Last March, I wrote Gaza: Genocide by Starvation, analyzing Israel’s strategy to divert attention from the starvation caused by its blockade by shifting the narrative to food distribution and internal security. In support of this strategy, the Biden administration implemented a flawed plan, squandering more than $320 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money on a failed floating pier, and inefficient airdropping—an illusory remedy aimed at buying Israel more time by diverting attention from the siege, while offering a hollow promise to alleviate starvation in Gaza.
According to the World Food Program, in October 2024 and due to Israeli restrictions, the U.N. organization was only able to bring less than 30% of what was needed in Gaza. In the north and following 40 days of complete siege with no food and water allowed in, only after the U.S. threatened to stop supplying Israel with weapons, three aid trucks were allowed to enter the town of Beit Hanoun. Then as the food was unloaded for distribution, Israel opened fire at the crowd forcing hungry families to flee the area. Additional food trucks destined to Jabalia and Beit Lahia towns were not allowed in, where children have resorted to eating weeds to survive,
Since May, Israel has granted less than 30 of the more than 300 requests for individual drivers to enter Gaza. This month alone (November), the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs spokesman, Stephane Dujarric reported that Israel rejected 27 out of 31 planned humanitarian missions, and the four entries it allowed “were severely impeded.” As a result, bakeries and kitchens in northern Gaza had to shut down, nutrition aid suspended, and no fuel to operate hospitals, water and sanitation facilities.
Whenever Israel acceded to international pressure and allowed food trucks into Gaza, it often turned the food distribution centers into death traps. One such massacre occurred on February 29, 2023, at Al Rasheed Street. The previous day, news spread that trucks carrying flour were en route to Northern Gaza. Hundreds of hungry men and women gathered at the designated drop point, the Nabulsi Roundabout.
By 4:30 the following morning, the trucks’ headlights began to flicker in the distance, their beams piercing the freezing darkness. Excitement surged through the desperate crowd. Women wept, relieved that their children would soon have food. As the trucks drew closer, their lights grew brighter, illuminating the hope and anguish etched on the faces of those who had waited so long.
The trucks passed the Israeli army checkpoint and roared into the roundabout, their rumbling engines competing with the growling stomachs of the crowd. Hungry men and women cautiously approached, desperate for food, when suddenly, deafening cracks of gunfire shattered the cold morning.
The swarming crowd was a perfect target for Israeli tanks and snipers positioned around the area. In an instant, hope turned to horror, and the flour sacks soaked in the blood of the hungry. At least 118 civilians were killed, and more than 750 were injured.
The Nabulsi Roundabout—a designated drop point coordinated between the U.N. and Israel—Flour Massacre was neither the first nor the last instance of Israel disrupting aid delivery and distribution. About three weeks earlier, on February 5, Israeli naval gunboats targeted food trucks for the ninth consecutive day. In April, Israeli drones struck clearly marked vehicles belonging to the World Central Kitchen, killing seven aid workers.
In parallel with the food aid massacres—the targeting distribution centers and killing international aid workers—Israel also targeted local police protecting aid trucks. Without police security, the resulting combination of exacerbated mass starvation, hopelessness, and desperation could pave the way for armed gangs to attack and loot aid convoys, triggering a total breakdown of law and order. This has always been part of an Israeli broader strategy aimed at dismantling societal and cultural community structures entirely.
As a result of targeting the aid truck’s security escorts, the police stopped providing security protection for aid convoys. Hence, Israel succeeded in impeding the delivery of food it had authorized for entry into Gaza. The Biden appointed U.S. Ambassador David Satterfield remarked that “With the departure of police escorts it has been virtually impossible for the U.N. or anyone else … to safely move assistance in Gaza because of criminal gangs,”
Absent of security protection, this past weekend, November 23, Israel unexpectedly granted permission for 109 U.N. aid trucks to enter Gaza. According to CNN, the convoy, originally scheduled to cross into Gaza on Sunday, was instead instructed at short notice to depart on Saturday via an alternative route.
Immediately after crossing into Gaza, and still in a restricted area controlled and patrolled by the Israeli army, a local armed gang intercepted the convoy, opening fire on the trucks. According to a driver, Israeli tanks and drones were nearby observing the attack. In a short time, 97 of the 109 aid trucks intended for the starving population were commandeered by the armed criminals. It’s important to point out that the Israeli army who shoots civilians without warning, allowed an armed gang to operate freely under their watchful eyes. When questioned about their failure to intervene and prevent the looting, the occupying Israeli army claimed that protecting aid convoys was not their responsibility.
Through it all, the Biden administration has speciously urged Israel to “temporarily stop its military offensive on Gaza,” while simultaneously vetoing U.N. Security Council calls for a ceasefire. Most recently Wednesday November 20 where the U.S. was the only vote (14 to 1) opposing the latest resolution. Meanwhile, Israeli firster U.S. Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, has been calling on Israel since November 2023 to ensure humanitarian aid gets into Gaza, while supplying the very weapons and bombs to enforce what Israeli War Minister promised on October 9, 2023, “complete siege . . . no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”
The Biden administration has played a pivotal role in enabling Netanyahu’s engineered chaos and the unfolding genocide in Gaza, as well as in turning a blind eye to Jewish colonist mobs terrorizing Palestinian villages in the West Bank, and the violent rampage in Lebanon. The Administration’s complicity in facilitating crimes against humanity must neither be ignored nor downplayed. Any arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court would be insufficient without also holding Netanyahu’s collaborators in Europe and the United States accountable for their roles in these atrocities.
The fence line is 600m away. The northern part of Gaza, where Israel is carrying out a genocide within a genocide, systematically starving 300,000 Palestinians to death, is about 2km further.
The absurdity and the obscenity of being able to be this close to 20,000 murdered children, their bodies “prophetic voices from under the rubble” as a colleague called them, is difficult to accept.
The grotesque horror of a school field trip arriving at this location from two hours away to watch the mass slaughter from an observation deck was a shock I am overwhelmed by. The first wave of boys pumped celebratory firsts and thrust middle fingers upon their sight of Gaza.
There were no warplanes or drones visible. The school kids and other audience members of a genocide who gawked and put money into a telescope left disappointed as they saw no bombs or missiles, no artillery or tank fire. There were no blast waves from controlled demolitions to wash over them, and the numbers of smoke pillars from smoldering and cratered homes and schools were in the single digits, their fires not vigorous enough to be smelled. It must have been underwhelming and a let down; not much to boast about or revel in on the school bus ride home.
It was quiet. The sounds of those buried under rubble don’t reach the observation deck. No torn and wrecked bodies could be seen, no sunlight reflected in pools of blood, and no strips of clothes snagged on exposed bones fluttered in the strong wind. We were as close as we could be but so separate and so safe from it. It was sanitary and septic, picturesque.
I felt I was a voyeur, a tourist, a spectator. I felt disgust and disbelief. And I felt an absence within me that I cannot articulate.
To be that close to the cleansing and destruction of 2.2 million people and to be centering now my words on my feelings doesn’t escape me. Perhaps a well-achieved purpose of that observation deck of genocide.
The Nietzsche-ism, stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back at you, struck me as I stood there.
Stare into Gaza and Gaza stares back is what I am left with now, comfortable in my Jerusalem hotel, just hours after looking into their genocide as if I were on a platform at a national park or on the boardwalk at the shore.
The horror of the genocide I expected but did not see. I thought I might curse and cry. I did neither. The cruel and so very human spectacle of a caged people being destroyed as a display for school children was what I encountered. I did not expect that and I don’t know how to respond.
Note: Americans partially funded this observation deck.
The observation deck in Sderot looking into Gaza.
A school field trip assembled at the observation platform overlooking Gaza.
These are my first thoughts on standing that close to Gaza. I may need to revisit them.
I am in Palestine this week as part of a delegation to be in solidarity with and learn from those engaged in Palestinian liberation. Today, in addition to this visit to the border of Gaza, we met with Rabbis for Human Rights and an October 7th survivor in the Sderot settlement, as well as a Palestinian Lutheran minister in Bethlehem.
Owen Blacker, CC 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
What a bleak November for the USA. It would be easy to throw in the towel. Then again…
Look to the colonized people. The people our taxes oppress. They resist, resist, resist. Decade after decade and day after day.
Look to the living communities—the other ones. Driven to the edges of habitat by our kind, as a battered, desperate climate burns out the few viable places left. Struggling to live, despite our incessant manspreading into the spaces their evolution requires.
No, it’d be hard to give up.
We resist.
Oh, George.
After the election, some Trump voters told reporters they don’t pay much attention to what Trump says. They pay attention to their bank accounts (if they still have them). And they think groceries were cheaper when Trump was in office, and maybe remember the stimulus payments Trump signed. (Yes, Biden’s administration sent stimulus payments too—but remember the facts. Trump set a $2,000 figure and Biden’s additional payment—a promised $2,000—turned out to be $1,400, added to a $600 payment that Congress signed off during Trump’s term.)
The Democrats could have homed in on a lingering and widespread sense of financial alienation. The polls showed it simmering. So did the housing charts. Home prices have more than doubled in areas of Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Housing costs are rising everywhere—but especially in swing states, said The Washington Post on October 20.
Friday after the election, I listened to Trump-turned-Harris-supporter George Conway tell Sarah Longwell that inflation wasn’t really a thing, so people’s economic concerns must be “a proxy for something else that bothers them.” Oh, George. Do you know for every home for sale there are 30 households that rent? Do you know what they pay their landlords? Do you know how “the economy” suffocates people’s dreams and betrays entire generations?
Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell came out and said it. Inflation is going down (for now) but prices are not.
Under Biden and Harris and Obama for that matter, many of us have lived one unexpected medical event away from a financial calamity. The LGBTQI+ community implored the Democrats to actually defend medical care. Instead of more bread and less circus, the Democratic presidential campaign leaned into jet-setting celebrities. And the Cheneys.
As Joshua Frank put it, November 5th brought “blowback for 30 years of neoliberal capitalism.”
Two-Faced Coin
The cryptocurrency PACs supported political campaigns in a slew of states. Turns out the Coinbase CEO has designs on federal financial policy—or at least boosting Elon Musk’s designs on it.
Crypto spent millions in Massachusetts, trying to oust Elizabeth Warren, and injected more than $40 million into Bernie Moreno’s Ohio campaign, which unseated longtime Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown.
Brown understood the Democrats’ election outcome as primarily a class issue. Especially since NAFTA, Brown told Eugene Daniels at Politico, working-class support for the Democratic party has faded, “because Democrats haven’t focused on workers the way that we should over the last 30 years.”
Granted, the Harris campaign promised mortgage assistance. Great, but we need zoning allowances that support density rather than sprawl, and we need support for barely waged renters, and the end of this system that forces large segments of U.S. workers to try to live off starvation wages. And to that point, the rise of cryptocurrency highlights class issues. It was conceived in the throes of the Great Recession, just after the government bailed out the major U.S. banks, while millions of people lost their homes to foreclosures. Their adult children remember.
Yes, crypto would create its own class of high-emitting, jet-collecting oligarchs. As with the broader economy, crypto inequality is now horrendous, with less than 2% of wallets holding more than 90% of bitcoin. After the pandemic rocked corporate balance sheets, the denizens of Wall Street sidled in, smelling profit. By that point, many ordinary folk had downloaded crypto apps, looking for some bit of relief from a financial setup that erodes people’s dreams. It’s not surprising that underbanked households are particularly drawn to bitcoin. That has to be understood by anyone watching Trump jump on the crypto train, and crypto’s post-election rally.
I downloaded the Coinbase app in 2017, when I was teaching law as an adjunct, scouring online agencies for writing gigs, and working a nighttime grocery job. My co-workers at the store and I were the typical holders, with just a few hundred dollars’ worth, if we could keep it. This was our decentralized lottery, our whimsical hedge for wages in decline, in a world where landlords were keener on collecting rents than fixing roofs.
In October, the Harris team nodded to the pro-crypto pressure to replace Gary Gensler as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission—without pointing to the economic context in which that pressure arose.
Reality of Plunder
In the summer of 2021, defying the IMF, El Salvador’s government made bitcoin a legal alternative to the U.S. dollar, and required businesses to accept it. Here again, context matters.
Rich countries and firms control World Bank and IMF trade policies. And those policies benefit rich countries and firms disproportionately. The racial imbalance in trade advantages is heavy.
The neoliberal framework enables the erosion of workers’ rights in financially struggling countries. As noted by Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan, and Huzaifa Zoomkawala:
For every dollar of aid the South receives, they lose $14 in drain through unequal exchange alone, not counting other kinds of losses like illicit financial outflows and profit repatriation. Of course, the ratio varies by country—higher for some than others—but in all cases, the discourse of aid obscures a darker reality of plunder. Poor countries are developing rich countries, not the other way around.
Rich countries got rich in the first place through a pattern of colonial extraction. They used the extracted resources to build some sort of European descendants’ industrial complex template (EDICT?), leaving hunger, diaspora, abiding poverty, violence, and human rights abuses in their wake, and making it all seem normal and inevitable, so the struggles continue. Demand for computers and cars keep surging, at the expense of human lives and natural habitats. All oppressions are linked, dear friends.
To its credit, El Salvador was first in the world to ban metal mining, in an effort to stop ecocidal gold extraction. Nayib Bukele, alas, wants to end the ban — subjecting environmental and human rights activists to new rounds of state violence. Yet Biden and Harris recently saw fit to “dampen” their critiques of Bukele, catering to anti-migration sentiment in the 2024 U.S. election.
Frick and Frack
Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t hear the Harris campaign talk about dealing with the emissions from bitcoin mining. That could have started important conversations. But today’s Democrats have a dangerously inconsistent take on greenhouse gas emissions.
Yes, Trump and Pence bullshat us about Covid—and the Biden-Harris administration bullshat us about the climate crisis, just as Trump did.
Trump & friends like to scare climate scientists—and Harris likes to boast about having opened new leasing for fossil fuels when casting the tie-breaking vote on the Democrats’ climate law. What? In 2020, candidate Biden vowed to bar new oil or gas drilling on federal lands. But the Democrats would never put a phase-out plan in place.
Then, Harris campaigned in let’s-frack mode.
Trump is pushing for maximum fossil fuel extraction; but the Biden administration couldn’t stop turning federal lands into oil fields. Trump confuses sea level rise with “more oceanfront property”; so as a matter of course natural gas spiked after the U.S. election, and solar energy stocks wilted. But both money-driven parties keep the United States among the ranks of procrastinator nations on meaningful climate action.
If a house were burning, we’d put out the fire. When our collective home is on fire, we add more fuel to it. Our capitalist leaders’ promises of cheap oil and gas exacerbates the ever-worsening hurricanes, floods, droughts and killer crop failures. We’ve never witnessed a deadlier form of political malpractice.
Party Line
The USA has never played well in the sandbox of international law, policy, or just plain co-operation. But that doesn’t mean its people gave anyone a green light for war crimes.
Pro-Palestine protesters had been shouting Come November, we’ll remember all year. Large segments of poll responses in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona showed more interest in voting for a Democratic candidate who would promote an arms embargo on Israel—and also showed that such a candidate wouldn’t hurt the Democrats’ chances. Who knew? A lot of voters resent investing in Israel’s military campaign of genocidal violence. And yet, Tim Walz backed out of meeting with Gazan families who wanted to press these same points. The Democrats wouldn’t even let a Palestinian endorse Harris on stage. And when Palestine supporters disrupted Kamala Harris’s Detroit speech, the now-infamous retort was “If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that; otherwise, I’m speaking.”
Harris kept playing Beyoncé’s Freedom. But what of their freedom? Freedom, Freedom, where are you? Cause I need freedom too.
There was a vague sense of abusive parenting in it all. Harris promised a government that would to treat us well; meanwhile, the other child, Palestine, was taking the abuse—not us, so OK for now. We’d deal with those atrocities later. Or would we? Through social media, VP Harris’s national security adviser flatly said Harris wouldn’t support an arms embargo. Harris’s take on pro-peace protests as a gift to the Trump campaign was chilling. So much for keeping empathetic, energetic people engaged in current human affairs. So much for respecting the people who asked them to stop murdering children.
And this is the other blowback that overtook the campaign. A map of countries that recognize Palestine speaks for itself. And the refusal to listen contributed to the election of a tyrant.
Hillary, Bill, and Obama, and the whole campaign consultant circle proved willing to shame potential voters, leveraging race and sex to extract votes. Their logic had limits. Female candidates from swing states did manage to win seats in Congress. Reproductive rights prevailed in 7 out of 10 state ballot measures, including Arizona’s and Nevada’s—yet the Harris-Walz ticket didn’t get that same strong support. Party leaders themselves came under scrutiny for never having codified Roe v. Wade.
Come on, Democrats. Even amidst your funding of war criminals, Bernie sent you voters. (Sigh.) Why couldn’t you have bothered to relate to those voters? And what about the contract workers, the gig workers, the nation of adjuncts and part-timers piecing jobs together, the people working on wealthy tech companies’ platforms who don’t even get minimum wage? Why couldn’t you have encouraged migrant workers and torture escapees, rather than taunting and frightening them? Where were you with the help that was and is needed? But you’ve got billions for the military industrial complex, even genocide?
What we needed from Harris wasn’t the spectacle. We needed less speaking and more listening. Less joy. More witnessing. We got Cheney endorsements when we needed a commitment to an arms embargo and Medicare for All. Israel provides free universal healthcare to its people. U.S. taxpayers who fund Israel do not even get that basic support.
Let me be clear: the Trump Republicans hold outrageous opinions of people on the left, workers, migrants, and LGBTQI+ folk. Trumpism’s hallmarks (aside from greed) are racism and misogyny. It’s poised to target people whose views, presence, or citizenship Trump and Vance resent. And now I hear people shaming their Republican peers for overlooking the vile speech and conduct of the Trump Republicans. The Dems can’t believe what Trump’s win says about who we are. For sure; yet I must ask: Didn’t it trouble you to know who we already were?
Enemies Within
To Republicans of the Cheney persuasion, Trump was a massive log obstructing the track. Republicans nostalgic for their pre-Trump glory needed to jump on Harris’s train to keep moving, and eventually wrest their influence back. So they bonded with Harris, who looked delighted.
Liz Cheney’s dad Dick designed the Iraq War after leaving the CEO post at Halliburton to come to the White House. As VP, Dick Cheney continued to enjoy deferred salary and stock options in Halliburton.
Halliburton became “the largest private contractor for American forces in Iraq, with $11 billion in government contracts,” as Peter Carlson described the company in The Washington Post. Its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root built the detainee warehouse at Guantánamo Bay.
A certain Yaser Esam Hamdi was apprehended and brought to Guantánamo after a prison uprising in Afghanistan in 2001. Hamdi, it came to light, was a U.S. citizen—born in Louisiana to Saudi parents. Thus, Hamdi’s detention was unconstitutional. It was, that is, until the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the Bush-Cheney administration to push Hamdi’s citizenship aside, because “the review of battlefield captures in overseas conflicts is a highly deferential one.”
VP Cheney expressly recommended calling U.S. citizens suspected of supporting Al-Qaida “enemy combatants” who could be detained indefinitely. Defending military tribunals, Cheney stated: “This is the way we dealt with the people who assassinated Abraham Lincoln and tried to assassinate part of the Cabinet back in 1865.”
Due process be damned; the executive branch gets to decide who goes into storage in the brigs, the camps, or the dungeons.
We Resist
Nature runs the most adept anti-capitalist protests. Capitalism is no match for climate chaos. Florida is turning to “socialism” (Newsweek’s term) to try to keep homes insured, now that hurricanes are causing the profit-hungry companies to flee the state. This is only the beginning, Florida. Welcome to sea-level living in the midst of global heating. This is what Kivalina was telling you.
And now, Trump’s return to the White House brings global climate action to a head. When the basics of living are in jeopardy, who will this government sacrifice? Whose resources will be taken? Any groups or nations serious about climate will need to unite and isolate the U.S. And by the same token, we must sideline the usual suspects.
Xi Jinping is already seeking alliances with EU and Asian countries to offset Trump’s tariff threats. So there we have it. If countries can open networks for mutual assistance, so can NGOs. How about the non-moneyed political parties and movements uniting for mutual support and changemaking?
It’s good to see Trump Republicanism spotlighted in anti-fascism protests led by Just Stop Oil. No time like the present to discuss the colonialist, capitalist mindset, and how to get over it. The alternative is the endless warrior culture—whether the Commander in Chief pursues retribution or joy.
In our late stage as a hyper self-domesticated species, the most ethically unhinged people have nuclear weapons. We need to create an authentic alternative. That can’t happen when people keep electing champions of the “most lethal fighting force in the world.”
We must press for a fairer global economy that stops replicating colonial-era exploitation. Challenge those who chastise third-party voters. Because we must cultivate alternatives to money-driven politics while our atmosphere still exists. It is well past time to sideline the hopelessly corrupt two-party duopoly.
On November 14, 2023, a month into Israel’s genocidal attack on the Palestinians in Gaza, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, one of the leaders of Ansar Allah and of the government of Yemen, delivered a speech that was broadcast on Al-Masirah television. “Our eyes are open to constant monitoring and searching for any Israeli ship,” he said. “The enemy relies on camouflage in its movement in the Red Sea, especially in Bab al-Mandab, and [does] not dare to raise Israeli flags on its ships.” The Bab al-Mandab, the Gate of Grief, is the 14-nautical-mile wide waterway between Djibouti and Yemen. What is interesting is that, by United Nations treaty, a country claims 12 nautical miles as its territorial limit; this means a large part of the waters are within Yemen’s jurisdiction.
Five days later, Yemeni commandos flew in a helicopter over Galaxy Leader, a cargo ship that is registered in the Bahamas and is operated by the Japanese NYK shipping line but that is partially owned by Abraham Ungar (one of Israel’s richest men). The ship continues to be held within Yemen’s territorial waters in the port of Saleef, with its 25 crew members as hostages in Al-Hudaydah governorate. This assault on Galaxy Leader, and then on several other Israeli-owned vessels, halted the traffic of goods to the Port of Eliat, which sits at the end of the Gulf of Aqaba. Squeezed between Egypt and Jordan, this port, which is the only non-Mediterranean Sea access for Israel, no longer has the level of cargo ships that it had before October 2023 and the private operator of the port has said it is almost bankrupt. Over the course of the past year, the port has been hit by drone and missile strikes emanating from Bahrain, Iraq, and Yemen.
U.S. Strikes Are Not Working
Yemen’s government said that it would desist from any attack if Israel stopped its genocidal war against the Palestinians. Since the Israeli attack continues, Yemen’s attacks have also continued. These Yemeni attacks have provoked massive assaults on Yemen’s already fragile infrastructure—including an Israeli attack on Yemen’s port city of Hodeidah in July and punctual missile attacks by the United States. When U. S. President Joe Biden was asked if the U. S. airstrikes and missile strikes on Yemen were working, he answered bluntly: “When you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” In other words, Yemen’s government—erroneously called the Houthis after the Zaydi tradition of Islam followed by a quarter of the Yemeni population—is not going to cease its attacks on Israel just because the U.S. and the Israelis have been hitting their country. Yemeni opposition to the Israeli genocide exceeds the Zaydi community, the Ansar Allah movement, and the Yemeni government. Even Tawakkol Karman, who received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2011 and is a critic of the Yemeni government, has been vocal in her criticism of Israel.
Biden’s admission that the U.S. missile strikes will not stop Yemen from its attacks has been accurate. Yemen faced a murderous bombardment from Saudi Arabia from 2015 to 2023, with the Saudis destroying large parts of the infrastructure in Yemen. And yet, the Yemenis have maintained the ability to strike Israeli targets. In October 2024, the United States military deployed B-2 Spirit bombers to hit what the Pentagon called, “five underground targets.” It was not clear if these weapons depots were destroyed, but it does show the increasing desperation of the U.S. and Israel to stop the Yemeni attacks. The names of the U.S. missions (Operation Prosperity Guardian and Operation Poseidon Archer) sound impressive. They are backed by a roster of carrier strike groups to protect Israel and to hit Yemen as well as groups that attempt to deter Israel’s genocide. There are at least 40,000 U.S. troops in the Middle East and at any given time at least one carrier strike group with aircraft carriers and destroyers. According to the U.S. Navy, there are two destroyers in the Mediterranean Sea (USS Bulkeley and USS Arleigh Burke) and two in the Red Sea (USS Cole and USS Jason Dunham), with Carrier Strike Group 8, anchored by the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, en route to the Mediterranean as USS Abraham Lincoln goes off to the Pacific Ocean. There is a considerable amount of U.S. firepower in the area around Israel.
A Political Solution
Biden has not been the only person to say that the U.S. attacks on Yemen have failed. U. S. Vice Admiral George Wikoff, who leads Operation Prosperity Guardian, addressed an audience in Washington, D.C. from his headquarters in Bahrain in August. Wikoff said that the United States cannot “find a centralized center of gravity” for the Yemenis, which means that it cannot apply “a classic deterrence policy.” If the United States cannot strike fear into the leadership of the Yemeni government, then it cannot halt the Yemeni attacks on Israeli shipping or infrastructure. “We have certainly degraded their capability,” Wikoff said referring to the drones and missiles shot down by the U.S. weapons. Wikoff did not mention that each of the Yemeni missiles and drones cost about $2,000, while the U.S. missiles used to shoot them down cost $2 million. In the end, the Yemenis might be the ones degrading the U.S. military (the Wall Street Journal reported in October that the U.S. is running low on air-defense missiles, and the same paper reportedin June that the U.S. had spent $1 billion on its war on Yemen since October 2023). Like Biden, Wikoff reflected: “Have we stopped them? No.” In an interesting aside, Wikoff said, “The solution is not going to come at the end of a weapon system.”
As far as the Yemeni government is concerned, the only solution will come when Israel ceases its genocide. But even a ceasefire might not be sufficient. In early November, the United Nations official Louise Wateridge posted a video on X of the desolation in northern Gaza, and then wrote, “An entire society now a graveyard.” The ability of the Yemeni government to cease shipping to Israel and to pin down the United States off its coast might embolden it to continue with this if Israel continues its illegal policies of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Both Wikoff and Biden agree that the U.S. policy has not worked, and Wikoff even said that the solution is not going to be through military force. It will have to be political.
In thousands of ways, we are taught to accept the world we live in as the only possible one, but thousands of other ways of organizing homes, cities, schools, societies, economies, and cosmologies have existed and could exist.
We started a project called Made Differently: designed to play with the possibility and to overcome the suspicion—instilled in us every day—that life is limited, miserable, and boring.
Our first focus is Cities Made Differently, exploring different ways of living together. Read and imagine four different kinds of cities taken from our book which are listed below, and continue your exploration, downloadable at a4kids.org, for drawing and dreaming.
City of Greed
What if you had to live in a city whose citizens must pay not only for housing and health care but also for the air they breathe?
The dystopian novel The Air Merchant takes place in a secret underground factory city. Mr. Bailey, the factory owner, condenses air from the atmosphere and sells it to his fellow citizens for a profit. Eventually, the Earth’s atmosphere thins, creating a catastrophic shortage of breathable air. With the price of air increasing, fewer and fewer humans can afford to keep breathing.
When people can’t pay for the air they breathe, the police throw them out of the city. Everyone lives in constant fear of suffocating, thinking only of how to earn enough money to spare their loved ones and themselves that terrible fate. The food company Nestlé is often criticized for its irresponsible use of water in India, Pakistan, and other developing countries. Captured in the documentary film We Feed the World (2005), former Nestlé chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe said:
“It’s a question of whether we should privatize the normal water supply for the population. And there are two different opinions on the matter… NGOs, who bang on about declaring water a public right… That’s an extreme solution. The other view says that water is a foodstuff like any other, and like any other foodstuff, it should have a market value. Personally, I believe it’s better to give a foodstuff a value so that we’re all aware it has its price…”
City as a Family
Imagine a city without any strangers, where everything is shared, and everyone looks after each other. There are no shops, no money, and no danger at all.
We think of the family as a group that practices “basic communism”: from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. Any family is thought to be protected by bonds of kinship from the cruel laws of the outside world. Unlike businesses, rarely will a family throw out a sick child or an elderly parent because they are no longer “revenue-generating assets.”
According to Roman law, which still underlies the value system of Western societies, a family was all those people living within the household of a paterfamilias or father whose authority over them was recognized as absolute. Under the protection of her father, a woman might be spared abuse from her husband, but their children, slaves, and other dependents were his to do with as he wanted.
According to early Roman law, a father was fully within his rights to whip, torture, or sell them. A father could even execute his children, provided that he found them to have committed capital crimes. With his slaves, he didn’t even need that excuse.
The patriarchal family is also the model for authoritarianism. In ancient Rome, the patriarch had the right to treat his household members as property rather than as equal human beings.
The Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that humankind originally lived in small bands of hunter-gatherers composed of close friends and relatives until big cities and agriculture emerged, and with them wars, greed, and exploitation.
However, archaeology shows us numerous examples of how people in different times and across different parts of the Earth lived in large metropolitan areas while managing their collective affairs on a fairly egalitarian basis. At the same time, there have always been small communities where status inequality prevailed and a privileged minority at the top benefited by exploiting the rest.
We know from our personal experience that in almost every family there are elements of both authoritarianism and baseline communism. This contradiction never fully goes away but different cultures handle it differently.
A City оf Runners
The people who live in this city believe that real life is all about constant competition.
The people in a city of runners find it fascinating or even necessary to keep track of who among them is more important, who is richer, smarter, more beautiful, or more worthy. There are many ideas about how the city came to have habits like this.
One of the city’s revered philosophers, Thomas Hobbes, believed that the natural state of human beings is to seek violent domination over their neighbors, and that society without the authority of the sovereign would quickly turn into a battle of all against all. Constant competition between people is thus seen as an enjoyable game as compared to real war, which is always lurking around the corner.
Naturally, in cities like this, there must be some who are poor, ugly, and unhappy. Just as in some children’s games, there are winners and losers.
People living in the city of runners foster an admiration for winning in their kids, and an ambition to surpass their peers in all areas. Children in the city of runners have no interest in learning together, sharing, or mutual aid. Helping someone pass an exam is considered “cheating” and is strictly punished. All their lives, adults are engaged in constant competition over beauty, skill, and wealth.
Runners believe that people who live differently from them and who refuse to play their games simply choose to be losers. During the 1968 student unrest in Western countries, some disaffected young people abandoned the big cities for the “sleepy” provinces where they created autonomous settlements, many of which still exist today.
Underground City
Living in an underground city could be safe and convenient. Without weather, there’s no risk of storms. And no trees mean no forest fires.
Underground cities have been around practically forever. The city of Derinkuyu in the Turkish province of Cappadocia, for example, was built between 2000 and 1000 BCE. The landscape of volcanic tuff—a unique soft stone—could be hollowed out without requiring complex tools, making room to house 20,000 people. The underground city boasted a stable, corrals, churches, schools, canteens, bakeries, barns, wine cellars, and workshops. The intricate system of tunnels connecting it all together meant that intruders would not know their way around and quickly get lost.
Tunnels are found underneath many cities. Rome is famous for its catacombs, and at one time subterranean burial chambers were commonplace. These days, tunnels tend to be for underground trains called subways. In Beijing, the residents became so fearful of nuclear war that they built an entire bunker city, with 30 kilometers of tunnels connecting underground houses, schools, hospitals, shops, libraries, theaters, and factories. There’s even an underground roller skating rink!
Mexico City has not gone as far as to build an entire city underground, but architect Esteban Suarez is planning an underground apartment building. And what a building it will be! Piercing the center of the Mexican capital with its tip will be a 65-story pyramid—no wonder they call it the earthscraper. The glass-enclosed area above the surface will be for recreation and outdoor concerts.
Underground, the building will be heated and powered with geothermal energy, making the pyramid energy self-sufficient. It’s not easy building downward into the earth, but building underground won’t disrupt the historical landscape of the city. And it evades the city’s building codes restricting the height of structures to eight floors.
Mirny, a town in the Russian far north, has its eye on an abandoned diamond mine as the site for an underground city. There are no more diamonds to be found, but its abandonment threatens neighboring villages with cave-ins and landslides. Moscow architect Nikolai Lyutomsky has proposed a solution: building a strong concrete skeleton inside the quarry to strengthen its walls while covering its top with a transparent dome, resulting in an underground eco-city fit for 10,000 people.
Located in the Yakutia Republic, the town has a harsh arctic climate with temperatures reaching as low as -60 degrees Celsius in the winter. But underground, the temperature never falls below zero. The quarry would thus be good for both people and plants. Its architects have allocated most of the city’s inner space to vertical farms. Farms for food production, technical laboratories, factories, and research centers are located underground and, aboveground, there will be play centers and schools. Moving between the underground and the surface is quick and easy.
Going underground to avoid possible misfortunes—might seem like a good idea, but there’s a catch: if you don’t like the rules of your community it’s tough to get out. How important is it to be able to easily leave one community, whose rules no longer suit you, and join a different one?
This excerpt is adapted from Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber’s Cities Made Differently (MIT Press, 2024, all rights reserved) and is distributed in partnership with Human Bridges.
Thomas Friedman, screengrab from Zoom interview with Katie Couric.
The New York Times’ leading columnist, Thomas Friedman, has devised an answer to “How Trump Could Earn an Unexpected Place in History.” Friedman believes there is an opportunity for Donald Trump to exert pressure on Israelis and Palestinians, which would help the president “find a place in the history books that you did not expect.” This is part delusion, part illusion, and part confusion, all hallmarks of Friedman’s writings on the Israeli genocidal campaign in Gaza over the past year.
Friedman argues that the “one common denominator among Israeli Jews, Israeli Arabs, and West Bank Palestinians” is that they are “exhausted by this war.” But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu isn’t exhausted; his actions in Gaza and Lebanon are prolonging the war, which serves his interest. After all, the war is his “Get out of Jail Free” card as well as his instrument for remaining the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history.
And there is no guarantee that Netanyahu’s immediate successor will be less dependent on the ultra-orthodox community for forming a coalition government than he is. In fact, the majority of the Israeli population appears to support Netanyahu’s genocidal bombardment policy, which has found its way to Lebanon. Hundreds of Lebanese children have been killed by Israeli bombardments, and more than 1,000 children have been injured. In the past two months, more than 400,000 Lebanese children have been displaced from their homes, according to the UN children’s agency.
Friedman also falsely credits Trump as the “rare American president” who formed a detailed plan for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians. But this so-called peace plan, called “Peace to Prosperity,” gave Israel the right to annex 30 percent of the West Bank where most Israeli settlers live, with the remainder of the territory becoming a demilitarized Palestinian state. Trump proposed that the Palestinians would be compensated for the loss of territory by receiving land from Israel’s Negev Desert, and that Gaza and the West Bank would be connected by roads and tunnels. Imagine any Israeli government accepting the idea of a tunnel under Israel linking Gaza and the West Bank.
The religious right dominates the Israeli government, and has no interest in a two-state solution. There is even speculation in Israel that the Netanyahu government will move to formally annex the West Bank in the near term in order to stop any speculation regarding a two-state solution. This step would end any possibility that any Arab state, particularly Saudi Arabia, would contribute to the rehabilitation of Gaza. Throughout the West Bank, moreover, Arab communities are currently facing violent attacks from Israeli settlers as well as Israeli police and security forces. The Nakba of 1948 lives on, still taking Palestinian lives and settlements.
The naming of Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and prominent Christian Evangelist, as the ambassador to Israel does not suggest that the Trump administration will have any interest in a two-state solution. Huckabee not only opposes such a solution, but he says there is “no such thing as the West Bank” and “no such thing as settlements.” He prefers the Israeli ultra-Orthodox terms for the West Bank, which are “Judea” and “Samaria.” And he refers to the illegal settlements as “communities,” “cities,” or “neighborhoods.” Maybe Friedman doesn’t understand that Trump made his position clear in his debate with President Joe Biden when he said that America should let Israel “finish the job” in its war with Hamas.
The capstone to this Orwellian language is Huckabee’s claim that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian,” which too many Israeli prime ministers, including Golda Meir, also believed. Many of Trump’s other appointees are one-sided supporters for Huckabee’s beliefs as well as for Israel’s genocidal military campaign that has killed so many innocent civilians, particularly women and children.
According to Friedman, the revival of the Trump plan “would signal to Iran that Trump intends to isolate Tehran militarily—and diplomatically—by…helping realize the ‘Palestinians’ legitimate desire for self-determination.” Friedman’s endorsement of a hard-line stance toward Iran, which echoes the hard-line positions of both Trump and Netanyahu is additional evidence of the columnist’s failure to understand the policies that are not working in the Middle East. At a time when it is possible to begin a dialogue with Tehran, Friedman is supporting militarized policies that have failed. The Persian Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, are reaching out to Iran. The United States should be telling the Israelis that we will be doing so as well.
Friedman believes that, if Trump returns to his “detailed plan for coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians,” he could be “remembered as the president who preserved Israel as a Jewish democracy and helped to securely birth a Palestinian state alongside it.” It’s more likely that there be more support for an Israeli Prime Minister, even one who has been charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC). In an unprecedented action against a pro-Western official, the ICC has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. Citing testimony from journalists in Gaza, who have become Israeli targets, the judges said there were “reasonable grounds” that Netanyahu and Gallant bore “criminal responsibility” for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity during the war between Israel and Hamas.
Photograph Source: Mstyslav Chernov – CC BY-SA 4.0
There are many reasons for regretting the resurrection of Donald Trump, but one overwhelming reason for welcoming it is that he is a peacemaker not a war maker, and will actively lever America’s power to pacify an increasingly dangerous world.
Western leaders do not actively seek war with Russia, China, or Iran. But they do not actively seek peace. Ukraine is a case in point.
Our leaders have repeatedly stated that it is up to Ukraine to define the terms on which it will make peace. Meanwhile, they will continue to supply it with ‘all it takes’ for victory. Given that the big demographic and military imbalance between Ukraine and Russia precludes a Ukrainian victory at the present level of support, this stance leaves only two options: Ukraine’s defeat or a dangerous escalation with unpredictable consequences.
President Biden’s unconfirmed authorization for Ukraine to use US-made ATCAMS to strike targets in the Kursk region comes too late to affect the outcome of the war. While sufficiently limited to avert a direct conflict between NATO and Russia, it is too limited to prevent a Ukrainian defeat. In any case, it holds for only another two months. Trump’s team has indicated that the new President will bring simultaneous pressure on both Putin and Zelensky to end the war quickly.
Any successful peace initiative will have to accept that this conflict has no single bad guy. We do not recognize Putin’s view of NATO as a beast with encircling claws. At the same time, Russians can be forgiven for thinking that the Western narrative is not quite as defensive as it seems. “The spread of our values makes us safer” declared Tony Blair in Chicago in 1999, justifying NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia. This sets out the ground for forcible regime change when the opportunity offers. The underlying message is that democracy is the peaceful, dictatorship the warlike form of the state, so a war for democracy is necessarily a war for peace. Many Western analysts view the war in Ukraine as a war for regime change in Russia, which is why they cannot contemplate anything less than a Ukrainian victory.
Christian teaching offers more secure grounds for negotiating an end to the Ukraine conflict. According to Augustine of Hippo, the claims of peace are paramount. A perfectly just peace is unattainable in this world, but humanity may be brought closer to it. War may be a means of doing so, so that absolute pacifism is untenable. But since right and wrong are rarely unambiguous, justice is always relative, and war, therefore, must be waged with restraint and limitation. (Some analysts prefer the term ‘justifiable’ war to capture the essence of the thought that no war can be perfectly just.)
What is a justifiable war? Chapter 7, Article 51) of the UN Charter recognizes the ‘inherent right of self-defense’ if a member is subject to armed attack. In UN terms, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was both unjust and illegal; Ukraine is fighting a just war in self-defense; the Security Council is powerless to stop it in the face of Russia’s veto; and Ukraine deserves all the support we can give it.
The weakness of just war theory is twofold: in the extension of the idea of ‘defense’ to the defense of values rather than territory and recourse to ‘preventive’ war even when there is no attack or immediate danger of one. In such formulations defence and attack lose their commonsense referents. Was the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 defensive or aggressive? The US claimed it was fighting a defensive war against Saddam Hussein to prevent him using ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (which he turned out not to have) at some time in the future. This elasticity of reasoning invites an indefinite inflation of the meaning of defence. Russia might, and did, justify its invasion of Ukraine as a preventive move to counter NATO expansion.
No less formidable is the difficulty of defining a just peace. Augustine thought of a just peace not in legal terms but as a peace which would last as long as it could in a wicked world. He rejected the imperial (Roman) model of peace secured by obliteration of the enemy as too costly in terms of carnage and bloodletting –’they made a desert and called it peace’ said Tacitus of Roman imperial methods. Rather he adopted the Aristotelian idea of peace as orderly proportion. ‘Order’ wrote Augstine ‘is the adjustment of the like and unlike each to its own place’. This was partly realised by the Westphalian system of the ‘balance of power’, though balance of powers would give a better idea of it, with each part contributing to the harmony of the whole.
Any peace project based on the idea that freedom is indivisible, and that an attack on a single person’s freedom is an attack on everyone’s is bound to break down in face of the diversity of cultures and powers. Yet this remains the official western view. The second coming of Trump, with his isolationist instincts, promises to break this mold, For it is not the universalization of our values that foreign policy should aim for, but the harmonization of the like with the unlike.
Sugar-cane planting ceremony in Merauke, West Papua, July 2024. Indonesian presidential office handout/Muchlis Jr.
“By way of transmigration … the different ethnic groups will in the long run disappear because of integration…and there will be one kind of man.”
– Martano, Indonesian Minister of Transmigration, March 1985
“Brigadier-General Ali Murtopo told us in 1969 that if we want to be independent we should write to the Americans and ask them if they would be good enough to find us a place on the moon.”
Indonesia’s new president, war criminal Prabowo Subianto, couldn’t even wait to be sworn in. He established a “strategic initiative” of five “Vulnerable Area Buffer Infantry Battalions” in the Keerom, Sarmi, Boven Digoel, Merauke, and Sorong Regencies of West Papua to “enhance security” with an additional 5,000 troops as backup for the 25,000 already there. According to the Armed Forces Chief, General Agus Subiyanto, “the main goal of the new battalions is to assist the government in accelerating development and improving the prosperity of the Papuan people”. He didn’t mention a possible future presence of militias, which is Prabowo’s way of dealing with populations that resist military-improved prosperity. On 21 October, just one day after Prabowo’s inauguration, Muhammad Iftitah Sulaiman Suryanagara, Minister for Transmigration, announced plans to resume the government’s transmigration programme in West Papua. It was needed, he said “for enhancing unity and providing locals with welfare”. Prabowo himself hotfooted it to West Papua on 3 November to check out a programme aiming to create three million hectares (an area about as big as Belgium) of food estates across the country. Reuters calls this a “self-sufficiency drive”. Forest, wetland, and savannah will be turned into rice farms (in which Indonesia’s military has a major stake), sugarcane plantations, and other infrastructure, which would include military installations to guard the sequestered land. This “key food programme” is actually ecocide. In net terms, it will add approximately 392 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere.
For the past six decades, Indonesia has been an occupying colonial power in West Papua. The United Nations is responsible for this and its atrocious consequences, as John Saltford meticulously details in his account of the 1969 UN-orchestrated handover of West Papua to Indonesia in a so-called Act of Free Choice, which was nothing more than “a ridiculous and overtly manipulated denial of West Papuan rights”. Ever since, overt manipulation of the reality of the West Papuan people has been the order of the day in the international arena. The murderous farce is officially blessed as Indonesia has been a member of the UN Human Rights Council since 2006. The UN has refrained from confronting Indonesia about its refusal to allow an official visit to West Papua, although more than a hundred countries have demanded it. After all, investigating crimes against humanity committed by one of its leading human rights “defenders” might be awkward. “Universal” human rights law turns out to be for some but not for others. And “some” can kill and otherwise destroy “others” with impunity.
The transmigration equation is actually this: moving people in = moving people out. Whether they want to move in or want to move out. Some people don’t have the right to decide these things. That transmigration in West Papua comes with so many troops, that it is so highly secretive, is enough to suggest that “enhancing unity” and “providing welfare” are not the agenda at all. In both origin and destination, transmigration is not voluntary but more due to deceit and brute force, respectively. In itself, it’s another form of militarisation because there are many former military personnel secreted among transmigrants, especially in border areas. As the Free Papua Movement (OPM) leader James Nyaro warned, “Don’t think of these settlers as ordinary civilians. They are trained military personnel disguised as civilian settlers”.
Since West Papua with its torture mode of governance isn’t open to independent observers it’s almost impossible to get accurate figures of the numbers in the equation but a recent estimate puts the total number of internally displaced people at about 80,000. This displacement means denial of the basic rights needed for survival: food, shelter, health, freedom from suffering, torture, inhuman treatment, danger, and from fear, freedom of movement, liberty, and security. Genocide Watch reports that some 500,000 West Papuans have been killed since the Indonesian occupation began and, in 2015, the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization calculated that West Papua’s population was approximately 4.4 million, but only around two million were Indigenous West Papuans. The figures show that Indonesian settlers outnumber West Papuans by some 10% and that about 25% of the population has been murdered. In 2004, a Yale University study concluded that the evidence “… strongly suggests that the Indonesian government has committed proscribed acts with the intent to destroy the West Papuans as such, in violation of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and the customary international law prohibition this Convention embodies.” Twenty years later, the evidence of genocide is even more compelling but even more hushed up.
Why is this horrible case of genocide, ecocide and, in the end, human species suicide (“unwitting suicide, causing one’s own death while pursuing other ends”) being ignored? One explanation comes from Edward S. Herman. There are “good and bad genocidists”. In the “first fine careless rapture” of Indonesia’s New Order (military dictatorship), its genocidal project and mechanisms were lauded and assisted by the World Bank, “development aid” bodies like the IGGI (Inter-governmental Group on Indonesia), and funded by World Food Program, the EEC, Asian Development Bank, Islamic Development Bank, West Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United States, and the UNDP. After throwing West Papua to wolves in New Order clothing, the “international community” has, by omission and commission, embraced this as a “good” genocide, perpetrated by our genocidists and it has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to stop it. Underlying this fact is racism, murderous, systemic racism.
Transmigration comes with a lot of baggage. You only have to look at the history of transmigration in West Papua to understand how transmigration, European and settler colonial in origin, belongs to the “good” genocide package. It began in Dutch colonial times, in the early nineteenth century, when poor settlers sent to the outer islands were forced to provide plantation labour, with very high mortality rates. The standard—a very low bar for the rights of some—was set. After independence, Sukarno continued the programme, now planning to transport millions of people from the islands of Java, Madura, Bali, and Lombok to less densely populated settlement areas in Sumatra, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, and West Papua. His original plan, announced in 1949, was to move 48 million people over 35 years, thereby reducing Java’s population from 54 million to 31 million. However, the targets of this immense social engineering endeavour (the World Bank’s “most irresponsible project” in the words of Survival International) were never achieved. Between 1979 and 1984, the peak transmigration years during Suharto’s New Order military regime, 535,000 families (almost 2.5 million people) were moved.
The rights of transmigrants themselves, many of them poor peasants who are either tricked or coerced into leaving their homes, are also violated, as transmigration is a matter of “national security”. They are moved to state- or privately-owned estates, where the company concerned, often a military asset, cultivates twenty percent of the land while the transmigrants, now a de facto coolie labour force, must cultivate the rest and sell the crops to the company. They are promised eventual ownership of 1.5 hectares of cultivable land and 0.5 hectares for a house and garden but, when crops are eventually produced some years later, they must pay for the land by reimbursing some the bank credit used for the company’s initial investment. They live in compounds far from the land they’re allocated, and are also in danger from attacks from the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNPB) or displaced local people.
For West Papuans, the arrival of transmigrants was preceded by forced displacement as the rule in transmigrant areas was one Papuan family to nine non-Papuan families. By 1984, about 700,000 hectares of land had been confiscated (about a third of the size of Belgium, to stay with the earlier comparison) without any compensation. In 1981, the counterinsurgency “Operation Clean Sweep” (suggesting that West Papuans were rubbish to be cleared away, like their rainforest) came with the slogan Biar tikus lari kehutan, asal ayam piara dikandang (Let the rats flee to the jungle so the chickens can breed in the coop), which also says a lot about the almost captive status of transmigrants.
It’s been known for more than forty years that transmigration is a fiasco within its own framework of the benign “development project”. Costing an average of US$7,000 per family in the mid-1980s, it was an economic disaster that gobbled up almost 40% of the economic development budget of the outer islands. Rather than alleviating poverty there, transmigration aggravated it and spread it more widely. Most transmigrants were worse off after moving. Population pressure in Java wasn’t relieved. The environmental calamity it caused was clear from the start. Yet, with World Bank and Asian Development Bank loans, plus bilateral financial aid, transmigration kept expanding so that, from 1980 to 1990, ten times more people were moved than in the previous seven decades. By 1991 forest loss was estimated at 1.2 million hectares per annum.
Transmigrasi has strategic and economic (cash crop) goals other than the mostly stated aim of reducing population pressure. In 1987, the Department of Transmigration was fairly honest for once: ‘‘the frontier regions of Kalimantan, Irian Jaya, East Timor have the priority for migrating military people for the purpose of Defense and Security’’. The idea was to seed active and retired military personnel into transmigration settlements and administration to create buffer zones in “trouble spots”. When he headed the Cendrawasih/ XVII Regional Command in West Papua, Brigadier-General Sembiring Meliala referred to ‘‘The Basic Pattern of Territorial Management Specific to Irian Jaya, Employing the Method of Community Development Centers.’’ By this he meant camps to which the Indigenous peoples of West Papua would be moved after being ejected from their traditional villages, where they were to be “Javanised” with special courses of ‘‘guidance and instruction.’’ In fact, transmigrasi is a depraved plan that aims to strengthen “national defence and security” (read: military benefits) by means of mass murder and at the price of global warming with all its planet-wide consequences: après moi le déluge.
Propaganda is another important aspect. Posters distributed by an organism whose name declares that West Papuans are aliens—Project for the Guidance of Alien Societies of the Directorate General for Social Guidance (Projekt Pembinaan Kemasyarakatan Suku-Suku Terasing)—and text books that were distributed in the early 1980s, by which time twenty-four major transmigration sites had been established on 700,000 hectares of appropriated land, show West Papuans as primitive, dirty and lazy and, depicted beside them, Javanese as neat, clean, civilised, and hardworking. The term Papuan was generally expunged, or Papua and Maluku were lumped together as one geographical, ethnic, and cultural entity. Information like the following was disseminated: “The inhabitants of Maluku and Irian both come from the same ethnic stock: Irianese. … [T]he countryside of Irian has not yet been cultivated because of the lack of people. Even their staple food, sago, just grows wild in the jungle.” The government still refers to transmigration in abandoned land.
This is all part of what settler colonialism scholar Patrick Wolfe calls the “logic of elimination”, whereby Indigenous populations are obliterated to gain control of land and resources. “The deployment of five new battalions in Merauke is best understood in terms of Wolfe’s logic of elimination.” In another word, genocide. But it’s not just a local genocide that the Indonesian military hopes to tuck away behind restricted access to West Papua and a sweeping press ban, because it’s also ecocide. And this affects the whole world.
So far, the results in Merauke, for example, are that Papuans number less than 40% of the population, life expectancy is 35 years for men and 38 for women, and HIV rates are extremely (and suspiciously) high. The Indonesian government, boasting about how it’s strengthening environmental standards, plans to take two million hectares of land in this region for a sugarcane project of five consortiums of Indonesian and foreign companies. Since this—“the world’s biggest deforestation project”—is designated a project of “strategic national importance”, Indonesian law allows the government to expel Indigenous communities from their land. President Prabowo Subianto’s first official visit to “West Papua” wasn’t to West Papua, but to the Merauke food estate, the National Strategic Project, to what, for him, was a part of Indonesia that needs the protection of heavily armed troops against the local Malind people who are protesting the seizure and destruction of their land, customary forests, and villages, without any prior warning, let alone consultation. Destruction of their very lives. West Papuans are fighting back, not only as an organised National Liberation Army but also as groups and individuals armed with bows and arrows or weapons acquired on the black market from low-ranking Indonesian soldiers whose welfare is neglected. Stripped of their identity as ancestral keepers of the land and forest by acts of capitalist violence, in which the agribusiness crops are in themselves part of the destructive machinery, Indigenous people become “terrorists” threatening Indonesia’s national security, and therefore exterminable.
Alien monocrops, affecting both natural forests and peatlands, significantly increase carbon emissions as well as the direct devastation they cause. Rainforests are often described as Earth’s oldest living ecosystems. Some have existed in their present form for at least 70 million years. For example, the Amazon rainforest probably appeared some 55 million years ago during the Eocene era. Rainforests cover only 6% of the Earth’s surface but contain more than half its plant and animal species, so they’re extraordinarily dense with all kinds of flora and fauna which, since they also help to regulate climate, are essential to human wellbeing. They are usually structured in four layers: emergent (top layer, up to 60 metres high); canopy (about five metres thick, forming a roof over the two remaining layers, creating a humid, dark environment below, and protecting topsoil); understory (dark, still, and damp); and forest floor (where decomposers like slugs, termites, worms, and fungi thrive, breaking decaying fallen organic matter into nutrients). Although each layer, with different levels of sunlight, water, and air circulation, has its own characteristics, they belong to an interdependent system. When a tree is cut down, at least four different whole ecosystems are destroyed. And every single species that disappears has knock-on effects on other species including, eventually, humans. In this sense, a single tree can represent the whole forest. The rainforest is many worlds that are unknown to the marauding species—the humans that come to cut them down—who see only cash crops where whole cosmologies have thrived since human time began.
It’s no coincidence that Prabowo has announced a new transmigration programme at the same time as his ecocidal deforestation regime intensifies. These conjoined twins of his agenda are the two sides of Indonesian colonialism in West Papua: exploitation and settlement by dispossession. Benny Wenda, Interim President of the United Liberation Movement for West Papua tells it from his people’s perspective: “Indonesia only wants West Papua’s resources; they do not want our people. The wealth of West Papua—gas from Bintuni Bay, copper and gold from the Grasberg mine, palm oil from Merauke—has been sucked out of our land for six decades, while our people are replaced with Javanese settlers loyal to Jakarta.”
Although Rafael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide”, was greatly concerned about colonial genocides, he is generally and mistakenly seen as having a more limited understanding of the word, in “the wake of the Holocaust in order reflect its features as a state-organized and ideologically-driven program of mass murder”. Israel’s present, horrific genocide in Palestine, a moral wound inflicted on all humanity, has laid bare the deep colonial, racist roots of the Westphalian world order, supposedly of equal sovereign states. Rather, it is an order of “unequal subjects; sovereigns and colonized; and of states, empires, settlers, and colonies”. As such, it normalises mass shredding of defenceless people, especially children, and their debasement to unidentifiable body parts in plastic bags. The fact that its victims tend to be dark-skinned is part of an ongoing colonial legacy arising from the destructive forces of European capitalism. The results in terms of international law, including genocide law, are visible in the power of veto used by the United States to block proposals put before the UN Security Council ordering Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza. “The right to veto is not only a privilege of the victors in WW2; it is an advantage given to themselves by the same vanquishers that simultaneously happened to be at the time former and new empires.”
If the international legal system is dominated by old imperial powers and newer transnational companies, every aspect of exploitation, subjugation, and even genocide in former colonies will be ignored, disguised and, in some cases, encouraged. In West Papua, hiding behind innocuous terms like development, enhancing unity, welfare, and sustainability are the facts that directly affect the other people, the original peoples of West Papua.
1) The causes of political and social unrest in West Papua extend far beyond the question of self-determination; the people are not just “rebels” as they’re often depicted but are threatened with extermination.
2) They’re not a “primitive” lesser or alien species but wise human kin who know how to live in harmony with nature and who, protecting their environment (and hence that of everyone), are said to stand in the way of progress (read: destruction).
3) They have no rights as people or as individuals as the international legal order doesn’t protect them, but lets the genocide happen.
4) They’re frontline victims of the civilising lie which, now taking the form of global warming, is telling us what civilisation has done to this planet, humanity’s habitat.
5) West Papua rainforest custodians are subjected to an alien military mindset or, in practice, everyday brutality and devastation. In a detailed study, Yezid Sayigh spells out the scary reality of what military-managed “sustainability” means in Egypt, and the comparison with the Indonesian regime is relevant because the Indonesian military is also heavily involved in extractive sector business.
6) The West Papua people are clearly subject to the “logic of elimination” by occupying forces seeking to gain control of land and resources.
7) Not all genocides are highly organised, high-tech mass killing projects. Genocide can be achieved through gradual dispossession, destruction, and small-scale but constantly repeated killing, as is happening in West Papua, and also against many other Indigenous peoples.
8) As genocide scholar Kjell Anderson asks, if West Papuans “do not regard themselves as Indonesians and are not regarded as such by other Indonesians”, how can they survive as a people in the militarised, hegemonic state of Indonesia?
9) The UN is still dodging its responsibility for the genocide in West Papua even though its own human rights experts express “serious concerns about the deteriorating human rights situation … citing shocking abuses against indigenous Papuans, including child killings, disappearances, torture and mass displacement of people”.
Rafael Lemkin understood genocide as aiming at the annihilation of essential elements of a group’s conditions of life: political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, and moral. Whatever the group and wherever it was. All of these elements were assaulted in European colonial projects around the world, and are being destroyed by Indonesia’s colonial project in West Papua, most recently by the revival of transmigration and deliberate destruction of Indigenous cultures and ways of life. As philosopher Imge Oranlı observes, genocide denial “is a peculiar phenomenon that speaks to the ontology of evil. Here, the evilness of an evil event is not readily evident to the public because the evil in question was socially and politically produced by the same ideology that continues to shape the collective social imagination of that very public.” The western collective and social imagination is shaped by the deeds and ideology that enabled a good part of European “civilisation”. So, some genocides are more acceptable than others. Once again, think of Belgium: what if a European country of about the same size as the recent land appropriation in West Papua was subjected to the same genocidal project. Would the “international community” remain passive and silent?
“Good” or “bad” genocide, the issues are inescapably the same: genocide (humans kill others of their own nature)→ecocide (as part of this project, humans kill nature) and, in the end→suicide (humans kill themselves).
Photograph Source: Staff Sgt. Jamal Sutter – Public Domain
When a political party loses its legitimacy, its traditional priorities and moral compass, its candidates lose elections. Opting not to hold an open convention, which would have tested political viability, the DNC (acting on the President’s recommendation) invited Kamala Harris to replace Biden on the ticket. For many Democrats, the lack of a competitive primary undermined the legitimacy of process.
In a misguided effort to attract anti-Trump Republicans, Harris enlisted conservative Republican Liz Cheney to join her on the campaign trail. This strategy failed. The Republicans stuck with Trump or voted third party. In the effort, Harris alienated many core supporters who saw her cave on such issues as fracking, immigration and health care. Her policy backtracking was another blow to party legitimacy.
An even more delegitimizing strategy was to take for granted the support of working-class voters and labor unions. Both UAW President Shawn Fain and Senator Bernie Sanders were noticeably absent from Harris’ campaign events, which included instead entertainment celebrities and Cheney. Commenting on the election outcome, Bernie said it “should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
The possibly heaviest, blow to party legitimacy was the large defection of progressives and other Democrats who were horrified by the ongoing genocide in Gaza and by the continued transfer of U.S. weaponry to Israel for its wars in both Gaza and Lebanon. Harris lost the popular count by five million votes. At the same time, she finished 12 million votes below the 81.2 million votes Biden received in 2020. Where did those missing Democratic voters go?
The November 10 New York Times featured an op-ed entitled “Democrats Ignored Gaza, and It Brought Down Their Party.” Its author. Peter Beinart, a contributing Opinion writer for the Times and an editor at large of Jewish Currents offered an answer to the missing voter question. He observed that,
“Over the past year, Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians–funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media–has triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activation in a generation.”
He went on to say, “Many Americans roused to action by their government’s complicity in Gaza’s destruction have no personal connection to Palestine or Israel. Like many Americans who protested South African apartheid or the Vietnam War, their motive is not ethnic or religious. It is moral.”
I could identify with Beinart’s remarks. When Biden began enabling Israel’s genocide last October, I left the Democratic Party after 68 years of loyal membership. My vote on November 5 was a write-in for Bernie Sanders.
Since then, I have come to realize that Biden has not been alone in starting or expanding U.S. wars of choice. Of the seven Democratic presidents in office from 1945, only Jimmy Carter managed to avoid war (though it was the Iranian hostage crisis and his failure to rescue U.S. hostages that denied him a second term).
How can the Democratic Party recover its moral compass, with proxy wars raging in both Gaza and Ukraine? Why should the U.S. continue to give Israel an exception from international law and United Nations condemnation? According to Beinart, “Democrats must begin to align their policies on Israel and Palestine” with the broader principles of human equality and respect for international law. “The Palestinian exception,” says Beinart, “is not just immoral. It is politically disastrous.”
Unless the Democratic Party abandons its current war policies in favor of international diplomacy, it won’t be able to win back the support of its important progressive wing. It will continue to lose elections.
Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain
There is no justifiable explanation for lame duck President Joe Biden’s sudden turnabout decision to okay Ukraine’s use of longer-range US ATACMS ballistic missiles t which can hit targets as much as 200 miles inside Russia.
Biden and his ironically-dubbed national security “brain trust” of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan have for most of this year been nixing Kiev’s request for such missiles as well as permission for Ukraine use Britain’s Storm Shadow stand-off air-launched long-range cruise missiles to hit Russian targets. They did this arguing that such attacks on the Russian heartland could lead to a spiraling escalation of that war — an escalation that could quickly go nuclear.
Now those two out-of-their-depth but supremely over-confident advisors and the doddering outgoing president they serve are claiming the US “has to respond” to Russia’s supposed escalation of the war. They are referring to Vladimir Putin’s acceptance of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s offer of over 10.000 North Korean troops to assist Russia in driving invading Ukrainian forces out of its Kursk region north of Ukraine.
But the Ukrainian invasion of the Kursk Oblast itself was an significant escalation or this conflict and the US had made it worse by providing shorter range missiles, called HIMARs, which were already bing launched from Ukraine into Russian territory.
Basically, the Ukrainian-Russian war, now 1000-days running, has been following an all-too-common pattern of tit-for-tat escalation of the kind that led to WWI, the US CiVil War, the Korean War and the Spanish-American War, The problem is that at some point one of those tits or tats is likely to lead to a situation where Russia, feeling hard-pressed by a more powerful adversary in the US and its NATO allies, will feel sufficiently threatened to resort to a nuclear response. And the nature of nuclear war which is fought by missiles, not by the ponderous moving of large numbers of troops and motorized weapons, is that the process of escalations is measured in days, hours or even minutes.
Will this latest move up the escalation ladder, providing Ukraine’s military with US (and British) rockets that can hit targets deep inside Russia, and doing so in both cases with the necessary assistance of US military satellites for guidance, be the rung that leads to Russia’s use of some of its nukes?
Fortunately probably not, but the mere chance that it could happen makes Biden’s escalation decision beyond appalling.
I say it is not likely to lead to nuclear war because in fact, it is unlikely that Ukraine will have the ability to launch any ATACMS rockets in the remaining few weeks of Biden’s presidential dotage. Firstly, even any of those rockets in Ukraine, they are few in number. The UK’s Telegraph newspaper quotes a retired leader of Ukraine’s military as saying it would take ‘hundreds” of those missiles to significantly weaken Russia’s advancing counterattack in Kursk. Second, the Ukrainian military personnel using the ATACMs have to be trained in how to fire them and to use the satellite-based guidance system to direct them to targets. All that will take time. And time is running out for the Biden administration. On Jan. 3, 2025, the new Congress, which will be fully in the hands of the Republicans, will be seated, and the new Republican-led Senate can be counted on to tie Biden’s hands and reverse his decision on provision of the rockets, if instructed to do so by incoming President-Elect Donald Trump.
Jan. 3 is only 45 days away.
Moreover, Biden (who has promised Trump a “smooth transition” (in contrast to Trump’s refusal to leave office after the 2020 election), will in the coming weeks have to follow the long-standing tradition of a smooth handoff by bringing Trump and his foreign policy team in on discussions on any foreign policy crisis or issue,
And Trump certainly does not want to begin his second term with a hot war on his hands.
So why did Biden and his foreign policy handlers make this sudden provocative and destabilizing decision?
It is surely not because Russia invited in some North Korean infantry — poor souls who will surely be chewed up given the language barrier between the Korean-speaking troops and their Russian officers.
I suspect Biden’s decision to authorize the more powerful and longer-range missiles fo Ukraine was motivated by a desire to either establish his and his foreign policy team’s hard line against Russia. Or more ore sinisterly, it could be an effort to actually press Russia into responding with some kind of retaliation, hopefully not nuclear, but perhaps a conventional attack on US or British trainers, of a storage depot for ATACMS rockets.
Putin, however (who has reportedly been in phone communication with Trump), knows that the incoming president badly wants to start off his second presidential term with a peace deal in Ukraine. Given that, the Russian leader, no matter how angry he may be at the breaching of one of his ‘red lines,’ is unlikely to allow himself to be provoked into taking a retaliatory action that could provoke a surge of anti-Russia patriotic fervor in the US. Such a result could prevent Trump from following through with his plan to be the peacemaker.
Any way you look at it though, Biden’s and his advisors’ move on providing those ATACM missiles and okaying their use inside Russia is the height of recklessness and must be condemned.
Photograph Source: Airman 1st Class Colin Simpson – Public Domain
J,D, Vance explained in 2020 why he put aside the elitist atheism he picked up in college and law school to become a Catholic (“How I Joined the Resistance,” The Lamp, April 1, 2020). His quest for a meaningful life led Vance to be baptized a Catholic in 2019. The sentiments he so eloquently endorsed in 2020 suggested that in politics he would act as a Pope Francis progressive—the very opposite of a sophist acolyte for Donald J. Trump. Instead, we now see a vice-presidential candidate who lives by what Peter Quinn calls the “Wanton Opportunism” of a “Horatio Hillbilly,” Commonweal, September 8). Equally problematic, Vance is paired with a presidential candidate who, as Alexander Motyl points out (here, October 20) stops at nothing to boost his own power.
Has J,D, sold his soul? Does ne still have one? As Vance advanced through what he called “our educational hierarchy”—from Ohio State to Yale Law—he worried that his “assimilation into elite culture came at a high cost.” Having fallen in love, he found that the emotional demons of his childhood made it hard for him to be the type of partner he wanted to be. His “obsession with achievement” would fail to produce the achievement that mattered most–a happy, thriving family.
Vance had immersed himself in the logic of meritocracy and found it deeply unsatisfying. “I had traded virtue for achievement and found the latter wanting. But the woman I wanted to marry cared little whether I obtained a Supreme Court clerkship. She just wanted me to be a good person.” A voice in his head demanded: that he put her interests above his own and master his temper.
As Vance considered how his twin desires—for success and for character—both conflicted and did not, he met the venture capitalist and conservative libertarian Peter Thiel at Yale. Sone things Thiel said persuaded Vance he was too obsessed with achievement—not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition. J,D, had prioritized striving over character. “I felt more shame over failing in a law school exam than I did about losing my temper with my girlfriend.” He decided all this had to change. He would focus on what he could do to improve things.
The answer he landed on, “as unsatisfactory then as it is now,” is that you can’t actually “solve” social problems. The best you can do is reduce them or blunt their effects.
Political experts on the right blamed these problems on “culture” and lack of personal responsibility, while the left’s intellectuals focused on the “structural and external problems” such as finding jobs and adequate resources.
J,D, sought a broad synthesis: “I felt desperate for a worldview that understood our bad behavior as simultaneously social and individual, structural and moral; that recognized that we are products of our environment; that we have a responsibility to change that environment, but that we are still moral beings with individual duties; one that could speak against rising rates of divorce and addiction, not as sanitized conclusions about their negative social externalities, but with moral outrage.”
Vance felt that St. Augustine’s critique of 5th century Rome fit the United States. Society has become oriented “towards consumption and pleasure, spurning duty and virtue.” J,D, came to see Catholicism as a kind of Christianity obsessed with virtue, but aware that “virtue is formed in the context of a broader community; sympathetic with the meek and poor…without treating them primarily as victims; protective of children and families and with the things necessary to ensure they thrive.” He believed that the best part of him took its cues from Catholicism. “It was the part of me that demanded that I treat my son with patience and made me feel terrible when I failed.”
So how could this seeker for virtue and truth align with an aspirant for the highest office in the land—a man notorious for his cruelty to women and daily resort to a Big Lie? Vance’s current partnership with Trump ignores J,D,’s earlier rejection of opportunism. Vance now looks like the incarnation of Goethe’s Faust, an intellectual who, despairing of finding meaningful truth, sold his soul to the devil in return for earthly pleasures.
Despite Satan’s interventions, Faust never reached the point where he could say to any situation, “Stay with me now, you are so wondrous.”
After ruining a young woman’s life, Faust got Satan to help him do something good for society. They built dikes and reclaimed flooded lands—actions that earned Faust a place in heaven instead of hell.
Regardless Vance’s ostensible skepticism about achievement, he accepted Peter Thiel’s help to become a successful venture capitalist and Thiel’s millions to finance his Senate race in Ohio.
Thiel believes that freedom and democracy are incompatible, due to welfare beneficiaries, As Robert Reich observed in The Guardian, October 3, Vance has become the handpicked leader of the anti-democracy movement in the US– part of Thiel’s “libertarian community of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers and disaffected far-right intellectuals”—the antitheses of the Christian values that Vance claims to champion..
In February, the public health specialist Muna Abed Alah published a paper in the journal Current Psychology titled “Shattered Hierarchy: How the Gaza Conflict Demolished Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs.” The idea of a hierarchy of needs—first published by the psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943 and subsequently modified in various ways by Maslow and others—has long been pervasive in the world of pop psychology, while some in academia have poked holes in Maslow’s logic. Now, Alah suggests that the Palestinians of Gaza have rendered the hierarchy of needs wholly obsolete.
Briefly, Maslow and others who followed have identified universal human needs—including but not limited to basic physiological requirements, safety, cognition, self-actualization, and transcendence—and listed those needs along with others in a precise order. They maintain that an individual’s physiological needs (food, water, shelter, etc.) must be satisfied first and that each subsequent need can be fulfilled only after the needs that precede it in the list have been at least partially fulfilled.
Well, Alah writes, the people of Gaza have torn up and thrown away Maslow’s blueprint.
Regarding non-fulfillment of physiological needs, Alah of course cited Israel’s campaigns depriving Palestinians of food, water, fuel, shelter, sleep, and other necessities. Safety was being totally erased by Israel’s relentless bombing throughout Gaza. Endlessly repeated destruction of hospitals, assassination of medical personnel, and targeting of trucks and people that gather at food-distribution locations has prevented the satisfaction of both physiological and safety needs. With serial displacement of millions of people, separation of family members, and deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians, the need for esteem has been swamped; people’s sense of dignity and control over their lives has been wrecked. Israel’s intentional bombing of schools and universities has blocked their pursuit of cognitive needs. Regarding the need for self-actualization, Alah wrote, “The relentless focus on mere survival in the face of constant threat overshadows any opportunity for self-fulfillment . . . In such an environment, where safety and basic needs are a daily struggle, the luxury of realizing personal potential becomes nearly impossible.”
But what about transcendence, the peak of the hierarchy of needs? In Alah’s words, it “involves connecting with something larger than oneself, including spiritual experiences, deep connections with others, and contributions to the broader society.” With none of the prerequisites being satisfied, transcendence should have receded completely out of reach months ago, according to Maslow’s thesis. Instead, Alah, observed, transcendence is the one need that was being realized:
“Amidst ongoing conflict and siege, achieving transcendence is notably difficult, yet it manifests itself in unique and meaningful ways. Despite the limitations in aid and resources, many people in Gaza have started to help each other, fostering a strong sense of community and solidarity. This mutual assistance not only addresses immediate needs but also serves as a powerful form of transcendence, allowing individuals to connect with and contribute to something greater than themselves.”
The coordinated service, heroism, and sacrifice personified by Palestinian journalists, taxi drivers, first responders, and health care professionals during the war is by now legendary. But countless other people in all walks of life have demonstrated similar degrees of transcendence. In his article, Alah focused on the resilience of Gaza’s civilian population. Here, I’ll just add that the armed resistance forces in Gaza—encompassing the al Qassam Brigades (Hamas’s armed wing) and others—also have transcended unbearable hardship by mounting an extraordinary collective effort.
“Something Greater than Themselves”
A report released in August by Ground Truth Solutions and Arab World for Research and Development (AWRAD) revealed the extent of mutual aid occurring in Gaza over the past year. Conducted in June and July, the survey of 1,200 civilians confirmed that none of the fundamental needs at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy were being fulfilled in Gaza. As expected, when asked about their most immediate priorities, 90 to 99 percent of the respondents listed Maslow’s basic needs: food, water, shelter, and safety.
But more than 90 percent also listed priorities such as “care for marginalized groups” and “doing something to contribute or support.” A large share of people also provided food, water, help with daily affairs, electric power, housing, childcare, or psychosocial support to others in the community—and received such help from others. Community volunteer groups organized early in the conflict, and about one-third of respondents told interviewers they had benefited from support provided by these groups.
Displaced families or communities taking refuge in a new location said they’d found plenty of help. Local leaders and committees helped them set up tent encampments or “find other housing arrangements in host families.” Furthermore, “When asked about the most important resources available to them, people often mention community kitchens, which provide a means through which local aid groups can provide support and residents can pool resources to try and reach those in greatest need.”
At the time Ground Truth Solutions and AWRAD were conducting these interviews, the Israeli onslaught and aid blockade had been going on for nine months. When families and communities are forced to live with constant hunger and thirst, to go without medical care, to watch family members and compatriots die all around them for months on end, sustaining a functional society can become physically impossible. As a result, the report noted, “During in-depth discussions, both aid providers and community volunteers mentioned the erosion of mutual aid within communities as resources become scarcer.”
Burdens of scarcity, displacement, and death-risk accumulate over time. There’s only so much that people can take, however brave and generous they are. But that doesn’t mean the Palestinians are giving up. One woman told Ground Truth interviewers, “We are a mighty people who have dignity and we will prevail. We’ll die standing like palm trees and we will not kneel.” It may be that colonized people just don’t fit Maslow’s model. Alah himself noted that its “Western-centric origins may not adequately reflect the collective experiences of trauma and resilience that significantly influence societal dynamics in regions like Gaza, where cultural heritage plays a pivotal role in shaping communal responses to adversity.”
No Choice but to Fight
The Palestinian armed resistance too is exemplifying transcendence. As part of a great tradition established by wars of liberation throughout history, they have held their own against a far larger, more powerful army—one equipped and supported by the world’s biggest military-industrial complex, that of the United States and other Western powers.
Gaza’s fighters have so far thwarted the occupiers’ efforts to depopulate Gaza. They are mounting fierce resistance against the army’s attempt to drive all Palestinians from northern Gaza into the South, annex and resettle the North with Israelis, and let the South become one big, uninhabitable “deportation camp” (somehow inhabited by millions of Palestinians until they are pushed out).
The Palestinians are fighting with antitank weapons, rifles, and mortars that they designed and manufactured themselves. In so-called “return to sender” missions, they’re blowing up IDF tanks and troops using “barrel bombs” filled with explosives they’ve recycled from the Israeli “dud” munitions that litter Gaza’s landscape. They’ve also gained remote control of Israeli drones, landed, reprogrammed, and armed them, and then sent them back out to attack IDF sites. In these and many other ways, the resistance forces have shown great resourcefulness.
They’ve shown not only ingenuity but great courage as well. In resistance videos (starting at the 2 hr 6 min mark in this one), we can see fighter after fighter dash from a bombed-out building across dozens of meters of open ground, highly exposed to drone fire, lugging a 45-pound, locally manufactured explosive device. They place them just a few feet behind an IDF tank, dash back across the open ground, and take cover just before the bomb explodes.
The resistance fighters attack only military targets that threaten the people of Gaza. After they strike, and IDF ambulances and medevac helicopters arrive to carry away the wounded and dead, the resistance fighters film from a distance but do not attack them.
Some readers might object to the inclusion of resistance fighters among examples of how people of Gaza are rising above their demolished hierarchy of needs. But focus on the than 2 million-plus people who have lived through more than 13 months of unspeakable horrors—preceded by 18 years of open-air imprisonment and a blockade that has deprived them of fundamental human needs, a siege punctuated by deadly IDF bombing campaigns in 2006, 2008-9, 2012, 2014, and 2021, along with massacres of nonviolent protesters in 2018. (And Israel’s unlawful occupation of Gaza goes back another four decades, to 1967.) No population that’s been under deadly siege and bombing for two decades would accept an open-ended continuation of such savagery without fighting back.
The death and destruction that occurred during the Palestinian resistance’s October 7, 2023 military action could never justify Israel’s attempted eradication of an entire society—even if one chose to believe every one of the now-debunkedclaims that the Israeli military, government, and press have made about that day.
Even if on that day the resistance had committed every act of which the Israelis have falsely accused them, the latter’s genocidal campaign of the past 13 months (and counting) is a monumentally extreme violation of two fundamental principles of international conflict: proportionality (retaliation must not be disproportionately more severe that the acts being retaliated against) and distinction (military targets may be attacked, but civilians or civilian targets must not).
In Gaza, Nonviolence Is a Nonstarter
My friend Justin Podur, author of the 2019 Gaza novel Siegebreakers, points to the 2018 mass protest known as the Great March of Return as conclusive evidence that nonviolence had no chance of ending the Israeli occupation of Gaza—that, indeed, nonviolence has never freed a people from a violent colonial power.
Every Friday for a year starting in March, 2018, Palestinians, by the tens of thousands on some days, carried out nonviolent actions at various points along the giant fence that (along with a sea and air blockade), separates Gaza from the rest of the world. The groups protested on their own land, along their own side of the barrier. By sticking to wholly nonviolent resistance, March of Return protesters did what many around the world are constantly urging the people of Gaza to do. But starting on the very first Friday, Israeli forces on the other side of the fence fired with abandon at the unarmed protesters. Over the next twelve months, the troops shot and wounded 30,000 people, killing 266. The dead included dozens of children. Though a horrific massacre, it was just a peek-preview of the crimes Israel would commit against Gaza’s civilian population during this genocide half a decade later.
The Israeli regime will use any excuse at any time to kill, maim, or displace Palestinians. The regime, not the resistance, is the driving force behind the conflict. In Podur’s words, “the slaughter of Palestinians at the Great March of Return was not the fault of the nonviolent protesters any more than the genocide in 2023-24 was the fault of the Palestinian armed groups.”
Recently, the Palestinian journalist Abubaker Abed, who reports from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, was asked if he has a message for Westerners who demand that those of us protesting the genocide answer the question, “But do you condemn Hamas?” He responded,
“Regardless of political affiliations, do you really condemn someone who defends you and has your back against a terrorist state? Israel has been butchering, dehumanizing, torturing, and bombing us for 76 years. And has imposed a strict siege on us in Gaza for 17 years. In this context, where does this question even fit? It’s incredibly enraging that people are trying to justify Israel’s genocide by asking such silly questions.”
Those of us who live in a country that’s supplying unlimited support for Israel’s all-out military assault and starvation campaign have no right to demand that the Palestinians refrain from fighting back. Our time is better spent demanding a total embargo on the provision of arms, money, or anything else to Israel. We too are responsible for bombing Gaza’s people out of access to their basic Maslow needs. Now, to do nothing more than celebrate the valiant perseverance into which we ourselves have forced them would be a hollow gesture indeed. And to engage in pious tut-tutting over their armed resistance would be immeasurably worse.
A UN Special Committee has characterized Israel’s war in Gaza as genocide, while Western “free” media has abandoned its ethical responsibility to cover and or report objectively on the conduct of Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon. Western corporate media outlets, without exception, acquiesced to Israeli directives barring reporters from entering Gaza. Journalists embedded with the Israeli army report only what Israel permits them to observe, creating a one-sided, heavily filtered narrative.
The programmed absence has deprived Western public of critical information to show what UNICEF describes as the most dangerous place in the world for children. Disregarding these realities, corporate Western media outlets often dehumanize Palestinians, dismissing their grievance while overtly empathizing with the Israelis. Case in point, they extensively cover the relocation of hundreds of Israeli families, while offering little to no coverage on the Scholasticide of the 625,000 Palestinian children who are unable to attend school for a second year because Israel has damaged or destroyed 85% of Gaza’s schools. Similarly, they disregard U.N. documented Israel’s use of “starvation as a weapon of war . . . destroying vital water, sanitation and food systems,” and neglect the plight of 90% of Gaza’s internally displaced population, many of whom have been forced to relocate nine or ten times. In addition, the media’s intentional omission of the destruction of the entire higher education system, with 100% of Gaza’s 12 universities demolished, leaving 88,000 students unable to continue their studies.
Just as with the systematic destruction of Gaza’s educational system, the “free” media has failed to critically report on Israel’s deliberate strategy to dismantle Gaza’s healthcare system. According to former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, this strategy involved “relentless and intentional attacks on medical personnel and facilities,” including the killing, detention, and torture of medical staff as part of a “concerted policy to destroy Gaza’s healthcare system.” By the end of July 2024, the World Health Organization reported that Israel had conducted 498 raids on healthcare facilities. Out of Gaza’s 36 hospitals, less than 16 are partially operational, leading to the near-total collapse of the healthcare system.
The managed “free” media deploys countless reporters in Tel Aviv to cover the effectiveness of Israel’s Iron Dome missile system, yet no one on the ground investigates the starvation in North Gaza or even show the face of one of the approximately 16,800 murdered children or the anguish of over 17,000 children who have lost one or both parents. At the same time, the programmed media floods screens with images of a broken glass window in a “Jewish only” colony, but no cameras are allowed to capture the devastated 163,778, plus residential units in Gaza.
The so-called “free” Western media does not question or fact-check Israeli disinformation, hasbara, when American made jets target schools or demolish residential towers under the pretext of “command centers” inside these facilities. Worse yet, the media propagates a false narrative, portraying Israel’s malevolent policies as acts of benevolence because they issue a warning ahead of bombing homes to smithereens, and then murder civilians as they evacuate under the same orders. Journalists ignore Palestinian voices pointing out that the wide scale destruction of homes, “safe shelters,” and critical infrastructure is part of a calculated Israeli strategy to render Gaza uninhabitable and forcibly displace its residents. Their reporting from afar, normalize Israeli violence and ethnic cleansing as they parrot Israeli Newspeak without scrutiny.
A glaring example of the media abdicating its objectivity is the case of Al-Shifa Hospital, where Israeli military officials showcased an elaborate 3D model purportedly depicting a command center beneath the hospital. The Israeli disinformation was echoed by U.S. President Joe Biden and the White House, further amplifying the false Israeli narratives to an unsuspected public.
In November 2023, Al-Shifa Hospital was occupied by the Israeli army. Doctors were arrested, several tortured to death in Israeli custody, and the hospital was forced out of service. Western journalists, embedded with the Israeli military, joined the Israeli army to show the world what was claimed to be a military command center beneath the hospital. However, to uncover that the only underground edifices in the hospital’s vast complex were originally designed by Israeli architects Gershon Zippor and Benjamin Idelson, and commissioned by the occupying Israeli Public Works Department in 1983.
The embedded Israeli propaganda tool, aka Western media, accompanied Israel’s chief disinformation officer on a tour of Al-Shifa Hospital but left empty-handed, unable to find the flaunted “command control center” or any military facilities under the hospital. Human Rights Watch later concluded that the military raid at the hospital constituted a war crime after failing to provide evidence “to justify revoking the hospital’s status as protected by the laws of war.”
Rather than holding Israel accountable for destroying a major health facility, the embedded media continued to market Israeli lies to excuse violations of international law. The lack of critical reporting and fact-checking is a betrayal of the journalistic responsibilities, effectively serving as implicit approval or, at the very least, normalization of the Israeli war crimes.
Another case on how the media facilitates violence and aggression is the adoption of Israeli-nuanced jargons that desensitizes readers, and redirects focus. For instance, by framing Israel’s wars against Palestinians in Gaza and the people of Lebanon as a war against “Hamas” or “Hezbollah,” the media employs euphemisms that deflect Israeli responsibility for the broader impact of the war on innocent civilians. This framing whitewashes Israeli culpability for the destruction of 80% of homes, 60% of the hospitals, 85% of the schools, 100% of the universities, the displacement of 90% of the population, the razing of villages, and the starvation of children, portraying these atrocities as mere “collateral damage,” or unintended victims in a crossfire.
Furthermore, Western media’s dereliction in contextualizing Israeli violations of the international humanitarian law, the findings of the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court, leaves readers unaware of the legal ramifications and obscures accountability. In doing so, Western media becomes, wittingly or unwittingly, a complicit platform in Israeli hasbara.
Western media has even abandoned fellow local journalists who remained in Gaza and were purposely targeted by the Israeli army. Israel’s assault on the truth, including attacks on journalists and their families, is unprecedented in war zones. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), Israel has murdered 137 journalists and media workers, making it the deadliest since CPJ began collecting data in 1992.
Zionist hasbara, bolstered by a powerful media plutocracy and influential special interest groups in the West, has normalized Israeli lies and bias against Palestinians for over 76 years. This media-constructed narratives distorts public understanding, manipulates public discourse and shape policy debates. Inevitably, the systematic dissemination of misinformation shapes a one-dimensional view of the conflict, suppresses dissent, and position Western media as a key instrument in manufacturing consent for Israel’s wars of genocide.
Industrial plant, Longview, Washington. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
The world desperately needs to pull the plug on fossil fuels. So agree most of the official delegates from nearly 200 nations who have gathered this month by the Caspian Sea for the 29th annual global “Conference of the Parties” on climate change — COP29 for short — in Azerbaijan’s capital city Baku.
But not all the estimated 70,000 attendees at this year’s COP are practicing what they should be preaching. Private jet arrivals at Baku’s international airport, news reports note, have just doubled.
What makes that such a big deal? Practically nothing symbolizes wanton disregard for our Earth’s environment more dramatically than private jet travel. A corporate executive taking a single long-haul private jet flight, points out the Travel Smart Campaign’s Denise Auclair, “will burn more CO₂ than several normal people do in an entire year.”
Researchers at Oxfam have just gone through the flight records of 23 global billionaires. Those airborne souls averaged 184 private jet flights each over a recent single year. They each essentially circumnavigated the globe ten times over. Their flights averaged 2,074 tons of carbon emissions, an outlay an average person globally would take 300 years to emit.
Extravagances like private jets help explain why global carbon emissions last year expanded by 1.3 percent. To get climate anywhere near under control, UN secretary general António Guterres noted on the eve of this month’s COP29 extravaganza, the world’s nations ought to be reducing carbon emissions by at least 9 percent a year.
“The world is still underestimating climate risks,” Guterres added. “It’s absolutely essential to reduce emissions drastically now.”
And that reducing will only unfold, the UN secretary general emphasized in his COP29 opening remarks, if the world’s nations address the pivotal contribution to climate catastrophe that our world’s wealthiest are making.
“The rich cause the problem,” as Guterres explained, “the poor pay the highest price.”
Observers have tagged this year’s global environmental gathering the “climate finance COP.” The key question before all the official government delegates gathered in Baku: Who will actually pay the bill for addressing the climate change crisis?
Back in 2009, national delegations to that year’s COP gathering pledged to raise an overall annual $100 billion over the next 15 years. The world’s nations have since then met that target only once. Any new annual target for the next 15 years, most researchers and activists agree, needs to run considerably higher, anywhere from $500 billion to $5 trillion higher.
No one can reasonably expect governments alone, COP principals from rich nations counter, to come up with anywhere near that level of support. These rich-nation COP delegations want to encourage private investors to get more involved in financing new climate initiatives.
In other words, instead of taxing the world’s wealthiest at higher levels, rich nations want to give their richest more opportunities to become ever richer.
Nations rich with fossil fuels most heartily agree. The “onus” for financing moves to counter the climate crisis, COP29 president Mukhtar Babayev from Azerbaijan is arguing, “cannot fall entirely on government purses.”
Our globe’s richest nations would also like to expand the trading of “carbon credits,” transactions that let wealthy developed nations delay making costly emissions cuts at home by underwriting much less costly climate actions in poor nations.
But the offset projects that developed nations underwrite, the Guardiannotes, have regularly overpromised and underdelivered, leaving “wildfires burning through forests that were supposed to be protected and emissions from renewable energy projects being counted on balance books even though they would probably have been built anyway.”
This year’s CO29 conference will wrap up on November 22, and no serious climate change analyst is predicting any consensus that could significantly slow our globe’s ever more perilous progress to climate collapse. Developed nations, Bloomberg’s Mark Gongloff observes, remain “loath to pitch in more than $100 billion a year.”
“Transitioning the world to clean energy alone,” counters Gongloff, could actually cost $215 trillion by 2050.
How could the world make real progress toward those trillions? Guardianenvironmental editor Fiona Harvey earlier this week ran down some promising options.
Nations could for starters, Harvey notes, put a serious tax bite on the “unprecedented” profit bonanza that fossil-fuel companies have enjoyed ever since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Those companies have pocketed well over a quarter-trillion dollars in profits in the two years since.
Nations could also place new taxes on the jet flights our richest so enjoy or move to end the more than $650 billion spent annually in the developing world on subsidies for fossil fuels and polluting industries. Better yet, in a world where our five richest billionaires have more than doubled their wealth since 2020, we could adopt the 2 percent annual tax on billionaire wealth that Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has proposed.
A global tax along that line could raise $250 billion per year from just the world’s 100 richest families.
The only sure thing about initiatives like these: No proposals that could make a real climate difference will get any serious attention at COP29, as the prime minister of Albania, Edi Rama, observed in his brief and biting remarks to conference-goers. Rama opened his address to COP29 by noting that he had decided to ditch his prepared remarks after spending some time in the conference’s leaders lounge.
The global notables in that lounge, Rama continued, had all gathered to “eat, drink, meet, and take photos together, while images of voiceless speeches from leaders play on and on and on in the background.”
“To me, this seems exactly like what happens in the real world every day,” he went on to explain. “Life goes on with its old habits, and our speeches, filled with good words about fighting climate change, change nothing.”
Concluded Rama, a former artist and the current chair of his nation’s Socialist Party: “What on Earth are we doing in this gathering, over and over and over, if there is no common political will on the horizon to go beyond words and unite for meaningful action?”
That inaction — in the face of overwhelming global public support for greater pro-climate action — continues to comfort our world’s most fantastically wealthy.
Soweto housing (c. 2009). Photograph Source: Kevin Gabbert – Public Domain
In 2002, the state of Gujarat in India erupted in horrific violence that would shape and define Narendra Modi’s political career. The pogrom, which left thousands of Muslims dead and displaced tens of thousands more, demonstrated the ease with which fear and hatred can be weaponised in pursuit of political power. Modi’s right-wing populism, rooted in Hindu fascism, enabled and cemented his rise to national prominence. Today, South Africa risks following a similarly destructive trajectory as political elites increasingly try to incite xenophobia against African and Asian migrants to redirect anger over a devastating economic and social crisis onto vulnerable scapegoats.
The 2008 pogroms in South Africa, when over 60 migrants and people from ethnic minorities were killed and many thousands displaced, marked the first dark moment in the country’s post-apartheid history. Alliances between local politicians and thugs scapegoated migrants for the country’s deep-rooted economic inequalities, even though they were often victims of the same systemic neglect. Now, fifteen years later, the same dynamics persist, but the scale and intensity of xenophobia have evolved, with new flashpoints and actors emerging.
One of the most alarming developments in recent years has been the rise of Operation Dudula, a vigilante movement targeting migrants. On 16 June 2021, a day of deep historical significance as South Africa commemorates the Soweto Uprising of 1976, Dudula held its first march in Soweto. Operation Dudula, like other xenophobic outfits, actively tried to present itself as a continuation of the struggle for national liberation, this time with people like impoverished Zimbabweans working in the informal economy and small-time Pakistani shopkeepers being cast as the enemies of the people.
Dudula, adopting a militaristic posture, went on to organise ‘raids’ on migrant-owned businesses, forcibly evict migrant families from their homes, and patrol communities to identify and expel migrants. In several townships, Dudula’s actions created a climate of fear not only for migrants but also for South African-born residents who refused to participate in these raids.
Despite the group’s openly violent and unlawful actions, the state’s response was tepid. The police allowed them to act with impunity and some political leaders tacitly endorsed Dudula’s activities, viewing the movement as a means to channel public frustration without addressing systemic failures. This lack of accountability emboldened Dudula, but the organisation never achieved any sort of mass support. Although it received huge media coverage, it was never able to evolve beyond being small groups of thugs with a media-savvy privately educated leader.
Political and other elites justify their xenophobia in the name of the poor but, strikingly, the mass-based organisations of the poor and the working class are mostly not xenophobic. During the 2008 pogrom, Abahlali baseMjondolo, the radical movement of the urban poor with over 150,000 paid-up members and many more supporters, bravely contested the xenophobic attacks and has remained resolutely opposed to xenophobia. It includes migrants among its leaders and on the platforms at its big public events and worked with Congolese migrants to found the radical Lumumbist Congolese Solidarity Campaign, with which it has a close relationship.
The trade union movement has a long history of opposing xenophobia and including migrants in leadership positions. This remains true of many unions, including the metalworkers’ union, Numsa, the largest union in Africa. But in 2019, Zwelinzima Vavi, then General Secretary of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU), broke from this consensus, tweeting a photograph of Muslim migrant shopkeepers walking to a mosque with the caption: “These are new shop owners going for midday prayers. Too many things going wrong?”
In the national election in May this year, a number of contenders placed xenophobia at the centre of their platforms. Herman Mashaba and Gayton McKenzie, both Trumpian figures, were among the worst, but most voters didn’t buy it. Well less than 40% of eligible voters bothered to participate in the election, and Mashaba’s party won 1.2% of the vote while McKenzie’s party won 2.1%. But despite their failure at the polls, Mashaba and McKenzie both get regular and, in the case of McKenzie, fawning media coverage, creating the impression that migration is a hot-button issue for voters.
In recent days and weeks, xenophobic rhetoric has dangerously escalated, with the media and politicians taking the leading role. Claims that migrant-owned stores are “poisoning children” with expired or tainted goods have circulated widely. One video circulating on WhatsApp goes a step further and claims that Pakistani shopkeepers are poisoning the water supply. McKenzie declared: “We need to close all these shops. We can’t be debating this matter. The shops should be closed and owners arrested to be deported. What more do we want to see, more children dying?”
There is a genuine issue in South Africa with a long list of pesticides that have been banned in most other countries but continue to circulate freely. With the state not providing refuse removal to informal settlements, people often buy dangerous pesticides to deal with rat infestations. There have been occasions where, tragically, children have died. But this is a result of the failure of the state to remove refuse and to regulate dangerous toxins, not a conspiracy by migrant shopkeepers to poison South African children.
In response to the tragic deaths of six children in Naledi, Soweto, due to terbufos poisoning a coalition of civil society organisations and trade unions issued a report highlighting systemic regulatory failures. The coalition, operating under the South African People’s Tribunal on AgroToxins, emphasized that these fatalities are a direct consequence of inadequate regulation and enforcement concerning hazardous pesticides.
The report focuses particularly on terbufos, an organophosphate pesticide banned in the European Union since 2009 due to its high toxicity but still in use in South Africa. The coalition criticizes the continued manufacture and export of such chemicals from Europe to developing countries, labelling it a “racist double standard in the pesticides trade.”
Despite all this, many politicians and much of the media continue to speak as if migrant shopkeepers are part of a sinister conspiracy to murder South African children. At the same time, another folk devil is being carefully fabricated as the state presents all informal miners working shafts abandoned by mining companies as both “illegal foreigners” and “dangerous criminals.”
Informal miners, known as ‘zama zamas’, are poor men from across Southern Africa, many from South Africa, taking on dangerous and difficult work to survive an economic crisis. Some work under criminal gangs, but many are just ordinary men trying to survive.
In recent days, a crisis has unfolded in Stilfontein, in the North West Province, where zama zama miners have been trapped underground by the police who have blocked supplies of food and water in an attempt to force the miners to surface. Families have gathered at the site, anxiously awaiting news of their loved ones.
Instead of treating this as a humanitarian crisis, the state has responded with hostility. Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni said: “We are not sending help to criminals. We are going to smoke them out. They will come out. Criminals are not to be helped; criminals are to be prosecuted. We didn’t send them there.” There are real fears that men may die, or may have already died, in the mines.
The active attempts by political elites, in and out of the ANC, to incite xenophobic hatreds and scapegoat migrants cannot be separated from the broader economic and social crises. Official unemployment rates exceed 30%, with youth unemployment surpassing 60%. Hunger is widespread, and 27% of children under five years old are affected by stunting, a condition resulting from chronic undernutrition that impairs growth and development.
The recent termination of the COVID-19 Social Relief of Distress (SRD) grant, coupled with harsh austerity measures in the mid-term budget, has exacerbated the crisis. At the same time systemic corruption and mismanagement have further eroded public trust. In this climate of desperation, migrants have become convenient scapegoats for the political class.
The 2008 anti-migrant pogrom should serve as a warning for politicians like Ntshavheni, Mashaba, and McKenzie who, with Trumpian recklessness, try to ignite the fires of xenophobia. Modi’s success in building an effective hard right project on the back of a pogrom should serve a warning to all who aspire to a democratic future for South Africa.
South Africa must confront its systemic inequalities head-on and reject the politics of scapegoating. A broad based united left front, rooted in the mass organisations rather than NGOs and tiny sectarian organisations, is urgently needed.
Photograph Source: Office of Speaker Mike Johnson – Public Domain
The results are in and the clear winner of the 2024 U.S. presidential election is undeniably Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is now freer than ever to pursue his genocidal campaign against Palestinians; demolish Lebanon; create more illegal settlements on the West Bank; and even annex the West Bank itself if he chooses to do so.
There is no better indication of the close relations between Donald Trump and Netanyahu than the recent announcement of the exchange of ambassadors to their two capitals. Netanyahu has named Yechiel Leiter, a settler activist and a former aide who was Netanyahu’s chief of staff when the prime minister served as finance minister years ago. They are very close. Leiter was also an aide to the late war hawk Ariel Sharon, when Prime Minister Sharon served in the Knesset.
As a young man, Leiter was a member of the Jewish Defense League, which was formed by right-wing rabbi, Meir Kahane. The group was designated a terrorist organization following the discovery of its plan to bomb a mosque in Los Angeles. Leiter himself founded a U.S.-based fund (the One Israel Fund) that supplies security equipment and financial assistance to the illegal settlements on the West Bank. Leiter is doing his best to expand the West Bank settlements, and he and his family currently live in one of them. At a funeral for one of his sons, Leiter crudely denounced President Joe Biden for pursuing a cease-fire.
Following the Leiter appointment, Trump announced that former Arkansas Governor, Mike Huckabee, would be his ambassador to Israel. Huckabee opposes a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and claims that “there’s really no such thing as a Palestinian.” Like Leiter, he favors permanent Israeli control over the West Bank, a term he will not use, preferring the Israeli terms “Judea” and “Samaria.”
During a visit to Israel, Huckabee said that “there is no such thing as a West Bank.” As for the illegal settlements, Huckabee similarly says that “there is no such thing as a settlement.” He calls them “communities…cities…neighborhoods.” To cap it all off, Huckabee emphasizes “there’s no such thing as an occupation.” Huckabee, moreover, is a Christian evangelical, and Trump is a hero to conservative Christians for ending Roe vs. Wade. Trump often referred to “my beautiful Christians” at campaign rallies.
In his first term, Trump’s ambassador to Israel was David Friedman, who infamously referred to a liberal Jewish organization as “worse than kapos,” meaning Nazi collaborators. Like Leiter, Friedman wanted Israel to annex the West Bank. In his second term, Trump will have real estate developer Steven Witkoff as a special envoy to the Middle East. Witkoff was a key fund raiser for the Trump campaign, raising “six-figure and seven-figure donations” from Jewish donors.
With Trump in the White House, Netanyahu will no longer have to worry about U.S. efforts to get more humanitarian aid into Gaza. The Biden administration sent a warning letter to Israel in October to ensure the opening of more aid channels into Gaza, but the thirty-day deadline was ignored, and humanitarian aid is at its lowest levels since the start of the war. At the same time, the bombing of civilian communities and civilian shelters has gotten worse. Israel has simply refused to comply with the requests that were contained in the letter signed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
In addition to ignoring the U.S. demarche, the Netanyahu government went out of its way to embarrass the Biden administration once again. Netanyahu sent a special envoy, Ron Dermer, to the United States with a plan for a ceasefire in Lebanon. Before going to Washington, however, Dermer flew to Mar-a-Lago to brief Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, on the details of the plan. Netanyahu has described the plan as a “gift” to Donald Trump. Trump, for his part, has already told Netanyahu that he can “do what you have to do” against Hezbollah and Hamas.
The discussions in Mar-a-Lago appear to be a violation of the 1799 Logan Act, which criminalizes negotiations between the United States and a foreign government by an unauthorized American citizen. But no one seems to care about the law these days. Dermer, who like Leiter was born in the United States, has a very close relationship with Kushner. Meanwhile, the Israeli Defense Forces appear to be making plans to ramp up ground operations in Lebanon.
The White House and the Congress over the years have played to the worse sides of Israeli prime ministers, but Netanyahu has always gotten the best treatment that Washington has to offer. The catering to his militarism must stop, but there is simply no chance of this as long as Trump and his acolytes form the national security team in the White House.
Immigration to the U.S. southern border has long been subject to cold-hearted racial demagoguery. The Statue of Liberty may have welcomed some of the “huddled masses” from Europe at different times, but no such welcome was ever given to people from south of the border. There, a different attitude has prevailed.
Donald Trump’s MAGA hate speech includes such descriptions of non-European immigrants as “stone cold killers,” “immigrant criminals from the dungeons of the world,” “rapist,” “pet eaters” — or “invaders” from across the southern border. Some may find Trump’s words pleasing and others dreadful, but he is far from original.
The story begins in 1846 when U.S. President Polk— encouraged by the slavocracy eager for more land to expand their operations and by the merchant capitalists looking for a gateway to the Pacific — set about to rip off the northern half of Mexico from the rest of that country. Among the European Americans who followed their “Manifest Destiny” west to newly conquered lands after the war in 1848, there was debate about whether the new U.S. territories would be “slave” or “free.” But there was neither debate nor doubt about how to receive the non-white immigrants who made it to those promising lands.
In a Congressional hearing in the 1880s a member of the House committee on immigration questioned a representative from California: “Two years ago California came before this committee and stated herself in opposition to the Chinese and Japanese immigrant and in favor of Chinese and Japanese exclusion, stating that they wanted to develop a great big white State in California, a white man’s country; and now you come before us and want unlimited Mexican immigration . . . I cannot see the consistency.”1
But there was consistency. Chinese and Japanese workers were among the first waves of non-whites whose labor would lay the groundwork for large scale agriculture and the California dream that would not be theirs. But as important as their labor was it came with a defect making them far from the ideal workers white employers desired: They were difficult to remove thus posing an unacceptable threat to white demographic dominance.2 Mexican labor, however, was close at hand and easily deportable, a quality that made it, by the early 1920s, the immigrant labor of choice.
The southern border became, not the firm line of defense of national sovereignty as our contemporary demagogues would have us see it, but the portal for the low wage laborers on whose backs an empire was being built. But the door was meant to be a revolving one and herein lay the conflict.
Through the years the southern border has been the scene of a schizoid dance of immigration. There were times when employers on U.S. farms, factories, and railroads, couldn’t get enough of those “hard working,” “uncomplaining” Mexican (or Central American) workers—think of the Bracero program during the World War II years.3 Then there were other times marked by furious nativist-driven campaigns to stop the flow and rid the land of “criminals,” “disease ridden delinquents,” “drug runners,” “ants,” “communists” or “terrorists”— depending on the era. Notable in this are the years 1930, 1954, and 1994.
In the early 1930s hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were deported or otherwise forced out of the U.S. having been made convenient scapegoats for a brutal Depression economy. The deportations were massive and indiscriminate and accompanied by a ferocious campaign of racial intimidation and threats so intense that many of those who left the U.S., did so on their own out of fear of violence. Forty to sixty percent of those deported or repatriated were U.S. citizens, and many were children.
1954 was the year of Operation Wetback, a militarized campaign of terror and mass deportation that resulted in the suffering and death of many immigrants. Operation Wetback was principally an ethnic cleansing campaign. Its goal was to reverse the “troubling” growth of Mexican and Mexican American communities in California and the Southwest. But the deportation campaign ultimately failed, not because it wasn’t well planned or brutally executed, but because the immigrant communities had become interwoven in the economic and social fabric of border states. After a military style mass deportation of more than a million immigrants which caused terrible suffering, American authorities appealed to Mexicans to return to the U.S.! The California and southwest economy could not function without them. 4
In the intervening years since Operation Wetback the structural dependence of U.S. capitalism on cheap, vulnerable labor has increased. At the same time, one of the foundations of white supremacist control and identity, the demographic dominance of white people, is more challenged than ever. What began as a labor system largely restricted to California and the southwest has now become a key part of the labor structure for the entire country. In places throughout the U.S., and especially in the cities, essential jobs from service to construction to meat packing, child care and elder care, are dependent on immigrant workers. And the countryside? Today nearly 90% of U.S. farm and dairy workers are immigrants, roughly half undocumented.
Walk the streets of major cities, go to the school rooms and work places and the demographic future greets you in all its multiplicity. This is what lies at the heart of the MAGA-fascist immigrant frenzy— a clash of demographics.
For the nativist who has bought into the notion that the U.S. is a “white man’s land” and must always remain so — this is the metastasizing of a nightmare. For those who view humanity through a broader lens, it is a twist of historical irony and the harbinger of a potentially better world.
The Crazy Dance
In the 1980s President Reagan tried to alter the crazy dance of immigration with an amnesty for what were then three million immigrants deprived of documents.5 Today, 38 years on, there are at least 11 to 12 million people with this status. Thirty-eight years have passed since there has been any viable path to the most basic “legal residency” for those millions. And the reason for this is no great mystery: No matter how much verbal fog obscures it, the U.S. economy depends on their labor, their cheap labor.
U.S. capitalism admits to no apartheid nor racial caste system, and yet it can’t function – and compete — without workers deprived of basic rights. The endless discussions and promises over the last decades about “comprehensive immigration reform,” have been so entangled in their own contradictions that one residing in Alice’s Wonderland would find it beyond the pale . . . with no end in sight.
Beginning in the 1990s we witnessed with Clinton, Bush and Obama, the border wall constructed, laws criminalizing immigrants enacted, a spectacularly cold blooded decision to drive refugees from NAFTA6 into the desert where many died, and an endless raging frenzy over “border security.” Meanwhile, beginning especially under Obama, immigrant detention centers sprouted like diseased deformities on the landscape. In the mid 1990s California’s conservative governor Pete Wilson tried to solve the state’s “demographic problem.” It was called Proposition 187, a draconian plan of ethnic removal that sought to enlist teachers and healthcare workers to its cause. The ballot measure passed easily but the plan failed. Massive resistance by teachers, medical workers, and youth from the immigrant communities, played an important role. The fight to defeat Proposition 187 was a watershed for California. It actually secured greater respect and rights for immigrants, much to the chagrin of the nativists and white supremacists. And they have not forgotten that defeat!
When campaigning for office the first time in 2016, Trump cited and praised Operation Wetback. He even mimicked Herbert Brownell, the Secretary of State in 1954 who, at the height of that Operation, threatened to shoot immigrants to discourage them from coming. Trump, not to be outdone in the verbal thuggery department, said at the time he would machine gun them. And we saw how those words aroused people to horrible actions in 2019 in places like the garlic festival in Gilroy, California and a Walmart in El Paso, Texas.7
And now in the Trump2 era, a more rabid fascist nationalism targets the broader non-white community, and non-white immigrants in particular, not only as inferiors, but overtly as racial enemies, and poisoners of blood!
Trump2 is better organized, with a more indoctrinated base, possessed with a histrionic passion for preserving white dominance, or white supremacy, and with the added zeal of racial animus and Christian fundamentalism. It is also linked to the more desperate moment as the U.S. empire confronts greater challenges to its global dominance. The MAGA fascists look to rouse the populace with a racial zeal for the imperial tests ahead.
The depth of Trumpite insanity was spoken to by the MAGA groupie Elon Musk in a conversation with Joe Rogan on November 4 when he referred to then upcoming election as an “existential” moment: “If the Democrats win the election they will legalize enough illegals to turn the swing states. And [then] everywhere will be like California. There will be no escape” (my emphasis)–“Everywhere will be like California.” Such is the vision of hell for the MAGA racial fanatics.
To be sure Trump’s MAGA fascism is more than an immigration and demographics project. It is the fervent vision of a U.S. returning to the unassailable heights of global domination. The glue that holds this MAGA project together bears a striking resemblance to its German counterpart in the 1930s. Racial demagogy, white (instead of Aryan) supremacy, (and misogyny) at its core. While not new, in the world of today, it’s a lunatic vision and its lust for a racial reckoning is more dangerous than it’s ever been.
Postscript:
The opposite of this MAGA vision sees defense of humanity as a whole as our sacred responsibility. And that includes the defense and preservation of this little, abused planet of ours. The MAGAites are going to have to be defeated if we are to succeed in uplifting our humanity. Along with that, the system out of which this MAGA nightmare has arisen will also have to go. Will the coming assaults on immigrants be a spark for a broader, more radical social movement?
1 Stoll, Steven, The Fruits of Natural Advantage, UC Press, 1998 p.152
2 Throughout the 1800s western nativists waged war on Asian immigrants. This included racist pogroms that literally burned down Chinese communities on the west coast. In 1882 the nativists succeeded in passing the Chinese Exclusion Act.
3 The Bracero program was a wartime measure begun in 1942 that brought millions of Mexican workers under contract to work in California and other states. Their contract stipulated that they had to return to Mexico after their period of contractual labor ended. The Bracero program ended in 1964 but the need for Mexican labor did not.
4 Operation Wetback was a militarized operation led by a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General. At least one million workers and their families were deported, sometimes deep into Mexico far from their homes. Some deportees were dumped inside the Mexican border without food or water. Hundreds of deaths resulted.
5 In 1986 Congress passed the Simpson/Mazzoli Act (Immigration Reform and Control Act or IRCA) that provided for an amnesty for 3 million undocumented workers to legalize their status. In addition a program for growers allowed for many additional legalizations. One of the aims of this amnesty was to assure employers of a more stable workforce. Simpson/ Mazzoli provided for sanctions for employers who continued to hire undocumented workers. This was meant to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants. But this provision was not enforced and following Simpson /Mazzoli the flow of undocumented immigrants into the labor force continued and increased.
6 The North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in 1994. Among its effects were lowering tariffs on U.S. produced corn. The subsequent flooding of the Mexican market with cheap U.S. corporate grown corn caused corn prices to fall and hundreds of thousands of small Mexican farmers were ruined, a fact that the mainstream media has largely ignored. Many displaced farmers and rural workers, to survive, went north. But just at that time a border wall was constructed in such a way as to force them to make their way north through dangerous mountainous and desert terrains leading to hundreds and then thousands of deaths. According to one estimate at least 8,000 immigrants have died crossing the Mexico – U.S. border since the latter 1990s.
7 In August 2019 a mass shooter killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in one of the deadliest attacks targeting Latinos in modern U.S. history. This followed a shooting in Gilroy the previous month where three people were killed and eleven wounded. The shooters in both cases were white, those injured and killed, mainly Latinos.
Hæn-fugul (hen), Book of Hours; England, c. 1300; Walters Art Museum, MS W.102, f. 77v.
People think they know lots about chickens, and you’d think they would: There are four living chickens for every living person in the world—and since chickens are domestic fowl (a separate subspecies from their wild ancestor, the red jungle fowl of Southeast Asia), all of them live among humans.
Still, chickens are rarely celebrated in our culture and seldom given the respect they deserve. I once sat next to a man on an airplane who detailed for me at length the attributes of the species: they are stupid, disgusting, filthy, cowardly, occasionally cannibalistic automatons, he said.
How had he acquired this opinion? It turned out he had worked at a factory farmwhere most chickens are raised for food in the United States in a dirty, overcrowded warehouse resembling a prison camp.
This is not the best place to get to know someone. Nor is a dinner plate. Yet, for most of us, our relationship with chickens is generally of a culinary nature. In fact, the first definition of the word “chicken” I encountered on the internet doesn’t even mention that it’s a bird. It’s “the flesh of a chicken used for food.”
Over the decades of sharing my life with successive flocks of these affectionate, industrious, and resourceful birds, I’ve learned that almost everything people “know” about chickens is wrong.
At the Agway feed store, my friend Gretchen ordered 12 chicks of the same breed she’d first owned—Black Sex-Links—for my husband Howard and me. They are so named because the females can be identified upon hatching by their all-black color, averting the problem of raising a coop full of jealous roosters. She hand-raised them in a heated trailer on the farm.
Howard and I often visited them there, holding one or two peeping chicks in our hands, on our laps, or tucked into our sweaters, speaking softly to each so she would know us. When they were old enough—no longer balls of fluff but sleek, slim black miniatures of their eventual adult selves—they moved into our barn. Our travels in the Chicken Universe had begun.
At first, I was afraid they’d run away or become lost. We prepared a cozy, secure home for them on the bottom floor of our barn, with wood shavings scattered over the dirt floor, a dispenser for fresh water, a trough for chick feed, some low perches made from dowels, and a hay-lined nest box made from an old rabbit hutch left over from one of the barn’s previous denizens, in which they could, in the future, lay eggs.
Chickens need to be safely closed in at night to protect them from predators, but by day, we didn’t want to confine them; we wanted to give them free run of the yard. But how could they possibly understand that they lived here now?
Once we let them out, would they even recognize their space in the barn and go back in it? When I was in seventh grade, my family moved to a new house; on my first afternoon there, I literally got lost in my own backyard. Could these six-week-old chicks be expected to know better?
Gretchen assured me there would be no problem.
“Leave them in the pen for 24 hours,” she told me. “Then you can let them out, and they’ll stick around.
They’ll go back in again when it starts to get dark.”
“But how do they know?” I asked.
“They just do,” she said. “Chickens just know these things.”
When I found them all perched calmly back in their coop before dusk, I saw that Gretchen was right.
In fact, chickens know many things, some from the moment they are born. Like all members of the order in which they are classified, the Galliformes, or game birds, just-hatched baby chickens are astonishingly mature and mobile, able to walk, peck, and run only hours after leaving the egg.
This developmental strategy is called precocial. Like its opposite, the altricial strategy (employed by creatures such as humans and songbirds, who are born naked and helpless), the precocial strategy was sculpted by eons of adaptation to food and predators. If your nest is on the ground, as most game birds’ are, it’s a good idea to get your babies out of there as quickly as possible before someone comes to eat them. So newborn game birds hatch covered in down, eyes open, and leave the nest within 24 hours.
They followed me everywhere, first cheeping like the tinkling of little bells, then clucking in animated adult discussion. If I were hanging out the laundry, they would check what was in the laundry basket. If I were weeding a flower bed, they would join me, raking the soil with their strong, scaly feet, then stepping backward to see what was revealed. (Whenever I worked with soil, I suspect they assumed I was digging for worms.)
When Howard and I would eat at the picnic table under the big silver maple, the Ladies would accompany us. When my father-in-law came to help my husband build a pen for Christopher Hogwood, who was still a piglet, the Ladies milled underfoot to supervise every move. The hens were clearly interested in the project, pecking at the shiny nails, standing tall to better observe the use of tools, and clucking a running commentary all the while.
Before this experience, Howard’s dad would have been the first to say that he didn’t think chickens were that smart. But they changed his mind. After a few hours, I noticed he had begun addressing them. Picking up a hammer they were examining, he might say, directly and respectfully, “Pardon me, Ladies”—as if he were speaking to my mother-in-law and me when we got in the way. But when their human friends are inside, and this is much of the time, the Ladies explore on their own.
A chicken can move as fast as nine miles an hour, which can take you pretty far, and ours have always been free to go anywhere they like. But ours have intuited our property lines and confine their travels to its boundaries. They have never crossed the street. For years, they never hopped across the low stone wall separating our land from our closest neighbors. That came later—and it was not the result of any physical change in the landscape but the outcome of a change in social relationships among their human friends.
My travels in the Chicken Universe have been a portal to an unknown kingdom. We all see birds daily, and chickens are among the most familiar birds. Yet again and again, as I watch the hens and roosters in my life, I am reminded how movingly like us birds can be—and how thrillingly different.
This adapted excerpt is from What the Chicken Knows by Sy Montgomery (Atria Books, 2024) and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) with permission from Atria Books. It was adapted and produced for the web by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
In 2016 Steve Bannon told Donald Trump that if he played his cards right, he could become
“the Roosevelt of the Right.” That is, he could create a coalition of ultra-wealthy capitalists, small entrepreneurs, and discontented workers and bind them together under the flag of cultural nationalism. The key to doing this was to campaign against “the System” – not the system of capitalist oligarchy, of course, but the structures of administrative regulation, relatively free trade, and military commitments abroad that defined what Trump and Bannon called the “Deep State.” The key to their electoral success was to cast MAGA as the movement of systemic change and the Democrats as the party of the status quo – a trap into which the supporters of Biden and Harris blindly fell. If Trump took steps toward becoming the Roosevelt of the Right, the Democrats looked more and more like Herbert Hoovers of the Left.
The pain and suffering inflicted in defeated Democrats and independent liberals by the train wreck of November 5th is real and understandable. That many of them have learned very little from this experience is revealed each night on CNN and MSNBC, whose anchors and guests can’t stop complaining about Trump’s rude attacks on established bureaucratic practices and foreign policy norms. For example, they repeatedly call him a “felon,” unwilling to admit that trying to use the judicial system to discredit him was not only a failure but a serious political mistake and a diversion. Liberals turn to the courts when they are losing the battle for hearts and minds in the streets, workplaces, and legislatures. Unfortunately, Stormy Daniels did not supply them with a program to win back the alienated working class.
What did the voters want?
Exit interviews and other analyses reveal that those who voted for Trump or didn’t vote at all were reacting to two major problem-sets, one socioeconomic, the other ethnocultural. The socioeconomic issues included high prices and stagnant wages, growing personal debt, lack of opportunities to get ahead, the impact of deindustrialization and automation, skyrocketing inequality, and feelings of being abandoned and disrespected by the “elites”. The ethnocultural problems involved perceived threats to people’s identities as Americans, males, whites, Christians, non-college educated workers, Arab-Americans, country people, or members of other groups sensing a decline in their status and opportunities relative to those of more favored groups.
What would it take to solve problems like these? Clearly — or so it seems to me – these are structural problems requiring changes in existing socioeconomic and ethnocultural systems. But the Democrats licking their wounds would rather debate whether Kamala Harris lost because she was too progressive, as conservatives or centrists say, or because she wasn’t progressive enough, as Bernie Sanders and others on the Left believe.
The answer, I’m sorry to say, is “both.”
With respect to socioeconomic issues, Harris was not progressive enough. She pointed to reforms adopted by the Biden Administration that were helpful to working people but not remotely adequate to solve the underlying problems causing mass insecurity and suffering. Harris would not even commit to increasing taxes on the super-rich – but, if she had, she would still have had a credibility deficit. This is because the measures advocated by progressives like Sanders – reforms such as taxing the rich and raising the minimum wage – do not have the power to correct major structural malfunctions related to deindustrialization, automation, or even the challenge of low-wage immigration. More radical change is needed.
What sort of change? Consider the undocumented worker issue, so potent in influencing even the votes of Hispanic Americans. The economists agree that the U.S. has a serious labor shortage – but low-wage immigration clearly undermines the income levels of low-wage workers living in the same region. This problem could be mitigated, even eliminated, by adopting the sort of economic planning, with input from local communities, that would permit the government to guarantee high-wage jobs and public welfare subsidies in areas of high immigration. But so long as progressivism as defined by Democratic neoliberals excludes the possibility of serious economic planning and collective action, the Dems will be incapable of offering credible solutions to the real problems of our market-driven system.
What about the ethnocultural problems – the identity-based insecurities and ambitions mentioned earlier? Some say that, with regard to these issues, the Harris campaign was too progressive, in the sense that, in addition to economic reforms, it advocated women’s reproductive and workplace rights, racial equality, LGBTQ+ rights, and protection of the interests of other marginalized groups such as undocumented workers and prisoners. But the problem is not that liberals fight for the rights and interests of historically oppressed groups. It is that, by accepting the zero-sum rules of the existing oligarchical system, they declare less oppressed groups to be “privileged” and lump them in with elite oppressors. Not surprisingly, this threatens and alienates groups that are only relatively privileged, and who are actually potential allies against the oligarchy and its political camp followers.
Let’s be clear about this. The historic oppression of some groups, continuing into the present, is a fact. It is also a fact that systemic oppression to some extent benefits everyone who is not a member of the most oppressed group. For example, the cheap cotton produced by slaves provided jobs for white workers in the clothing industry as well as consumer goods for everyone who could afford them. But to be white rather than Black, male rather than female, straight rather than gay, gives straight white males only relative advantages over the members of more oppressed groups. It clearly does not relieve them of oppression by far more powerful elites. In fact, their relative superiority over other groups is part of a sleazy divide-and-conquer game used by those with oligarchical power to keep them in line.
People do not live “by bread alone”; even if relatively comfortable, they will fight to defend the existence and interests of the groups they strongly identify with. Even so, it seems undeniable that socioeconomic struggles and precarity incline many of those suffering either to challenge more powerful groups or to seek scapegoats among groups considered their social inferiors or pariahs. MAGA’s identification of immigrants as rapists and criminals was a classic exercise in such scapegoating.
Cui bono? Who benefits from such a conflation of economic and moral threats? Of course, those at the top of the socioeconomic ladder would much rather have troubled workers and insecure middleclass folks punching down than punching up! The MAGA movement thrives on this dynamic, and the Democrats do not yet seem to understand that the way to challenge it is not just to defend the interests of the most downtrodden groups but to relieve their suffering – and that of the slightly less downtrodden – by punching up!
The enemy is the oligarchy
How to punch up? Consider that our political system offers voters a choice between two parties, one more “liberal” and the other more “conservative,” both of which claim to represent all classes of Americans, from workers and small entrepreneurs to the great capitalists who control our key financial, manufacturing, communications, and service companies. The roughneck working on an oil rig and Elon Musk in his Austin, Texas compound are both Republicans. The scholarship student at a march against genocide and the CEO of Lockheed Martin are both Democrats. Some bargaining between the elements of each party coalition is permitted, but the masters of the economy maintain and modify the basic rules of the game. So, whichever party citizens vote for, the wealthiest, most powerful groups in our society remain in the driver’s seat. Whichever party is elected, the solutions to certain problems that might alter the system to the elites’ disadvantage are automatically placed out of bounds, and thinking seriously about them becomes taboo.
Consider the weapons industry, for example. Producing weapons and weapons delivery systems is the healthiest, most profitable sector of the U.S. manufacturing economy. The military-industrial complex is an oligarchical industry, with profits guaranteed by the government, that kills millions of people and destroys property around the globe. Suppose that you don’t like this situation and want to slash the military budgets and redirect this production to peacetime uses. Forget it! You will be called irresponsible, pro-Russian, pro-Chinese, AND anti-worker, since you will be threatening jobs as well as investments. The Democrats will be as opposed to your proposal as the Republicans – if not more so. This is because the same oligarchs owning the same or related companies, and financing the careers of the same or related politicians, set the rules and define the limits of permissible discussion in both political parties.
What is vicious about this is not merely that elite power makes a farce of democracy, but also that it continually generates solution-less problems. Thus, we export weapons of destruction as if there were no possibility of converting military production into a program to produce goods and services to satisfy basic human needs. We fight over immigration as if there were no such thing as a planned economy capable of remedying our labor shortage without lowering wage rates and bankrupting social services. And we choose sides in disputes between relatively oppressed and less oppressed identity groups as if there were no way to reduce competition between them for unnecessarily scarce resources and economic opportunities.
What James Carville might say, if he understood the situation better, is “It’s the system, stupid!” If we do not recognize that it is the system of capitalist oligarchy and its political servants that limit the possibilities of conflict resolution and generate most of this discontent, we will keep fighting unnecessary battles that Democrats are unlikely to win against a movement that claims (however falsely) to be anti-system.
In a nutshell: the Republican victory of November 5 was not a rejection of the Left – it was the result of a vacuum on the Left. The MAGA Republicans allowed themselves to consider forms of change that many consider taboo, for example, making radical cuts in federal regulatory agencies. These changes will make the plight of working people worse, not better, but they point in an instructive direction. Those on the Left must also permit themselves to consider forms of system change that are now taboo.
Critics may brand proposals to reconstruct a destructive neoliberal system “socialist,” “communist,” “anarchist,” or what have you, but if they point the way to shifting power from the oligarchs to the people, working people will respond positively. They are already anti-system. The challenge now is to make it clear to everyone that Trumpism is nothing more than a disguise for oligarchical tyranny, and that we can only control the economy by owning it and operating it collectively.
Arab and Muslim American voters did not remove Democrats from office, nor did they cost Kamala Harris the Oval Office. They merely sent a strong message that Palestine matters, not only to Arabs and Muslims but to many Americans as well.
The ones who cost the Democrats the elections are the Democrats themselves. Their humiliating defeat on November 5 was due largely to their undeniable role in the Israeli war and genocide in Gaza.
Peter Beinart put it best in his November 7 op-ed in the New York Times, entitled “Democrats Ignored Gaza and Brought Down Their Party.”
“Israel’s slaughter and starvation of Palestinians — funded by U.S. taxpayers and live-streamed on social media,” according to Beinart, has “triggered one of the greatest surges in progressive activism in a generation”. The writer correctly indicates that the core of this activism was “Black Americans and the young”.
Undeniably, for the first time in US election history, Palestine has become a domestic American political issue – a nightmare realization for those who labored to maintain US foreign policy in the Middle East as an exclusive Israeli domain.
Aside from Arab voters, black voters and voters from other minority groups who prioritized Palestine, many white Americans felt the same way. This claim is particularly important as it suggests that American voters are challenging the identity politics paradigm, and are now thinking around common struggles, values and morality.
“Democrats may no longer be able to rely on young voters to boost numbers, as Harris appears on track to have the lowest support among voters aged 18-29 in this century,” a report in the British Independent newspaper noted. Knowing the relatively strong support for Palestine among young Americans, US politicians have much to worry about in coming elections.
We already know that support for Palestine is overwhelmingly strong among young Democrats. A poll conducted by Gallup in March 2023 indicated that, for the first time, Democrats’ “sympathies .. now lie more with the Palestinians than the Israelis, 49% versus 38%.”
Even more astonishing, the overall US Democratic constituency is more pro-Palestine than Israel. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center last April, the overall young American population “are more likely to sympathize with the Palestinian people than the Israeli people.” While a third of adults under 30 sympathized “entirely or mostly” with Palestinians, only 14% sympathized with the Israelis.
These numbers did not seem to matter to the Democrats who continued to take for granted the votes of youth and other minority groups. They made a grave mistake.
The Biden Administration has played a central role in funding and sustaining the Israeli war machine, thus facilitating the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Millions of Americans took notice and acted upon their sense of collective rage to punish the Democrats for what they had done to the Palestinian people.
According to a report prepared for Brown University’s Costs of War project, the Biden Administration has granted Israel a record of at least $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel in the first year of the war. Additionally, according to a report published on October 4 by the non-profit investigative newspaper ProPublica, “the US has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry” to Israel since October 7, 2023.
Merely hours after the US presidential election results were announced, the Israeli Ministry of Defense signed a deal “to acquire 25 F-15IA combat jets from U.S. manufacturer Boeing for $5.2 billion, with an option to get 25 more,” according to Defense News. In other words, Biden remains unrepentant.
Biden, Harris and others may twist the logic to justify their support for Israel in any way they wish. However, there can be no denying that their administration has played a leading role in the Israeli genocide in Gaza. For this, they were duly and deservedly penalized by American voters.
The understandable euphoria among many of Palestine’s supporters in the US notwithstanding, we must not harbor any illusions. Neither President-elect Donald Trump nor his entourage of right-wing politicians will be the saviors of Palestine.
We must recall that it was Trump’s first term in office that paved the road to the complete marginalization of the Palestinians. He did so by granting Israel sovereignty over occupied East Jerusalem, recognizing the illegal settlements as legitimate, waging financial warfare against Palestinians, and attempting to destroy the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, among other actions.
If Trump returns to his old destructive policies in Palestine, another war will certainly start.
This means that the pro-Palestine camp, which has managed to convert solidarity into decisive political action, must not wait for the new US administration to adopt a more sensible political line on Palestine. Judging by the history of Republican support for Israel, no such sensibility should be expected.
Thus, it is time to build on the existing solidarity among all American groups that voted against genocide in the latest elections. This is the perfect opportunity to translate votes into sustained action and pressure so that all aspects of the US government may hear and heed the deafening chants of ‘ceasefire now’, and ‘free, free Palestine.’
This time around, however, these chants are backed by solid evidence that American voters are capable of destabilizing the entire political paradigm, as they did on November 5, 2024.
Detail from the French poster for the 1960s re-release of Todd Browning’s film Freaks.
It’s been a hallucinatory week, which I hope explains my momentary lapse of reason in believing that an unshackled and restored Trump might follow through on his vow to drive the neocon contagion from the halls of executive power, if only out of revenge for plotting against him for the last eight years. After all, this was the man who evicted John Bolton. (The right side of my brain reminds me that this was also the man who hired John Bolton and the equally evil Elliot Abrams.)
The early visions were promising. Trump slamming the door firmly in the face of two neocon job applicants, Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo, the man who plotted the assassination Julian Assange, acted on my political psyche with the chimeric allure of Lemon tekking a dose of Psilocybe cubensis, which are currently popping up in pastures all along the Oregon coasts. But before reaching peak high, the whole exciting illusion began to melt into some Daliesque hellscape populated by a grotesquerie of neocons, Christian nationalist end-timers, and billionaire defense contractors.
First, news broke that Trump had tapped Lil Marco Rubio for Secretary of State, then a mini-Goebbels himself, Stephen Miller, as his deputy Chief of Staff. This was quickly followed by the termagant from Albany, Elise Stefanick, as UN ambassador, resumé-embellisher John Ratcliffe at the CIA, Christian fundamentalist Mike Huckabee as ambassador to Israel, and FoxNews star Pete Hegseth to run the Pentagon. The fantasy had dissolved into another Bad Trip.
Like capitalism itself, neoconservativism seems endlessly adaptable, capable of filling any void, assuming any visage, from Rumsfeld to Hillary Clinton. Trump’s rogues gallery aren’t the apex neocons of the Bush-Obama-Clinton-Biden era. There’s no pretense of intellectualism. These are the grunts. This is neoconservatism run by the gut. The very wise Stephen Walt referred to Trump’s national security peaks as a Team of Lackeys. But in the Man’s own coarse, simplistic language, they’re just Trump’s Chumps, hand-picked for their obsequiousness and blind fealty to their boss. People who follow orders and don’t ask questions. Whether they’re competent enough to implement Trump’s plans remains to be seen.
Trump rolled out his cabinet of curiosities like a carnival barker at a tent show, with the introduction of each new act yielding a louder gasp from the audience… Rubio is the most peculiar case. But then, he is a peculiar man who has fashioned his political career in Florida out of a histrionic hostility toward Cuba while largely concealing the fact that his family fled the island to escape the dictatorial grip of Fulgencio Batista. Some may find it odd that Trump picked Rubio off the trash heap where he’d flung him after Rubio signed on to a Senate report documenting Russia’s courting of the 2016 Trump campaign, particularly its entreaties to Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort. But there’s no loyalty stronger than the rehabilitated man. And Rubio had been put through a process of Trumpian operant conditioning: abuse, humiliation, exile, supplication, return, reward. Rubio has bent the knee, licked the boots (or Ferragamo’s in Trump’s case), and kissed enough ass to be sent forth to excoriate the rest of the world with his juvenile style of bluster and bombast.
Rubio’s hectoring brand of anti-diplomacy will accompanied by the coruscating keening of his backup singer, Elise Stefanick, who impressed Trump with her McCarthyite scolding of Ivy League presidents for their laxity in not violently crushing the campus anti-genocide protests last spring. It’s hard to envision a UN ambassador more ill-equipped for the job than Biden’s Linda Greenfield-Thomas, the hapless enabler of Palestinian genocide, may fill the bill as Trump’s one-note Jeanne Kirkpatrick–one shrill note at that.
Someone said that instead of a cabinet to Make America Great Again, Trump had drafted a team to Make Greater Israel. You’ll scan futilely for any peacenik libertarians or even hardcore isolationists in this gung-ho retinue, all of whom seem eager to greenlight the immediate annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories on route to more glorious (and insane) confrontations against Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, China and any stubborn nation that refuses to hand over its lithium to Elon Musk. Not only aren’t there any guardrails in sight, there’s not even a handbrake.
+++
+ Craig Mokhiber, human rights lawyer: ‘Donald Trump has drained the swamp – and appointed every loathsome swamp creature he found there to his administration. In January, the US will be governed by a hodgepodge of white nationalists, Christian fundamentalists, fascists, Zionist loyalists, neocons, Islamophobes, xenophobes, and racists. To which people in the Middle East reply, “So, more of the same?”’
+ Sure, Rubio’s a neo-con hawk, but can he play guitar while he runs diplomatic cover for a genocide?
+ NBC reported on Tuesday that some Democrats in Congress are “pleasantly surprised” by several of Trump’s picks, such as Marco Rubio. “Some Democrats” have replaced “Florida Man” as the annual favorite in the Darwin Awards…
+ Rubio introduced a bill last year to prevent a future president from leaving NATO, and Biden signed it into law.
+ What’s the over/under in the number of months before Trump starts bad-mouthing Rubio?
+ Sen. John Fetterman: “Unsurprisingly, the other team’s pick will have political differences than my own. That being said, my colleague Sen. Marco Rubio is a strong choice, and I look forward to voting for his confirmation.” Ladies and gentlemen, the future leader of the Democratic Party, according to no less of an authority than Chuck Todd…
+ Elise Stefanick is so abrasive that she might even alienate those three or four Pacific Island nations that tag along with the US votes, shielding Israel from UN sanctions. So maybe it’s not all bad, at least on Gaza, where it could scarcely get much worse.
+ Ivana would have been the better choice…
+ So, no long-desired cabinet post for poor Lindsay Graham, always a bridesmaid, never the bride…
+ Trump’s pick to run the CIA, John Ratcliffe, has accused Iran of committing “acts of war” against the US by allegedly hacking Trump campaign emails and allegedly plotting to assassinate Trump. Ratcliffe wants the US to conduct joint attacks with Israel on Iran.
+ This is the third time Trump has nominated John Ratcliffe for a top intelligence post. In 2016, Ratcliffe withdrew his nomination to become director of National Intelligence after it was revealed that he had “exaggerated” resume by claiming he was a terrorist-fighting federal prosecutor in East Texas under George W. Bush, even though court records showed no there were “no significant national security prosecutions in that jurisdiction during his tenure.” Ratcliffe also took sole credit for a major crackdown on the employment of undocumented immigrants by a poultry producer when the case was actually “a multistate, multiagency operation.”
+ In 2020, Trump again nominated Ratcliffe to head the DNI, and this time, Ratcliffe narrowly won the approval of the Senate after vowing to be impartial and apolitical. A few weeks later, the NYT reported that Ratcliffe had “approved selective declassifications of intelligence that aim to score political points, left Democratic lawmakers out of briefings, accused congressional opponents of leaks, offered Republican operatives top spots in his headquarters and made public assertions that contradicted professional intelligence assessments.”
+ For Ratcliffe’s old job as DNI, Trump has tapped the Harris-slayer, Tulsi Gabbard. In 2019, Gabbard told Trump’s pals (and financial underwriters), the Saudis where to stuff it…
+ Of course, as always with Gabbard, we must confront the question of what animates her anti-Saudi animus: the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, their genocidal war on Yemen, their involvement in the 9/11 attacks, or her well-documented Islamophobia?
+ A Middle East History Moment with Pete Hegseth: “Open up your Bible. God granted Abraham this land. The twelve tribes of Israel established a constitutional monarchy in 1000 BC. King David was their second king and established Jerusalem as the capital. Jews were fighting foreign occupiers for centuries, ultimately maintaining a presence there. And right now, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, are trying to erase the Jewish ties to Jerusalem, as we speak. I’ve been there multiple times. They’re trying to make it look like Jews were never there. The most important aspect of this is the international community granted sovereignty to the Jews, to the Jewish state, after World War II, and Israel has had to fight defensive war after defensive war, with every country coming to crush it, ever since then just to exist.”
+ Of course, this was almost precisely the position Bill Clinton took when he scolded Arab-American voters in Michigan for being hesitant to vote for Harris.
+ More Hegseth: “Zionism and Americanism are the front lines of Western civilization and freedom in our world today.”
+ Back in 2019, Hegseth bragged on FoxNews about never washing his hands and claimed he couldn’t remember washing them once in the past 10 years.
+ Hegseth wants women on KP duty, not in combat: “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective, hasn’t made us more lethal, has made fighting more complicated.”
+ Sen. Tammy Duckworth responding to Pete Hegseth saying women shouldn’t be allowed to serve in combat: “I would ask him, ‘Where do you think I lost my legs? In a bar fight?’ I’m pretty sure I was in combat when that happened.”
+ Using his direct pipeline to Trump as a FoxNews contributor, Hegseth convinced Trump to pardon three service members convicted or accused of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq, including Eddie “the Blade” Gallagher.
+ From 2012 to 2015, Pete Hegseth was CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, an NGP funded by the Koch brothers’ network, whose top priority was privatizing Veterans Administration health care. Hegseth’s leadership of the organization came under scrutiny after he hired his brother at an annual salary of $69,497.
+ A social conservative, Hegseth’s two marriages ended in divorce after extra-marital affairs, one with a staffer and another with a FoxNews producer who later bore his child.
+ Vanity Fair reported that on Thursday, the Trump transition team held an emergency meeting over newly surfaced allegations of sexual misconduct by Pete Hegseth involving a woman he had what is described as an “inappropriate” encounter with in Monterey, California, in 2017. Hegseth apparently told the transition team that the relationship was consensual and had been investigated by the Monterey police, who declined to file charges. A case “he said, she said,” according to Hegseth, which is hardly the most exculpatory denial. Say this much, Trump hasn’t picked a team of incel fanboys.
+ Paul Rieckhoff, founder of Independent Veterans of America: “Hegseth is undoubtedly the least qualified nominee for SecDef in American history. And the most overtly political. Brace yourself, America.”
+ In picking Hegseth, Trump passed over Iowa Senator Joanie Ernst, who’d been lobbying for the post. Ernst is best known for castrating hogs in a campaign ad, which I guess would have qualified her to run the biggest porkbarrel feedlot on the Hill…
+ Mike Huckabee, Trump’s pick for Ambassador to Israel, on the principles guiding his approach to the Middle East: “I believe the scripture. Genesis 12: Those who bless Israel will be blessed; those who curse Israel will be cursed. I want to be on the blessing side, not the curse side.” Megiddo Now!
As National Security Advisor, Trump tapped Mike Waltz, an ultra-rightwing congressman from Florida. Waltz is a former Army Green Beret who said he wants to “take the handcuffs off of the long-range weapons we provided Ukraine.” The Wall Street Journal called Waltz “among the most hawkish members of Congress on China.”
+ In 2017, Walz argued at the CPAC conference that the US should be ready to remain in Afghanistan for several generations until the very “idea” of radical Islam is defeated.
+ Kristi Neom, Trump’s choice to run the Dept. of Homeland Security, is banned from stepping foot on every tribal reservation in South Dakota after repeatedly slandering the tribes as acting like subsidiaries of the Mexican drug cartels…
+ The party that obsessed over the seizure and killing of P-Nut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon is about to make a confessed puppy killer the head of a national department that can do warrantless no-knock raids, where dogs are often killed merely for barking.
+ Sen Markwayne Mullin on Trump’s AG pick Matt Gaetz: “The first time I ever met this guy, he walked up to me, and Kristi Noem was at the podium. We were just elected, so we were going through orientation. And he walked up to me and said, ‘Man, she’s a fine bitch!’” Cabinet meetings should be a blast! Does Corey Lewandowski, with whom Noem has become especially intimate, according to reporting by Ken Silverstein, know about this?
+ Back in April, Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-Arizona) had this to say on CNN about Matt Gaetz: “I serve with some real scumbags. Matt Gaetz, he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties.”
+ “I hereby resign as a US representative…effective immediately, and I do not intend to take the oath of office for the same office in the 119th Congress. To pursue the position of attorney general in the Trump administration. Signed, sincerely, Matt Gaetz.”
+ The House Ethics Committee has been investigating Gaetz since 2021. Gaetz resigned from Congress on the same day Trump announced his plans to nominate him for Attorney General and two days before the House Ethics Committee was set to vote on releasing its “highly damaging” report outlining its investigation into the Republican for sexual misconduct. The committee loses its jurisdiction over Gaetz after he leaves Congress.
+ John Clune, the attorney for the woman at the center of the child sex trafficking allegations involving Gaetz, is urging the committee to release its report, saying, “She was a high school student, and there were witnesses.”
+ After being told of Gaetz’s nomination for Attorney General, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) said: “Are you shittin’ me?”
+ Charlie Sykes, a former Republican congressman from Ohio: “Appointing Gaetz as attorney general is designed to trigger the Libs. In reality, it is humiliating the Senate’s new GOP majority. Before they even take office.”
+ To Gaetz’s credit, he has called on Trump to pardon Edward Snowden…
+ Why Gaetz may have a shot at confirmation by the Senate, despite allegations of drug use and sexual misconduct: He’s married to Ginger Luckey, the sister of Oculus V.R. founder Palmer Luckey, who, along with three Palantir executives, started the surveillance technology company Anduril, which has won several billion dollars worth of Pentagon contracts for counter-drone weapons and “Advanced Battle Management Systems”…
+ Still, it’s ludicrous to think that Matt Gaetz could further debase the office of Attorney General, where the likes of Mitchell Palmer, John Mitchell, Richard Kleindeist, Ed Meese, Janet Reno, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr have already roosted…
+ Trump’s pick for “border czar,” Thomas Homan, developed the “child separation” policy in 2014 while he headed ICE under Obama. A year later, Obama gave him an award for how well he had done his job of deporting people. Now he’s going to reprise his role on steroids under Trump. Homan said he plans to enlist the military to execute Trump’s plan to track down, detain, hold in concentration camps, and deport more than a million immigrants under the Alien and Sedition Act of 1797.
+ Cecilia Vega asked Homan on 60 Minutes: “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”
Homan: “Of course there is. Families can be deported together.”
+ Richard D. Wolff: “A strong, growing economy attracts and integrates immigrants. A weak, declining economy deports them. What made America great was immigration, not deportation. Don’t be fooled.”
+ According to Politico, Trump is expected to nominate RFK Jr to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which, given Jr.’s views on vaccines, would make a strange repudiation of one of Trump’s best policies during his first term, Operation Warp Speed, which demonstrated that the federal government could actually spring into practical action. (The main reason Trump might want to elide it from the collective memory.)
+ During a TikTok town hall in June, RFK Jr. said he would order NIH to stop all research on drug development and infectious disease for 8 YEARS.
+ Meanwhile, H5N1 avian flu creeps on, steadily picking up lethal momentum…
+ What will Trump’s blood pressure come in after RFK transitions him from his normal McDonald’s fare to the roadkill diet?
+ Andrew Jackson had his “kitchen cabinet,” while Trump’s cabinet of curiosities seems destined for the outhouse.
+ JD Vance may well end up being the least weird person at Trump cabinet meetings.
+ On Wednesday, Trump gave a victory speech to House Republicans with Elon Musk tagging along: “Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him. Until I don’t like him.” He’s beginning to sound like Henry XIII after the gout had set in….”and then it’s off to the Tower with him.”
+ Word on the Hill is that Musk has warned Republicans that he will finance a primary challenge to anyone who votes against Trump’s cabinet nominees or legislative priorities.
+ Elon keeps throwing around the word, Doge, which most of us associate with the rulers of Italian city-states like Venice and Genoa–doge, duce, duke. But a mere dukedom is too petty a domain for Musk. He uses the term as an abbreviation for a Department of Government Efficiency, which he believes Trump has appointed him and Vivek Ramaswamy to command. However, as Nathaniel St. Clair points out, two people running a Department of Efficiency isn’t evidence of efficiency. It’s actually a proposal for a commission (a department posting would require Elon and Vivek to open up their financial holdings), like the Cat Food Commissions of old. Musk claims he’s going to save the taxpayers tens of billions and fire thousands of federal workers who do nothing but enforce regulations that make his life more difficult. Good luck finding something left to cut. After nearly forty years of neoliberal austerity and regulation-slashing, there’s not much fat left to carve, except in the Pentagon, which will require real courage and some very sharp knives.
+ Speaking of Elon Musk, Humza Yousaf, the former first minister of Scotland, has accused Musk of scouring through his private DMs in a campaign to “besmirch” his reputation. Yousaf described the owner of X and Tesla as “one of the most dangerous men on the planet.”
+ Meanwhile, JD Vance has threatened European leaders that the US will withdraw from NATO if they impose regulations on Musk’s corporate operations in Europe–which, all things considered, probably isn’t the best way for the US to finally get out of NATO. Vance also said that “Germany and other nations” will have to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine, not Russia. A government of, by and for the peop…uh…Elon.
+ Good luck filling these jobs after the Great Deportation…
+++
Biden, 2020: “Nothing fundamental will change.”
+ Did Neville Chamberlain yuk it up like this with Hitler at Munich in late September 1938?
+ How disinterested and lax have the Democrats become? Senate Democrats have yet to confirm Biden’s last NLRB nomination, even though this would maintain a Democratic majority on the board through late 2026.
+ I speculated in my column last week that the premature unwinding of Medicaid may have contributed to Harris’s defeat in some battleground states. Now, there are some numbers to back this up. Consider that in Pennsylvania, for every vote that Harris lost by, 3.5 people lost their Medicaid coverage during the great unwinding. In Wisconsin, the ratio was 5.5:1; in Michigan, it was 6.5:1. (h/t Artie Vierkant for crunching the math.)
+ Stephen Semler assembled these revelatory polling numbers…
Biden approval rating after passing the American Rescue Plan: 57% (highest of the entire term)
Biden approval after most pandemic aid programs expired: 43%
Biden approval after all pandemic aid programs expired: 37%
+ In 2025, when Obamacare subsidies are set to expire, millions of Americans are projected to lose their health care. What a top-to-bottom scam Obamacare turned out to be.
+ John Oliver on the persistent calls that the Democrats must migrate even further to the right: “If what you want is a centrist campaign that’s quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, that candidate existed and she just lost.”
+ Since Clinton, the Democrats have been willing to sacrifice 100,000 votes to curry the favor of one banker or CEO. Ultimately, they ran out of votes to offer on Wall Street’s sacrificial altar.
+ Julie Roginsky, Democratic strategist, on CNN: “Hey college kids, if you’re trashing a Columbia University campus over some sort of policy…” What a strange way to admit that the genocide was a policy…
+ Before he started droning American citizens, Obama won the Democratic nomination and was elected president by running against the Iraq war. Kamala Harris lost to Trump by running with the people who instigated it.
+ James Zogby: “[Liz Cheney] accused [Obama] of being a traitor. Why? Because he criticized torture — which was her father’s thing. At what point does this person become somebody who’s going to win votes for us?”
+ If there was a single issue Harris stayed somewhat consistent on during the campaign, it was reproductive rights, which she undercut by going out on the road with an anti-abortion zealot like Liz Cheney.
+ Biden has issued the fewest pardons and clemencies (26) of any president in modern times and The Atlantic is pushing for him to give one to…Liz Cheney?
+ Biden, Pelosi and Harris seem to have missed the announcement about the Brown Acid circulating at the DNC…
+ Harris had the worst performance with the youth vote since John “I was for the war before I was against it” Kerry…
Harris: +12
Biden: +24
Clinton: +19
Obama: +23
Obama: +34
Kerry: +9
+ In 2009, during the debates over whether to bailout GM and Chrysler, the man many Obama staffers, including David Axelrod (who often speaks for the Man himself), want to become the new head of the DNC, erupted during a meeting over the entirely sensible demands the autoworkers should have a say: “Fuck the UAW!” That Axelrod would really prefer Rahm Emanuel over Shawn Fain tells you a lot about why the Democrats are in such a wrecked state and why their recovery looks very doubtful, indeed.
+ David Axelrod: “Dems need a strong and strategic party leader, with broad experience in comms; fundraising and winning elections. One thought I surfaced … is Ambassador Rahm Emanuel. There may be others, but he is kind of sui genesis: Dude knows how to fight and win!”
+ If Rahm lands the job, it will be another case of the Democrats committing “suicide right on the stage…”
+ Rebuffing calls from liberal Democrats, Justice Sonya Sotomayor, who is 70 and a severe diabetic who often travels with a nurse, says she has no plans to step down from the court and allow Biden to nominate a new justice. So, nothing was learned from the Ruth Bader Ginsberg debacle. The Supreme Court has been lost for a generation, not that it ever represented much of a force for progressive values or even a fail-safe for the rights of minorities and the poor. For most of its history, it’s been the most reactionary branch of government, a guardian of power, property (including humans as property), and economic privilege.
+++
The Earth endured its second warmest October in the last 175 years and is on its way to its warmest year on record.
+ Ilham Aliyev, president of Azerbaijan, which is hosting the latest global climate conference (CO29), called reports of his country’s soaring carbon emissions “fake news” and said that nations should not be blamed for developing and using fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, which Aliyev said were “God’s gifts.” At least Aliyev showed up, unlike some of the leaders of the world’s biggest emitters, including Biden, Macron and Modi.
+ Mark this ignominious distinction down on the Biden-Harris legacy: Despite the lofty pledges by Western nations at COP28 last year, global carbon emissions have hit new highs, and there is no sign of a transition away from fossil fuels.
+ According to a new study in Nature, the emissions from private flights by rich people increased by 46% between 2019 and 2023: 70% of these flights came from the US, and half were shorter than 500 kilometers–in other words, the Democrats’ new base…
+ Even though the kill quota set by the state of Montana had already been filled, a fifth Yellowstone wolf has been killed just north of the Park, all five from the same pack. Three more are missing.
+ I spent much of the last week in Astoria, Oregon, at an aging hotel on the waterfront docks, about a quarter mile away from a vast log loading yard for NW Forest Link, a log export company, which manages the storage and loading of timber cut in the Pacific Northwest onto giant cargo ships bound for Asia before the logs have been sawn in American mills by American workers. On this rainy November weekend, the caterpillars, log loaders, and trucks were working round the clock to fill the cargo holds of the Pan Nova, a 700-foot long, 100-foot wide ship flagged in Panama. Despite the MAGA movement, the US continues to export nearly $3 billion in raw logs a year and thousands of jobs, mainly to China, Japan, Canada, South Korea, and Vietnam. The Pan Nova started its voyage north from Los Angeles harbor, docked in Astoria, gobbled up thousands of logs of Doug-fir, redcedar and Western hemlock, then departed up the Pacific Coast to Grays Harbor in Washington’s Olympic Peninsula to cart off even more of the ravaged temperate rainforests of the Northwest.
Pan Nova, Panamanian-flagged bulk cargo ship, Port of Astoria, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Rough (raw) logs being loaded onto the bulk cargo ship Pan Nova, Port of Astoria, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
NW Forest Link loading dock, Port of Astoria, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
NW Forest Link loading dock, Port of Astoria, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
NW Forest Link loading dock, Port of Astoria, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
+ Trump selected climate denier Lee Zeldin to head the EPA, which the Trump team has vowed to move out of DC. This is not a bad idea. They should move it to Cancer Alley. Zeldin said his priorities will be “to restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI.” None of these have much to do with the mission of the agency he is poised to run.
+++
+ Walter Benjamin’s 13 rules for writing…
+ Of course, if you’re in a rush, you can set ChatGtp to Benjamin mode, which is almost guaranteed to generate its own “death mask of conception.”
“Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph. D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy. Mr. Trump is a con man straight out of Mark Twain; he will say anything, promise anything, do nothing. But his movement baffled the party of education and innovation. Their most brilliant minds couldn’t figure him out.”– Thomas Frank
Hyper-capitalism is the death knell of democracy. It reduces everything to a commodity, monetizing and pathologizing every aspect of life. The blind faith in markets and unfettered individualism has dismantled the social state, ravaged the environment, and fueled staggering inequality. By divorcing economic activity from its social costs, liberals have obliterated civic culture, creating a vacuum filled by despair and alienation. Into that vacuum emerged a band of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, radical Christian nationalists, and a cruel band of misogynists and neoliberal fascists.
Let’s be clear: liberals have never escaped the shadow of Reagan, whose anti-government rhetoric and racist spectacles reshaped the political landscape, nor that of Milton Friedman, whose dogmatic worship of capitalism and contempt for social responsibility set the stage for decades of exploitation.[1] Liberals have not only failed to dismantle these legacies—they’ve deepened them. They accelerated the war on Black women, expanded the carceral state, gutted the working class with NAFTA, and under Obama, cozied up to bankers while millions of Americans lost their homes and livelihoods in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.[2]
Instead, liberals clung to the isolating ethos of individualism and a myopic fixation on electoral wins at all costs, turning a blind eye to the loneliness and despair consuming millions of working-class people yearning for community and solidarity. In their neglect, they left an open wound, one that Trump exploited with his grotesque theater of hate. His fraudulent promises of “making America great again” cloaked a cynical swindle in the language of bigotry, lies, and the comforting rituals of spectacle, offering a hollow illusion of unity while solidifying a totalitarian nightmare rooted in the very structures of domination liberals refused to confront.[3]
Liberals bear significant responsibility for the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement. Their complicity lies in more than their failure to challenge the “manufactured ignorance” churned out by today’s totalitarian digital disimagination machines.[4] It is also rooted in their refusal to engage with how youth, people of color, and the displaced experience their suffering and name their realities.
For too long, liberals have failed to recognize education for what it truly is: not merely a service or a tool for economic adaptation, but the very foundation of democratic life. By reducing education to a set of instrumental skills needed to “compete in the global economy” and privileging standardized tests over critical thinking, they have stripped away the radical potential of learning while sabotaging any viable notion of critical pedagogy.[5] Education is not simply about preparing individuals for work; it is about preparing them for the struggle to shape the world. When we turn education into a factory for producing compliant workers rather than active, informed citizens, we sabotage the very principles of democracy.
In their haste to placate the demands of neoliberalism, liberals abandoned the transformative power of education as a vehicle for collective consciousness. They relinquished any serious commitment to the idea that education could—and should—be a force that fosters social awareness, critical inquiry, and solidarity. Instead, they celebrated the hollow rhetoric of “school-to-work” and embraced policies that treated students as nothing more than cogs in a corporate machine.
Too many liberals remained silent as the media—a crucial pillar of democratic society—was surrendered to a far-right agenda and a corrupt corporate elite. In the process, the media has become a tool of misinformation, distorting reality to serve the interests of the powerful. Right-wing media has not just fostered ignorance; it has crafted a society incapable of distinguishing fact from fiction, truth from lies, democracy from authoritarianism.
This is the legacy of liberalism’s failure to defend education as a critical practice for political engagement. By abandoning the radical potential of the classroom and turning a blind eye to the growing monopoly over information, they have paved the way for the erosion of democratic values and social relations. In an age marked by the resurgence of fascism, especially with the election of Trump, Americans find themselves in a world where ignorance is weaponized, and truth is under siege. Lost in the veil of spectacularized stupidity and lies promoted by the likes of Fox News, Newsmax, One America News Network, and Elon Musk’s X, it is almost impossible to image education as both a defense and enabler of democracy.[6]
Meanwhile young people act not only as cultural critics but also as cultural producers across a variety of platforms—from social media and podcasts to online documentaries, blogs, and art installations—creating new pedagogical spaces to educate and mobilize the public. These spaces are crucial in both raising awareness of the growing threat of fascism and advocating for the dismantling of entrenched systems—such as the influence of money, the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and other elements of a corrosive capitalism—that distort the promise of a radical democracy.
What is unforgivable is the liberal retreat into the mythic fantasy of an America that never existed. Historical amnesia has become a mass pedagogical weapon of depoliticization. This denial left the path wide open for a regime that embodies the darkest truths about the nation’s past and present. Now, we are left with a pedagogy of terror and ignorance—a cultural framework that normalizes violence and enshrines cruelty, allows the planet to destruct, accelerates the war on people of color and women’s reproductive rights. This is the “Third Reich of Dreams” Charlotte Beradt warned about, where the nightmare is both lived and embraced.[7]
Carlos Lozada, writing in The New York Times, captures a stark truth when he declares that neither Trump nor Trumpism are passing fads.[8] Trump and his MAGA movement are not outliers on the fringe of American identity—they are a reflection of what America has become. As Lozada insightfully observes, “Trump has changed us by revealing how normal, how truly American, he is.”[9] He adds that for far too long, the political establishment has clung to the comforting illusion that Trump’s behavior is abnormal, a deviation from the national norm. This belief is reflex, “a defense mechanism, as though accepting his ordinariness is too much to bear.”[10] It is a psychological mechanism meant to shield us from the uncomfortable reality that if Trump is ‘normal,’ then America must be, too. And who among us wants to be roused from the comforting fantasy of American exceptionalism? “It’s more comforting to think of Trumpism as a temporary ailment than a pre-existing condition.”[11]
Trump’s fascist dreamscape is on full display in his administration’s appalling plan to deport between 15 and 20 million undocumented immigrants from the United States. This policy is not just about immigration—it is an act of racial and class warfare, targeting people of color, the poor, and millions fleeing poverty and violence in Latin America. There is more at work here than the long tradition of xenophobia in the United States.[12] There is also the affirmation of the carceral state, which intensifies the criminalization of vulnerable populations, carried out by a state machinery designed to dehumanize and eradicate those deemed unworthy of citizenship.[13] This a form of domestic terrorism writ large as a white nationalist fantasy of exclusion and elimination. As Greg Grandin states Trump’s deportation policy amount to a “nationalization of border brutalism” that have the potential to become a murderous policy of “extremism turned inward, all-consuming and self-devouring.”[14]
Leading this heinous project are Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, and Kristi Noem—hard-right ideologues determined to weaponize the power of the state against entire communities. For instance, Stephen Miller embodies the ideological extremism driving this policy. His declaration that “America is for Americans” chillingly echoes Adolf Hitler’s assertion that “Germany is for Germans.” This is not immigration reform—it is racial cleansing. It is a deliberate strategy of disposability, rooted in white supremacy, and executed through the machinery of the carceral state and the criminalization of everything considered other and disposable.
This policy envisions a dystopian reality: families torn apart, children ripped from their parents, and communities shattered. Immigrants are reduced to mere bodies—loaded into boxcars, shipped to prisons, or expelled from the country altogether. The parallels to Nazi Germany’s genocidal regime are undeniable. The projected image of trains deporting people to prisons and detention camps is a harrowing reminder of where such dehumanization and racial politics inevitably lead. This is not hyperbole; it is history repeating itself.
Trump’s immigration policy is the embodiment of anti-democratic values, a dystopian fascist nightmare that weaponizes fear, hatred, and dehumanization. It strips away any facade of justice or humanity, laying bare the raw brutality of racial exclusion and state violence. This is not policy—it is vigilante terror—crafted to solidify a fascist vision of America built on the ruins of dignity, compassion, and freedom.
At its core, this policy targets the most vulnerable people defined by Trump and his allies as vermin, criminals, and rapists, threatening an imagined America that is white, Christian, and ultranationalist.[15] It feeds off a volatile mixture of racial anxiety and hatred, bolstered by the rhetoric of superiority and power. This is a politics that normalizes cleansing, expelling, imprisoning, and ultimately erasing entire populations, all with chilling efficiency.
This fascist dreamscape echoes the darkest chapters of history. We have seen this before: the language of dehumanization, the machinery of disposability, and the moral collapse, silence and complicity that permits such atrocities. It is a story that must rouse every ounce of outrage and resistance within us. The stakes could not be higher. We must confront this assault on humanity with unrelenting urgency—before it is too late.
Hope may be under siege, but it is not lost. No nightmare of oppression endures unchallenged. The weight of tyranny always carries within it the seeds of resistance. Frederick Douglass’s timeless truth echoes powerfully today: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”[16] Resistance today is more complex, demanding, and urgent, but I believe this generation of young people will find a way forward. Young people in social movements extending from Black Lives Matter Fridays for Future to March for Our Lives and Extinction Rebellion are already forging a new language of resistance—one that speaks of solidarity, hope, and transformation. Their voices and actions signal a reckoning on the horizon, one we cannot afford to delay.[17] The clock is ticking, but the possibilities for liberation and justice remain alive. Time is short, but the possibilities remain alive. Once again, the promise of a real democracy and forceful resistance may be injured, tattered, and apparently shredded but it is not lost.
This generation of youth recognizes that education and culture are vital battlegrounds where fascist ideologies wage war through manufactured ignorance, systemic racism, and the deliberate erosion of imagination. They understand that culture and power are not abstract notions but concrete forces that shape agency, politics, and the possibilities for liberation. For these young activists, the relevance of education goes far beyond academic settings—they see it as central to shaping the broader political landscape.
They are acutely aware of what pedagogical terrorism looks like: the suppression of critical thinking, the distortion of history, and the imposition of ideologies designed to stifle dissent and dehumanize the oppressed. At the same time, they understand the transformative potential of an emancipatory pedagogy, one that challenges authoritarianism, fosters critical consciousness, and empowers communities to reclaim their voices and futures. Education, in their eyes, is a democratic space where the fight for justice and freedom begins.
Youth resistance has become a powerful force for the revitalization of cultural politics and the role of free speech and the building of social movements, while stressing the importance of education as a democratizing force. The current wave of protests across the country, particularly in support of Palestinian rights and sovereignty, illustrates this growing momentum. Young people are crafting a critical pedagogy that not only resists the encroachments of authoritarianism but also actively promotes civic engagement and reclaims culture as a site of power, resistance, and empowerment.
In this struggle, they have become “border crossers,” bridging divides between academia and society, theory and practice, education and action. Their work is transformative, mobilizing social movements and redefining education as a tool for resistance and liberation. They remind us that the classroom is not a retreat from politics but a crucible for imagining and building a more just and democratic world.
Unlike liberals, they are keenly aware of how neoliberalism has transformed universities into market-driven institutions that prioritize profit over democratic values, civic responsibility, and critical thought. They have voiced concerns about the rise of “neoliberal fascism,” a fusion of corporate power and authoritarianism, which erodes academic freedom and marginalizes public intellectuals. Given their critiques the corporatization of universities, which reduces education to careerism and consumerism, while silencing dissent, they have not only criticized higher education for investing in the war machine and Israel’s genocidal war, but they have also called for universities to reclaim their democratic mission by fostering critical thinking, resisting authoritarianism, and addressing social and environmental injustices.
Against the rising tide of fascism in the United States and across the globe, young people have bravely asserted their voices, pushed up against the forces and pedagogical instruments of domination, and crossed boundaries to share their hope and the possibilities for a new world. In doing so, they offer not just hope but a defiant call to dismantle the vast machinery of pedagogical terrorism wielded by the financial elite—figures like Elon Musk. They have not merely critiqued the disimagination machines and cultural apparatuses that churn out lies, conspiracy theories, and assaults on critical agency and resistance. They have envisioned something greater: the reinvention of democratic practices and collective struggle, emphasizing cultural transformation as indispensable in the battle against fascist ideologies.
Their call for an unflinching critique of neoliberalism and its entanglement with fascist politics is a clarion demand for a new language of resistance—one that recognizes culture and education as pivotal battlegrounds in the fight against Trump’s ominous vision of a “unified Reich.” This moment calls for more than critique; it demands a revolutionary imagination capable of forging a massive social movement that reclaims democracy as a radical, participatory project.
We must respond to their urgency with a collective determination to reshape mass consciousness through critical pedagogy, cultural politics, and bold, decisive action. Now is the time to disrupt this totalitarian machinery of misery, destruction, and death—to build a future where democratic practices thrive, and the specter of authoritarianism is irrevocably defeated.
Notes.
[1] Rick Perlstein, Reagan Land (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2020).
[4] Henry A. Giroux, Pedagogy of Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
[5] Kenneth J. Saltman, The Corporatization of Education (New York: Routledge, 2024); Henry A. Giroux, Neoliberalism’s War on Higher Education (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2019).
On May 10, 2024, the UN General Assembly passed overwhelmingly, with only nine negative votes (Argentina, Czechia, Hungary, Israel, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea and the United States) a resolution (https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/ltd/n24/129/97/pdf/n2412997.pdf) which “Determinesthat the State of Palestine is qualified for membership in the United Nations and should therefore be admitted to membership in the United Nations” and “Accordingly recommends that the Security Council reconsider the matter favorably.”
Early foreign policy appointments, both formally announced and authoritatively rumored, by President-elect Donald Trump make clear that there is absolutely no chance that his incoming administration would permit the Security Council to approve an upgrade in the status of the State of Palestine from observer state to full member state.
There is, however, one tiny glimmer of hope in this darkness.
On December 23, 2016, after Trump’s first election but before he took office, President Barack Obama instructed his UN ambassador to abstain, and thereby to permit the adoption by a 14-0 vote, in the vote on UN Security Council Resolution 2334 (https://press.un.org/en/2016/sc12657.doc.htm), which reaffirmed that Israel’s establishment of settlements in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, had no legal validity, constituting a flagrant violation of international law, and which reiterated the Security Council’s demand that Israel immediately cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.
Obama’s abstention decision constituted an act of insubordination and disobedience which shocked the Israeli government, and it would have been inconceivable at any previous time during his presidency or if Hillary Clinton had been elected to succeed him. One may assume that Obama did not wish virtually has last act as president to be a final demonstration of his contempt for international law and the views and values of the vast majority of mankind.
While Israel could and, unsurprisingly, has ignored UN Security Council Resolution 2334, a UN Security Council resolution approving full UN member state status for the State of Palestine would create a fact that no country could ignore. The occupation of the entire territory of a UN member state by another UN member state, which, in the case of Palestine, the International Court of Justice has recently confirmed (https://www.icj-cij.org/node/204176) is unlawful and must rapidly end, could not be permitted to stand indefinitely or without prompt and significant consequences.
Might Biden, who has been repeatedly humiliated and treated with contempt by Netanyahu notwithstanding his having given Israel everything it has sought, militarily, financially and diplomatically, as it has pursued its genocidal assault against the Palestinian people, follow the Obama precedent and finally assert his personal freedom and independence by instructing his UN ambassador to abstain from a Security Council vote on a new application by the State of Palestine for full UN member state status?
The period between today and January 20 offers the best opportunity for full UN membership which the State of Palestine has ever had, and it may be the last opportunity.
The State of Palestine and its friends throughout the world should try.
Indigenous leader Lidia Thorpe confronts King Charles III during his visit to Australia. (Screengrab from X.)
If you go to the bluff at Kings Park in Perth, Australia, you can overlook the Swan River and enjoy a remarkable view. Across the bay, there is a phalanx of steel and glass buildings that rise to the skies. Each of these buildings carries a sign that glistens in the sharp sun: BHP, Rio Tinto, Chevron, Deloitte, and others. Kings Park no longer survives merely with the patronage of the British King, who continues to claim sovereignty over Australia. Part of it is now named Rio Tinto Kings Park, needing the corporate profits from this enormous mining company to sustain its charms. Down one of the avenues of the park there are trees set apart by a few meters, and at the base of these trees are small markers for dead soldiers from past wars; these are not graves but remembrances that are crowned by Australian flags. The park brings together the three crucial pieces of Western Australia, this province of which Perth is the capital which is the size of Western Europe: the British monarchy, the mining companies and its affiliates, and the role of the military.
Of Kings
A few days before I arrived in Canberra, an aboriginal senator, Lidia Thorpe, interrupted the celebration of King Charles III to say, “You are not my king. This is not your land.” It was a powerful demonstration against the treatment of Australia ever since the arrival of English ships to the country’s east in January 1788. In fact, the British crown does claim title to the entirety of the Australian landmass. King Charles III is head of the 56-country Commonwealth and the total land area of the Commonwealth takes up 21 percent of the world’s total land. It is quite remarkable to realize that King Charles III is nominally in charge of merely 22 percent less than Queen Victoria (1819-1901).
The day after Senator Thorpe’s statement, a group of aboriginal leaders met with King Charles III to discuss the theme of “sovereignty.” In Sydney, Elder Allan Murray of the Metropolitan Local Aboriginal Land Council welcomed the King to Gadigal land and said, “We’ve got stories to tell, and I think you witnessed that story yesterday in Canberra. But the story is unwavering, and we’ve got a long way to achieve what we want to achieve and that’s our own sovereignty.” When Captain James Cook (1770) and Captain Arthur Phillip (1788) arrived on this Gadigal land, they were met by people who had lived in the area for tens of thousands of years. In 1789, a smallpox epidemic brought by the British killed 53 percent of the Gadigal, and eventually—through violence—they reduced the population to three in 1791. It is accurate, then, for Elder Murray to have said to the press after King Charles III left that “The Union Jack was put on our land without our consent. We’ve been ignored.” What remained were barrangal dyara (skin and bones, as the Gadigal would have said). Given the value of the land in Sydney, the Gadigal clan would today be one of the richest groups in the world. But apart from a few descendants who do not have title to the land, the ghosts of the ancestors walk these streets.
Of Minerals
Australia is one of the widest countries in the world, with a large desert in its middle section. Underneath its soil, which has been walked on by a range of Aboriginal communities for tens of thousands of years, is wealth that is estimated to be $19.9 trillion. This estimate includes the country’s holdings of coal, copper, iron ore, gold, uranium, and rare earth elements. In 2022, Australia’s mining companies—which are also some of the largest in the world—extracted at least 27 minerals from the subsoil, including lithium (Australia is the world’s largest producer of lithium, annually providing 52 percent of the global market’s lithium).
On May 24, 2020, Rio Tinto’s engineers and workers blew up a cave in the Pilbara area of Western Australia to expand their Brockman 4 iron ore mine. The cave in the Juukan Gorge had been used by the Puutu Kunti Kurrama people for 46,000 years and had been kept by them as a community treasure. In 2013, Rio Tinto approached the Western Australian government to seek an exemption to destroy the cave and to extend the mine. They received this exemption based on a law called the Aboriginal Heritage Act of 1972, which had been drafted to favor mining companies. Rio Tinto, with substantial operations in Western Australia and around the world, has a market capitalization of $105.7 billion, making it—after BHP (market cap of $135.5)—the second largest minerals company in the world (both Rio Tinto and BHP are headquartered in Melbourne). Hastily, BHP began to reconsider its permission to destroy 40 cultural sites for its South Flank iron mine extension in the Pilbara region (and after its investigation and conversation with the Banjima community) decided to save 10 sites.
Craig and Monique Oobagooma live in the northernmost homestead in Australia near the Robinson River. They are part of the Wanjina Wunggurr, whose lands are now used for the extraction of uranium and other metals and minerals. The uranium mines in the north are owned and operated by Paladin Energy, another Perth-based mining company that also owns mines in Malawi and Namibia. There is also a large military base in nearby Yampi. Craig told me that when he walks his land, he can dig beneath the soil and find pink diamonds. But, he says, he puts them back. “They are sacred stones,” he says. Some parts of the land can be used for the betterment of his family, but not all of it. Not the sacred stones. And not the ancestral sites, of which there are only a few that remain.
Of Militaries
In 2023, the governments of Australia and the United Kingdom signed an agreement to preserve “critical minerals” for their own development and security. Such an agreement is part of the New Cold War against China, to ensure that it does not directly own the “critical minerals.” Between 2022 and 2023, Chinese investment in mining decreased from AU$1809 million to AU$34 million. Meanwhile, Australian investment in building military infrastructure for the United States has increased dramatically, with the Australian government expanding the Tindal air base in Darwin (Northern Territory) to hold U.S. B-1 and B-52 nuclear bombers, expanding the submarine docking stations along the coastline of Western Australia, and expanding the Exmouth submarine and deep space communications facility. All of this is part of Australia’s historically high defense budget of $37 billion.
In Sydney, near the Central Train station, I met Euranga, who lived in a tunnel which he had painted with the history of the Aboriginal peoples of Eora (Sydney). He had been part of the Stolen Generation, one in three Aboriginal children stolen from their families and raised in boarding schools. The school hurt his spirit, he told me. “This is our land, but it is also not our land,” he said. Beneath the land is wealth, but it is being drained away by private mining companies and for the purposes of military force. The old train station nearby looks forlorn. There is no high-speed rail in vast Australia. Such a better way to spend its precious resources, as Euranga indicated in his paintings: embrace the worlds of the Aboriginal communities who have been so harshly displaced and build infrastructure for people rather than for wars.
Image: Fires in Israel and the Gaza strip – 7 October 2023 Image is about 48 kilometers wide. – CC BY 2.0
Last November, on the one-month anniversary of the October 7th assault, President Isaac Herzog of Israel wrote a letter to university and college presidents in the United States, seeking to prevail on them to “condemn the barbarous acts.” Herzog wrote admiringly of the “critical thinking skills” he himself gained during his education at American universities, while aiming to quell debate on campus for fear that an abundance of critical thinking was leading students to criticize Israel for bringing on the anti-colonial violence, instead of accepting it as pure, unadulterated evil that came out of nowhere.
“We are all students of history,” Herzog declared, before indicting the “foul ideologies targeting Jews” that he viewed as the driving force behind the devastating attacks of the month before and now polluting the minds of the US college students he was seeking to silence. Invoking the Holocaust by name, Herzog drew a straight line from the antisemitism of the Nazis to the present, thereby erasing the contingent nature of the history of what Edward Said once described as “two peoples locked in a terrible struggle over the same territory, in which one, bent beneath a horrific past of systematic persecution and extermination, was in the position of an oppressor towards the other people.”
It was interesting to see Herzog recruit history, which he understands as a topic, not a method, to his cause because shortly before he wrote, his own government had slammed secretary-general of the UN, António Guterres for declaring that while nothing could justify the killing and maiming of civilians, it was also important to understand that the assault “did not happen in a vacuum.” In other words, Guterres thought it necessary to specify the historical forces at work and instead chose, not the Nazi Holocaust, but 1967 as the relevant context, noting that Palestinians “have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.” Israeli officials fulminated over Guterres’ remark, while Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan claimed that he had spouted a “justifying context” and thus “failed the test” for purportedly not condemning the perpetrators as evil in no uncertain terms.
The Israeli government’s attack on Guterres caused historian Ilan Pappé to weigh in. What Pappé feared the most about Israel’s harsh reaction to Guterres was the prospect that something as fundamental to the search for truth as basic historical practice might now be deemed antisemitic, as the state of Israel and its supporters expanded even further the now already expanded definition of antisemitism far beyond the hatred of Jews as Jews. The brutality of the October 7th attack, Pappé pointed out, “cannot be justified in any way, but that does not mean it cannot be explained and contextualized.”
Pappé then sketched out, in a disciplined fashion, a four-part historical framework applicable to October 7th. He began with the Christian theological roots of Zionism in the nineteenth century organized around the millennial wish for a Jewish return to the Holy Land. Theology evolved into public policy toward the end of the century, as political Zionism emerged to address the European problem of antisemitism by focusing on Palestine, where Jews would assert a superior historical claim over the indigenous residents, a development that eventually gave rise to a settler-colonial project. Context two began in 1948, as the Zionists terrorized, murdered, and expelled the Palestinians based on a systematic plan of ethnic cleansing drawn up prior tothe founding of the state of Israel. Context three referenced the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967. And context four involved the siege in Gaza. The prehistory of the blockade began after Oslo when Israel, in 1996, finished constructing barbed wire, sensor-equipped fencing around the strip. Completion of the siege occurred shortly after Palestinians voted Hamas into office in a fair election. Beginning in 2007, as Pappé explains, Israel “controlled the exit and entry points to the Gaza ghetto, monitoring even the kind of food that entered—at times limiting it to a certain calorie count.”
A subsequent effort to historicize October 7th, now making the rounds on US college campuses, is being put forth by historian David N. Myers of UCLA, and Hussein Ibish, a scholar of comparative literature, who once collaborated with co-founder of The Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah, but who has since taken a right turn. In a series of four lectures at Fordham University, Myers and Ibish have turned around Edward Said—who advocated for the Palestinian people with empathy for the genocide suffered by Jews—to acknowledge the trauma experienced by the Palestinians.
Their goal, it would seem, is to replace political scientist Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” model, which Said demolished as abstract, reductive, and ignorant of “complex histories,” with a new framework: call it a clash of traumas. They see trauma, especially as it related to the Jews’ experience of the Holocaust and the Palestinians’ experience of the Nakba, as the essence of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Myers put it, “these two traumas have intersected or clashed with one another to create sparks of conflict, perhaps no more profoundly so than in the wake of October 7th where the trauma of the Holocaust is retriggered for Jews and the trauma of the Nakba is retriggered for Palestinians, especially when we think about the fact that two million Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced.” Calling attention to the collective traumas of Jews and Palestinians is meant to aid us in adopting a more empathic understanding of the “conflict,” a word they employ despite acknowledging its asymmetric nature.
Myers and Ibish divide up the history into three main periods: 1882 to 1948; 1948 to 1967; and 1967 to 2023, which provide the contexts for “October 7th and Its Aftermath,” their crowning fourth lecture, in which they argue that the Abraham Accords, which ignored the Palestinian question, combined with the protests over Benjamin Netanyahu’s gravitation toward illiberalism as expressed in judicial reform (meant to more efficiently ethnically cleanse the Palestinians), and Hamas’ presumed anger at these developments, especially the former, to bring on the attack.
Comparing this periodization with Pappé’s rendering reveals significant overlap. Both historical interpretations agree on the importance of Zionism, which is why Myers and Ibish begin their story in 1882 when the first wave of Jews migrated from Russia to Palestine. And both acknowledge the importance of 1948 and 1967. The main difference is that Pappé emphasizes the siege of Gaza since 2007 and places it on an equal level with these earlier turning points.
No mention is made by Myers and Ibish in their five and a half hours of lectures of the more than 4,000 people killed by Israeli forces in the six assaults on Gaza between 2006 and 2022, which Ibish refers to as “these little wars.” It is not that they ignore the siege completely. Ibish acknowledges that after Israel removed its settlers from Gaza in 2005 it still “retained control over all means of ingress and egress” though this “different kind of occupation,” as he put it, goes by in the blink of an eye, hiding from view the mass murder and abject sadism that have taken place in the years leading up to October 7th.
Nor do Myers and Ibish mention the 2018–2019 Great March of Return, a year-and-a-half long almost completely peaceful popular protest, dreamt up by people outside of Hamas but ultimately embraced by the group, in which Palestinians marched to the fence separating Gaza and Israel to contest the siege. According to a 2020 UN report, the demonstrations led to the killing of one Israeli and the injury of seven others, and the deaths of 214 Palestinians, mostly unarmed, including 46 children. The number of injured Palestinians is jaw-dropping: more than 36,100. Some 4,903 of those injured, a report by the UN Human Rights Council reveals, suffered life-changing injuries to their lower bodies as the Israeli authorities cleared the way for snipers to aim low to deal with the “key inciters.” “Journalists and health workers who were clearly marked as such were shot,” the Human Rights Council concluded about Israel’s intentional infliction of harm, “as were children, women, and persons with disabilities.”
Selection of evidence is a normal part of historical study. But one wonders how we are supposed to empathize with the Palestinians, much less understand the historical forces that gave rise to the attack on October 7th, if the siege of Gaza and the resistance to it, especially the overwhelmingly nonviolent march to break the chains of colonialism, is swept under the rug.
Moreover, Hamas comes off in their analysis almost as a puppet whose strings are pulled by Israel which, as Ibish notes, funded and supported it to keep Gaza and the West Bank split, thereby preventing a Palestinian state, a plan that “worked beautifully, but it led inevitably to October 7th.” A more plausible theory of Hamas’ actions is put forward by Jeroen Gunning, a scholar of Middle Eastern politics who is the author of Hamas in Politics: Democracy, Religion, Violence (2008). Gunning has pointed out in a recent interview that Hamas had previously turned to wars, political overtures, and “then there’s this march, which is a nonviolent expression of anti-colonial struggle, and none of that leads to anything.” With its tactical arsenal nearing exhaustion, Gunning continues, the groundwork was laid “for the hardliners to come back in and say we have to prepare for a dramatic, violent explosion.”
Equally problematic is how Myers and Ibish handle the development of Zionism, in which they acknowledge the partial legitimacy of the settler-colonial framework while pointing out that “the reduction of Zionism to an ideology of either elimination or control of the land ignores the fact that Zionism was also really an ideology of survival, an ideology of escape.” Their logic is as follows. No matter how brutal and predatory the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians might be, there is a good justification: Zionism was developed to rescue Jews from the vicious antisemitism they experienced in Europe.
It is hard to square this seemingly rational desire for survival with the fact that the Zionists replicated the reasoning of none other than antisemitism itself, justifying the need for a Jewish homeland by arguing that Jews could never be assimilated in Europe and must exit the European stage to found a nation of their own. Not only did the Zionists adopt the logic of antisemitism, they crawled into bed with antisemites who welcomed their Zionism with open arms, including the Nazis, when it suited their colonial ambitions, which were predicated, above all, on the demographic premise of a Jewish majority in Palestine. The fears of dissident Zionists that the concept of a Jewish majority would lay the groundwork for Jews to claim a superior right at the expense of non-Jews in Palestine came true. Zionism has thus been characterized by political scientist Norman Finkelstein as a “radically exclusivist ideology” or, alternatively, in the words of intellectual historian Joseph Massad, as “a religio-racial epistemology of supremacy over the Palestinian Arabs, not unlike that used by European colonialism with its ideology of white supremacy over the natives.”
Another significant problem with how Myers and Ibish handle their discussion of Zionism emerges when they describe its imposition in Palestine without the proper contextualization. They tell us almost nothing about the non-Europeans Jews living in Palestine except that this Jewish community, as Ibish points out, was “not very big.” Yet somehow it seemed to be surviving in the Arab world before the arrival of the Zionists.
As Ussama Makdisi has explained in his Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (2019), by the latter part of the nineteenth century, Ottoman reformers in the Arab eastern part of the empire had constructed a political framework founded on a secular understanding of equality that sought to incorporate as citizens both Muslims and non-Muslims. This ecumenical frame persisted and is evidenced in a British report on a struggle between Arabs and Jews, which flared up in Jerusalem in 1920. “Up to a very recent date the three sects, Moslem, Christians and Jews,” the report stated, “lived together in a state of complete amity.”
While avoiding any romanticization, Makdisi explains that the ecumenical frame, which “valorized religion and coexistence, and demonized sectarianism,” existed until Zionism led to its destruction by “inserting religion into nationalism in a part of the world already rife with politicized religious difference.” Myers and Ibish, by contrast, paint a picture of clashing traumas—Palestinian and Jewish—that seem inescapable when, in fact, even as late as the 1940s, liberals such as Albert Hourani, rejected the partition of Palestine, and put forward a plan for an Arab state in which, as Makdisi notes, “Jews could very plausibly be incorporated into an ecumenical nationalist Arab polity.”
Given the enormity of the horrors that have unfolded in Israel and Palestine over the last year and the resulting Mississippi River of blood, disciplined thinking about the historical forces that explain why this violence has taken the form that it has is needed now more than ever. Methodical historical thought can liberate us from the debilitating inevitabilities of a clashing traumas chronology, which makes it seem as if sectarianism is human nature. And trauma an inexorable part of the human condition. It can also make it easier to imagine alternatives and possibilities and, above all, can help produce a fuller understanding of why historical actors have done what they have done.
This article contains and curates Middle East historian Lawrence Davidson’s collection of Mouin Rabbani’s tweets on the 2024 Amsterdam football riots. Read them while they last. Rabbani, a director of the Palestine American Research Center, is a leading analyst on Palestinian politics and Middle Eastern affairs. A senior fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies, he is widely known for his various international contributions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and his writings can be found in Foreign Policy, Al Jazeera, The Middle East Report, and the New York Times.
The Maccabi Tel Aviv soccer club is commonly known for its intense fanbase, like many large soccer clubs internationally. Occasionally, fans attract collections of supporters who engage in collective violence or aggressive acts and behaviors, especially in reaction to “contested political symbolism.” On November 8, 2024, the Associated Press stated that “Israeli fans were assaulted after a soccer game in Amsterdam by hordes of young people apparently riled up by calls on social media to target Jewish people, Dutch authorities said Friday. Five people were treated at hospitals and dozens were arrested after the attacks, which were condemned as antisemitic by authorities in Amsterdam, Israel and across Europe.” Large portions of the story have since been revised.
On November 10, 2024, the New York Times wrote that, “street disturbances began Wednesday night, a full day before the match, after Maccabi fans began arriving in Amsterdam. Authorities in Amsterdam said supporters of Maccabi had taken down a Palestinian flag from a building. A video posted to social media [showed] men climbing a building to tear down a Palestinian flag while others nearby shout[ed] anti-Arab chants. Tensions had mounted a day earlier when Israeli fans vandalized a taxi and burned a Palestinian flag in the city.”
The western press and leading supporters of Israel, including President Biden were quick to categorize the fans acting in self-defense. United States Representative Ritchie Torres took to X to write: “As we remember the 86th Anniversary of Kristallnacht, we in America must summon the moral courage to stand up, speak out, and act against antisemitism with fierce urgency of now. If antisemitism is allowed to fester freely, aided by the silence and cowardice of a complacent center, the nightmare of pogroms and [Kristallnacht(s)] in America will become not a question of ‘if’ but a question of ‘when.’ Amsterdam should be an awakening for America.”
Quickly challenging the dominant narrative, savvy political commentator and journalist Idrees Ahmad, stayed with the story as it unfolded and questioned the pogrom characterization citing the rabid fan base’s extremist songs, flag burning, and hateful chants targeting Gazans, that mainly referenced civilians and children.
Mouin Rabbani’s X Account
Context
Rabbani explained how that, “For over a decade the football governing bodies FIFA, the International Federation of Football Associations, and UEFA, the Union of European Football Associations, have consistently rejected demands to suspend or expel the Israel Football Association (IFA) and individual Israeli football clubs from their ranks.” Jules Boykoff and Dave Zirin have documented the glaring double standard in failing to suspend Israel in writing for the Nation.
In another tweet, Rabbani elaborated on how, “FIFA and UEFA have been formally requested to do so by the Palestinian Football Association (PFA) on multiple occasions, and have additionally been called upon to adopt measures against the IFA by a variety of activists and fans who launched the Red Card Israeli Racism campaign.” BBC also reported about a month ago on the apparent breaches that rendered a FIFA investigation.
History
Rabbani touched on the historical implications in this tweet: “demands to sanction Israeli football were made on a variety of grounds: that Israel is an institutionally racist state and should be treated no differently than apartheid South Africa (suspended by FIFA in 1961) and Rhodesia (suspended in 1970); that the IFA includes clubs based in illegal settlements in the illegally-occupied Palestinian territories; that the IFA discriminates against Palestinian clubs; that IFA teams discriminate against Palestinian players; that Israel in 2019 prevented the PFA cup final from taking place when it prohibited the Khadamaat Rafah team traveling from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank to play against Balata FC; that Israel has killed and maimed Palestinian players; that Israeli clubs systematically tolerate racist and genocidal conduct by supporters; and a variety of other grounds, most recently that Israel is perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip that has resulted in the killing of numerous Palestinian players, officials, and staff.”
The following thread shows Rabbani’s continued explanation, context and summary:
“The PFA petitions were based not only on general principles or international human rights treaties, but rather, and primarily, FIFA’s and UEFA’s own regulations, which explicitly prohibit the conduct Israel, the IFA, and various IFA teams are engaged in.”
“On each occasion FIFA and UEFA have rejected the PFA’s and Red Card Israeli Racism campaign’s demands on the grounds that sport and politics should not mix. On the same principle, namely that sports and politics must be strictly separated, teams and players who engage in gestures of solidarity with the Palestinians, or display symbols such as the Palestinian flag, have been fined and punished.”
“Glasgow Celtic, which strongly identifies with the Palestinian cause, is in this respect the most notable example. In 2014 it was fined GBP 16,000 after fans raised the Palestinian flag during a Champions League qualifier against KR Reykjavik of Iceland. In 2022 it was fined GBP 8,619 after fans displayed hundreds of Palestinian flags during a match against Israel’s Hapoel Be’ersheva. In the latter case Celtic supporters responded by raising not only the full amount of the fine, but also a six-figure sum that was promptly disbursed to various Palestinian charities.”
“Elsewhere, individual players have also been sanctioned. In one of many such examples, in January 2024 the Asian Football Confederation fined Jordan’s Mahmoud Al-Mardi for displaying the slogan “Palestine is the Cause of the Honourable” on his undershirt after he scored a goal against Malaysia during the Asian Cup.”
“FIFA’s position on the strict separation between sports and politics is at least in theory an arguable proposition, but it was never consistently applied. Fans of Ajax, the Dutch club that hosted Maccabi Tel Aviv for the Europa League match on 7 November, for example, routinely waved giant Israeli flags in support of their team and were consistently able to do so freely. It was only when supporters of opposing clubs began waving Palestinian flags in response that action was taken by the football authorities to ban both symbols.”
“More importantly, the reasoning adopted by FIFA and UEFA ultimately proved to be a complete sham enveloped in brazen hypocrisy. Specifically: within days of the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, both FIFA and UEFA suspended the Russian Football Union and every single Russian football club. The entire process literally took less than a week. And in contrast to the suppression of gestures in support of the Palestinians, explicit solidarity with Ukraine, and the prominent display of the Ukrainian flag, were if anything encouraged.”
“As for the latest PFA application to FIFA to sanction Israel on a variety of grounds, submitted this May and supported among others by the Asian Football Confederation, FIFA President Gianni Infantino has ensured his organization moves even slower than the International Criminal Court (ICC). Most recently, and after months of foot-dragging and refusing to even put the PFA petition on the FIFA agenda, Infantino in October announced that an investigation would be conducted to assess the PFA’s case, but refused to announce a date on which this would be completed, or its results announced. Had he behaved similarly in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he would have been dismissed faster than you can say ‘Infantino is a tool’.”
Pro-Palestinian Activists Sought to Have the Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv Fixture of 7 November Cancelled, Rabbani cont’d.
“It is against this background, and that of the long- and well-established reputation of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s fanbase for uninhibited genocidal racism, that pro-Palestinian activists sought to have the Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv fixture of 7 November cancelled. When they predictably failed, the activists announced they would be holding a protest at the Ajax stadium, the Johan Cruijff Arena, on the day of the game. Just as predictably, this too was rejected by the Amsterdam municipality and police, who ordered the activists to hold their protest at a location some distance from the stadium. The activists complied, and their demonstration passed without incident.”
“The violence that has been in the news for the past several days did not start during or after the game, but rather the day before it and even earlier. Several thousand Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, as is common for such events, had traveled to Amsterdam to attend their team’s away game. But rather than conducting themselves responsibly, or engaging in hooliganism directed at supporters of the opposing team or random passers-by – phenomena which are not uncommon in the world of football – the Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters set their sights on a different target altogether: Arabs.”
“Not only do the Israeli club’s supporters have a reputation for genocidal racism (their motto is ‘Death to the Arabs’, supplemented with the chant, ‘May Your Village Burn’), but many of those who traveled to Amsterdam have during the past year served in the Israeli military’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
“Imagining themselves to have the same liberties they are accustomed to in Israel, they began attacking private homes in Amsterdam that had the Palestinian flag on display in solidarity with Gaza; assaulting individuals of Arab appearance, including a number of Dutch-Moroccan taxi drivers; vandalized a number of taxis, completely destroying one; and more generally taunting those within earshot with chants of ‘We’ll Fu*k the Arabs’, ‘Fu*k you Palestine’, ‘Let the IDF Win to Fu*k the Arabs’, and ‘There is No School in Gaza Because there are No Children Left’.”
“Simply put, these foreign terrorists – arming themselves with sticks, bicycle chains, and various other implements – rampaged through the center of the Dutch capital, subjecting the city and its residents to a racist reign of terror. In this regard @ashatenbroeke reports that for days before the match, chat groups of pro-Palestinian activists had been warning members not to wear keffiyehs, Palestinian buttons, or other visibly Palestinian items in public because such people were being physically assaulted and spat upon by Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters.”
Rabbani on the Amsterdam Police
“The Amsterdam police for the most part let their honoured Israeli guests go their merry way and refrained from intervening. Indeed, there are several videos of police cars simply driving past physical assaults and similar incidents, as if attacks on residents by visiting Israeli thugs is completely normal behaviour. In one incident recounted by @ashatenbroeke that was filmed, Israeli hooligans threw a serving of French fries with mayo at an individual then beat them up. The police in this case did make an arrest – of the individual assaulted.”
“As the game approached, the Israeli supporters were escorted to the stadium by the Amsterdam police force, apparently also a common practice in such circumstances but in this case likely intensified given widespread condemnation of Israel’s genocide and the attendant security risks. On their way to the stadium, gangs of Israeli supporters continued with their violent behaviour, all the while chanting their genocidal slogans. The Amsterdam police force is no less racist than its counterparts elsewhere in Europe or for that matter [in] the West and did not arrest one of the Israeli hooligans. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how the police escort would have responded to supporters of an Arab club marching through the center of Amsterdam chanting ‘Death to the Jews’ and assaulting anyone wearing a kippa.”
“Once inside the stadium, and before the game started, the Israeli supporters observed the minute of silence commemorating the hundreds who recently died in floods in Spain’s Valencia with loud whistles, more racist chanting, and setting off flares. As the supporters left the stadium, their genocidal racism now intensified by the 5-0 drubbing administered to their club by Ajax, they essentially picked up where they had left off before entering the stadium earlier that evening. This time, their intended victims fought back.”
“According to some accounts the response was prepared and organized, according to others it was spontaneous. Most likely there were elements of both. Those who confronted the Israeli hooligans have typically been described as primarily consisting of Dutch Moroccans, with aggrieved taxi drivers prominent among them. More accurately they were primarily youths, consisting of many Amsterdammers of Arab origin but also others.”
“In contrast to their previous inertia the Amsterdam police now swung into action, arresting approximately 60 of the Dutch defenders but again not a single Israeli. All but 4 were later released. Many more arrests are expected in the coming days and weeks based on CCTV footage and the like. But these too won’t include a single Israeli because they have left The Netherlands and enjoy total impunity in Israel. Rather, they are playing the heroic victim to popular and official acclaim in Israel, and indeed that of Western elites and media. The energetic support of the Amsterdam police notwithstanding, the Israeli hooligans discovered that fistfights on the streets of Amsterdam are somewhat more challenging than killing babies in Gaza. A number were beaten up, and five required hospitalization. (All were discharged from hospital the following day).”
“At this point Kafka and Alice in Wonderland jointly seized control. In the words of @elydia35, this was ‘Probably the first time in history we’ve seen world leaders offer their thoughts and prayers to football hooligans’. It is if anything a massive understatement.”
“Almost immediately Western leaders and media commentators began describing the events as a ‘pogrom’. Not by the genocidal Israeli thugs but rather against them. As if the police encouraged the attacks against the Israelis rather than allowing Israeli gangs to rampage through the city they are paid to keep secure.”
“Instead of being correctly framed as s confrontation between Israeli hooligans and those they sought out, it was transformed into a massive hunt against ‘Jews’. Genocide Joe, who still maintains he has seen images that don’t exist of beheaded Israeli babies, likened the disturbances in Amsterdam initiated by the Israeli hooligans to the rise of Nazism and preliminary phases of the Holocaust. He was far from alone in this respect. That this was an anti-Semitic rampage and nothing else and nothing less immediately became an article of faith.”
“With the commemoration of 1938’s 9-10 November Kristallnacht, a key milestone on the way to the Holocaust, only days away, the comparisons flew fast and furious. As if it was Jewish properties and not those displaying Palestinian symbols or of Arab appearance that were being vandalized and smashed. Selective outrage, and selective condemnation, enjoyed another moment of triumph.”
“Just as history commenced only on 7 October 2023, @ashatenbroeke notes that the response to the Amsterdam disturbances have simply elided anything and everything that transpired before the end of the Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv match. Even by the abysmal standards set by the media during the past year with respect to Palestine, coverage of Amsterdam very successfully plumbed new depths.”
Rabbani on Geert Wilders
Notable Dutch politician, Geert Wilders, the leader of the Party for Freedom (PVV), known for his extreme right-wing views on immigration, national identity, and religion, has advocated for stricter immigration policies, bans on the Koran, as well as other controversial polices.
“Among the most hysterical reactions has been that of Dutch strongman Geert Wilders, who although not in government effectively rules The Netherlands. Wilders is of partly Indonesian background, and during his youth was due to his appearance often taunted by racist classmates. Rather than resolving to strive for a society free of racism, he became a peroxide blond and decided that he would defeat his tormenters by becoming the most accomplished racist of them all. A stint working on an Israeli kibbutz, where he was treated no differently than other unpaid labour, also transformed him into a fanatic Zionist and Israel flunkie. He for example continues to insist Jordan is Palestine and has been a vociferous genocide cheerleader from the moment is commenced.”
“After 9/11 Wilders found his calling, and it was Islamophobia. Given the demography of The Netherlands, his poisonous bile was specifically directed at Dutch Moroccans, who he would like to see stripped of their citizenship and deported. Indeed, he was in 2016 convicted by a Dutch court for a 2014 appearance in which he promised his audience that he would ‘arrange’ for ‘less Moroccans’ in The Netherlands.”
“Wilders is very much the ideological heir of the wartime National Socialist Movement (NSB), the blood and soil Dutch fascist party which held that one could not be both Jewish and Dutch. The NSB enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis during the 1940-1945 occupation, was outlawed after liberation, and its leaders (e.g. Anton Mussert and Rost van Tonningen) were variously executed or committed suicide.”
“Wilders’s rabid pronouncements proved too much even for the right-wing liberal (i.e. conservative) VVD, which in 2004 expelled him from its ranks. He thereafter formed the Party of Freedom (PVV), which is not a political party in the normal sense but rather a personal fiefdom with opaque funding solely and wholly controlled by Wilders.”
“Wilders won the 2023 Dutch parliamentary elections on the strength of his positions. But since no party ever wins a majority in Dutch elections, he had to form a coalition with several other parties. Their condition for joining his government was that Wilders forgo the premiership (to which he would normally be entitled) because he would be too great an embarrassment on the European and international stage. Wilders agreed and nominated Dick Schoof, a former spy chief best known for authorizing the illegal surveillance of Dutch citizens, particularly Muslims.”
“Wilders has even by his own standards reached new heights of hysterical rhetoric in response to the events in Amsterdam. Part of his project is to present anti-Semitism not as a European phenomenon that was exported to the Middle East, but rather a core Islamic value that is being imported into Europe by immigrants.”
“Refusing to utter a word in defense of Dutch citizens violently assaulted by Israeli thugs, Wilders has instead spoken of “A pogrom in the streets of Amsterdam”, “Muslims with Palestinian flags hunting down Jews”, “A Jew hunt in Amsterdam” and to top it off, “We have become the Gaza of Europe”. His solution is to “denaturalize” (i.e. revoke the citizenship) of “radical Muslims” and expel them from the country. His rhetoric about reclaiming The Netherlands from “Islam” would have one think he’s about to reconquer Andalusia and impose similar measures.”
“Wilders’s Islamophobia is only part of the story. There’s also considerable domestic politics at play. He has demanded the immediate resignation of Amsterdam mayor Femke Halsema, who previously led the Green Left Party which represents everything Wilders hates. Although she has been a loyal soldier repressing and demonizing pro-Palestinian activists during the past year, Wilders clearly smells blood and is determined to extract his pound of flesh. He has also attacked the police in [crazy] fashion and condemned the government for what he terms its limp response.”
“This is best understood as Wilders seeking to ensure that it is he and not Schoof who rules the roost, and to establish power and influence over institutions independently of formal government authority. It’s the authoritarian playbook, which Wilders hopes will eventually catapult him to formal leadership of the country.”
“Seeking to maintain their own fiefdoms, Halsema, Schoof, coalition partners, and other objects of Wilders’s ire have for all intents and purposes adopted the pogrom/Kristallnacht 2024 narrative and gotten with the program. Whichever way the internal power struggle plays out, massive repression of opposition to Israel’s genocide in The Netherlands now seems all but certain.”
Conclusion
Reading the entire Rabbani account is head-spinning and reminds me of how, in 2003, Professor Charles Tilly wrote one of the all-time great sociological books entitled The Politics of Collective Violence. In this seminal work he stated that, “human life is one mistake after another” and that, “we make mistakes, detect them, repair them, then go on to make more mistakes.” With arresting detail and a strong command of the past, as well as an interdisciplinary approach, Tilly argued that collective violence shared consistent yet unique properties in specific settings. He pointed out how collective violence entailed specific forms of social interaction, and he tried to measure how participants, victims, perpetrators, and various forms of state coordination yielded different political structures encapsulating violent actions.
Tilly wanted to understand how various forms of government could potentially reduce collective violence by analyzing contentious politics and root causes of structural violence. Tilly covered violence as politics, trends, variations, and explanations for violence, as well as chapters on rituals, coordinated destruction, opportunism, and brawls, to name a few. One area of the book that always interested me was his Chapter 4: Violent Rituals. Here, he provided how sporting events offered case studies of “scripted damage” and revealed forms of contentious politics and collective violence.
In the chapter, he cites scholars Andrei Markovitz and Stephen Hellerman and explains how soccer serves as a form of scripted damage. If anything, the scholars write, “nationalism plays an ever even greater role in team sports than it does individual sports…the team’s collective entity and very being … supersedes any identification with the individual. Because soccer is the world’s most widely performed team sport played internationally by more nations than represented in the United Nations, nationalism has enjoyed a greater presence in this game… In many cases it has led to ugly riots furthered nationalist excesses, spawned national hatreds and prejudice while appealing to hostility and contempt toward opponents.”
Tilly outlined social identity formation through soccer and explains several terms that make scripted damage possible during matches; they include boundary and cross boundary interactions, polarization, and competitive display. Often European spectators and adjacent soccer followings generate charged up fan bases with politically robust capacities (violence to control populations in the form of state formation) capable of producing harmful behaviors within large crowds and groups.
The world continues to watch the ways in which Western media first turned a blind eye to genocide and now to the outright ethnic intimidation of Arabs. Altered narratives such as the “pogrom thesis” will continue to enable a reproduction of harmful behaviors within large crowds and groups that mislead fans both locally and globally.
CounterPunch will continue to follow the story as it unfolds.
“…the United States and Israel are making significant progress toward stabilizing three dangerous wars: Israel’s tit-for-tat conflict with Iran, the devastating assault on Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the brutal year-long war against Hamas in Gaza.”
– David Ignatius, Washington Post, November 6, 2024
“Settling Israel’s wars in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran will be far simpler. Netanyahu has largely achieved his goals: Hamas is devastated militarily. Hezbollah has been decapitated and is ready to withdraw from southern Lebanon. And Iran has been unable to retaliate successfully, thanks in part to U.S. military might.”
– David Ignatius, Washington Post, November 8, 2024.
For the past year, the Washington Post’s senior diplomatic columnist, David Ignatius, has been loyal to the U.S. and Israeli national security teams, playing the role of stenographer in sharing and repeating their optimism about peace in the Middle East. He has reported one hopeful scenario after another, and avoids criticizing the self-serving comments from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Secretary of State Antony Blinken over the past year regarding the outlook for peace.
Not even Netanyahu’s firing of Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who favors a cease-fire, has dampened Ignatius’ optimism regarding a “safe landing” for the three dangerous wars involving Israel. Neither is Ignatius’ optimism weakened by the election of Donald Trump, which will give Netanyahu greater opportunities to continue his militarism.
In seeing “so many opportunities to end the nightmare of war in the Middle East,” Ignatius ignores or simply doesn’t recognize the painful history of Israel and its neighbors. It requires a belief that the Lebanese Armed Forces could be deployed to South Lebanon where it could disarm Hezbollah. Such a belief requires that an empowered Lebanese Armed Forces stand up to Hezbollah, a well-trained and well-disciplined force with significant combat experience on the border with Israel and in Syria. This belief also requires that the politics of Beirut can be reshaped, but Lebanon is a failed state that has had no president for the past three years. Nevertheless, Ignatius agrees with sources who tell him that a Lebanese agreement could be completed “in the next few weeks.”
Ignatius even sees opportunities for the deployment of a peacekeeping force in Gaza that would consist of military forces from European and moderate Arab countries to begin “stabilization operations” in Gaza. This would require that the United States provide a military command-and-control center based in Egypt near the Gaza border. It is very difficult to imagine the Israeli government agreeing to such a force, particularly in view of its hardline demands regarding the Philadelphi Corridor, the land border between Gaza and Egypt. Israeli forces discovered numerous tunnels in this region used for smuggling weapons into Gaza.
Ignatius concludes that Gaza might be the hardest “post-conflict landing zone” to establish. This ignores the potential for and implications of a wider Iranian-Israeli confrontation. Trump could make a difference in the latter scenario because his “blank check” policy toward Netanyahu could lead to an all-our war between the two countries that would certainly involve the United States.
There is a fourth battleground that Ignatius doesn’t mention: the West Bank. Ignatius refers to promises that Israel made last year to refuse to discuss any new West settlement for four months, to refuse to authorize outposts for six months, and to take steps to curb violence. The communique was signed by Israel, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and the United States. He fails to mention Israel’s increased violence in the West Bank, which includes possible war crimes, crimes against humanity, and ethnic cleansing. Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits an occupying power from transferring parts of its civilian population into occupied territory, which Israel has been doing for the past six decades.
Ignatius’ most recent column appeared several days after last week’s election, but there is no speculation regarding the difference Trump’s return to the White House would make. Trump’s first term featured his support for numerous Israeli positions, including moving the capital to Jerusalem, recognition of the Golan Heights as part of Israeli sovereignty, and encouraging additional (illegal) settlements on the West Bank. Trump’s second term will be preoccupied with a worsening Israeli-Palestinian situation as well as the possibility of a wider conflict between Israel and Iran. Trump’s shares Netanyahu’s concerns about Iran getting a nuclear weapon. The region (and the world) is far more chaotic than in 2017, when Trump’s first term began; his capricious decision making could worsen the situation in the region.
Ignatius (and the mainstream media in general) makes no mention of a law passed last week that would allow Israel to deport family members of Palestinian attackers, including Israeli citizens. Netanyahu and his Likud Party championed the bill that was passed 61-41. The law would apply to Palestinian Israelis and residents of East Jerusalem, who could be departed either to Gaza or “another location, for a period of seven to 20 years.” This doesn’t augur well for Netanyahu’s policies toward the West Bank and Gaza in the near term.
The mainstream media is doing an inadequate job identifying the need for changing the dynamics of U.S. bilateral relations and contextualizing the root causes of the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Regarding diplomatic dynamics, the Trump administration must seek bilateral dialogues with Russia and China, and restore diplomatic relations with Iran and North Korea. Regarding Israel and Palestine, the Trump administration must not act on the basis of a crisis that began on October 7, 2023, but address the root causes of a conflict that began 76 years ago. Future articles will discuss the importance of “new thinking,” and will echo William Faulkner’s warning that the “past is never dead; it’s not even past.”
Bonneville Dam, Columbia River. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
A free-flowing river supports abundant fish and wildlife, provides drinking water, and other intangible recreational benefits. But humans have sought to block rivers with dams for millennia. While dams have provided benefits like hydroelectricity and water storage, they have also been ecologically disastrous. Besides blocking fish migrations, these human-made structures can destroy seasonal pulses of water that keep ecosystems in balance. Some dams—especially those used for power—can deplete water in streams, leaving entire stretches of river bone dry.
Dams are not built to last forever. Most have a lifespan of more than 50 years, and 70 percent of dams in the United States will be older than that by 2030, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers 2021 Infrastructure Report Card. The cost of repairing and maintaining these obsolete structures can be significant—even more expensive than removing them altogether.
“Dams are not like the pyramids of Egypt that stand for eternity,” said former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt in 1998. “They are instruments that should be judged by the health of the rivers to which they belong.”
The National Inventory of Dams (NID), an online database maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tracks 92,366 dams across the United States as of October 18, 2024, with an average age of 63 years. Of these, 16,720 dams are classified as “high hazard potential,” meaning their failure will likely result in loss of life and significant economic damage. Less than 40 percent of the dams in the inventory provide critical services such as water supply, irrigation, hydropower, navigation, or flood risk reduction. However, it’s important to note that the NID has size limits for inclusion in its inventory; there are more than 500,000 dams in the United States.
Removing dams is the fastest way to restore a river. The selective removal of outdated or unsafe dams offers an economical and effective way to eliminate liability for dam owners while improving river health. By restoring rivers to their natural state, dam removal can result in a wide range of long-term benefits, including enhancing public safety and quality of life and boosting economic development in communities nationwide. Dam removal can also protect Tribal lands, increase property values, protect against flooding, support wildlife and biodiversity, and enhance recreational opportunities.
In addition to restoring the river channel, restoring the low-lying areas—or floodplains—around rivers is an essential part of dam removal, and it gives our waterways room to spread out. Healthy floodplains provide vital habitats for fish and wildlife, help rivers accommodate floodwaters resulting from frequent and intense storms, and—in concert with limiting development in areas prone to flooding— shore up some communities’ resilience in the era of climate change.
Case Study: Bloede Dam
In cases like Bloede Dam, which blocked the natural flow of the Patapsco River in Maryland, removal was the preferred option for a dam owner burdened with an unsafe structure. Like many outdated dams in the United States, the Bloede Dam’s negative impact on the Patapsco River exceeded its usefulness. It generated electricity for less than 20 years before its turbines became clogged with sand and rock, making maintenance too costly. Consequently, the power company shut it down. Despite this, the dam stood for around a century, blocking the river’s natural flow and acting as a drowning hazard in a public park until it was removed in 2018.
During that time, it blocked migrating fish like alewife and blueback herring from reaching upstream habitats where they spawn and grow. Publicly owned dams like Bloede can significantly cost taxpayers in necessary upkeep and repairs–often for structures that no longer serve a purpose. In addition, the Bloede Dam was a low-head dam with water continuously flowing over the crest of the dam, creating a dangerous swirl at the dam’s base. Low-head dams have resulted in thousands of fatalities across the nation, and Bloede Dam led to the deaths of at least 10 people between 1981 and 2015.
In September 2018, explosives blasted a hole in the concrete Bloede Dam, opening a new era of ecosystem restoration. Over the following weeks, the remainder of the dam was removed with explosives and heavy equipment. The dam’s removal restored more than 65 miles of habitat for resident and migratory fish. For diadromous fish species, which must migrate between fresh and marine waters to complete their life cycle, it meant that their freedom of movement had finally been restored. Several species of diadromous fish migrate between the Patapsco River and Chesapeake Bay, returning to where their ancestors have spawned for millennia.
This reconnected river is now safer for visitors and is helping to revitalize the health of the entire Chesapeake Bay. Removing Bloede Dam opened more than 65 miles of spawning habitat to native river herring, American shad, and hickory shad. Without the dam blocking them from tributaries that are key to their migration, American eel can now access 183 miles of open river.
In addition to restoring the river ecosystem, the removal of the Bloede Dam means that visitors to the park can safely enjoy this now-thriving river. Since its removal, we have witnessed local communities return to its banks, kayaking through the former impoundment, fishing from recently uncovered boulders in the stream, and cooling off on hot summer days. Removing unused dams like Bloede is one of the most important things we can do to maintain healthy rivers and the ecosystems and economies they support.
A Brief History of Hydropower Dams
While damming rivers began in ancient times, the construction of hydropower dams started in earnest during the Industrial Revolution to power local mills. Hydropower dams began powering the electricity grid in the early 20th century, driven by the demand for reliable and renewable energy sources. These massive engineering projects were feats of modern ingenuity and engineering, promising electricity, flood control, irrigation, and water supply. Once seen as symbols of progress and innovation, many hydropower dams are now recognized for their significant negative ecological and social impacts. Removing dams as they become uneconomical or unsafe is essential to restoring river ecosystems and communities.
More than 2,500 hydropower dams have been built across the country. Federal agencies, states, municipalities, and private organizations own these. Most of the dams were built during a building boom that lasted from the 1930s to the 1970s. Several federal agencies took part in reshaping rivers, including the Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees water resource management; the Bureau of Land Management, which administers federal lands; and the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates and maintains approximately 740 dams across the United States.
In retrospect, most of these projects’ ecological and social costs were often overlooked and continue to be forgotten.
Rivers were dammed, ecosystems were disrupted, wildlife migrations were blocked, and communities, many Indigenous, were displaced. As environmental awareness grew in the latter half of the 20th century, the negative impacts of dams became more evident, leading to a reevaluation of their role and the dam removal movement.
The dam removal movement was ignited with the removal of the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine in 1999. This federally regulated hydropower dam fully blocked fish migration for 160 years, and environmental groups advocated for its removal. Edwards Dam was the first project for which the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission denied a relicensing application and ordered a dam to be removed against the owner’s wishes, determining that the river’s ecological, economic, and community benefits outweighed the hydropower production of the project.
Across the nation, tens of thousands of dams that have outlived their purpose continue negatively impacting natural ecosystems. Removing these dams could save money, reduce the liability of owning them, and restore the natural environment.
Between 1912 and 2023, 2,119 U.S. dams were removed, with more than three-quarters demolished since the turn of the 21st century. The nation saw a major milestone in 2023 with the initiation of the nation’s largest dam removal project on the Klamath River in California. Still, only 46 federally regulated hydropower dams have been removed, representing less than 3 percent of removals across the country.
“Dam removal can rewrite a painful chapter in our history, and it can be done in a manner that protects the many interests in the [Klamath River] basin,” wrote U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell in 2016.
Tribal salmon fishing site below The Dalles Dam, Columbia River. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Indigenous Communities and Tribal Land
In many cases, removing dams restores Indigenous territory. We must acknowledge that the land and rivers in the Americas and many regions across the globe are the homelands of Indigenous communities who have been stewards of these lands for thousands of years. The historical and ongoing injustice of the theft of tribal lands must be addressed through legislation, regulation, restoration, cooperation, community engagement, and increasing awareness by citizens and local, state, regional, and federal agencies.
Many hydropower developments have negatively impacted Indigenous communities by depleting native fish runs, damming sacred rivers and sites, and disrupting the communities’ relationships with waterways. Therefore, removing dams and letting rivers flow naturally is an essential part of respecting the values of these tribes and supporting their efforts to ensure land and water protection and restoration.
“Removing dams can serve as a form of land back for Native nations,” said Heather Randell, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, in a February 2024 episode of the podcast Resources Radio. “Dam removal can be a way to restore tribal sovereignty over their ancestral land and enable tribes to rehabilitate the land and water ecosystems that supported their livelihoods for thousands of years and were damaged by dam construction,” said Randell, who co-authored the article, “Dams and Tribal Land Loss in the United States,” published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in August 2023.
Impacts on Wildlife
While hydropower dams provide renewable energy, they often cause substantial ecological disruption. Dams alter water flow, temperature, and sediment transport, leading to degraded water quality and negatively impacting aquatic habitats. Fish populations, particularly migratory species, suffer as dams block access to spawning grounds, causing a decline in biodiversity.
One of the most significant environmental impacts of dams is the fragmentation of river ecosystems. Rivers naturally flow from their headwaters to the sea, creating diverse habitats that support a wide range of species. Dams interrupt this flow, creating reservoirs often inhospitable to native species and promoting the proliferation of non-native ones. This disruption can lead to the collapse of local fisheries and the loss of recreational activities that are dependent on healthy, free-flowing rivers. Hydropower dams can be incredibly impactful as they are often constructed on the mainstem of rivers, lower in the watershed, and can completely cut off the watershed’s upper reaches from migratory species.
For example, in October 2023, the Oregon Capital Chronicle reported that the Nez Perce Tribe would do “whatever it takes to save the salmon” while referring to a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s plan to keep dams on the Snake River functional. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has four dams on the lower Snake River, the largest tributary of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. These dams collectively kill 50-80 percent of juvenile salmon and steelhead fish that try to migrate downstream.
“As Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), we are bound to the salmon and the rivers—these are our life sources,” said Shannon F. Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe, in a March 2024 press release about the landmark agreement between the federal government, tribes, and states from the Pacific Northwest to restore salmon and other native fish populations in the Columbia River Basin. “We will not allow extinction to be an option for the salmon, nor for us,” he said.
The U.S. government has lost several lawsuits, with federal judges ruling that dams threaten salmon populations in violation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
In May 2024, a federal judge ruled that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers violated the ESA by releasing water from the Coyote Valley Dam on Lake Mendocino County, California, which disturbed endangered salmon and steelhead trout populations in the Russian River. Intended as flood control (in preparation for a storm, for example), the released water increased the river’s turbidity (amount of sediment or organic matter), harming fish development and survival.
Dams can lead to the accumulation of sediment, which puts access to clean water at risk. In a paper published in December 2022 in the journal Sustainability, researchers from the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health warned of dams’ threat to water security, saying that thousands of the world’s large dams are filling up with sediment to such a degree that they may lose more than 25 percent of their storage capacity—around 1.65 trillion cubic meters—by 2050.
According to the study, “The decrease in available storage by 2050 in all countries and regions will challenge many aspects of national economies, including irrigation, power generation, and water supply.”
Dredging sediment from reservoirs to reclaim storage space is often cost-prohibitive. Sediment can also contain harmful pollutants, including legacy chemicals like TDDT, PCBs, and the pesticide chlordane; chemicals currently in use like the insecticide bifenthrin and a variety of flame retardants; and metals like lead, zinc, and cadmium, which concentrate in sediment instead of water.
The sediment release during dam removal must be carefully managed to prevent downstream contamination and ecological damage. Sediment management is a critical aspect of the dam removal process, as the sudden release of stored sediments can smother aquatic habitats, harm aquatic biota, and degrade water quality, affecting both wildlife and human communities downstream.
Economic and Social Considerations
Each dam removal project requires detailed studies, engineering, permits, and planning. Evaluating the economic and social implications of dam removal is crucial. While the initial construction of dams has often spurred economic growth, their long-term costs—including maintenance, environmental degradation, and lost recreational activities—can outweigh the benefits. The financial burden of maintaining aging dams can be significant, and many communities find that removing outdated structures is more cost-effective than continuing to repair them.
Communities may experience significant changes, both positive and negative, from dam removal. These include job losses in the hydropower sector. Their removal, however, leads to potential gains in tourism and recreation. Engaging with stakeholders and conducting a thorough cost-benefit analysis are essential steps in decision-making. The revitalization of river ecosystemscan lead to new economic opportunities, such as increased tourism, enhanced recreational fishing, and the restoration of cultural heritage sites often submerged or inaccessible due to dam reservoirs.
Moreover, dam removal can have profound social impacts. For Indigenous communities and other groups with historical ties to river landscapes, dam removal can represent a restoration of ancestral lands and a reconnection with cultural practices centered on river ecosystems. However, addressing communities’ concerns is essential; comprehensive planning and open communication are vital in balancing these diverse needs and ensuring a smooth transition.
Planning and Preparation for Dam Removal
Successful dam removal requires meticulous planning and preparation. Initial assessments should evaluate the dam’s structural condition, potential environmental impacts, and the logistical aspects of removal. Engaging with local communities and stakeholders from the early stages is essential to ensure their concerns and insights are integrated into the planning process.
Another critical step is obtaining the necessary regulatory permits. This involves navigating federal, state, and local regulations, which can be complex and time-consuming. Collaborating with regulatory agencies can help streamline this process.
An environmental impact assessment is often required to ensure dam removal complies with legal standards and minimizes adverse ecological effects.
Technical Aspects of Dam Removal
The technical aspects of dam removal are multifaceted. Engineering and construction methods must be tailored to the specific characteristics of each dam and its surrounding environment. Techniques can range from controlled deconstruction to blasting and everything in between, depending on the dam’s size, type, and location. Hydraulic modeling and simulation tools can also help predict the effects of dam removal and design effective removal measures.
Managing sediment and water flow during removal is a significant consideration that can and has been successfully managed thousands of times. Strategies must be developed to handle the release of trapped sediments and stabilize riverbanks. Sediment management plans often include phased removal, sediment dredging, and sediment traps or silt fences to control sediment dispersion. Ensuring the safety of workers and nearby communities is paramount throughout the removal process. Safety protocols include monitoring for structural stability, water quality testing, and emergency response plans.
Innovative engineering solutions have been developed to address these challenges. For example, temporary diversion channels or cofferdams can help control water flow during the deconstruction process, minimizing downstream impacts. Cofferdams are sometimes designed as temporary enclosures to allow excavation and deconstruction in an environment with reduced water flow. They also protect workers. Cofferdams were constructed during the dismantling of the Elwha Dam. To remove the taller Glines Canyon Dam, temporary spillways were built to help drain the reservoir.
Case Studies and Lessons Learned
Examining past dam removal projects provides valuable insights and lessons. Successful case studies, such as removing the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams on the Elwha River in Washington state, highlight the potential for ecological recovery and community benefits. These projects faced numerous challenges, from technical difficulties to stakeholder opposition, but ultimately demonstrated the feasibility and advantages of dam removal.
The Elwha River restoration project, one of the largest dam removal efforts in U.S. history, offers a compelling example of the benefits of dam removal. Following the removal of the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams, which began in September 2011, the river has experienced a dramatic recovery. Salmon and steelhead trout have returned to their historic spawning grounds, and the Elwha River ecosystem has shown significant signs of recovery. The project also provided valuable lessons in sediment management, stakeholder engagement, and adaptive management practices.
Other notable examples include the removal of the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Maine and the Marmot Dam on the Sandy River in Oregon. Both projects resulted in substantial ecological benefits, including the return of native fish species and improved water quality.
“Ten years after the Edwards Dam in Augusta, Maine, was removed from the Kennebec River, the river has totally come alive,” according to the Natural Resources Council of Maine. “The coalition of groups that worked on this project for more than a decade knew that the benefits would be enormous, and they have been. The Edwards Dam had blocked the river since 1837. Since its removal on July 1, 1999, the water quality in the river has improved, millions of fish are returning to long-lost spawning habitat, ospreys and eagles soar along the river, and Maine people and visitors paddle [in] what feels like a wilderness river.”
The Western Rivers Conservancy also reported the overall positive impact of the Marmot Dam removal project. “For a century, Marmot Dam had impeded access to nearly 100 miles of salmon and steelhead habitat in the upper Sandy River basin. The best-case scenario—everyone’s highest hope—was that Sandy’s salmon and steelhead would be spawning again in the upper river within two years. Some believed it would take 20.”
“To everyone’s surprise, Sandy’s fish proved people wrong. Within 48 hours of the dam coming out, threatened coho salmon were already swimming upriver from the dam site. Within months, the Sandy flushed out the equivalent of 150 Olympic-size swimming pools full of sediment, a process that was expected to take two to five years,” added the report by the conservancy, highlighting the advantages of allowing the river to flow unobstructed.
These case studies reveal the incredible and fairly rapid restoration of natural ecosystems after dam removal.
Post-Removal Monitoring and Restoration
The work does not end when the dam is removed. Post-removal observation and monitoring are essential for tracking the ecological recovery of the river and its surroundings. This includes monitoring water quality, sediment transport, and the return of fish and wildlife. Long-term monitoring helps identify potential issues and ensures timely interventions to support the river’s recovery.
Likewise, habitat restoration efforts, such as replanting native vegetation and restoring wetlands, can add to the ecological benefits of dam removal. Riparian vegetation plays a crucial role, including stabilizing riverbanks, filtering pollutants and sediments from runoff into waterways, protecting croplands and downstream areas from flood damage, and providing habitat and food sources for native wildlife. Restoration projects often involve partnerships with local conservation groups, volunteers, and government agencies to achieve these goals.
Adaptive management is a critical component of post-removal restoration. This approach involves regularly assessing the effectiveness of restoration efforts and making adjustments as needed. Adaptive management recognizes the dynamic nature of river ecosystems and allows practitioners to respond to unexpected challenges and opportunities. By incorporating scientific monitoring and community feedback, adaptive management ensures that restoration efforts are effective and sustainable in the long term.
Policy and Legislation
The regulatory framework governing dam removal can be complex, involving various government agencies and other stakeholders. Understanding and navigating this framework is crucial for successfully completing dam removal projects. Policy changes, such as the introduction of streamlined permitting processes and increased funding for river restoration, have facilitated dam removal efforts.
In April 2024, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service provided $70 million in grants for 43 projects to remove dams and other river barriers in 29 states. Federal initiatives, state programs, and local regulations are integral in shaping the process.
Navigating the legal landscape requires collaboration with regulatory bodies, environmental organizations, and community stakeholders. Compliance with environmental laws, such as the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act, is essential. Additionally, obtaining the necessary permits often involves conducting detailed ecological impact assessments and engaging in public consultations to address community concerns.
Climate Change and Hydropower Dams
Climate change adds another layer of complexity to the issue of hydropower dams. Changing precipitation patterns, frequent extreme weather events, and shifting temperature regimes affect dams’ operation and environmental impact. Some regions may experience reduced water availability, diminishing the effectiveness of hydropower generation, while others may encounter increased flooding risks.
According to a 2017 study published in the Journal of Hydrology, “the trade-offs between reservoir releases to maintain flood control storage and drought resilience, ecological flow, human (domestic, agricultural, and industrial) water demand, and energy production (both thermoelectric and hydroelectric) will increasingly need to be reconsidered in light of climate change, population growth, and water technology deployments.”
Extreme weather events, which have become more frequent and intense due to climate change, can imperil dam infrastructure. Kristoffer Tigue of Inside Climate News wrote in July 2024, “[C]limate change presents a growing threat to the nation’s nearly 92,000 dams, many [of them] more than 100 years old, as heavy rainfall, flooding and other forms of extreme weather become more common and severe.”
The Midwest—notably Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—maintains a high risk for severe flood damage from rivers due to the increased severity and frequency of extreme weather events tied to climate change. The Fifth National Climate Assessment, the federal government’s primary report on climate change impacts and risks, released in November 2023, points out that since 2018, the Midwest has experienced 30 failures or near-failures of aging dams.
Dam removal can be part of broader climate adaptation and mitigation strategies. Restoring natural river flows can enhance ecosystem resilience to climate change by improving habitat connectivity and supporting biodiversity. Free-flowing rivers can act as natural buffers against floods and droughts, providing essential ecosystem services that help communities adapt to changing climatic conditions.
Removing dams reduces greenhouse gas emissions, particularly methane. Methane is produced underwater by the anaerobic decomposition of organic material like algae and other vegetation sequestered in a dam’s reservoir. This process happens naturally in lakes but is unnatural when a dam causes it. Free-flowing rivers do not emit methane.
A study conducted between 2013 and 2019 by scientists at Uppsala University in Sweden found that hydropower dams in tropical environments were “methane factories.” Project coordinator Sebastian Sobek said, “We found that methane bubbling (ebullition) was the most relevant conduit for greenhouse gas emissions in most reservoirs under study.” While the study focused on tropical environments, the unnatural process of methane release through the decomposition of organic materials occurs anywhere there is a dam.
The free-flowing upper Klamath River. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Global Opinion on Dam Removal
The movement to remove hydropower dams is not confined to the United States; it is a global phenomenon. Worldwide, countries recognize the benefits of restoring free-flowing rivers.
Europe, in particular, has seen a surge in dam removal projects driven by the European Union’s Water Framework Directive, which aims to achieve good ecological status for all water bodies in the region. Countries like France, Spain, and Sweden have undertaken significant dam removal projects, leading to improved river health and increased biodiversity.
In Asia, countries such as Japan and China are also beginning to address the impacts of aging dams. Japan has removed several obsolete dams to restore river ecosystems and improve fish passage. Meanwhile, facing severe river pollution and biodiversity loss, China has been exploring dam removal as part of its broader environmental protection initiatives.
“China benefited so much from decades of water conservancy projects,” Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, toldBloomberg News in 2021. “Maybe it’s time for the industry to pay back for the environmental restoration.”
“Our vision is to have rivers full of fish,” said Herman Wanningen of the World Fish Migration Foundation, a Dutch organization that works to protect fish populations and free-flowing rivers. There are great examples around the world where the environment is healthier because rivers were set free. We want to share these inspiring stories and show that dam removal is a viable option.”
Sharing knowledge and experiences across borders can help interested parties worldwide to develop more effective strategies for restoring rivers and supporting sustainable water management practices.
Future Directions and Innovations
As the practice of dam removal evolves, so do the technologies and methodologies used to carry out these projects. Advances in remote sensing, geographic information systems, and environmental DNA are providing new tools for monitoring and assessing the impacts of dam removal. These technologies enable more precise measurements of ecological changes and can help identify the most effective restoration techniques.
Innovations in engineering are also making dam removal safer and more efficient. Techniques such as advanced blasting methods allow for the controlled dismantling of dams with minimal environmental disruption. Furthermore, improved sediment management practices and eco-friendly construction materials are enhancing the sustainability of dam removal projects.
Integrating climate resilience into dam removal planning will be crucial. As climate change continues to alter hydrological patterns, interested parties must consider how restored rivers can adapt. This might involve designing restoration projects that enhance floodplain connectivity, improve groundwater recharge, and support diverse and resilient ecosystems.
How Local Communities Help Rivers Run Free
Interested parties can help restore rivers in their communities. The first step is to learn if the dams in your area serve their intended purposes. The National Inventory of Dams is an excellent place to start.
Connect with your local river volunteer group and cleanup organizations to participate in river conservation. Make your voice heard during discussions about proposals to build new dams and relicense existing dams. Spend time getting to know your local river or stream. Talk to your local, state, and federal elected officials about why removing dams that have outlived their usefulness can help restore ecosystems and biodiversity, honor Indigenous communities, support local communities, and combat climate change.
Individuals and groups interested in learning more about dam removal can join American Rivers’ National Dam Removal Community of Practice to access the latest resources, including training opportunities and shared expertise, to expand and accelerate the practice.
Removing hydropower dams represents a transformative approach to river restoration, offering substantial ecological, economic, and social benefits. Practitioners can restore river ecosystems and revitalize communities, including tribal nations and Indigenous communities, by learning from past experiences, engaging with stakeholders, and leveraging new technologies.
As global awareness of environmental sustainability grows, the momentum for dam removal is likely to increase. By fostering international collaboration and innovation, we can restore the world’s rivers to their natural, free-flowing states, providing invaluable benefits for future generations.
Serena McClain, the director of river restoration at American Rivers, who has assisted in the removal of dozens of dams, said it best: “With dam removal, it’s not about what we’re taking away. It’s what we’re gaining. This is about getting people to embrace the power and potential of a natural river. Free-flowing rivers will give us so much if we just give them the chance.”
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Cracked cell window in the Warden’s office, Alcatraz Prison. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
“I must hold in balance the sense of the futility of effort and the sense of the necessity to struggle; the conviction of the inevitability of failure and still the determination to ‘succeed’–and, more than these, the contradiction between the dead hand of the past and the high intentions of the future. If I could do this through the common ills-domestic, professional and personal–then the ego would continue as an arrow shot from nothingness to nothingness with such force that only gravity would bring it to earth at last.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
+ Two things are certain about the DNC’s reaction to getting crushed by Trump: No lessons will be learned from the pummelling, and the people who predicted the loss will be blamed for it. One usual scapegoat the Democrats habitually blame, the Greens, underperformed in the role of spoiler, so they’ve redirected their fire to Bernie Bros, Arab-Americans, men (Hispanic, Black, and white), and advocates for trans rights.
+ Harris lost the popular vote by five million votes. Jill Stein only garnered 642,000 votes, just 25,000 more than RFK, Jr., who’d long since withdrawn. In no state did Stein get enough votes to cost Harris the state. Good luck blaming the Greens (which says much about the politically emaciated condition of the Greens). Even in Wisconsin (where Harris lost by only 31,000 votes), Stein, who captured only 12,666 votes, didn’t fare well enough to be blamed (or credited) for costing Harris the state. In Pennsylvania, Harris lost by 165,000 votes. Stein collected only 33,591 votes. In Michigan, where Stein had her best showing in a battleground state, winning 44,648 votes (0.8%), Harris lost to Trump by 82,000 votes.
+ In an election where both major party candidates backed genocide in Gaza and more oil drilling and fracking at home, the already withdrawn RFK Jr. got more than twice as many votes as Jill Stein in Oregon, who managed only 0.7 percent in a state that’s been very friendly to 3rd party candidates. Maybe the Greens need to reassess their strategy and their candidates.
+ Typically, the ritual knives are also out for Biden, who some Democrats, including Harris campaign staffers, are eager to offer up as a sacrifice for the loss.“Biden will hold a lot of blame for it,” a senior Harris campaign official told CNN. “And frankly, he should.” This is shameful asscovering. Harris ran the worst, most uninspired Democratic presidential campaign since Mondale, but Fritz was more likable and actually tried to offer a slate of policies to counter Reaganism. Harris ran against her own base–textbook Clintonian triangulation without Bill’s charisma to pull it off.
+ Isaac Chotiner, New Yorker: “Joe Biden’s stubbornness in refusing to step aside as the Democratic nominee until July is the single biggest reason for Donald Trump’s victory…Biden’s arrogance remains astonishing to behold.”
+ Chuck Todd: “I think John Fetterman could be a North Star for the party. He’s a guy who’s figured out how to win. He’s basically a working-class Democrat who has stayed a Democrat while all of his brethren have basically moved toward Trump. I think Fetterman could play a pretty big role in how the party’s going to get wherever it goes to next. Fetterman sees to get it. Look where he was on Israel, too.”
+ Fetterman? This has got to be an SNL routine, right?
+ Fetterman gives new definition to “working class.” He grew up in an affluent suburb of York, PA. His father was an insurance company executive who supplemented John’s income by $54K a year when he served as Braddock, PA’s part-time mayor.
+ Joe Scarborough: “Democrats need to be mature and Democrats need to be honest. And they need to say, yes, there is misogyny. But it’s not just misogyny from white men! It’s misogyny from Hispanic men! It’s misogyny from Black men who do not want a woman leading them. There might be race issues with Hispanics. They don’t want a Black woman as president of the United States. The Democratic Party likes to Balkanize people into groups and say, oh, white people don’t like women and Blacks. A lot of Hispanic voters have problems with Black candidates! They don’t like each other.”
+ Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.) says Democrats “have to stop pandering to the far left…I don’t want to discriminate against anybody, but I don’t think biological boys should be playing in girls’ sports.” I don’t want to discriminate against anyone but them, them, uh, pro-noun people!
+ Rep. Seth Moulton also blamed Democratic support for trans-rights for their losses…“I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete. But as a Democrat, I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” (I wonder if Moulton can contemplate his two little girls getting (god forbid) burned to death in a tent by a US-made bomb?)
+ Democratic strategist Ally Sammarco: “White men without college degrees are going to ruin this country.”
Julie Roginsky: “I’m going to speak some hard truths…We are not the party of common sense, which is the message the voters sent to us…When we address Latino voters…as Latinx, for instance, because that’s the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think we don’t even live on the same planet as they do. When we are too afraid to say that, hey, college kids, if you’re trashing the campus of Columbia University b/c you’re unhappy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that is unacceptable. But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we do not know what to say when normal people look at that and say, wait a second. I send my kids to college so they can learn, not so they can burn buildings and trash lawns, right?” (Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was Democratic mayors and liberal university administrators who called SWAT teams onto campuses to beat up students.)
+ With snobbish and disdainful attitudes like these, the Democrats may not win another presidential election this century.
+++
+ Here’s a breakdown of the electorate that restored Trump to office…
White (71%)
Harris: 41%
Trump: 57%
Hispanic/Latino (12%)
Harris: 52%
Trump: 46%
Black (11%)
Harris: 85%
Trump 13%
Asian (3%)
Harris 54%
Trump 39%
American Indian (1%)
Harris 34%
Trump: 64%
Other (2%)
Harris 43% Trump 52%
+ Trump won 64% of the Native American vote, perhaps because of the fact that Neil Gorsuch, of all people, has become the most pro-Native voice on the Supreme Court. Gorsuch wrote the sovereignty decision in the Oklahoma case and was engaged in a two-year-long spat with Kavanaugh on tribal rights, while the Biden-Harris administration approved a vast copper mine on Oak Flat, an Apache sacred site in Arizona.
+ This “white wave” electorate didn’t reject progressive ideas; they rejected the candidate who failed to advocate them for fear of alienating Big Tech execs and Wall Street financiers. Voters in both Alaska and Missouri approve increasing the minimum wage to $15. Voters approved paid sick leave in Alaska, Missouri and Nebraska. Voters in Oregon approved a measure protecting marijuana workers’ right to unionize. Alaska voters banned anti-union captive audience meetings. Arizona voters rejected a measure that lowered the minimum wage for tipped workers. Massachusetts approved the right of rideshare workers to organize for collective bargaining. New Orleans voters approved a Workers Bill of Rights.Voters in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York approved measures granting a state constitutional right to abortion.
+++
+ If you’re looking for one anecdote that explains why Harris lost the election, this one is hard to top: According to a piece by Franklin Foer in the Atlantic, Harris’s early attempts at voicing a populist economic message, timid though it was, attacking corporate greed was quickly muted by one of her top economic advisors, her brother-in-law Tony West, the chief legal officer Tony West, who told her that if she wanted to curry favor with his network of CEO’s she’d have to lay off Big Business. So figures like Shawn Fain were replaced on the campaign trail with the likes of Mark Cuban.
+ In October, Harris appeared more times on the campaign trail with Mark Cuban than UAW president Shawn Fain and was escorted by Liz Cheney more often than anyone else.
Trump embraced Musk, and Kamala left Bernie out in the cold. You wonder what analytics the Harris campaign was looking at. Or did they go Old School, i.e., what would Jamie Dimon want?
+ But it wasn’t just Bernie Harris rejected; it was also Tim Walz, whose role in the campaign was limited to emphasizing his career as a (assistant, as Trump acidly noted) high school football coach and duck hunter. As a result, Walz became so unrecognizable that he lost his own county, which Biden won handily in 2020.
+ Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, on what focus groups told her: “Everybody knows what Trump economics is — China; tariffs; tax cuts. Then you go to them and ask, ‘What are Democratic economics?’ and someone will make a joke about welfare, and half the people can’t name anything. It’s nothing like the Republican brand.”
+ Who’s fault is that? They’ve spent the last 35 years trying to extinguish the legacy of the New Deal and Great Society. ObamaCare wasn’t public health “care” but a mandate to have private health insurance.
+ Harris completed the transition of the Democratic Party into the party of the rich…
2020: Trump wins voters over $100K, 54-52
2024: Harris wins voters over $100K, 54-45
2020: Biden wins voters $50K-$100K, 57-42
2024: Trump wins voters $50K-$100K, 49-47
2020: Biden wins voters under $50K, 55-45
2024: Trump wins voters under $50K, 49-48
+ FDR, 1936: “Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob. Never before in our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they are today. They are unanimous in their hate-and I welcome their hatred!”
+ The entire Harris strategy was based on using Liz Cheney to convince disaffected Republicans to vote for her while not taking any progressive position that might alienate such mythical voters. They convinced no one.
+ How registered Republicans voted:
2020
GOP 94%
Dem 6%
2024
GOP 94%
Dem: 5%
+ Matt Duss, former Sanders advisor: “The first thing Democrats should do is find the consultant whose idea it was to campaign with Liz Cheney in Michigan, and put that person on an iceberg where they can’t do any more harm.”
+ Moreover, it turns out that Harris couldn’t sell the one policy message she tried, no matter how haltingly, to sell: “In 2022, Dems won voters who said abortion should be “legal in most cases” by 22 points, 60-38.Yesterday, those voters split 49-49.”
+ Abortion rights proved a bi-partisanship issue almost everywhere it was on the ballot and far outdistanced the support for Harris…
Arizona
Abortion: 63.1%
Harris: 49.5%
Colorado Abortion: 61.4%
Harris: 54.9%
Florida
Abortion: 57.1%
Harris: 42.9%
Maryland
Abortion: 73.9%
Harris: 59.8%
Missouri
Abortion: 53.8%
Harris: 42.2%
Montana
Abortion: 54.5%
Harris: 34.9%
Nebraska
Abortion: 53.2%
Harris: 44.7%
New York
Abortion: 63.1%
Harris: 56.3%
+ The Harris campaign raised a billion dollars and ended $20 million in debt. Many people got rich by dispensing terrible advice.
+ People joke about Trump Steaks, Trump Wine, Trump University, and all the other ludicrous and failed ventures. But the Democrats burned through a billion dollars on a campaign that yielded a worse result than HRC in 2016. In the interim, both Ohio and Florida have gone from 50/50 states to deep red, even to the point of Ohio evicting a popular senator with working-class cred like Sherrod Brown for a lunatic like Bernie Moreno. Yet the same high-priced, loser consultants are already lining up gigs for next spring’s gubernatorial primaries and shopping themselves around to potential Senate and House candidates for 2026.
+ Among the many bone-headed decisions made by her campaign savants, the Harris campaign rejected a plan by the Congressional Black Caucus in September to spend $10 million recruiting black undecided voters. This move proved even more arrogant than Gore shutting down the Caucus’s effort to challenge the Supreme Court’s hijacking of the 2000 election…
+ As a consequence of Biden pulling the plug on the expansion of Medicaid during the pandemic, more than 25 million people lost their government health insurance by September 12, 2024. People living in Michigan (1.1 million), Georgia(800k) and Pennsylvania (1 million) were among those hit the most brutally. Is it any wonder they may have felt betrayed by Biden and Harris?
+ Trump got two million fewer votes than he did in 2020 and still won by five million votes. It was a turnout election in which Harris–who performed only a little better than HRC in 16–gave Democratic voters little reason to turnout–other than fear of Trump, who they’d already endured and (mostly) survived.
2016
HRC 65.85 million
Trump 62.9 million
2020
Biden 81.3 million
Trump 74.2 million
2024
Trump72.7 million
Harris 68 million
+ Jeff Shurke, Blue Collar Empire: “The 2020 election was a miraculous reprieve. Dems had a short window to enact the kinds of sweeping, New Deal-style reforms necessary to reverse the rise of fascism. They obviously failed, or rather fulfilled Biden’s promise to donors that “nothing would fundamentally change.”
+ Non-college voters make up around 60% of the electorate. Here’s how they split in the last five presidential elections…
+ Noah Kulwin: “I don’t think anyone who gloats about the economy has to buy Obamacare insurance.”
+ Harris was a bad candidate who delivered a bad message. As a consequence, she ran significantly behind most Democratic senatorial candidates.
Tester +13
Osborn +13
Klobuchar +11
Gallego +7
Brown +7
Allred +5
Rosen +4
Heinrich +4
Kim +4
Kaine +3
Slotkin +2
Baldwin +2
Casey +2
Mucarsel-Powell: 0
+++
+ In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump amplified his anti-war rhetoric. Why? According to the New York Times, internal polling showed that still undecided voters were “six times as likely as other battleground-state voters to be motivated by their views of Israel’s war in Gaza.” Either the Harris campaign missed this lurking demographic or, more likely, just didn’t care. Of course, Trump’s still going to give Netanyahu the greenlight to burn Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon to the ground and then target Iran.
+ In the primaries, 100,000 Democrats voted “Uncommitted” as a protest against the Biden-Harris administration’s arming of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Two weeks before the election, Bill Clinton was sent to Benton Harbor to berate them for failing to fall in line. Harris lost Michigan by around 80,000 votes. Maybe they should be blaming Bill?
+ Hamid Bendas, IMEU Policy Project: Trump saw this polling and started kissing babies in Dearborn; Harris’ people saw it and sent Ritchie Torres and Bill Clinton to berate voters in Michigan. I will never understand it.”
+ There are more than 200,000 Muslim voters in Michigan and more than 88,000 Lebanese Americans of any faith and they made Harris pay the price for her indifference to their concerns about their relatives and friends in Gaza and Lebanon.
Vote totals in Rashida Tlaib’s Dearborn, Michigan congressional district…+
+ Mouin Rabbani: “For the first time in modern American history contempt and disdain for Arabs, and demonization of Palestinians, has proven to be a losing rather than winning electoral strategy.”
+ But it wasn’t just Arab-American voters in Michigan who’d expressed their distaste for the Biden-Harris administration’s obscene support for genocide in Gaza. Earlier this year, a CBS poll found that 48% of Hispanic registered voters said the war on Gaza would be a “major factor” in their vote for President, a higher percentage than Black (39%) or White (34%) registered voters. In addition, 64% of Hispanics polled said the US should stop sending weapons to Israel. Yet, another warning that went unheeded.
+++
Jimmy Williams. Photo courtesy of IUPAT.
+ Jimmy Williams, president of the Painters Union (IUPAT), one of the most progressive unions in the AFL-CIO, on Harris’ defeat: “Working people deserve a party that understands what’s at stake, and that puts their issues front and center when campaigning and governing. A potential Republican trifecta, along with Project 2025, will be catastrophic for unions, including my own. But if the Democrats want to win, they need to get serious about being a party by and for the working class.”
+ UAW President Shawn Fain on the 2024 Presidential Election: “UAW members around the country clocked in today under the same threat they faced yesterday: unchecked corporate greed destroying our lives, our families, and our communities. It’s the threat of companies like Stellantis, Mack Truck, and John Deere shipping jobs overseas to boost shareholder profits. It’s the threat of corporate America telling the working class to sit down and shut up…It’s time for Washington, DC, to put up or shut up, no matter the party, no matter the candidate. Will our government stand with the working class, or keep doing the bidding of the billionaires? That’s the question we face today. And that’s the question we’ll face tomorrow. The answer lies with us. No matter who’s in office.”
+ Bernie Sanders: “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them. First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo. And they’re right…Will the big-money interests and well-paid consultants who control the Democratic Party learn any real lessons from this disastrous campaign? Will they understand the pain and political alienation that tens of millions of Americans are experiencing? Do they have any ideas as to how we can take on the increasingly powerful Oligarchy which has so much economic and political power? Probably not.”
+ Murtaza Hussain: “Suppressing the Bernie movement in 2016 effectively destroyed the Democratic Party. That was a turning point year GOP also had an insurgency with Trump but they ultimately worked with him to some new kind of synthesis. The Democrats never got past their decrepit ancien regime.”
+ The Democrats have tried to extinguish every insurgent movement within the party, from Eugene McCarthy in 1968 to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow coalition in 1984/88. They didn’t even have the sense to coopt their ideas and organizing methods. They tried to quash those, too.
+++
+ The big question is whether Trump, intentionally or not, has defeated the neoliberal/neocon project in America or simply vanquished some of its most inept political practitioners.Capitalism seems almost effortlessly to adapt to every new threat, and Trump surrounding himself with a retinue of rapacious billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks is undoubtedly a warning sign that we may be about to enter a darker and more cruel phase of late-stage capitalism.
+ Hey, MAGA really stuck it to the elites this time!
+ The crypto industry pumped more than $130 million into the campaign, often cryptically not even mentioning “crypto” in its ads, which may have taken down Sherrod Brown in Ohio and won enough contested House seats to save the House for the GOP.
+ Shares in private prison companies GEO Group and CoreCivic soared on the news of Trump’s election and the prospect of the mass roundup and detention of immigrants, anti-genocide protesters and lefty journos….
+ According to the Financial Times, “the incumbents in every single one of the ten major countries that….held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has ever happened in almost 120 years of records.” Apparently, Mexico, which elected Claudia Scheinbaum decisively to succeed the term-limited AMLO, is not a “major country.” No wonder lessons are never learned.
+ Biden picking Merrick Garland as AG was the most self-defeating cabinet pick since Obama picked Tim Geithner to run Treasury and bail out the same bankers who’d screwed over the people who elected Obama.
+ Musa al-Gharbi, in an interview with Reason on the fatal contradictions of progressive elites…
One of the core cultural contradictions is that we have these two drives that are both sincere. It’s not the case that we are cynical or insincere when we say we want the poor to be lifted up. We want the people who are marginalized and disadvantaged in society to live lives of dignity and things like that. I don’t think people I don’t think people are being cynical or insincere about that. But that’s not our only sincere commitment. We also really want to be elites, which is to say, we think that our opinions and our views and our wishes should carry should carry more weight than the person checking us out at the grocery store. We think we should have a higher standard of living than the person selling us clothes and shoes at Dillard’s. And we want our children to reproduce and have an even higher social position than us. And these drives are in fundamental tension, right? You can’t be an egalitarian social climber.
+ And, let me tell you, children, the prophecy was fulfilled…
+ El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, the Victor Orban of Central America, said he spoke on the phone with Trump after his election, where they had “an interesting conversation about his podcast strategy, the bullet that nearly killed him, the incredible people around him, the sometimes harmful effects of U.S. aid funds, Soros-backed NGOs.”
+ Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said the military is prepared to carry out all “lawful orders” under President Trump. Too bad they didn’t commit themselves to this restriction when Obama ordered them to drone American citizens…
+ The movement to divert public money into private/charter schools suffered three big defeats in a couple of unlikely states.
In Colorado, voters defeated a measure to constitutionalize “school choice.”
In Nebraska, voters repealed a law that diverted public money to private schools.
In Kentucky, voters rejected a measure to allow public money to be sent to private schools.
+ Ann Selzer’s Iowa poll, which gave so many liberals false hope, only missed by 17 points. Call it Far-Outlier polling…
+ Jack White, who is suing Trump in federal court for his unauthorized use of Seven Nation Army, on Trump’s victory: “All those rich pricks riding in their Cybertrucks listening to their Rogan and Bannon and Alex Jones podcasts, are laughing all the way to the bank looking forward to their tax cuts that don’t apply to the middle class.”
+ Where will roadkill rank on RKF, Jr’s Food Pyramid, when he takes over the FDA?
+ One positive outcome from Harris’ defeat: UAW members felt free to renew their campaign to push the union to divest from one million dollars in Israeli bonds.
+ I was up until 3 am Wednesday writing my obituary for the Harris-Walz campaign and then couldn’t get to sleep, so I picked Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americans off the shelf, as a refresher course in what’s coming our way. It’s a morbidly funny novel, even when it cuts perilously close to home.
+ Democrats shouldn’t despair for long. Their party will soon be resurrected into a facsimile of its former state with few noticeable changes. Capitalism needs two faces of roughly equal power in the US to make the entire game seem legit.
Crawling from the wreckage,
Crawling from the wreckage You’d think by now at least That half a brain would get the message
The election of Trump is more than a political event; it is an attempt to legitimize a brutal evolution of fascism in America. His rise is not accidental but symptomatic, emerging from the depths of collective fear, dread, and anxiety stoked by a savage form of gangster capitalism—neoliberalism—that thrives on division and despair. This climate, steeped in a culture of hate, misogyny, and racism, has given life to Trump’s authoritarian appeal, drowning out the warning signs of past and present tyranny.
While it’s clear that American society changed dramatically with Reagan’s election and the corrupt rise of the billionaire elite, we must also recognize how liberals and the Democratic Party, instead of resisting, aligned with Wall Street power brokers like Goldman Sachs. In doing so, they adopted elements of neoliberalism that crushed the working class, intensified the class and racial divide, accelerated staggering levels of inequality, and intensified the long lacy of nativism, all of which fed into the conditions for Trump’s appeal. Clinton’s racially charged criminalizing policies, Obama’s centrist neoliberalism and unyielding support for the financial elite, and Biden’s death-driven support for genocide in Gaza have contributed to a culture ripe for authoritarianism. In short, this groundwork didn’t just make Trump possible; it made him inevitable.
But perhaps one of the most overlooked failures of liberalism and Third Way democrats, and even parts of the left, was the neglect of education as a form of critical and civic literacy and the role it plays in raising mass consciousness and fostering an energized collective movement. This failure wasn’t just about policy but, as Pierre Bourdieu observed, about forgetting that domination operates not only through economic structures but also through beliefs and cultural persuasion. Trump and his engineers of hate and revenge have not only rewritten history but obliterated historical consciousness as fundamental element of civic education. Historical amnesia has always provided a cover for America’s long-standing racism, nativism, disavowal of women’s right. Capitalizing on far right propaganda machines, Trump managed, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat notes, to convince millions of Americans that they “simply could not accept the idea of a non-White and female president.” Nor could they insert themselves in a history of collective struggle, resistance, and the fight for a better world. He also convinced the majority of Americans that it is okay elect a white supremacist to be the President of the University.
Bernie Sanders rightly observes on X that “It comes as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working-class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” Of course, the Democratic Party shares with mainstream media stenographers the fact that they have refused to forcefully acknowledge, as Sherrilyn Ifill points out, that not only the MAGA crowd but also “a majority of white Americans in fact have chosen to embrace white supremacy rather than the promise of a multi-racial democracy.” Sanders’ comments only scratch the surface. The issue of abandonment and moral collapse also extends to the pedagogical realm: for decades, the right has wielded the educational force of culture to persuade white, Latino, and Black workers to turn their backs on their own interests, binding them to an authoritarian cult and white supremacist ideology that exploits their alienation and sabotages any sense of critical agency. Since the 1970s, galvanized by the Powell Memo, reactionary conservatives have grasped, far more than the left, the transformative power of ideas. They have weaponized culture to dismantle institutions that once nurtured critical thought, education, and resistance. Recognizing that reshaping public consciousness was essential to their agenda, they systematically eroded critical literacy, attacked public spaces, and transformed public and higher education from forces of liberation —turning them into either sites of repression and training or more disdainfully, full scale sites of indoctrination. This was no accident; it was a core part of their long-term strategy—to strip society of its capacity for dissent, molding a populace more easily controlled, more willingly complicit in its own subjugation.
Trump is the grim culmination of this cultural war against reason, truth, and critical thinking. Mass ignorance and civic illiteracy have become not mere byproducts but the very engines of a strategy to blind working people and those considered expendable to the economic injustices ravaging their lives. Rather than addressing these economic onslaughts, they are instead lured into a communal theater of hate and bigotry. This spectacle of manufactured ignorance and call for cult-like loyalty does more than cloud the mind; it becomes a political weapon, rendering the dispossessed both docile and divided. Neoliberal ideology intensifies this dynamic, imprisoning people in suffocating bubbles of self-interest and hyper-individualism. It wages a calculated assault on collective solidarity, designed to transform the public into isolated consumers, unable to envision a politics beyond their private lives or recognize that their true power lies in unity and critical consciousness. At the same time, it takes advantage of the anxiety and loneliness experience by the disposed to lure them into a false community of hatred and lawlessness. The need for solidary falls prey under Trump into the lure of what Ernst Bloch in The Principle of Hope called the swindle of fulfillment.
With no viable movement for meaningful social change in sight, Trump and his modern-day Brownshirts exploited the void left by a crisis of consciousness. Into this gap, they injected a corporate-controlled culture that shaped daily life with a culture steeped in hatred, fear, anxiety, and the force of endless fascist like spectacles. It is worth noting that such spectacles are chillingly reminiscent of Nuremberg in the 1930s, designed to stoke division and obedience, distracting the public from any path toward collective resistance or liberation. This carnival of divisiveness and dehumanizing rhetoric did more than destroy the nation’s civic and educational fabric, it produced a poisonous populist culture that changed the way most Americans view the past, present, and future.
If we are to confront this fascistic momentum, we must urgently return to the tools necessary to rebuild a mass consciousness as a precondition for a mass movement–one that can use the mobilization of mass consciousness, strikes and other forms of direct action to prevent this new fascist regime from governing. We need to stop this machinery of death from enacting the enormous suffering, misery, violence, and power that gives it both a sense of pleasure and reason for enduring.
With Trump’s rise to power, American citizens have empowered a fascist agenda—one bent on enriching the ultra-wealthy, gutting the welfare state, deporting millions, and dismantling the very institutions that uphold accountability, critical thought, and democracy itself. These structures are not just formalities; they are the lifeblood of a radical, inclusive democracy and the safeguard for an informed citizenry. In this perilous moment, Seyla Benhabib, drawing on Adorno and Arendt, confronts us with a question of profound urgency: “What does it mean to go on thinking?” Her call to “learn to think anew” resounds with particular force as we grapple with the stark reality of Trump’s election.
We are now compelled to rethink the very foundations of culture, politics, power, struggle, and education. The stakes are clear. In mere weeks, as Will Bunch notes, a man who attempted to overturn an election—who espouses overt racism, embraces white supremacy, and boasts about his rancid misogyny, has pledged mass deportations, and threatens military force against political opponents—will once again assume power. This is a historical crossroads that demands a radical reevaluation of our democratic commitments and strategies for real social and economic change.
Chris Hedges aptly warns that “the American dream has become an American nightmare [and that] Donald Trump is a symptom of our diseased society. He is not its cause. He is what is vomited up out of decay.” Trump embodies the cumulative effects of decades of moral and social corrosion. His presidency signals not a departure but an intensification of a deep-seated national crisis.
In this historical moment, we face an urgent challenge to confront and dismantle the forces entrenching fascist politics and authoritarian governance. Now is the moment to radically transform our approach to theory, education, and the liberatory power of learning—tools we must wield to build a robust, multi-racial working-class movement that is unapologetically anti-capitalist and unwaveringly democratic. We must relinquish the myth of American exceptionalism and the dangerous illusion that democracy and capitalism are synonymous. The cost of inaction is dire: a future where democracy is not merely eroded but supplanted by a violent police state,—a betrayal soaked in blood, extinguishing the dream of a society committed to the promise and ideals of justice and equality.
The stakes could not be higher. We must confront this moment with uncompromising purpose, a blueprint for bold action, and an unyielding commitment to a radical democracy that defies fascist cruelty, bigotry, and the stranglehold of the financial elite at every step. Our future demands it, as does the vision of a society where justice, solidarity, and human dignity are not just ideals but realities—part of a future that defies the rising shadow of fascism threatening to consume us. We either fight to reclaim this promise, or we surrender to a darkness from which there is no return.
There was a vague sense of abusive parenting in it all. Harris promised a government that would to treat us well; meanwhile, the other child, Palestine, was taking the abuse—not us, so OK for now. We’d deal with those atrocities later. Or would we? Through social media, VP Harris’s national security adviser flatly said 
![Then-President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo participates in a sugar-cane planting ceremony in the Merauke regency of South Papua province, July 23, 2024. [Indonesian presidential office handout/Muchlis Jr]](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/then-president-joko-jokowi-widodo-participates-i-1-1008x630.jpeg)
![Then-President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo participates in a sugar-cane planting ceremony in the Merauke regency of South Papua province, July 23, 2024. [Indonesian presidential office handout/Muchlis Jr]](https://www.counterpunch.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/then-president-joko-jokowi-widodo-participates-i-1.jpeg)
