastor went even further in marrying the Bible to anti-immigrant hatred by saying, “Is the Bible in favor of these ICE raids?… The answer is yes.” He then added: “The Bible does not require wealthy Christian nations to self-immolate for the horrible crime of having a flourishing economy and way of life, all right? The Bible does not permit the civil magistrate to steal money from its citizens to pay for foreign nationals to come destroy our culture.”

A month earlier, during a speech announcing the bombing of Iran, President Trump exhorted God to bless America’s bombs (being dropped on innocent families and children): “And in particular, God, I want to just say, we love you God, and we love our great military. Protect them. God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank you.”

And in May, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Republican congressional representatives formed a prayer circle on the floor of the House as they prepared to codify the president’s Big Beautiful Bill. Of course, that very bill threatens to cut off millions of Americans from life-saving food and healthcare. (Consider it a bizarre counterpoint to Jesus’s feeding of the 5,000 and providing free health care to lepers.)

The Antichrist

And if that weren’t enough twisting of the Bible to bless the rich and admonish the poor, enter tech mogul Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and the man behind the curtain of so much now going on in Washington. Though many Americans may be increasingly familiar with him, his various companies, and his political impact, many of us have missed the centrality of his version of Christianity and the enigmatic “religious” beliefs that go with it.

In Vanity Fair this spring, journalist Zoe Bernard emphasized the central role Thiel has already played in the Christianization of Silicon Valley: “I guarantee you,” one Christian entrepreneur told her, “there are people that are leveraging Christianity to get closer to Peter Thiel.”

Indeed, his theological beliefs grimly complement his political ones. “When you don’t have a transcendent religious belief,” he said, “you end up just looking around at other people. And that is the problem with our atheist liberal world. It is just the madness of crowds.” Remember, this is the same Thiel who, in a 2009 essay, openly questioned the compatibility of democracy and freedom, advocating for a system where power would be concentrated among those with the expertise to drive “progress” — a new version of the survival of the fittest in the information age. Such a worldview couldn’t contrast more strongly with the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus demonstrates his preferential option for the poor and his belief in bottom-up strategies rather than top down ones.

More recently, Thiel has positioned himself “right” in the middle of the Republican Party. He served as Trump’s liaison to Silicon Valley in his first term. Since then, he has convened and supported a new cohort of conservatives (many of whom also claim a right-wing Christianity), including Vice President J.D. Vance, Trump’s Director of Policy Planning Michael Anton, AI and crypto czar billionaire David Sacks, and Elon Musk, who spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump elected the second time around. Thiel is also close to Curtis Yarvin, the fellow who “jokingly” claimed that American society no longer needs poor people and believes they should instead be turned into biofuel. (A worldview that simply couldn’t be more incompatible with Christianity’s core tenets.)

Particularly relevant to recent political (and ideological) developments, especially the military occupation of Washington, D.C., Thiel is also close to Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founder of the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank behind a coordinated attack on the homeless now sweeping the nation. That’s right, there’s a throughline from Peter Thiel to President Donald Trump’s demand that “the homeless have to move out immediately… FAR from the Capital.” In July, Trump produced an executive order facilitating the removal of housing encampments in Washington, a year after the Supreme Court upheld a law making it a crime, if you don’t have a home, to sleep or even breathe outside. And Thiel, Lonsdale, and the Cicero Institute aren’t just responsible for those attacks on unhoused people and “blue cities”; they also bear responsibility for faith leaders being arrested and fined for their support of unhoused communities and their opposition, on religious grounds, to the mistreatment of the poor.

On top of this troubling mix of Christianity and billionaires, however, I find myself particularly chagrined that Thiel is offering an oversold four-part lecture series on the “antichrist” through a nonprofit called ACTS 17 collective that is to start in September in San Francisco. News stories about the ACTS 17 collective tend to focus on Christians organizing in Silicon Valley and the desire to put salvation through Jesus above personal success or charity for the poor. That sounds all too ominous, especially for those of us who take seriously the biblical command to stop depriving the poor of rights, to end poverty on earth (as it is in heaven), and defend the very people the Bible prioritizes.

For instance, Trae Stephens (who worked at Palantir and is partners with Thiel in a venture capital fund) is the husband of Michelle Stephens, the founder of the ACTS 17 collective. In an interview with Emma Goldberg of the New York Times, Michelle Stephens describes how “we are always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized… I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”

In an article at the Denison Forum, she’s even more specific about her biblical and theological interpretation of poverty and the need to care for those with more rather than the poor. She writes, “Those who see Christ’s message to the poor and needy as the central pillar of the gospel make a similar mistake. While social justice movements have done a great deal to point out our society’s longstanding sins and call believers to action, it can be tempting for that message to become more prominent than our innate need for Jesus to save us.” Such a statement reminds me of the decades-long theological pushback I lived through even before the passage of welfare reform and the continued juxtaposition of Jesus and justice since.

A Battle for the Bible

Of course, such a battle for the Bible is anything but new in America. It reaches back long before the rise of a new brand of Christianity in Silicon Valley. In the 1700s and 1800s, slaveholders quoted the book of Philemon and lines from St. Paul’s epistles to claim that slavery had been ordained by God, while ripping the pages of Exodus from bibles they gave to the enslaved. During the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, churches and politicians alike preached what was called a “prosperity gospel” that extolled the virtues of industrial capitalism. Decades later, segregationists continued to use stray biblical verses to rubber-stamp Jim Crow practices, while the Moral Majority, founded in 1979 by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell, Sr., helped mainstream a new generation of Christian extremists in national politics.

Over the past decades, the use of the Bible to justify what passes for “law and order” (and the punishing of the poor) has only intensified. In Donald Trump’s first term, Attorney General Jeff Sessions defended the administration’s policy of separating immigrant children from their families at the border with a passage from the Apostle Paul’s epistle to the Romans: “I would cite you to the Apostle Paul and his clear and wise command in Romans 13, to obey the laws of the government because God has ordained them for the purpose of order. Orderly and lawful processes are good in themselves and protect the weak and lawful.”

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders summed up the same idea soon after in this way: “It is very biblical to enforce the law.” And in his first speech as speaker of the House, Mike Johnson told his colleagues, “I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear: that God is the one who raises up those in authority,” an echo of the New Testament’s Epistle to the Romans, in which Paul writes that “the authorities that exist are appointed by God.”

Over the past several years, Republican politicians and religious leaders have continued to use biblical references to punish the poor, quoting texts to justify cutting people off from healthcare and food assistance. A galling example came when Representative Jodey Arrington (R-TX), rebutting a Jewish activist who referenced a commandment in Leviticus to feed the hungry, quoted 2 Thessalonians to justify increasing work requirements for people qualifying for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). And that was just one of many Republican attacks on the low-income food assistance program amid myriad attempts to shred the social welfare system in the lead-up to President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in American history and a crowning achievement of Russell Vought’s Project 2025.  Arrington said: “But there’s also, you know, in the Scripture, tells us in 2 Thessalonians chapter 3:10 he says, uh, ‘For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: if a man will not work, he shall not eat.’ And then he goes on to say ‘We hear that some among you are idle’… I think it’s a reasonable expectation that we have work requirements.”

And Arrington has been anything but alone. The same passage, in fact, had already been used by Representatives Kevin Cramer (R-ND) and Stephen Lee Fincher (R-TN) to justify cutting food stamps during a debate over an earlier farm bill. And Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) used similarly religious language, categorizing people as deserving and undeserving, to argue against a healthcare plan that protects those of us with pre-existing conditions. He insisted that only “people who lead good lives” and “have done the things to keep their bodies healthy” should receive reduced costs for health care.

Such “Christian” politicians regularly misuse Biblical passages to blame the impoverished for their poverty. There is never a suggestion, of course, that the rich, who have functionally stolen people’s wages and engorged themselves by denying them healthcare, are in any way to blame.

A Theology of Liberation for a Time Like This

Such interpretations of biblical texts are damaging to everyone’s lives (except, of course, the superrich), but especially the poor. And — though you wouldn’t know it from such Republicans — they are counter to the main themes of the Bible’s texts. The whole of the Christian Bible, starting with Genesis and ending with the Book of Revelation, has an arc of justice to it. The historical equivalents of anti-poverty programs run through it all.

That arc starts in the Book of Exodus with manna (bread) that shows up day after day, so no one has too much or too little. This is a likely response to the Egyptian Pharaoh setting up a system where a few religious and political leaders amassed great wealth at the expense of the people. God’s plan, on the other hand, was for society to be organized around meeting the needs of all people, including describing how political and religious leaders are supposed to release slaves, forgive debts, pay people what they deserve, and distribute funds to the needy. The biblical arc of justice then continues through the prophets who insist that the way to love and honor God is to promote programs that uplift the poor and marginalized, while decrying those with power who cloak oppression in religious terms and heretical versions of Christian theology.

My own political and moral roots are in the welfare rights and homeless union survival movements, efforts led by poor and dispossessed people organizing a “new underground railroad” and challenging Christianity to talk the talk and walk the walk of Christ. Such a conviction was captured by Reverend Yvonne Delk at the 1992 “Up and Out of Poverty Survival Summit,” when she declared that society, including the church, must move to the position that “poor people are not sinners, but poverty is a sin against God that could and should be ended.”

Delk’s words echo others from 20 years earlier. In 1972, Beulah Sanders, a leader of the National Welfare Rights Organization, the largest organization of poor people in the 1960s and 1970s, spoke to the National Council of Churches. “I represent all of those poor people who are on welfare and many who are not,” she said, “people who believe in the Christian way of life… people whose nickels and dimes and quarters have built the Christian churches of America. Because we believe in Christianity, we have continued to support the Christian churches… We call upon you… to join with us in the National Welfare Rights Organization. We ask for your moral, personal, and financial support in this battle for bread, dignity, and justice for all of our people. If we fail in our struggle, Christianity will have failed.”

In a Trumpian world, where Christian extremism is becoming the norm, we must not let the words of Beulah Sanders be forgotten or the worst fears of countless prophets and freedom fighters come true. Rather, we must build the strength to make a theological and spiritual vision of everybody-in-nobody-out a reality and create the capacity, powered by faith, to make it so. Now is the time. May we make it so.

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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Photograph Source: Kees Torn – CC BY-SA 2.0

It’s been thirty-three years since I walked the streets of Takoradi—over three decades that feel less like time passed than the tide gone out. And now, out of nowhere, fresh footage arrives of low-bellied tankers at dawn, gliding past the harbour walls Guggisberg built more than a century ago, my laptop beaming as if the ships not just carrying oil and cargo, but precious moments there.

I think of all that must have flowed through those waters. Cocoa in burlap sacks from the forest belt—Ashanti and the Eastern Region—hauled by train to the harbour. Then Manganese, its vague shimmer tied to Nkrumah’s dream after independence. Nkrumah, father of Pan-Africanism, spoke of steel, of harnessing rivers, of Ghana lifting itself through resources. But the Volta River project, though vast and full of promise, couldn’t quite carry it. The current faltered, as currents sometimes do.

Takoradi in 1992 moved at a slower pace than today. Market Circle brimmed with women in bright cloth. Bowls of smoked fish balanced on heads. Voices rose and fell above distilled petrol stoves. The sound of the marketplace was like music. Outside the post office, taxi drivers leaned against battered Peugeots waiting for fares along the road to Sekondi. Certain inner visuals insist we remember.

Ships queued patiently in 1992, their silhouettes more Conrad than Spearman, more Amma Darko than pulp fiction. Porters shouldered sacks of cocoa while radios crackled with Jerry Rawlings’ great experiment. A Fourth Republic. Ballots instead of decrees. One afternoon I saw Rawlings’ Lear jet against the blue sky.

Evenings gathered slowly. Families drank palm wine as laughter pushed through the humid air. Teenagers chalked goalposts between warehouses.  Footballs smashed against corrugated iron. One boy tugged at my sleeve asking if Bobby Charlton—“friend to Ghana”—had truly been knighted. By the shore at neighbouring Sekondi, fishermen dragged paint-peeled canoes past old colonial villas. Abandoned British gravestones lay cracked and tilted and forgotten among the undergrowth. Locals smiled and warned of hunting spiders and green mamba snakes.

Fast forward to 2025: the footage handheld, consistent. Cranes towering like gods. The Western Railway torn up and relaid in new steel. The harbour humming. A likely chatter of logistics firms. Sodium lights flaring across container stacks as if manufacturing fake dawn.

And yet, through the noise and befuddled light, something in the footage endures. The rhythm of the place is harsher, but the pulse familiar. Fingerprints of the English remain not just in headstones. The skull-white castles will still be further east, whose “Doors of No Return” opened endlessly to the Atlantic—the stones, mute but unyielding, still accusing.

The principal groups involved in the transatlantic slave trade included the Asante, Fante, Denkyira, Akyem, Ga, and Ewe. Of the encouraging Europeans, it was Portuguese, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, and of course British (who built forts such as Cape Coast Castle and eventually became the leading European power in the region), each purchasing enslaved Africans and transporting them across the Atlantic.

American slave traders, especially from New England and the southern colonies, participated heavily, particularly in the 18th and early 19th centuries. American ships sometimes picked up enslaved people directly from the Gold Coast—what gained independence in 1957 as Ghana—or indirectly via Caribbean ports.

Takoradi today becomes a hinge. A dusty export town in 1992, blinking back into democracy. A sleepless port in 2025, blinking into global capitalism. In both: endurance, invention, mirth at the edge of hardship. Fish and cocoa, curfews and credit, oil and gold—circling back in new costume.

Today, Ghana stands as Africa’s largest gold producer. In 2024 the mines broke all records, and the output still climbs—gold traded for oil, gold converted into foreign exchange. It’s the paradox of plenty—abundance pressed into scarcity, wealth translated into debt. Back in Jubilee House, John Dramani Mahama performs “the choreography of IMF orthodoxy”—each gesture a promise of relief, each step angled towards bondholders. Cocoa harvests falter, lights flicker between brightness and dumsor—the electricity still staging its own unpredictable vanishing acts.

One recent UK-backed mining project, fed with millions of pounds of taxpayer money, evaporated in mismanagement—proof the plundered earth does not always yield to spreadsheets. One industry voice, speaking with bluntness, told me it was almost inevitable. “West Africa is, in truth, less stable than ever. Perhaps the surprise is not that it failed, but that anyone believed it might succeed.”

And yet, at a distance, Ghana retains for me a kind of magic. The sort a privateer might blank. Extraordinarily, it is a nation with no true enemies. This is surely a massive achievement. Not Côte d’Ivoire, not Togo, not even the restless desert to the north. No, its adversaries are different. They are amorphous, ungraspable: the occasional seepage of Sahelian militants across the borderlands, the stubbornness of ethnic feuds, the cold arithmetic of international finance. These are struggles not with nations, but with conditions—dependency, fragility, the invisible structures that outlast leaders.

The Ghanaian poet Awoonor once wrote, “What has been broken shall be woven, / the house shall stand, the feast shall be eaten.” His voice lingers even after his death in the famous shopping mall incident in Nairobi. It is written for Ghanaians as if the words themselves a promise. Watching all this footage, a part of me has breathed again. The harbour alive, cranes turning. History circles, but—as I keep saying—Ghana endures.

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Photograph Source by Nathaniel St. Clair

The politicization of intelligence is nothing new, but Donald Trump is finding new ways to pursue it.  The United States has gone to war with phony intelligence on major occasions, including the Mexican-America War, the Spanish-American War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War.  Too many directors of the Central Intelligence Agency have been directly involved in politicizing intelligence, including Richard Helms, James Schlesinger, William Casey, Robert Gates, David Petraeus, Mike Pompeo, George Tenet, John Brennan, and the current director John Ratcliffe.

In addition to lies justifying the use of force, such as Tenet’s “slam dunk” guarantee to provide intelligence support for invading Iraq, there were lies regarding the use of torture and abuse, including Brennan’s efforts to block the Senate Intelligence Committee from documenting the unconscionable use of torture.  Various presidents have blocked the American public from seeing the SIC’s report, including President Barack Obama.

Most of the efforts involving politicization were conducted behind closed doors, but Trump’s efforts are being played out in public, and they involve virtually every member of his national security team.  Last week, for example, Senator Mark Warner, the ranking member of the SIC, was blocked from visiting the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, which is part of his oversight duties.  Apparently, this was caused by the caviling of a right-wing activist, Laura Loomer, who holds no position in the administration and lacks a security clearance.  The trip itself was a secret one, which means  someone in the Pentagon illegally shared the information with Loomer, who has had a key role identifying members of the government thought to be insufficiently supportive of Trump. 

When I was a CIA intelligence analyst, the agency was accustomed to briefing members of the congressional intelligence committees on sensitive and controversial issues.  The late Senator John Glenn, who was initially a critic of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties, regularly got disarmament briefings at the CIA.  As a result, he became supportive of SALT II and encouraged others on the Hill who were skeptical to support the treaty.  I was involved in these briefings as well as others that dealt with intelligence regarding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979.

Loomer’s interventions are unprecedented.  She posted her opposition to Warner’s visit and classified briefing on social media, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was quick to cancel the visit.  Similarly, Loomer identified others who were proclaimed as insufficiently loyal, and the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, a leading toady in the administration, was quick to remove the director of the National Security Agency, General Timothy Haugh, and his deputy, Wendy Noble.  Loomer and Gabbard were also directly involved in removing the security clearances of 37 career intelligence officials, claiming they had pursued “personal, partisan, or nonobjective agendas.”  Retired intelligence officials at the highest level maintain their clearances in retirement because they are called back during times of crisis in order to take advantage of their institutional memories.  It is the nation’s loss to lose the expertise of these individuals.

Gabbard fired the National Intelligence Council’s top two officials, NIC chairman Mike Collins and his deputy, Maria Langa-Rickhof, because their assessments contradicted an administration assertion linking Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro regime to the criminal gang Tren de Aragua.   The U.S. navy has eight naval combatants and a submarine in the Caribbean, and last week, one of the combatants destroyed a Venezuelan vessel and killed 11 people, claiming they were members of the TdA gang they claim is controlled by Maduro.  Venezuela denies the charge, and U.S. intelligence supports Maduro regarding the absence of any linkage between the TdA and the government.  Hegseth ordered the attack, and the Pentagon has supplied no information on what drugs were on the vessel and the details of the strike.  In such situations, vessels are seized and crews are apprehended; murder has not been part of the process until now.

An appeals court has already ruled that the Trump administration unlawfully invoked a centuries-old wartime law to deport Venezuelan migrants linked to TdA.  Again, the intelligence community determined that there was no evidence of such linkage, and that the presence of TdA members didn’t amount to an invasion or “predatory incursion.”  The gang itself, moreover, has never been linked with the drug smuggling that Trump is falsely citing to engage in an act of war on the open seas.

(In 2001, a CIA-directed operation in Peru led to the downing of a plane carrying American missionaries. The CIA ignored all procedures in failing to identify the tail number of the church-owned plan per procedure.  The CIA then blocked efforts to investigate the downing of the plane, although the Bush administration did shut down the program.)

The actions of the Trump administration thus far will make it impossible for foreign countries and even our own public to know what is true and what is false when it comes to intelligence assessments.  The National Security Council seems to play no real role in the conceptualizing and implementation of policy, and there have been no apparent efforts to use the intelligence community in any objective fashion.  The leaders of the national security community are highly partisan and unlikely to take any actions that challenge the random and capricious designs of Trump and JD Vance.  The mainstream media has been timid in reporting acts of politicization, and the ability of whistleblowers to function in the current environment has been badly compromised.  Leaders in the intelligence community, such as CIA director Ratcliffe, have done nothing to protect their people.

The American public has a right to demand that presidents appoint individuals with exceptional integrity and experience for key roles in the intelligence and foreign policy communities in order to maintain an open and constitutional democracy.  This is clearly not the case with the Trump administration, and we can expect that the shameful acts of the past will lead to even more shameful acts.  The renaming of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, which a Washington Post editorial endorsed on Saturday, augurs for greater use of the military.

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Photograph Source: Elekes Andor – CC BY 4.0

In military coups, the generals take over from one day to the next. Civilian presidents, when they declare martial law, assume emergency powers and start immediately ruling like dictators.

But the more common method of destroying a democracy these days is through death by a thousand cuts. Elected leaders only gradually undermine democratic institutions and accumulate more executive power. One day, voila, the democracy is fatally compromised, and no one can point to a single act that transformed the elected leader into an autocrat.

That is the way that Vladimir Putin, who was elected to his first term as president in 2000, has become Russia’s leader for life. Viktor Orban became Hungary’s prime minister in 2010 and, by consciously following Putin’s example, has presided over Hungary ever since.

And now Donald Trump is following Orban’s example. The architects of Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s return to power, were inspired by the Hungarian’s attacks on higher education, his controls on the press and the judiciary, his rewriting of the constitution, and his emphasis on nationalism, Christianity, and the heteronormative family.

And now Trump is in turn inspiring other right-wing leaders around the world, from Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Javier Milei in Argentina to Karol Nawrocki in Poland and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. He has also motivated citizens in countries from Canada to Australia to defeat Trump-like politicians out of fear that they would undermine those democracies.

But the global backlash against Trumpism is, so far, an exception to the rule. The sad truth is that democracy is under siege around the world. Last year marked the nineteenth consecutive year of democratic decline, according to Freedom House, with 60 countries experiencing an erosion of political and civil liberties.

In the Varieties of Democracy report this year out of Sweden, autocracies outnumbered democracies for the first time in two decades. Three-quarters of people around the world live in autocratic states. And project head Staffan Lindberg warns that “If it continues like this, the United States will not score as a democracy when we release [next year’s] data.”

The erosion of democracy has not only continued in the United States. It has accelerated.

Most recently, Trump has attempted to take over Washington, DC. He has called in the National Guard to address the city’s crime, even though the crime rate in the city has been on the decline. He is going after undocumented workers, and he is destroying homeless encampments. The administration refuses to provide details about the people it is arresting on a daily basis.

Washington, DC is not a state, so Trump is taking advantage of the district’s political weakness and dependency on federal dollars. This, however, is a test. Trump has pledged to send the National Guard into other major U.S. cities. All of the cities he has mentioned—Chicago, Baltimore, New York—are controlled by Democrats.

After meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, where the Russian leader agreed that the 2020 election had been “stolen” via mail-in ballots, Trump declared that he would eliminate voting by mail along with voting machines. The U.S. president has falsely claimed that Democrats use mail-in ballots to commit election fraud.

Meanwhile, in Texas, the Republican Party has forced through an electoral redistricting plan that will give the party a strong chance to gain another five seats in the House of Representatives. In general, the party in opposition does well in mid-term elections, and the Democrats have been expecting to win back the House in the 2026 elections. Trump, however, is determined to keep Congress in his party’s hands, even if he has to break the rules to do so.

In his dealings with U.S. institutions like universities, media outfits, and law firms, Trump is acting like a mafioso who runs a protection racket. The U.S. president has used threats of legal action and the withholding of federal funds to shake down universities for protection money. The Trump administration has hit universities with huge financial penalties — $200 million against Columbia University, $500 million against Harvard, $1 billion against UCLA. He has launched enormous lawsuits against media companies like ABC, CBS, and the Wall Street Journal. He threatened law firms that had earlier supported suits against Trump with financial penalties unless they agreed to pay up by way of pro bono work for the U.S. government.

With his latest judicial appointments, Trump has decided that the judges he previously elevated are not conservative enough: they have to be hardline MAGA supporters. The Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization, was instrumental in helping Trump create the Supreme Court’s current conservative majority. But Trump blasted conservative judges, including those recommended by the Federalist Society, for their opposition to his tariffs and other policies. In his second term, Trump is now focused more on radical judges who will not put any constraints on his administration’s policies.

In other words, Trump has targeted multiple sources of resistance within U.S. society: intellectuals, journalists, lawyers, and even conservative judges who are uncomfortable with Trump’s anti-democratic moves. And he is determined to change the electoral rules to ensure that his party maintains its political dominance at the federal and state levels.

Part of Trump’s motivation is to extract large sums of money for himself and his family—over $3 billion so far, according to a New Yorker estimate. Another rationale is revenge against everyone who has challenged or mocked him over the years. Trump also wants accolades for his performance: the cover of Time magazine isn’t enough, he wants a Nobel Prize.

But Trump also has an ideological agenda: to sanitize America. He wants to get rid of the homeless and the undocumented from cities, whitewash American history and eliminate references to “how bad slavery was,” and heavily police expressions of political dissent. It’s a short step from such efforts at “sanitation” to the assassination of political opponents (as in Russia) and the destruction of entire categories of people (like Israel’s targeting of Palestinians in Gaza).

Democracy is messy, no question about it. But Trump is not “cleaning up” democracy. He is destroying it. It is not happening overnight, which might produce a huge civic backlash. Rather, Trump’s assault on democracy is taking place little by little so that American citizens can gradually acclimate to the new authoritarian environment.

Originally published in Hankyoreh.

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The moment of the attack on the vessel from Venezuela. (The White House).

One of President Trump’s first executive orders since returning to the presidency in January was the designation of certain drug cartels as “terrorist” organizations. In doing this, Trump signaled a renewed war on drugs with the possibility of the United States military acting unilaterally throughout Latin America.

As with much of Trump’s foreign policy, it was not immediately clear how literally one should take his threats to strike cartels and deploy special forces south of the U.S.-Mexico border. After all, the United States already has partnerships with repressive forces from Mexico to Colombia, which it established through an earlier war on drugs in the 1970s. Could these threats of military action in Latin America be nothing more than a bargaining tactic meant to secure more economic and geopolitical advantages for U.S. imperialism in Latin America?

If Trump’s recent military aggression toward Venezuela is any indication, the administration’s threats to launch a new war on drugs at the expense of any vestige of regional sovereignty should be taken very seriously.

Following the deadly U.S. attack on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea on September 2 — justified under dubious claims that the boat was trafficking drugs with the backing of Venezuela’s government — the Trump administration has consistently said that it is prepared to carry out more such strikes. In an interview with Fox News on September 3, Pete Hegseth said, “President Trump is willing to go on offense in ways that others have not been.” Since that interview aired, Hegseth’s official title was changed from Secretary of Defense to Secretary of War. In a video about the rebrand of his department, Hegseth promises “We’re gonna go on offense, not just defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”

The escalation is not just rhetorical. The United States has deployed 10 stealth fighter jets to Puerto Rico for further military action in the region, and on September 6, U.S. sailors and marines carried out amphibious landing exercises in Puerto Rico, leading many people to speculate that the administration may be preparing for a regime change operation in Venezuela. Some foreign policy analysts have noted that the current level of U.S. military build-up in the Caribbean is not nearly enough to carry out a full-scale invasion of Venezuela. However, a report in CNN based on anonymous sources suggests that the administration is seriously considering military strikes within the country. Part of the calculation, according to the report, is that such strikes may be enough to squeeze Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro into conceding power.

It may be too soon to predict how exactly the escalations against Venezuela will play out. But what should be clear is that the Trump administration is committed to establishing a new Monroe Doctrine of hegemonic dominance over Latin America. This policy will be built up through a new war on drugs, which is deeply intertwined with the war on immigrants that continues to escalate within the United States. Venezuela is currently in the eye of the storm, but there are greater implications for the entire region.

Venezuela is just the easiest target due to the longstanding bipartisan support for U.S. aggression against the country. This bipartisan hostility was shown clearly in Trump’s first term when Democrats supported a coup attempt, which ultimately failed. While Maduro has opened the way for U.S. imperialism to access Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, decades of tensions with Venezuela have left U.S. soft power and economic exploitation in the country far more limited than most anywhere else in Latin America. As a result, the Trump administration has less to lose in testing out interventionist action toward Venezuela. Similar actions would come with much greater costs to U.S. capital if tried in Mexico for example, which is far more subordinated to and compliant with U.S. imperialism

The United States has lost significant ground to its main capitalist rival, China, in terms of influence via soft power and access to markets in Latin America. As a result, many countries in the region have been hedging between the two powers and more overtly challenging U.S. dictates for the region. This is seen in Brazil’s challenge to Trump’s tariffs to try to shape the country’s political affairs and in criticism from a variety of Latin American leaders over Trump’s extreme anti-immigrant policies. These leaders have still conceded to U.S. imperialism far more than they’ve resisted, due in large part to the region’s economic subornation to the United States ,which Trump is now weaponizing with tariffs.

Nonetheless, the erosion of U.S. hegemony in the region compared to past decades is prompting Trump’s more aggressive approach. While Trump has mainly relied on economic aggression, the attacks on Venezuela show that military threats remain part of the imperialist toolkit. Whether or not Trump actually carries out intervention in Venezuela, the threats signal to every single government in Latin America and the Caribbean that the United States sees the entire region as fair game to pursue whatever acts of aggression and violations of sovereignty that it can get away with.

In response to the September 2 attack, a chorus of experts on U.S. foreign policy and international law have raised concerns about what kind of precedent the action sets. Even under the broad authority the U.S. executive branch has in carrying out military actions abroad, summary execution of alleged drug traffickers is a clear violation of the U.S. War Powers Act and international law.

Still, Trump and his cabinet have boasted that they can and will continue to flagrantly defy international norms. International law has always been applied selectively in the interests of U.S. imperialism, but presidents at least used to pretend that international norms should guide U.S. foreign policy. September 2 will certainly not be the last reminder that this administration is done playing by the old rules. If the Trump administration has its way, a new policy of “Peace Through Strength” will be written through violent intervention against the people of Latin America and the Caribbean.

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Photograph Source: President.az – CC BY 4.0

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s meetings in China last seek (September 2 and 3) took a remarkable step forward in defining how the world will be dividing into two great blocks as Global Majority countries seek to free their economies not only from Donald Trump’s tariff chaos, but from the U.S.-sponsored increasingly Hot War attempts to impose unipolar control on the entire world’s economy by isolating countries seeking to resist this control with trade and monetary chaos as well as direct military confrontation.

The SCO meetings became a pragmatic forum to define the basic principles that are to replace other countries’ trade, monetary and military independence from U.S. with mutual trade and investment among themselves, increasingly isolated from reliance on U.S. markets for their exports, U.S. credit for their domestic economies, and U.S. dollars for trade and investment transactions among themselves.

The principles announced by China’s President Xi, Russian President Putin and other SCO members set the stage for spelling out in detail the principle of a new international economic order along the lines that were promised 80 years ago at the end of World War II but have been twisted beyond all recognition into what Asian and other Global Majority countries hope will have been just a long detour in history away from the basic rules of civilization and its international diplomacy, trade and finance.

It really should not be surprising that not a word of these principles or their motivation has appeared in the mainstream Western press. The New York Times depicted the meetings in China as a plan of aggression against the United States, not as a response to U.S. acts. President Donald Trump summarized this attitude most succinctly in a Truth Social post: “President Xi, Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against the United States of America.”

U.S. press coverage of the SCO meetings in China presents a foreshortened perspective that reminds me of the famous Hokusai etching of a close-up tree in the foreground completely overshadowing the distant city in the background. Whatever the international topic is, it’s all about the United States. The basic model is a foreign government’s adversity toward the United States, with no mention of such policies being a defensive response against U.S. belligerence toward the foreigner.

The press treatment of the SCO meetings and its geopolitical discussions has a remarkable similarity with its treatment of NATO’s war against Russia in Ukraine. Both events are seen as if they are all about the United States (and its allies), not about China, Russia, India, Central Asian and other countries acting to promote their own attempts to create orderly and mutually beneficial trade and investment. Just as the war in Ukraine is depicted as a Russian invasion (with no mention of its defense against NATO’s attack on Russia’s own security), the SCO meetings in Tianjin and Beijing meetings were depicted as confrontational scheming against the West, as if the meetings were about the United States and Europe. 

On September 3 the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, called Putin perhaps the most serious war criminal of our time, as it was Russia that attacked innocent Ukraine, not vice versa from the 2015 coup onward. As Putin commented on Merz’s accusation: “we do not assume that any new dominant states should appear. Everyone should be on an equal footing.”

The military parade in Beijing that followed the meetings was a reminder to the world that the international agreements that created the United Nations and other organizations at the end of World War II were supposed to end fascism and introduce a fair and equitable world order based on the United Nations’ principles. To depict this frame of the meetings as a threat to the West is to deny that it is the West itself that has abandoned and indeed reversed the seemingly multilateral principles promised in 1944-1945. 

The U.S. and European treatment of the SCO meetings as shaped entirely by antipathy toward the West is not merely an expression of Western narcissism. It was a deliberately censorial policy of not discussing the ways in which an alternative to U.S.-sponsored neoliberal economic order are being developed. NATO head Mark Rutte made it clear that there was to be no thought that there even was such a thing as a policy by countries to create an alternative and more productive economic order when he complained that Putin was getting too much attention. That meant not to discuss what really has happened in the last few days in China – and how it is a landmark in introducing a new economic order, but not one that includes the West.

President Putin explained in a press conference that confrontation was not at all the focus. The speeches and press conferences spelled out the details of what was necessary to consolidating relations among themselves. Specifically, how will Asia and the Global South simply go their own way, with minimum contact and exposure to the West’s economic and military aggressive behavior.

 The only military confrontation that is threatened is by NATO, from Ukraine to the Baltic Sea, Syria, Gaza, the China Sea, Venezuela and North Africa. But the real threat is the West’s neoliberal financialization and privatization, Thatcherism and Reaganomics. The SCO and BRICS (as are now being discussed in follow-up meetings) want to avoid the falling living standards and economies as the West deindustrializes. They want rising living standards and productivity. This attempt to create an alternative, more productive plan of economic development is what isn’t being discussed in the West.

This great split is best epitomized by the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline. This gas was planned to go to Europe, feeding into Nordstream 1. That has all ended. Siberian gas will now go to Mongolia and China. It powered European industry in the past; now it will do the same for China and Mongolia, leaving Europe to depend on U.S. LNG exports and declining North Sea supplies at much higher prices.

Some geopolitical upshots of the SCO meetings

The contrast between the successful consolidation of SCO/BRICS trade, investment and payments arrangements and the U.S. destabilization makes it difficult for countries to try and join both the US/NATO bloc and the BRICS/Global South countries. The pressure is especially strong on Turkey, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia. They are observers of BRICS, and the Arab countries are especially financially exposed to the dollar and also host U.S. military bases. (India has blocked Azerbaijan from joining.)

Two dynamics are at work. On the one hand, the BRICS and Global Majority are trying to defend themselves against US/NATO economic aggression, and to de-dollarize their economies so as to minimize trade dependence on the U.S. market. That saves them from the U.S. weaponizing its foreign trade and monetary system from blocking their access to supply chains that have been put in place, and thereby disrupting their economies.

The other dynamic is that the U.S. economy is becoming less attractive as it polarizes, shrinks and de-dollarizes as a result of its financialization and rising debt overhead. It is becoming inflationary, subject to a debt-leveraged financial bubble that is at increasing risk of sudden collapse.

This basic moral contrast catalyzes the contrast of economic systems and policy between oligarchic privatized and financialized markets (neoliberalism) and industrial socialist economies. This socialism is the logical extension of the dynamic of early industrial capitalism, seeking to rationalize production and minimize waste and unnecessary costs imposed by rent-seeking classes demanding income without playing a productive role – landlords, monopolists and the financial sector.

The great problem, of course, is that the Americans want to blow up the world if they can’t control it and dominate all other countries. Alistair Crooke recently warned that the Evangelical Christian movement sees this as an opportunity for a  conflagration that will see Jesus return and convert the world to Christian jihadism. The term “late stage barbarism” is now being used throughout much of the internet for the ethnic supremacy fanaticism ranging from Wahabi jihadists and al Qaeda breakoffs through Gaza and the West Bank to the Ukrainian neo-Nazi revival (with its echoes in Germany’s hatred of Russia) not seen since the Nazism of the 1930s and ‘40s, denying that their opponents are fellow human beings. As an alternative to the SCO, BRICS and Global Majority this defines the depth of the spilt in today’s geopolitical alignment.

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Photograph Source: DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos – Public Domain

The Democratic Party has forfeited every claim to moral and political credibility. It is not a bulwark against fascism but an accomplice to it, a party of cowardice and complicity that props up the most barbaric features of gangster capitalism-extending from staggering levels of inequality to its refusal to support national health care. Its leadership, craven, visionless, and drunk on Wall Street money, has become a machinery of war and despair. It is wedded to the military-industrial complex and normalizes through its silence a culture of war, misery, and cruelty. It sends billions in weapons to Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal, fully aware those arms sustain a machinery of occupation and repression. With one act, fighting to cut off the flow of weapons, the Democrats could help end this slaughter. Instead, when Netanyahu recently visited the White House, they shook his bloodstained hand and smiled for the cameras, their shamelessness captured in a widely circulated, obscene photograph. This betrayal abroad mirrors the Party’s collapse at home. The Party’s cowardice is written into its very DNA.

 It is a party of whiners, trapped in ideological smugness and a flaccid discourse of compromise.  Given its political and ethical weakness, it is ironic that on occasion it drapes itself in the hollow language of “resisting Trump’s authoritarianism.” This becomes more obvious when it advocates, on occasion,  working with the regime, even as it props up authoritarians abroad and tightens the screws of neoliberal cruelty at home. Moira Donegan writing in The Guardian is right in stating that the Democratic Party is the party of self-sabotage, that is, it has a vision of American politics in which (they] have no power to set the terms of the debate on their own.” Its neoliberal policies have hollowed out working-class communities, shredded social protections, remained largely moot in calling out Trump’s regime as a criminogenic organization, and left despair in their wake, conditions that became the breeding ground for Trump’s authoritarian ascent. They created the void that fascism fills, and now they tremble before the monster they helped unleash.

The racist bile and fascist rhetoric spewed by Trump’s loyal sycophants, especially Stephen Miller, the president’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, receives far less outrage than the criticism directed at progressive voices like Zohran Mamdani, now running for mayor of New York City. When Miller brands the Democratic Party not only a domestic extremist organization but “an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists,” the silence from Democratic leaders is deafening. No effort is made to expose such language as rooted in the poisonous legacies of fascism and white supremacy, or  for that matter call for his resignation. Yet there can be no doubt that Miller’s discourse, and his influence in shaping Trump’s militarized immigration, education, and policing policies, is a five-alarm fire for democracy, one that demands unrelenting opposition. There is no effort on the part of the Democratic Party leadership to acknowledge that the Department of Homeland Security has become not only a domestic terrorist organization but a “white nationalist content, mill churning out bigoted, jingoistic schlock.” 

This cowardice abroad is matched by their silence in the face of fascism at home. Matters of moral witnessing, addressing war crimes, calling out massive violations of human rights at home and abroad are rarely acknowledged by the Democratic Party leadership. This is especially true with respect to the genocide taking place in Gaza. Not only is it morally indefensibly silent about its own complicity in arming Israel, it also reveals itself too timid to confront Israel’s genocidal policies in Gaza, where more than two million people have been reduced to conditions resembling a “vast Ground Zero.” As a party wedded to Wall Street, it is too timid to challenge the predatory capitalism that now mutates into one of the most destructive and exploitative economic systems on the planet, an order that thrives on the obliteration of human needs, elevates profit as its only sacrament, and transforms the state into a corrupt crime syndicate.

At home, the Democratic leadership refuses to lift a finger for candidates who represent genuine hope. Their refusal to support Zohran Mamdani in New York is not an oversight but a betrayal. Schumer and Jeffries embody the Party’s moral bankruptcy: Schumer the coward, Jeffries the gutless tactician, both locked in servitude to corporate power, both content to preside over a politics of endless war, mass incarceration, obscene inequality, and the normalization of state terrorism. They are the pallbearers of democracy, not its defenders. Commenting on the fact that Jeffries and Schumer have so far refused to endorse Mamdani, journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in a Wednesday column for The Guardian, “If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress.” Mehdi only gets it partly right: these two politicians embody not individual cowardice, but a party that supports genocide in Gaza, refuses to stand up to the military-industrial-academic complex, and could not care less about the future they are destroying for young people. 

The American people deserve more than these moral zombies. What is needed is a new party, one unafraid to fight for radical democracy and the dignity of all. A party that calls for the end of staggering inequality, a universal wage, free health care, free quality education for all, housing for everyone, strict gun restrictions, the abolition of poverty, and the dismantling of the warfare state. A party that will slash the bloated defense budget and redirect those trillions into schools, hospitals, homes, and the expansion of social rights. A party that will name criminalized  capitalism for what it is: a death-dealing order of greed, violence, corruption, and disposability.

Fascism does not arrive fully formed; it is cultivated in the soil of despair, in the immiseration engineered by Trump’s cruelty and the Democrats’ cowardice. Left unchallenged, it corrodes everyday life until cruelty appears normal and democracy becomes little more than a corpse draped in patriotic slogans of hate, disappearance, and lawlessness. The Democratic Party cannot halt this descent. It is too compromised by its allegiance to corporate power, too wedded to the financiers of misery, and too invested in the politics of fear to offer anything resembling resistance.

The time for illusions is over. The Democratic Party cannot be reformed, nor can it be trusted to halt the march of authoritarianism. What is required is not the rehabilitation of a party of cowardice, but the creation of a new political formation, one that does not tremble before fascism but confronts it head-on. A movement that refuses to confuse capitalism with democracy, that rejects the barbarism of endless war and the plunder of Wall Street, that refuses to sacrifice children in Gaza or in America’s streets on the altar of profit and power. Such a movement must be rooted in the struggles of ordinary people, grounded in solidarity and sustained by collective courage.

The future belongs to those who can imagine and fight for a radically different order: a socialist democracy grounded in solidarity, justice, and care. It belongs to those who demand free health care and education, who insist on housing and dignity for all, who struggle for racial, gender, and economic equality, and who reject the culture of disposability that treats lives as expendable. It belongs to those willing to rise up, organize, and fight for a world where freedom, justice, and equality are not a privilege of the few, but the common inheritance of all.

If fascism grows in the soil of despair, then resistance must grow in the soil of hope. Against a politics of fear, we must summon a politics of courage. Against the machinery of death, we must build a mass working-class movement with the power to imagine and fight for a future in which socialist democracy is not an empty slogan but a hard-won reality, hammered out in struggle, sustained by solidarity, and carried forward by those who refuse to be ruled by fear. Democracy will not be saved by the cowards of compromise or the apostles of war, but by those in the struggles of workers and the oppressed who risk everything for justice, equality, and hope.

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Poster calling for release of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, based on David Solnit’s art work. Photo credit, Code Pink.

In his last minutes of freedom before Israeli Defense Forces arrested him, Dr. Hussam Abu Safia, clad in a medic’s white coat, walked alone toward two Israeli tanks. His captors awaited him amid the rubble of Gaza’s Kamal Adwan hospital. An artist swiftly created a dramatic poster showing Dr. Safiya striding through the ruins of the hospital he directed. The artist, David Solnit, recently updated the poster’s caption. It now reads:   Free Dr. Abu Safiya   Eight months in prison Dec. 27, 2024 – August 27, 2025.

Dr. Safia had already endured agonizing losses at the Kamal Adwan hospital. In late October 2024, an Israeli drone attack killed his son, also a doctor. In a November 2024 attack on the hospital, Dr. Safiya was wounded by shrapnel, but continued working, insisting he would not close the hospital. He witnessed his colleagues being humiliated, beaten, and marched off to prison. By December 27, 2024, when Dr. Safia’s ordeal as a prisoner began, most hospitals in Gaza were non-functional.

On August 28, 2025, Dr. Safiya’s lawyer, Ghaid Ghanem Qassem, visited him in the Ofer Prison. She reports he has lost one third of his body weight. While imprisoned in in the Sde Teiman military Detention Center, located in an Israeli military base in the Negev desert, he showed signs of torture. Subjected to beating with electric shocks and batons, he sustained blows which may also cause him to lose his right eye. Yet his message remains intact:

“I entered in the name of humanity, and I will leave in the name of humanity… We will remain on our land and continue to provide healthcare services to the people, God willing, even from a tent.”

Regimes conducting a genocide have more than one reason to eliminate brave professionals attempting, life by precious life, to undo their inhuman work: doctors not only seek to slow down the dying, but they, like the journalists the Israeli regime so frantically targets, are specially positioned and specially qualified to accurately report on the intensity and nature of Israel’s extermination campaign. Silencing the citizens most capable of reporting on genocidal savagery is a key objective of genocide. 

In one of the most egregious efforts to eliminate a key eyewitness, Israeli naval forces, on May 9, 2025, killed twelve-year-old Mohammed Saeed al-Bardawil, who, as a passerby alongside his father, had witnessed Israel’s March 23^rd pre-dawn execution of 15 unarmed emergency rescue workers. The murdered paramedics had driven their clearly marked ambulances to a spot where they intended to retrieve victims of an earlier attack. The bullets that killed them were fired over six minutes as Israeli soldiers advanced to shoot directly into the survivors’ heads and torsos, afterwards using earth-moving equipment to bury their corpses and vehicles. On that day, Mohammed and his father were detained and made to lie face down near a burning ambulance. He is listed as a source in a well-documented NYT video on the massacre, dated May 2^nd. Eleven days later, an Israeli gunboat fired on his father’s fishing boat, killing Muhammed in his father’s presence off the coast of Gaza’s southern Rafah governate. 

It was less than two weeks ago, on August 25^th, that Israel killed Reuters camera operator Hussam Al Masri and nineteen others, four of them also journalists, in a series of double-tap precision guided aerial attacks on buildings and a stairway of the Al Nasser Hospital. Al Masri was easily targetable as he broadcast a live video feed from a Reuters outpost on a top hospital floor. Describing the second wave of the attack,  Jonathan Cook writes:

And when Israel struck 10 minutes later with two coordinated missiles, it knew that the main victims would be the emergency workers who went to rescue survivors from the first strike and journalists — al-Masri’s friends — who were nearby and rushed to the scene … Nothing was a “mishap.” It was planned down to the minutest detail.

Snipers and weaponized drone operators routinely kill Palestinians who courageously continue to don bullet proof press jackets, set up cameras, and report on Israel’s atrocities. Israel refuses entry to foreign journalists and when brave, grieving, impassioned young Palestinians insist on carefully documenting their people’s agony for Western news outlets, Israel carefully targets them using the traceable phone and broadcasting equipment necessary to their work, before posthumously branding them Hamas operatives. Craven Western officials watch from within Israel’s patron states, discounting brown lives on whatever flimsy pretexts white authorities offer them. Almost daily, new faces appear in an assemblage of photos showing hundreds of journalists Israel has killed. 

Health care workers and journalists who are still alive do their work amid struggles to prevent their families, their colleagues, their neighbors, and of course themselves, from deaths not just by direct massacre but by militarily imposed starvation and its handmaiden, epidemic disease. Surgeons speak of being too weak to stand throughout an operation. Reporters document their own starvation.

Palestinians long for protection, but even the prospect of UN mandated protective forces carries terrifying possibilities. What if “peacekeepers” assigned to monitor Palestinians collect data the Israelis will use to control them? Weaponized “stabilizing forces,” equipped with U.S. surveillance technology, could be used to target, imprison, assassinate, and starve even more Palestinians.

In the summer of 1942, in Munich, Germany, five students and one professor summoned astonishing courage to defy a genocidal regime to which we, reluctantly, have to look if we want to find a racist cruelty comparable to that currently seizing not just Israel’s leadership but, in poll after poll, strong majorities of its non-native population. The students’ collective, called The White Rose, distributed leaflets denouncing Nazi atrocities. “We will not be silent” was the final line of each leaflet. Hans Scholl, age 24, and his sister, Sophie Scholl, age 21, hand-delivered the leaflets to their university campus in February of 1943. The Gestapo arrested them after a janitor spotted them disseminating the leaflets. Four days later, Hans and Sophie, as well as their colleague Christopher Probst, were executed by guillotine.

Jailers’ photos of Sophie and Hans Scholl days before they were beheaded by the Nazis. Photo credit: German federal archives

With Israel’s nuclear arsenal capable of out-killing the Nazi regime over the course of a few minutes, and in the process inciting humanity’s final war; and with its leadership and populace radicalized through decades of fascist impunity to the point of endorsing not just a genocide but multiple, preemptive military strikes upon most of its neighbors at once, we may well be arriving at the moment when, as a result of our having let Israel assassinate, with impunity, the reporters of its crimes, there will be no-one in the outside world left to receive reports. 

The silence we allow ourselves today may soon be involuntary, and absolute. Let us summon up a fraction of Dr. Safia’s, of young Mohammad’s, of Sophie Scholl’s and Hussam al-Masri’s courage and speak while we can. 

The post “We Will Not Be Silent:” Hearing Stilled Voices of the Gaza Genocide appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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“There is no longer a credible way to justify US continuing material and diplomatic support for Israel.” – Photo by Matthew TenBruggencate

Failures of the UN Security Council and Western democracies to maintain international humanitarian law has left Palestinians ensnared in genocide, famine, and forced displacement. Despite the clear grounds for intervention, political will remains absent. In this exclusive interview for CounterPunch, international scholar Richard Falk argues that the General Assembly has the precedent and authority under the Uniting for Peace Resolution to bypass the Security Council and act decisively to protect civilians. Gaza offers a crucial test of whether the international system can prioritize people over politics.

Daniel Falcone: Considering the immobilization of the United Nations Security Council and the disastrous letdowns by Western democracies to maintain (IHL) international humanitarian law, what would it take for General Assembly to authorize a peacekeeping force, such as Blue Helmets, to intervene in Gaza?

Richard Falk: Both the humanitarian and moral imperatives and legal mechanisms are strongly supportive of an armed protective force to ensure the establishment of a permanent Gaza ceasefire, the delivery of food, water, fuel, and medicine to the surviving traumatized and largely malnourished Palestinians that continue to be confined to the killing fields of Gaza. And yet at the same time Gazan Palestinians are being openly threatened with post-genocide forced dispossession from their Gaza homeland or re-occupied as recommended in a variety of plans under consideration without meaningful Palestinian participation. This clashes with the basic human rights commitment to uphold the inalienable right of a nation and its people to self-determination.

The Uniting for Peace Resolution [GA Res. 377(V)] is a flexible instrument empowering the UN General Assembly to act when the Security Council is paralyzed by the right of veto possessed by the five permanent members (P5) in critical situations of global security, war prevention, genocide prevention, and humanitarian emergency. It was initially adopted as a Cold War initiative of the Western UN members to have a means to circumvent Soviet vetoes. UPR was most successfully relied upon in 1956 to secure the withdrawal of French, UK, and Israeli forces from Egyptian territory in a situation where a threat of wider war was addressed by the agreed deployment of a blue helmets UN peacekeeping force. This move supported by the US against its closest European allies and Israel was the high point in the subordination of geopolitical alignments to the core anti-aggression provisions of the UN Charter and has never been repeated. Washington think-tanks and foreign policy advisors have consistently criticized international legal commitments when in tension with alliance relations.

In the aftermath of the Kosovo War of 1999, it became obvious that the global order needed a basis for armed intervention as a last resort if genocide prevention was to become a meaningful component of the international order that emerged after World War II. Previously, in the colonial era, European states often claimed to be engaging in ‘humanitarian interventions’ to disguise their true motivations, which usually involved the exercise of political control and economic exploitation of the country in the Global South so targeted. The Global South was suspicious of such protentional encroachments on their sovereignty and political independence, reacting both to the abuse associated with past claims of humanitarian intervention and objecting to language that seemed to associate what is ‘humanitarian’ with discretion to engage in ‘intervention.’ The UN Charter addresses the issue obliquely in Article 2(7) that prohibits UN intervention in the ‘domestic affairs’ of member states except in instances of UN enforcement operations as authorized by the procedures of Chapter VII of the Charter addressing authorizations of force in the interests of maintaining international peace and security.

The attempted reconciliation of sovereignty with a UN protective role in desperate humanitarian crises became known as “The Responsibility to Protect” or ‘R2P’ with genocide prevention explicitly in mind, adopted in 2005 at a UN Summit as a norm calling for Security Council implementation as circumstances warranted. R2P was discredited by NATO’s 2011 regime-changing intervention in Libya in disguised form being proposed as a humanitarian protective move to protect the allegedly threatened civilian population of Benghazi by Libyan armed forces. Fooled by the humanitarian trappings of the requested UN authorization of force, Russia and China that refrained from using their right of veto no longer trusted the US and its European partners to confine intervention to humanitarian protection.

At this point, given the emergency conditions in Gaza, the General Assembly could extend the Uniting for Peace rationale for self-empowerment in circumstances of UN inaction to the urgency of fashioning a meaningful response to famine and Israeli defiance to comply with international law or the rulings of the ICJ. If this was done immediately it would create a mutually reinforcing legal foundation for UN action including the authorization, funding, and equipping of an armed protective force as the only remaining option given the military escalation involving Gaza City and one million sheltering Palestinians who face slaughter if they refuse evacuation orders that entail facing ultra-hazardous conditions imperiling life and minimal health.

In many respects Gaza presents a unique situation that has confronted the civilian population of Gaza for the past two years since October 7 of at once being entrapped within the lethal combat zones of Gaza with no secure sheltering safe zones, widespread destruction of homes and residential areas, mounting hunger and disease, destruction of habitat both understood as cultural heritage (sacred sites, historic buildings, museums, schools and universities) ecological viability. It would be a final betrayal of law and justice if the perpetrators of the crimes committed by the prolonged and unabashed genocide carried out in Gaza would be allowed to preside over the establishment of Gaza governance, plans for reconstruction, and arrangements for peace, justice, and security.

As of the start of 2025 Israel’s sophisticated manipulation of political discourse has begun rapidly losing the Legitimacy War, even in the complicit countries, on the symbolic battlefields of law and morality, and this is a significant factor in determining political outcomes in major conflicts since World War II. A major exception to Israel’s loss of control over the politics of perception is the maintenance of the largely uncontested identity of Hamas as a hateful terrorist entity that should be permanently excluded from any future formal role in the administration of Gaza. This reductionist view of Hamas is a triumph of Israeli state propaganda as accepted throughout the West as a sign of credibility of mainstream critics, especially when comes to stepping back from all out support of Israel, as illustrated by the German, British, Canadian, and French qualified recognition of Palestinian statehood often accompanied by a ritualized denunciation of Hamas. This neglects the fact that Hamas won an international certified election in 2006 largely on the basis of its resistance to Israeli unlawful occupation and sought a long-term ceasefire with Israel lasting up to 50 years, a proposal explained in detail to me while I was serving as Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine by Hamas leaders in Gaza, Doha, and Cairo, and evidently promoted in Washington at the time, but to no avail as Israel was insistent on keeping Hamas on the terrorist list and determined to continue using Gaza as a free zone for the testing of new combat tactics and weapons innovations.

After years of blockading Gaza since 2007 and otherwise abusing the population in defiance of the obligations of international law with respect to belligerent occupation as set forth in the 4^th Geneva Convention, a cornerstone of international humanitarian law, the attack of October 7 was instantly characterized as ‘terrorism’ rather than as a hybrid event that acknowledged the Palestinian right of resistance while criticizing verified violations of international humanitarian law in terms of the killing of civilians. Israeli propaganda sensationalized these violation of the law of war through exaggeration and inflammatory, false allegations of barbarism, the refusal to treat their own abusive behavior as a necessary part of the context, and the suspicious failure of the Netanyahu government to heed highly reliable warnings of an impending attack given to Tel Aviv leading to uninvestigated impressions that Israel allowed the attack to happen providing a pretext for launching this massive retaliation.

Such factors give plausibility to the interpretation of Israel’s recourse to genocide as not directly about land and people, and not about security, self-defense, and revenge as is the hasbara claim. Indirectly, it was the largest application of the Dahiya Doctrine by which Israel adopted the doctrine of grossly disproportionate responses to hostile provocations, rationalizing a means to strengthen the deterrence of future provocations. The Dahiya Doctrine was condemned as violating international law in the Goldstone Report prepared under UN auspice after the Israeli military incursion in Gaza at the end of 2008, extending into 2009.

A final relevant consideration is the refutation of all Israeli claims of sovereign rights or occupational authority in Gaza. The Advisory Opinion of the ICJ issued on July 19, 2024 in a near unanimous decision on the applicable law concluded that Israel had so persistently violated its primary duty of an Occupying Power to protect the status quo of an occupied people and ensure its safety and security that it declared that it lost its right to be legally Occupy and was under a legal duty to withdraw from the Gaza and the West Bank within a year and forego any further efforts to control the governance of these Palestinian territories that have so long suffered from Israel’s unlawful policies and practices, culminating in apartheid followed by genocide.

It is against this background that recourse to armed intervention in the form of a UN protective force is the only hope for constructing a serious challenge to Israel’s evident and still active plans to achieve Palestinian erasure as a political presence whether by continuing on the path to extermination or by inducing a Palestinian acquiescence to the Zionist objective of establishing Greater Israel, a one state solution encompassing the whole of mandate or Ottoman Palestine, or more grandiosity of extending the sovereignty from the Nile to the Euphrates, which mean displacing or repressing regional peoples other than the Palestinians, and seriously encroaching upon their territorial sovereignty.

Of course, the formation of a responsible armed protective force remains a daunting practical challenge despite the overwhelming legal, political, and moral case for making it happen. At the very least efforts should be made not to allow Israel to benefit from its crimes by being rewarded in the peace process by shaping the design of future Gaza governance and the Palestinian victimization being further punished by excluding their participation in any future international efforts at peacebuilding in Gaza or the West Bank.

Daniel Falcone: You often stress faith in basic humanity. With the growing global protests and changing views of the public, how can social movements pressure state actors effectively in your view?

Richard Falk: I suspect this may be a misleading impression that may be created by the fact that I have opposed the excessive and abusive use of power by the West in this historical period, but in other settings I would have more faith in the regulatory wisdom of those holding the reins of governmental power than in the wishes and values of people who are susceptible to manipulation and propaganda as the triumphs of ultra-right populism throughout the world currently illustrates, and earlier the rise of European fascism confirms.

The legitimacy of elected governments as in the United States is undermined by the recent rise in influence on the policy process associated by special interests in the private sector but with often controlling influence when it comes to the shaping of government behavior. This is particularly true with respect to the privilege of the wealthy about taxes and inheritance, excessive funding of bloated military and intelligence budgets, and exaggeration of the national interest in relation to alleged security threats associated with remote conflicts and political developments. The US government in the domain of foreign policy, and especially with respect to the use of force overtly or covertly, shows little deference to the opinions of the citizenry, most dramatically illustrated by the unconditional support given Israel despite its defiance of international law and morality, and commitment to policies increasingly treated by public opinion and the mainstream media as ‘genocide.’

The national crisis at the present is a compound of failures: a government subservient to the priorities of special interests rather than the wellbeing of its own citizens or the public good of humanity; a public depoliticized by state propaganda that is not constrained by evidence or truthfulness, and a political opposition that is weak and also subject to similar patterns of responsiveness to special interests and monied pressures. This inadequacy of the Democratic Party as a source of benevolent government is recently and unabashedly illustrated by the refusal of the party leadership to back Zohran Mamdani in the New York City mayoral election, despite his decisive victory in the primaries, and a platform that stresses the wellbeing of people rather than subservience to special interests, including the pro-Israel lobby that has used abundant funds to capture bipartisan unconditional national support for Israel, despite its Gaza campaign and denial of Palestinian rights in their own homeland. Also, unfortunate is the virtual absence of checks and balances to restrain the quixotic and anti-democratic maneuvers of the Trump presidency. There is no longer a functioning independent Supreme Court or Congress. This allows Trump to exert near absolute control over the political process in a manner dangerous for the country and the world, and a blatant repudiation of democracy in a constitutional republic.

Ever since the a-bombs were used in 1945 and the development of nuclear weapons in subsequent years, governments whether democratic or not, were subject to the will of the leader on questions that could eventuate in apocalyptic catastrophe whether by design, miscalculation, or accident. In this vital domain of policy, people and even elected officials are excluded. Decisions are ultimately made by the leader with access to ‘the nuclear football,’ and war plans for use and threat are matters of high secrecy as Daniel Ellsberg documented in his book, The Doomsday Machine, (2017) which disclosed dangerous war plans never disclosed to the public or even to Congress.

Responding to ecological challenges poses analogous issues, especially in the context of climate change, where the avoidance of future catastrophe depends on acting cooperatively in the global public interest. Despite the scientific consensus warning of the dangers of inaction and non-attentiveness, neither government nor the people exhibit the kind of mobilized consciousness needed for an effective global framework dedicated to ecological resilience and guided by allocating responsibility on the basis of perpetrating harm and ability to bear fiscal harm, and strong enough to curtail the efforts of corporations and others to retain the established order without addressing longer term threats. 

Daniel Falcone: The UN supported IPC (which leans conservative on methodology) and has declared famine in Gaza. It’s only the fifth such declaration in its history, as cited by the sharp analyst Idrees Ahmad. He cited previous famines in Somalia 2011, South Sudan 2017, 2020, and Sudan 2024. Considering this extreme classification, why do you think international responses remain bland and limited to boilerplate statements of concern rather than constructive paths like no-fly zones or UN peacekeepers?

Richard Falk: The simple answer is because there is not a strong enough political will to act on the part of governments critical of Israel, especially given US continuing support for Israel as evidenced diplomatically by reliance on the veto to block even a mandatory permanent ceasefire decision in the UN Security Council. Those former supporters, including NATO stalwarts UK, France, Canada, and Germany while stepping back, and antagonizing the Israeli government by tendering a recognition of Palestinian statehood, which even if hedged in various ways, was an expression of rising criticism of the latest phases of Israel’s tactics in Gaza, especially related to the blockage of humanitarian aid for a society officially declared to be in the midst of a famine with verified reports of daily deaths due to starvation and malnutrition, particularly affecting young children and the elderly.

While this step back from the Western solidarity with Israel is significant, it is mainly relevant with respect to the symbolic Legitimacy War, which the Palestinian are now winning decisively. We should take notice of the reality that in prior anti-colonial struggles waged since 1945 the side that politically prevailed in these conflicts was not the side that controlled the battlefield but rather the side that seized and held the high moral and legal ground in the conflict. In this sense, the emergence of Israel as ‘a pariah state’ may have more lasting political weight than recognition of Palestinian statehood or even an arms embargo. Thomas Friedman, always a trustworthy weathervane of establishment thinking in the US, has taken notice of this development in a column in the NY Times on August 25 with the provocative title, “Israel’s Gaza Campaign is Making It a Pariah State.” Although typically hedged by including a misleading demonization of Hamas and silence as to Palestinian self-determination rights, it can be viewed as a political surrender by the West in the all-important legitimacy war.

The more complex response to your question concerns the operationalization of an effective response in view of the geopolitical obstacles. What seems called for is an armed protective force supplemented by a no-fly zone over the whole of Gaza with sufficient capabilities to offer safety and security to the surviving Palestinian population. Whether Israel could be induced to consent to such an arrangement is extremely doubtful, and almost certainly the US under Trump would resist, if for no other reason, than opposition to any displacement of geopolitical primacy by deference to such a dramatic UN initiative.

It seems questionable, especially in view of the passive complicity of the leading Arab countries and Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), whether governments would put their citizens at mortal risk by undertaking such a mission even given the famine emergency and the widespread civil society support for such a rescue operation courageously undertaken despite dire risks. Israeli punitive responses to the Freedom Flotilla efforts to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza are suggestive of the dangers of attempting a forced entry to Gaza under UN auspices. The forthcoming Global Sumud Flotilla sailing from Tunisia, consisting of some 40 ships will further test Israeli resilience.

Daniel Falcone: Ahmad also stated that last year, USAID’s Famine Early Warning System sounded the alarms about the situation in Gaza. Biden forced a retraction and Trump only delivered on subsequent deterioration in this area. This was months before Israel blocked aid and later replaced UN aid distribution points with four GHF sites where Gazans were fired at. How should the public interpret the credibility of governments unwilling to act?

Richard Falk: As earlier responses suggest, it is a matter of mobilizing the political will to bear the costs and uncertain risks of challenging Israel’s behavior in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, however much it was itself acting unlawfully and now lacks any authority to perform as the legitimate occupying power. The US conduct dating back to the Biden presidency suggests a US unconditional commitment to Israel’s Gaza campaign. It is a matter of geopolitics taking clear, if disguised, dominance of the policy process, and a consequent disregard of the inhibitions of law, morality, and public opinion.

Now that the famine conditions are evident and combined with Israel’s defiant escalating violence directed at a starving, malnourished, and traumatized Palestinian survivors in Gaza, reinforced by the killing of truth-telling journalists and attacks directed at medical workers and facilities, there is no longer a credible way to justify US continuing material and diplomatic support for Israel. The Trump presidency is virtually silent as far as offering Israel sentiments of solidarity but continues to be active as by the recent sanctioning of the brave truth-telling UN special rapporteur on Occupied Palestine and officials of the International Criminal Court for acting against Israel.

Daniel Falcone: What are your thoughts on R2P and the ability to exercise it now? Is it time for the issuing of a no-fly zone and armed intervention at the IGO level?

Richard Falk: R2P was conceived in the aftermath of the Kosovo War in 1999, as an internationalized alternative to colonial era ‘humanitarian intervention’ by which the Global West used humanitarian arguments to disguise imperially motivated interventions, which usually were designed to protect ideological and economic goals. R2P was supposed to be a post-colonial expression of global responsibility for genocide prevention and other severe situations of danger arising from state repression or crimes against ethnic minorities. R2P was invoked in 2011 by NATO members of the Security Council in response to alleged dangers faced by the civilian population of Benghazi threatened by attacks from advancing military forces of the Qaddafi government in Libya.

Skeptical members of the Security Council, including Russia and China, were persuaded to abstain rather than veto the reliance on R2P to authorize a no-fly-zone and a protective armed force by reassurance that the goals would be confined to the humanitarian mission. R2P was discredited by NATO forces immediately engaging in a regime-changing military operation that resulted in producing chaos in Libya and the extra-legal execution of Qaddafi by a street mob. As a result, it was not relied upon in relation to prolonged Syrian or Iraqi civil strife as there was no longer any willingness on the part of geopolitical rivals to entrust uses of force to the West based on humanitarian reassurances.

The situation in Gaza is so desperate, and so widely perceived, that it might enable a Security Council mandate to invoke R2P, this time with the US refraining from exercising its right of veto by abstaining from a proposal to form a UN Protective Force as an urgent priority. If the US persists by vetoing such a decision, then by analogy to the Uniting for Peace Resolution, the procedural stalemate in the Security Council could justify the shift of burdens for the activation of R2P to the General Assembly. The UN for all its limitations has demonstrated a creative adaptation to overcome some of its operational shortcomings.

A notable illustration is the HRC development of Special Procedures, including the use of unpaid experts appointed by consensus in the 47-member Council Assembly, and recently vividly exemplified by the contribution of the Italian special rapporteur for Occupied Palestine who has analyzed and documented the Israeli military campaign in Gaza through her three influential reports on the Gaza genocide. I believe that the desperation of the situation in Gaza is an ideal context in which to make use of R2P as a mechanism of last resort to uphold fundamental humanitarian values.

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Photograph Source: Matt Johnson – CC BY 2.0

These days when I’m asked how I’m doing, I usually reply, “I’m fine until I start following the news.” It’s all so depressing. Donald Trump is everywhere. On front pages as well as in social media, DJT dominates. A day doesn’t go by without headlines mentioning something involving Trump. Tariffs? Attacks on the Federal Reserve or some other congressionally established institution? ICE? A recent court ruling for or against him? His Nobel Peace Prize quest? One could ask if his omnipresence is intentional. Does he set out to dominate the 24/7 news cycle or is his presence merely a reflection of his frenetic pace? “Attention, not cash, is the form of power that most interests him,” Ezra Klein wrote in the Times. Whether intentional or not, his media presence buries deeper stories. He diverts our attention from anything else. 

Trump stories appear, then quickly disappear. Today’s headlines have their own limited time cycle. We are now focused on Trump’s firings at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the fate of Susan Monarez as well as pressure on Jerome Powell and Lisa Cook at the Federal Reserve. What will be next? Will the next Trump headline bury the CDC story or the one about the Federal Reserve? Already we have trouble finding information about what happened to the U.S. Institute of Peace where its president, George Moose, was escorted out by local police. 

Like an avalanche, Trump news gathers speed and buries everything in its path only to pop up in another place. It’s exhausting, and overwhelming. As for intentionality, the former Trump chief adviser Steve Bannon described the strategy in 2018, “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” 

I asked a former CNN executive if true journalism is over with Trump’s domination. This is his response:

“Those believing journalism is on its last legs are mistaken. Certain people will always seek out information from reliable sources. There’s the catch: the seekers are fewer and fewer. There are also fewer and fewer reliable sources, some thriving, others fading away.

It’s true that media houses are distancing themselves from news output. The priority for executives is keeping the cash flowing. Venture capitalists and hedge funders have no interest in sending money to newsrooms. Crypto and AI is far more interesting. Sure, those products may be nothing more than 21st Century buggy whips and hula hoops, but buyers are lined up.

Some observers wax prolific about a declining audience for journalism. The more experienced know the true importance of readers, viewers and listeners who remain supportive of media outlets as opposed to those needing an hourly dose of celebrity, glamor or hate. Some media proprietors have made the lowest common denominator their choice.”

The former CNN executive is optimistic about the future of media, although he has seen and lived through several media outlets disappearing. There are those of us who do believe in fact-based media outlets. But are we enough to keep the media ship afloat? A recent story by David D. Kirkpatrick on “How much is Trump profiting off the Presidency?” in The New Yorker is an excellent example of the kind of long-term reporting that is needed. 

But there is a difference between longer articles in a weekly magazine – even The New Yorker now has a New Yorker Daily – and the 24/7 news cycle which feeds “an hourly dose of celebrity, glamor or hate.” DJT and his people have been able to appeal to a sizeable audience. “We want our news, and we want it now” is the current reality. The 24/7 news cycle gives instantaneous satisfaction; Trump fulfils that need. 

This is how the former CNN executive sees Trump’s relation to the media:

“Donald Trump was chosen by Robert Thomson, chief executive of News Corp. Mr. Thomson understands the media business better than all the rest. Mr. Thomson found a true believer in the power of television with highly addicted viewers, typically those offended by smart people. This was – still is – the Fox audience. The money flowed in from cable TV subscriptions and advertisers selling cheap goods.”

The relationship between Trump and the media is perfectly symmetrical. He wants to be front page every day. The media believes he sells. The result is that the public gets its dose of Trump news daily. So whether or not Trump sets out to headline the daily news, he manages to be there. The media can’t get enough of him – witness Maggie Haberman’s ongoing fascination with DJT in the Times. Nor is this something new. An Axios graphic in September, 2017, showed “The insane news cycle of Trump’s presidency in 1 chart.” 

How to get out of Trump’s dominated news? “How do you push back against a tidal wave?” political communication expert Dannagal Young asked. Besides retreating to some island with no connections, I began an experiment. At social gatherings I count the minutes before the conversation turns to Trump. Talk about the hot weather and climate change? An interesting movie or song that just came out? A book that’s worth suggesting to others? See how long it takes before the subject turns to Trump.

I’m not saying that Trump should be ignored. What I am suggesting is that his media domination is part of his personality and program. Being front and center is essential to who he is and how he functions. “[Trump’s] desire for that attention is so deep, it’s coming from such a deep place, he needs it so pathologically,” observed Chris Hayes, author of The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource.  

Ignoring Trump may be one way of countering him and what he stands for. But I cannot promise not to read about him or write about him. What he is doing to the United States and the world cannot be ignored, and that’s not Maggie Haberman-like fascination. 

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View from Glastonbury Tor, August 30, 2025. Photo: The author.

Land of miracles

I don’t know how we wound up on Pilgrim’s Way, legendary site of King Arthur and Queen Guenevere’s graves. My wife Harriet and I stopped in Glastonbury last Sunday, intending only to recharge our EV on the way to Stonehenge, but there we were, trudging up Wearyall Hill in the rain.  Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have traveled the same path 500 years before Arthur, planting his staff and seeing it sprout into a “Holy Thorn” tree (crataegus monogyna), incarnation of Jesus’s crown of thorns. This was a land of miracles, and I wanted one. I looked up at the sky and just that second, saw the sun break through the clouds. I quickly checked my phone for news, hoping the Supreme Court gained a conscience or that lightning struck players on a certain, West Palm Beach Florida golf course.  

Dialogue in Bristol

We travelled to Glastonbury from Bristol earlier that day after meeting for breakfast with our friend Wade Rathke. Wade is head of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), founded in 1970 by him and Gary Delgado. At its peak, it had some 1200 local chapters and 500,000 members in more than 100 U.S. cities.  ACORN waged successful campaigns in support of minority voter registration, living wage laws, and fair housing, among other things, until a right-wing smear campaign (in addition to some self-goals), nearly destroyed the organization in 2009. Since then, it’s regrouped and re-focused on international work, and is now leading ambitious housing, corporate accountability and environmental health campaigns in Latin America, Eastern Europe and the U.K. It was Wade’s ongoing support for Anthropocene Alliance – the environmental non-profit founded in 2017 by Harriet and me — that led us to meet up in Bristol. 

Wade is an energetic man with a sweep of white hair, prominent nose, and attentive blue eyes. He was born in Laramie, raised in New Orleans and gained his organizing chops in Little Rock. His accent reveals his Southern upbringing, and his speech is peppered with expressions like “that dog don’t hunt” and “all sizzle and no steak.” He’s a great talker but his confidence doesn’t get in the way of his ability to listen. After Harriet and I described some of the challenges of grassroots organizing, including the cost of underwriting it, we all fell into silence. After a little while, I broke it with flattery and a few cliches of my own: 

“Wade, we’re like the fox and you’re like the hedgehog; we have many wiles, but you have one big one. 

Right now, everybody agrees that grassroots organizing is the only way to halt the rise of fascism in the U.S. and U.K. In the U.S., the courts are disinclined to bail us out, Congress sure won’t, and when push comes to shove, the military will salute and follow orders from Trump. In the U.K., Labour seems to have a death-wish. It has cut budgets and services where it should increase them, for example social welfare, and raised them where it should cut them, for example defense. 

Democratic ships of state on both sides of the Atlantic are going down unless people go into the streets and demand change. Wade, you’re one of the people that really knows how to organize. Philanthropies ought to be throwing money at you to help fight this thing!”

Wade took a few beats before replying: “The folks I’ve met at the Malcolm X Community Center here in Bristol have been coming up to me and saying: ‘What are you gonna do about ‘that man’? How are YOU gonna stop him?’ 

I felt like they were blaming me – and why shouldn’t they? We didn’t do enough to prevent Trump’s rise. We just didn’t. And unless the Labour Party gets its act together, the same thing will happen here. Nigel Farage is waiting in the wings with his MAGA cap. 

And as for organizing, there’s never any guarantees. Some people are too tired, beaten, or scared to get organized. Others aren’t mad or hungry enough.  Eventually, they will be, and we need to be ready. But will it happen in time? I just don’t know. We may need a miracle.” 

We chatted some more and then said our goodbyes. Wade was flying back to New Orleans, and we were headed down to Stonehenge, on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire. William Blake painted and drew it several times, and I wanted inspiration for my planned monograph on the artist. He thought the builders of Stonehenge were Druids who practiced human sacrifice and cultivated war; their monument, he said, was a “building of eternal death, whose proportions are eternal despair.”  I wanted to see for myself.

Stonehenge, c. 2500 BCE, Wiltshire, England. Photo: The author.

Unplanned stop in Glastonbury

Heading south, we decided to stay off the motorways and stick to small roads; rural Somerset and Wiltshire have rolling hills with distant prospects and quaint villages with thatched cottages, and we wanted to see them. Our GPS however, obliged us too well. After about 30 minutes, we realized we’d gone far out of our way and were now approaching Glastonbury. Needing to recharge the car, we decided to stop there. 

The name Glastonbury is familiar because of the music festival held eight miles away in Pilton, and the ruined abbey, originally founded in the 8^th century. After charging the car, we walked up High Street for a cup of tea.  What a silly town! Nearly every other shop sold crystals, charms, herbal remedies, candles and books on witchcraft and paganism. Tourists here are a mix of pensioners (like me), New Age gurus, Wiccans, goths, hippies, dope smokers (in the alleys), Christians, Arthurians, and families with dogs and kids wanting a day out. 

Despite its thriving tourist industry, Glastonbury is a bit shabby, like almost everywhere in the U.K. For more than 15 years, under Tory rule, county budgets across the country were cut while expenses for social care, homelessness, education and environmental protection rose. As a result, most towns and cities are plagued by empty storefronts and decaying infrastructure, and its residents by unemployment or under-employment (“shit jobs”), poverty (especially child poverty), and food insecurity.

Refreshed by our tea, we were ready to see the sights. In a discarded National Trust brochure, I read about the fabled Glastonbury Tor, a nearby, conical hill on top of which sit remains of the 15^th century church of St. Michael. Deep below the church, I also read, there exists a cave (according to legend), leading to the fairy realm of Annwn where lives Gwyn ab Nudd, the lord of the Celtic underworld. Gwyn was renowned for heroic feats, including helping King Arthur seize the comb and scissors belonging to the ferocious boar, Twrch Trwyth. Remembering what Wade told us about needing a miracle to stop Trump (a ferocious bore if ever there was one) we decided to brave the rain squalls and ascend the Tor. 

Part way up, we paused at the gate leading to Chalice Hill, where Joseph of Arimathea is supposed to have buried the Holy Grail, the cup used by Jesus during the last supper, and later by Joseph to catch the savior’s blood during the crucifixion. The legend is of considerable antiquity and much honored, but nobody ever discusses how Joseph is supposed to have gotten to Glastonbury from Jerusalem, circa 33 CE. On reflection, however, I realized it might not have been so hard. He didn’t have to go through airport security or pass a customs inspection. He wouldn’t have had to brave the endless cue to board the Eurostar in Paris. In fact, as a Palestinian from Judea, he wouldn’t be allowed to enter the U.S. or the U.K. at all today! Back then, there were no passports or visas. All he needed to come to Glastonbury was a boat, a donkey cart to pick him up at the harbor, and a few good pairs of sandals.

About 20 minutes into our trek, we approached a fellow pilgrim – a man about 25-year-old, bearded, wearing a daypack and holding a walking stick. He slowed when he heard me telling Harriet that many people believe that Joseph of Arimathea was the possessor of “those feet” in Blake’s famous lyric, but that I wasn’t so sure:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

“The Holy Lamb of God,” from the Gospel of St. John, I said, clearly referred to Christ. Was Blake saying that both Joseph and Jesus were on that boat from Palestine? Why, of all the places on earth, I added, did they pick Roman-occupied Britain? That’s like going from the frying pan into the fire. 

That’s when the stranger piped up:  “But it must have been Joseph who came here. There are many, early sources that speak about Christ’s disciples in England, including Eusebius and Hilary of Poitiers. In the 12^th century, Robert de Boron wrote that Joseph sent the Holy Grail to Britain.  Why do you scoff at the idea that Joseph – and maybe his cousin Jesus too — came to England? There’s an 18-year gap in gospel accounts of Christ’s life. What’s to say he didn’t do a bit of traveling?”

I replied: “You mean, he took an extended gap year abroad?” 

My new friend answered: “Exactly! And there are other clues in the poem suggesting Joseph was the owner of “those feet.” He was a tinsmith, a metalworker, and Blake’s poem has refences to metalic weapons:

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

I’d clearly met my match and said so. Harriet and I said adieu and departed to finish our climb up Glastonbury Tor – 140 stone steps and a sequence of concrete ramps – to the ruins of the church of St. Michael. When we arrived, I cast my gaze in all directions, looking for more portent or signs. What about the swallowtail kite who seemed forever to hang in the air, held there by the steady rush of wind? I searched the news on my phone again – nothing. Deflated but undaunted, we headed back to town. We went down Chalice Hill, Wearyall Hill, Pilgrim’s Way and the High Street. We brushed past dogs and children, Wiccans and pensioners, dope smokers and Arthurians. This time, I walked more slowly past the New Age tchotchke shops and bookstores; I briefly browsed in one. Then we got back into our fully-charged car and drove back up to our flat in Norwich.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Vengeance.

It undeniably infects human affairs.

Parents observe it as their toddlers navigate playground dynamics: one child hits another; the other strikes back. Domestic feuds and old grudges can metastasize into jealousy, schadenfreude, and—if unchecked—retaliation. Belligerent drivers trigger micro-aggressions that can morph into road rage. In the extreme, assault and murder seem to beg for a commensurate response. Intentional harm breeds reciprocal foul. Whether on unabashed display or buried deeply beneath the surface, this base retributive impulse is potent, stealthy, and addictive—a perfect storm for inciting reactive violence. Society, to its peril, severely underestimates its capacity to do irrevocable damage.

Communally, this tit for tat unfolds with lethal consequences. Laws and government policies deftly conceal and enable the visceral thirst for vengeance through various forms of state-sponsored killing. This phenomenon particularly underpins two contemporary polarizing issues: the death penalty and the Gaza genocide. As the famed television personality and death penalty abolitionist Rev. Fred Rogers articulated, any form of the revenge model teaches children the patently hazardous lesson that two wrongs make a right. His wisdom rings true in both these cases.

The urge for retribution is insidious and subtle, often rendering it unrecognizable. It clouds objectivity, stifling judgment and self-awareness. It camouflages as false notions of “deterrence,” “public safety and security,” “justice,” a “Biblical mandate,” and “a lasting peace,” among other rationalizations. Many individuals and societies, therefore, vehemently deny any accusations of vengeful motivation—even for genocide—while unsuspectedly succumbing to its irresistible call.

The Shadow of the Holocaust

I should know. I once unwittingly operated under revenge’s cunning spell. As a third-generation Holocaust survivor, I used to experience the natural desire for vengeance against those who murdered my ancestors in cold blood. For years, that overpowering feeling contributed to my support of capital punishment. If I could not carry out that reprisal with my own hands, then I felt the state should do so by proxy against other murderers. “They should take ‘em out back and shoot ‘em,” some family suggested; “eye for an eye,” the Bible reinforced.

I was not alone among Jews in the wake of the Shoah (Holocaust) who harbored such feelings. Many certainly overcame rage and the urge for recompense, notably Elie Wiesel, Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Albert Einstein, and Eva Mozes Kor. Other survivors and descendants like me held on to the pain and anger that grew from direct and intergenerational trauma.

A personal experience as recently as 2008 illuminated this reality for me. I was watching Mark Herman’s film adaptation of John Boyne’s fictional Holocaust novel “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” alongside a child survivor who was also a respected friend. In the climactic scene, the Nazis accidentally gassed to death a concentration camp commandant’s young son, who had befriended the film’s eponymous character. When the bereaved SS officer wept and screamed in agony upon discovering his child among the dead, my friend responded by flatly stating, “Good. Now they know how it feels.” In that fleeting moment, after watching a charged movie that so vividly portrayed the suffering of my ancestors, I agreed. While revenge was neither blissful nor sweet, for those few seconds, it felt bitterly just. Even after that emotion departed from my heart, how could I judge my friend for seeking to avenge his family members whom he had witnessed the Nazis murder, especially when I myself could identify with his reaction? We were only human, after all, living in the shadow of the wholesale mass murder of our people.

Unveiling Vengeance on Death Row

My vengeful impulse shifted later that same year when I started working as a Jewish prison chaplain in Canada with individuals whose convictions would have rendered them eligible for execution in certain United States jurisdictions. I learned what motivated those men and women to commit monstrous crimes, and I saw that many changed over time. They were not inherently evil. On the contrary, many began engaging in sincere repentance while safely incarcerated and no longer a threat to the public.

As I witnessed these human beings transform, so too did my views. My prison experiences unveiled my unconscious bias toward retribution, and I began to see it more clearly for what it was: an understandable wish for payback. In part to help break the cycle of violence into which I was born—and that I had been inadvertently perpetuating—I decided to launch into activism for death penalty abolition.

Since then, as an ordained cantor and co-founder of “L’chaim! Jews Against the Death Penalty,” I have directly communicated for years with scores of condemned Americans— many now executed—as well as some of their victims’ loved ones. I have experienced the impact of government policies that shroud the collective appetite for vengeance in the form of psychologically and physically torturous state-sponsored executions. This pattern invariably repeats, even when murder victims’ family membersexpressly call for mercy. That tragically familiar scene unfurled again just this past week ahead of the United States’ most recent execution of Curtis Windom in Florida, whose governor predictably dismissed all such protests before he put him to death. As before, a political leader submitted to the will of death penalty advocates, many of whom harbor the mentality of “the more suffering, the better,” no matter if the existing execution methods of lethal injection, gassing, and the firing squad are unconscionable Nazi legacies.

Wielding Revenge in Gaza

A similar yearning to fulfill a deep-seated bloodlust has significantly influenced the Israeli government’s response to Hamas’ October 7, 2023, onslaught and the ongoing hostage crisis. That pogrom constituted the deadliest mass killing of Jews since the Holocaust, and the triggering of that historical memory and intergenerational trauma combined with the sheer devastation of the Hamas attack to create an unprecedented stimulus for violent response. Many have understood the incalculable brutality of that unjustifiable act of terrorism by observing that it, too, was in part a vengeful response to decades of suffering that Palestinians have endured since Israel’s 1948 independence, to which much of the Muslim world refers as the Nakba (“catastrophe.”) Since that unfathomable day nearly two years ago, Israeli hostage family members have increasingly demanded that government officials call for a ceasefire in Gaza to bring home their loved ones. Yet, the state has persisted in catering to hardliners who, motivated by vindictive extremism combined with Messianicreligious fundamentalism, use the excuse of Hamas recalcitrance to justify carrying out a genocidal policy of mass killing, destruction of societal infrastructure, and starvation. Pope Leo XIV rightfully labeled the outcome “collective punishment.” The effect strikingly evokes capital punishment, whose “machinery of death” so often overrides the wishes of murder victims’ families.

The terrorist organization Hamas, well-versed in revenge dynamics, strategically releases horrific videos of suffering and emaciated Israeli hostages such as Evyatar David and Rom Braslavski with the intention of stirring the popular bloodlust. On cue, Machiavellian and megalomaniacalleaders like Benjamin Netanyahu and convicted felon Donald J. Trump bow to the will of the riled hoi polloi so that they might hold onto power. Israel, in turn, continues its campaign of obliterating tens of thousands of innocent civilians who become martyrs, thereby playing directly into Hamas’ hands. Meanwhile, my coreligionists who are unable to see beyond vengeance’s capped lens project displaced anger onto those of us who dare to name the genocide that Israel’s government perpetuates.

Let there be no doubt: there is a time for fighting—even killing—to fend off lethal aggressors. The Axis Powers during the Second World War immediately come to mind, among many other examples. In the current human evolutionary phase, nations consequently must maintain strong militaries. Still, there is a time for even the most just wars to end, lest they cross the thin red line into unleashing a disproportionate force that cloaks collective punishment, as the Gaza genocide confirms.

Causality is complex, rarely reducible to a single point. As with any military conflict, multiple other geopolitical and historical factors are at play in the spiraling tempest that is Israel/Palestine. Likewise, various political considerations unrelated to the lex talionis psyche determine a state’s utilization of capital punishment. The carnal drive for vengeance, however, remains integral to both execution chamber protocols and to the policies that have buried countless emaciated children in the Gaza rubble. Neither would exist without the primitive urge of the revenge response that has propelled the cycle of violence and plagued humanity since time immemorial. Restorative justice practices, including harm acknowledgment, repentance, repair, forgiveness, and reconciliation, are the only viable means of breaking this fatal pattern.

“May the killings end.”

It will require vigilance to transcend the insidious fixation on vengeance, but it is indeed possible. Jewish anti-death penalty activism offers one telling model for achieving this. Traditional rabbinic parlance cites a specific posthumous honorific for murder victims who have died as martyrs, particularly in pogroms, genocide, or terrorist attacks. The acronym it adds after each martyr’s name is “HYD,” which derives from the Hebrew letters Hey-Yud-Dalet (הי״ד) and stands for “Hashem yikom damam” (”May G-d avenge their blood.”) Members of the “L’chaim!” (”To Life!”) death penalty abolitionist group, however, intentionally never invoke this vindictive formula when they pray for capital murder victims at execution vigils for their condemned assailants. In its place, without exception, they employ the more common refrain “Zichronam Livracha” (”May their memories be for a blessing”). They then conclude with the following prayerful intention for the murder victims:

May their abiding neshamot (spirits) be loving guides for us all.

May their loved ones be comforted among all the mourners of the world.

May no more blood be shed in their sacred names.

May the killings end.

So may it be for the tens of thousands of victims of both the October 7, 2023, barbarity and the resulting Gaza genocide, as well as all targets of vengeful acts—however veiled.

A version of this essay was first published in The Jurist.

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