The seal of the International Court of Justice.

The timing, as with so much in the ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon, was most appropriate. The Israeli Knesset had signalled its intent on crippling and banishing the sole agency of humanitarian worth for Palestinian welfare by passing laws criminalising its operations by 92 to 10 on October 28.

The attack on UNRWA also came with a contemporaneous legal effort, this time from South Africa.  Pretoria had already made its wishes clear on December 28, 2023 in filing an application in the International Court of Justice alleging “violations by Israel regarding the [United Nations] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide […] in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”  Acts and omissions by Israel, argued the South African government, were alleged to be of a “genocidal” nature, “committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza as part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group”.

By May 10, South Africa had filed four requests seeking additional provisional measures with modifications to the original provisional measures laid down by the ICJ.  The momentum, and frequency of the actions, even gave certain commentators room to wonder: Was Israel’s own due process rights regarding judicial equality and the right to be heard compromised?  Israel had promised to submit written observations by May 15 to the ICJ when faced with the sudden announcement on May 12 that the court would be holding an oral hearing instead.

These debates have been taking place before the concerted, dedicated, enthusiastic pulverisation of Gaza, and the ongoing killing, terrorisation and displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank.  In these cases, due process remains fantasy and distant speculation, especially concerning civilians.  With increasing regularity, there is chilling evidence that Israeli units have a programmatic approach to destroying a viable infrastructure and means of living on the strip.

On October 22, the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem expressed horror at the sheer scale “of the crimes Israel is currently committing in the northern Gaza Strip in its campaign to empty it of however many residents are left […] impossible to describe, not just because hundreds of thousands of people enduring starvation, disease without access to medical care and incessant bombardments and gunfire defies comprehension, but because Israel has cut them off from the world.”

In a chilling overview of the exploits of the IDF’s 749 Combat Engineering Battalion written by Younis Tirawi and Sami Vanderlip for Drop Site News, a record of systematic elimination of cultural, structural and intellectual life in the Gaza Strip is evident.  As members of the battalion’s official D9 company stated: “Our job is to flatten Gaza.”  In an operation that saw the destruction of the Al-Azhar University, First Sergeant David Zoldan, operational officer of Company A of the battalion, delights with fellow soldiers on seeing the explosion: “Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, did you see?!”

Statements of this sort are frequent and easily found up the chain of command.  They are also uttered with ease at the highest levels of government.  On October 21, Israeli Minister for National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir had told a “settlement” conference held in a restricted military zone that Gaza’s inhabitants would be given the chance to “leave from here to other countries”.  His reasoning for this ethnic cleansing has remained biblically consistent: “The Land of Israel is ours.”

In a media statement from its Department of International Relations and Cooperation dated October 28, the South African government announced its filing of a Memorial to the ICJ pertaining to its ongoing case against Israel.  The Memorial itself runs into 750 pages, with 4000 pages of supporting exhibits and annexes.  (Its December 2023 application had run into 84 pages.)  “The problem we have is that we have too much evidence,” remarked South Africa’s representative to The Hague, Ambassador Vusimuzi Madonsela to Al Jazeera.

Zane Dangor, director- general of the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, was more practical.  Israel might well inflate its dossier of bloody misdeeds, but some line had to be drawn in the submissions.  “The legal team will always say we need more time, there’s more facts coming.  But we have to say you have to stop now.  You [have] got to focus on what you have.”

While the formal contents of the Memorial remain confidential, the clues are thickly obvious.  It contains, for instance, evidence that Israel “has violated the genocide convention by promoting the destruction of Palestinians living in Gaza, physically killing them with an assortment of destructive weapons, depriving them access to humanitarian assistance, causing conditions of life which are aimed at their physical destruction and ignoring and defying several provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, and using starvation as a weapon of war to further Israel’s aims to depopulate Gaza through mass death and forced displacement of Palestinians.”

Despite that comprehensive assortment of alleged crimes, the legal commentariat wonder how far this latest effort will necessarily go in linking the decisions of Israeli officialdom with genocidal intent.  That Israel is committing war crimes and violating humanitarian law is nigh impossible dispute.  The threshold in proving genocide, as international jurisprudence has repeatedly shown over the years, is a high one indeed.  The dolus specialis – that specific intent to destroy in whole or in part the protected group – is essential to prove.

Cathleen Powell of University of Cape Town, for instance, has her reservations.  “If they can find genocidal statements from state officials and show that that directly led to a particular programme that led to the destruction on the ground, then that’s probably a very strong case,”.  But making that link would be “very difficult”.

Dangor has no doubts.  “Genocidal acts without intent can be crimes against humanity.  But here, the intent is just front and centre.”  Suffice to say that Israeli lawmakers and officials, aided by the exploits of the IDF, are making proving such intent an easier prospect with each passing day.

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Photo by Nathan Dumlao

Education is not the filling of a vessel, but the lighting of a fire.

– bell hooks

In an era marked by unprecedented threats to democracy from rising authoritarian forces, universities—once celebrated citadels of democratic learning and public service—now find themselves caught in a profound political and ideological siege. Rather than championing social justice or fostering spaces for rigorous intellectual exchange, many institutions have shifted their priorities to profit, silencing dissent and embracing market-driven models that serve a predatory capitalism, thus betraying their democratic mission. This crisis has deep roots, but the recent onslaught by far-right politicians and a reactionary billionaire elite is without precedent in its intensity and scale. This trend weakens the humanities and liberal arts, stripping higher education of its capacity to serve as a democratic public sphere and robbing it of the potential to cultivate socially aware students who challenge injustices and hold power to account. Increasingly, higher education runs the risk of becoming either right wing indoctrination centers or dead zones of the imagination.

Neoliberal ideology, marked by the irrational belief in the ability of markets to solve all problems, has deeply infiltrated public life, depoliticized critical issues and shifted education’s focus to workforce training. As education becomes increasingly privatized and subordinated to right-wing agendas, students are steered away from engaging with collective issues, ethics, or democratic participation. In the neoliberal university, students are encouraged to abandon any commitment beyond personal gain. Education is stripped of its civic purpose, no longer a path to responsible citizenship but a high-stakes financial transaction—a competition for entry into the lucrative world of hedge funds and exploitative financial ventures. This transformation reduces learning to mere careerism, undermining the university’s potential to cultivate engaged, socially conscious citizens.

In doing so, it fosters a dangerous form of historical and political amnesia, obscuring the reality that neoliberalism, which facing a crisis of legitimacy has aligned itself with a fascist politics steeped in white nationalism, white supremacy, and the politics of disposability. This alignment signals the rise of what I have called neoliberal fascism, a fusion of market-driven policies and authoritarian ideologies. Moreover, right-wing billionaires such as Bill Ackman, the hedge-fund CEO, are putting enormous pressure on universities to suppress dissent, particularly among critics of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and Lebonon and impose a curriculum that weakens the power and autonomy of faculty and students while turning colleges such as New College in Sarasota, Florida into citadels of indoctrination—a MAGA model for all of higher education.

This market-driven transformation has reshaped universities, reorienting them toward profitability and marginalizing disciplines that foster critical thinking, social responsibility, and collective imagination. The resulting commodification of education deprives students of the tools to challenge injustice or envision a more equitable society. Under such circumstances, the language of the market replaces civic language with personal, consumer-oriented perspectives, isolating individuals and obstructing a shared understanding of public concerns. In short, the critical function of higher education is under siege. Under such circumstances, higher education increasingly resembles disimagination machines.

The shift has also marginalized public intellectuals—scholars who contribute to society’s understanding of critical issues by connecting academic work to larger social problems. Instead, universities increasingly favor faculty who align with corporate values, reinforcing depoliticized, market-oriented approaches to education. This trend has led to the rise of  what George Scialabba calls the “anti-public intellectual,” figures who endorse market policies without addressing issues of justice and democracy. Or as in the case of  anti- public intellectuals such as Niall Ferguson whose writing legitimizes an outright fascist such as Trump. These corporate-aligned “anti-public intellectuals,” supported by neoliberal foundations like the Heritage Foundation, champion policies that erode public resources and democratic institutions. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 manifesto, for instance, aims to dismantle the welfare state and punish dissenters—a blueprint for an authoritarian reordering of American society under a potential second Trump administration.

Against this tide, public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Cornel West have long advocated for a different vision of education, one that invites students to question authority, seek justice, and cultivate democracy. Rather than focusing solely on producing economically viable graduates, universities must also strive to cultivate active, engaged citizens who can imagine a future free of climate catastrophe, militarism, systemic racism, and predatory capitalism.

Historically, universities have largely supported resistance and critical engagement, playing pivotal roles in movements for free speech, civil rights, and gender equality. However, this legacy is at risk. Neoliberal ideologies target universities because of their potential to promote democratic values and critical thought. As a result, right-wing movements and corporate interests increasingly attack universities’ public roles and democratic functions.

In response to these threats, a coalition of young people, critical public intellectuals, and progressive social movements has emerged, asserting that universities must be protected as bastions of democracy. As white nationalists, authoritarian billionaires, and neo-fascists wage war on education, it becomes clear that treating education as a public good is essential to sustaining a healthy democracy. Public intellectuals, students, and workers must defend educational institutions as sites of social justice and resistance against corporatization and the authoritarian impulses encroaching on democracy. Universities have a moral responsibility to press for social and economic justice, countering both corporatization and the rise of authoritarian ideologies.

The crisis in higher education is part of a broader neoliberal assault on democracy, which systematically privatizes education, undermines public trust, and weakens collective institutions. This relentless assault corrodes the very foundations of democratic life, replacing the values of cooperation, civic responsibility, and community with self-interest, competition, and social isolation. In this climate, public intellectuals play an essential role as guardians of engaged citizenship and intellectual integrity, equipping students and the public to see that democracy cannot sustain itself passively; it demands an active, vigilant defense. Universities, when aligned with their true purpose, become crucial spaces for cultivating the capacities, solidarity, and critical awareness necessary to confront and resist the encroachments of authoritarianism. What must be stressed here is that habits of power are learned and must in some cases be unlearned. This is an important pedagogical task.

The path forward for universities is clear: they must resist corporatization and recommit to fostering critical thinking, academic freedom, civic engagement, and democratic renewal. If higher education is to fulfill its democratic mission, it must resist the neoliberal plague and foster young people equipped to challenge inequities and envision a just, compassionate society.

In an era of collapsing visions, emotional plagues, manufactured ignorance, staggering inequality, environmental ruin, human misery, and rising authoritarianism, it is vital for academics to affirm higher education’s claim on democracy. Above all, academics need to stand firm in their ethical convictions, engage with the pressing social issues of our time and bridge the gap between learning and everyday life. Evoking the spirit of James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Edward Said, Ellen Willis, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Paulo Freire, our role as educators and citizens demands that we champion public intellectuals who dare to confront power, alleviate human suffering, and combat the moral vacuum of ultra-nationalism, white supremacy, and economic exploitation. Intellectuals, when aligned with these commitments, transcend the constraints of academic disciplines, engaging in society’s most urgent struggles, resisting the commercialization of knowledge, and bringing truth to bear amid a deluge of lies and conspiracy theories. They embody, as Kiese Makeba Laymon notes, “the vital connection between a reflective self-awareness and a commitment to social responsibility. Without an informed public, democracy is imperiled; without a language that interrogates injustice, there can be no path to justice.” At stake here is the recognition that without an informed public, there can be no democracy, and without a language critical of injustice, there can be no path to justice.

 Today, the role of educators as public intellectuals aligned with broader social movements has never been more vital, especially when far-right extremists around the globe seek to turn education into a force for indoctrination. Education has always been political, but in this era of book bans, weakened faculty autonomy, restricted curricula, and whitewashed history, imagining education as a practice of freedom is a radical act. It is not merely a means to transfer knowledge or a method, but a site of struggle over agency, identity, history, and the future. In a time when education can also become a tool of oppression, it is crucial to imagine education as a living pathway toward a strong and vibrant democracy. This suggests that young people and academics engage in a  profound dialogue with history, a commitment to honoring the memories of the forgotten, the silenced, and the oppressed as part of a relentless pursuit to hold power to account. It also suggests taking seriously the idea that pedagogy is a powerful force for shaping identities, agency, and social values. As Homi Bhabha rightly observes, pedagogy demands vigilance “at that very moment when identities are being produced and groups are being constituted.” In such contexts, pedagogy becomes a catalyst for empowering individuals to take responsibility not only for themselves but also for their communities, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to question authority and expose abuses of power. It urges us to learn from history, sharpening our ability to recognize, comprehend, and resist the insidious forces of fascism.

The McCarthyite rhetoric espoused by figures like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump poses a grave threat to the foundations of higher education. Vance has publicly branded  professors as “the enemy,” while Trump has pledged to cleanse universities of so-called ‘leftists,’ whom he denigrates as ‘vermin.’ For Trump, labels like ‘leftists’ and ‘Marxists’ serve as sweeping condemnations for anyone who dares engage in critical thinking or challenges the status quo. These attacks reveal a deep-seated contempt for universities as spaces of intellectual freedom, dialogue, and the pursuit of truth. By framing educators, scholars, and the media as “enemies from within,” these political figures are not merely undermining public trust in academic institutions; they are working to extinguish open inquiry and eradicate the diversity of perspectives essential for a vibrant democratic society. Their ultimate aim is to strip universities of their cultures of criticism, unsettling knowledge, and democratic values—even those values that remain tenuous The consequences of this discourse are severe, and we have seen a similar script played out in Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile, and more recently in Orban’s Hungary. To put it bluntly, this rhetoric signals a project of repression that escalates toward expulsions, imprisonments, and, if Trump’s language is any indication, hints ominously at what Fintan O’Toolerefers to as “so many of European history’s lagers and gulags and prisoner-of-war camps.”

Reviving historical consciousness as a pedagogical practice illuminates patterns of repression and opens pathways for resistance. Simultaneously, it offers a vision of leadership that amplifies the power of both individual and collective agency—a fierce, binding force that calls us to the obligations of social responsibility, justice, and freedom. It is a foundation for a democracy that pulsates with the promise of a future where economic, social, and personal rights are not merely ideals but lived realities, untouched by fear, repression, or the shifting, ever-present ghosts of fascism.

Universities now stand at a crossroads: they can either continue down the path of market-driven values, eroding their purpose, or reclaim their democratic mission as spaces of critical inquiry and social responsibility. Since the 1970s, neoliberalism–a predatory form of capitalism–has systematically dismantled the welfare state, public sphere, and commitment to the common good, reshaping universities in its image. This ideology insists that the market should dictate not only the economy but all realms of society, concentrating wealth among a corrupt billionaire financial elite while promoting unchecked individualism, deregulation, and privatization as guiding societal principles. Under neoliberalism, education is commodified, and citizenship is reduced to consumerism. Universities—once spaces for cultivating democratic ideals and intellectual freedom—now risk becoming extensions of this form of gangster capitalism, mirroring the racialized inequalities, militarism, and extreme wealth gaps that define our broader social landscape. To surrender to the commodification, commercialism, and corporatization of education and the fascist currents shaping contemporary politics would be a profound betrayal of higher education’s foundational mission. The stakes could not be higher: without an unrelenting commitment to radical democratic ideals, universities risk not only forfeiting their own relevance but also imperiling the very future of democracy at a moment when the specter of fascism looms with renewed force.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Israel has reached an unimaginable peak of evil. And indeed many people all over the world find it hard to imagine that this is so. …The only possible conclusion must be that Israeli evil has nothing to do with Judaism and that what is manifested in Israeli behavior is not Jewishness. It is pure colonialist, nationalist and chauvinistic racism and should be treated as such.

–Nurit Peled-Elhanan at the Closing Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, March 17, 2013

I recently had a horrific dream that transported me from the safety and peace of Vietnam to the blazing hell on earth that is Gaza. I was holding a sniper rifle and in my sights was an IDF soldier. There’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that I would have pulled the trigger had the dream not ended. While I’m a great supporter of non-violence, I also firmly believe in the right of self-defense, including in Gaza where Israel is the invader and a fanatical agent of genocide.

My nightmare was a visceral manifestation that this Israeli-conceived and -executed genocide weighs heavily on my mind, is embedded in my subconscious, and can even rear its ugly, bloodstained head in my dreams. It embodies the powerlessness I feel but also the anger, frustration, and sadness. I wake up thinking about this moral stain and go to bed doing the same. But, alas, there are also glimmers of hope, a lesson history has taught me.

In her recent PEN Pinter Prize 2024 acceptance speech, “No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound That Is Palestine,” Arundhati Roy stated the obvious for those with eyes to see and ears to hear: “Israel is not fighting a war of self-defense. It is fighting a war of aggression. A war to occupy more territory, to strengthen its Apartheid apparatus and tighten its control on Palestinian people and the region.” She forcefully and eloquently dispenses with the perverse notion so many who “stand with Israel” embrace that genocide, torture, and land grabbing are a form of self-defense.

This, of course, is official Israel’s party line. In his October 7, 2024 Address at the State Ceremony to Mark One Year since the October 7 Massacre, Benjamin Netanyahu stated that “We rallied together to defend our country, our homeland. We mustered immense mental strength. We outlined the goals of the war and we are achieving them: toppling the rule of Hamas; bringing all the hostages home, the living and the deceased alike—this is a sacred mission and we will not stop until we complete it; eliminating any future threat from Gaza to Israel; and returning the residents of the south and the north safely to their homes.” Sounding very much like his primary benefactor in Washington, D.C. with its “city upon a hill” sense of cultural superiority and exceptionalism, he referred to Israelis as “the Eternal People. A people that fights to bring light to this world, that aspires to spread good and eradicate evil. ‘A people that rises like a lion, leaps up like a lion’.”

Back to the cold, bloody reality. Amos Goldberg, the Jonah M. Machover Chair in Holocaust Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and co-editor with Bashir Bashir of The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press 2018), writes that

What is happening in Gaza is a genocide, in my opinion, because the level and pace of indiscriminate killing, destruction, mass expulsion, displacement, deliberate famine, executions, the wiping out of universities, cultural and religious institutions, the crushing of elites (including the killing of journalists), and the sweeping dehumanization of the Palestinians create an overall picture of genocide, of the intentional and conscious shattering of Palestinian existence in Gaza. Palestinian Gaza, as a geographical, political, cultural, and human entity no longer exists. Genocide is the deliberate destruction of a collective or part of it, not of all of its individual members – and that is what is happening in Gaza today.

I Stand With…

During a summer visit to Philadelphia, I regularly walked by a home in my temporary neighborhood that had large posters in its window that screamed, “We Stand With Israel” and “Philly Stands with Israel.” Almost immediately, as if on autopilot my mind began to sketch out an essay in the spirit of writing as therapy, a more productive and therapeutic response than throwing rocks through the window, something my angry alter ago was insisting I do, instant yet counterproductive and illegal gratification.

In a blog post I proclaimed that I stand with “the exploited, weak, oppressed, and victims of state-sponsored violence, including genocide, NOT the oppressors, exploiters, and murderers. It’s really that simple. That black and white. There are no gray areas. There is no moral equivalence here.” It’s a grotesque of the times that this commonsensical and moral position is branded as controversial and to oppose the genocidal actions of Israel is to be antisemitic.

My interior dialogue with a friend who has swallowed the line about “toppling the rule of Hamas; bringing all the hostages home” and “eliminating any future threat from Gaza to Israel,” I continued: “What Hamas did last year was barbaric but the 2.1 million people living in Gaza are not Hamas. The attack merely created an opportunity for Israel and the IDF to shorten the long game, a modern-day version of the desire for Lebensraum.

There’s a lot of talk about taking sides, especially in the US, a country whose citizens and political leaders are indoctrinated to view the world in black and white terms, e.g., us vs. them, good and evil. Tell me who you stand with and I’ll tell you what side of history you’re on.

When you ‘Stand with Israel,’ does that mean you stand for genocide? Does it mean you don’t care about the tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian men, women, children who have been displaced, injured physically and psychologically, and slaughtered? Are their lives of less value than those of Israelis? Are they of no value?

The ongoing genocide in Gaza is Israel’s ‘final solution’ in ‘cleansing’ the country of Palestinians. (As a student of German history, I don’t use this term lightly.) The persecuted have come full circle by becoming the persecutors whereby the ends always justify the means. As many have observed, Palestinians have become the Jews of the 21st century.”

State-Sanctioned Murder of Innocents as the Ultimate Human Rights Violation

I had an unpleasant but necessary exchange on LinkedIn, “the world’s largest professional network on the internet,” with J., a colleague with a Ph.D. who is an anthropologist and gender specialist, and highlights human rights in her profile. As part of a discussion about Israel and the U.S., I noted that both countries have much in common.

“They’re both essentially settler colonial states that have inflicted untold suffering and misery on ‘undesirables’ within and beyond their borders. It’s a given that the lives of their citizens are more valuable than those of ‘the other.’ Take the US war in Vietnam, for example. 58,220 US Americans perished while 3.8 million Vietnamese were killed. Yet it’s always been about US(A). This Harold Pinter quote is relevant: ‘The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.’”

I also referred to Israel as “a terrorist state by any reasonable definition of the term” and “a pariah state, an outcast in the global community.”

J.’s ill-informed and off-the-mark response: “I think that this is a very unfair and very uniformed comment. Calling Israel a ‘terrorist’ state is beyond unreasonable. It is the only democratic country in the region that respects women’s and homosexual rights. It allows anyone to have citizenship, regardless of their ethnicity, UNLIKE their neighbors. They are continuously attacked and then blamed when they resound (read response) in defense. What is also continuously ignored is the widespread hate for Jewish people, and non Muslims in general, that runs rife in the region. It is ignored that this is the primary reason for the continued aggression and hostility towards Israel as is the fact that all of the other countries in the region run tyrannical regimes that don’t afford the rights to their citizens that Israel does.”

You’ll notice she trots out the old canard, self-defense, as a justification for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and now Lebanon and Syria. It’s obvious she’s consumed enormous quantities of the blue and white Kool-Aid served up by Israel’s 24/7 propaganda machine.

But, hey, aside from the rampant racism in Israeli society, which J. either ignores or is blissfully ignorant of, the genocide in Gaza, and the murder of over a thousand civilians in Lebanon with no end in sight, Israel “is the only democratic country in the region that respects women’s and homosexual rights.”

The Complicity of Silence, The Moral Obligation of Resistance

You can be a celebrity or an ordinary person. If you stay SILENT, PASSIVE, INACTIVE while Palestinians trapped in Gaza – humans who breath, feel and dream exactly like you – get slaughtered by an unchecked army, you are no different from those who continued to go by their lives during past genocides who erased from earth millions.

-Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Instagram post, October 15, 2024)

All I can do from Vietnam is speak out in general and to fellow international educators (see International educators need to end their silence on Gaza), especially in my home country, who have remained silent in the face of the monstrous crimes being committed day and night by the Israeli military and that country’s political leadership.

It saddens and infuriates me that US international education leaders such as Dr. Fanta Aw, executive director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, and Allan Goodman, president and CEO of the Institute of International Education (IIE) among others, are among the silent.

Since I cannot read their hearts and minds, I don’t know if Victor Hugo’s observation that “It is not easy to keep silent when silence is a lie” applies to these colleagues and others who remain silent. What I do know is that their choice not to speak out against this genocide is a political statement, and a damning one at that. Thích Nhất Hạnh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, peace activist, and author, echoed this theme in response to a question about genocide posed by a young national security professional: “Even if you don’t do anything, if you allow the people to kill and destroy … that is also violence. Violence can be action or non-action.”

I was part of that quasi-US governmental world for four years of my decades-long career and am therefore familiar with the usual political and economic arguments in favor of silence, e.g., don’t damage important official relationships and “whose bread I eat, his song I sing.” I reject and condemn them, now as I did then. Silence is inexcusable, unconscionable, and unforgivable.

How I wish they would take this Elie Wiesel quote to heart: “I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Like other Holocaust survivors, I’m certain Wiesel would have taken the side of the Palestinians on the receiving end of Israel’s bullets and bombs.

Nobody But You, a poem by Charles Bukowski, comes to mind:

nobody can save you but
yourself.
you will be put again and again
into nearly impossible
situations.
they will attempt again and again
through subterfuge, guise and
force
to make you submit, quit and /or die quietly
inside.

nobody can save you but
yourself
and it will be easy enough to fail
so very easily
but don’t, don’t, don’t.
just watch them.
listen to them.
do you want to be like that?
a faceless, mindless, heartless
being?
do you want to experience
death before death?

nobody can save you but
yourself
and you’re worth saving.
it’s a war not easily won
but if anything is worth winning then
this is it.

think about it.
think about saving your self.
your spiritual self.
your gut self.
your singing magical self and
your beautiful self.
save it.
don’t join the dead-in-spirit.

maintain your self
with humor and grace
and finally
if necessary
wager your self as you struggle,
damn the odds, damn
the price.

only you can save your
self.

do it! do it!

then you’ll know exactly what
I am talking about.

Don’t be “a “faceless, mindless, heartless being” who experiences “death before death.” Our fellow human beings, men, women, and children are being murdered daily and the survivors are enduring unimaginable suffering. “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Save your spiritual self by speaking out against injustice and cruelty. It’s the least we can do, a meaningful way to live in the brief time we have been granted.

People show their true colors by what they say and do and by their complicity in silence. We and those who come after us will not forget what was said and not said, done and not done in this, the first livestreamed and meticulously documented genocide in human history. I say this not as a threat but as a solemn promise to the victims of this still unfolding early 21st century human catastrophe. Those who are actively involved in this genocide and regional state terrorism have more to fear aside from whatever their consciences may throw up. The official and unofficial days of reckoning can’t come soon enough.

Solutions for Sadness

In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Merlin proposes a solution for being sad: “The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

This is what I have done, to add to my admittedly scant knowledge about the origins of the founding of the state of Israel, including what Nurit Peled-Elhanan referred to as the “pure colonialist, nationalist and chauvinistic racism” that pervades Israeli society in her speech at the Closing Session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in 2013.

Another solution to sadness is to tap into a community of kindred spirits in international education and beyond. I have found my community, my people, online. There is no more important and urgent use of this space right now. Members of my online tribe include anti-Zionist Jews, Holocaust survivors, Muslims, and Palestianians in Gaza and the global diaspora, people from all walks of life. They are sources of real-time information and commiseration, and an endless well of inspiration. They give me hope as do those who have been martyred and their fellow human beings struggling to survive in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. As global citizens who believe in truth and justice, fear no one, and act with compassion and passion in the pursuit of common goals, we are legion.

Or create a video slideshow of injured, dying, displaced, and dead Palestinians set to Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings as a way of reflecting on and processing the Israeli-planned and -executed carnage that is occurring in Gaza.

Or create a page on my blog Israel’s Genocide in Gaza – And Other Regional Acts of Israeli State Terrorism that I update regularly.

Finally, there are abundant opportunities for individuals to offer financial support via legitimate international non-governmental organizations that will benefit the people of Gaza.

All I have are my moral compass, my words, and my support. They are small but count for something for I am not alone. I am consoled and encouraged by the realization that millions of others are doing what they can in myriad ways large and small to combat this evil and help the victims now and in the future.

Amina Youssef, a Lebanese Australian lawyer based in Sydney, wrote the following on LinkedIn that applies to all of us but especially those who remain silent:

It’s easy for you to get off social media.

It’s easy for you to unfollow.

It’s easy for you to close your eyes while a genocide occurs in Gaza and our people are killed in Lebanon.

It’s easy for you to say protestors are making you uncomfortable.

You have choices.

They do not.

You have power.

They do not.

What you do today can make an impact on helpless people who cannot do anything at all to help themselves.

Even if nothing comes of it, at least you tried.

What can we as global citzens do to ensure this noble call to action becomes a reality, to honor the memory of the martyred, and assist the survivors? This is one of the burning questions of our time and should be on the mind of everyone with a conscience. We must try “even if nothing comes of it.”

Eye on the Calendar

Arundhati Roy’s conclusion to her PEN Pinter Prize 2024 acceptance speech touched my heart, mind, and soul with its passion and crystal moral clarity. She quoted from Alaa Abd El-Fattah’s book of prison writing You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.

I have rarely read such beautiful words about the meaning of victory and defeat – and the political necessity of honestly looking despair in the eye. I have rarely seen writing in which a citizen separates himself from the state, from the generals and even from the slogans of the Square with such bell-like clarity.

‘The centre is treason because there’s room in it only for the General…The centre is treason and I have never been a traitor. They think they’ve pushed us back into the margins. They don’t realize that we never left it, we just got lost for a brief while. Neither the ballot boxes not the palaces or the ministries or the prisons or even the graves are big enough for our dreams. We never sought the centre because it has no room except for those who abandon the dream. Even the square was not big enough for us, so most of the battles of the revolution happened outside it, and most of the heroes remained outside the frame.’

As the horror we are witnessing in Gaza, and now Lebanon, quickly escalates into a regional war, its real heroes remain outside the frame. But they fight on because they know that one day—

From the river to the sea
Palestine will be Free.
It will.
Keep your eye on your calendar. Not on your clock.
That’s how the people – not the generals – the people fighting for their liberation measure time. 

As a student of history, including settler colonialism, which my country happily co-opted from the homeland of my ancestors and perfected to a tee, I know in my heart that both speak the truth.

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Painting of Jerusalem by David Roberts, 1839, in The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia. CC BY 4.0

At its height, the Ottoman Empire was one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse states in history, subsuming hundreds of discrete language and cultural groups. To control such vast swaths of diverse territory and so many ethnic, cultural, and linguistic communities for roughly 600 years required incredible flexibility and adaptability to local conditions.^[1] But Ottoman power waned dramatically in the decades preceding World War I. The Empire had already given up control of many of its territorial possessions, losing almost half of its land from the middle of the nineteenth century to the eve of the first world war. The Ottomans had suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Russian Empire in 1878, and they lost further ground to nationalist movements and British and French colonial projects. The Ottoman Empire entered World War I having lost its grip over vast swaths of territory in the Balkans, North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, the Caucasus, and eastern Anatolia.

The territorial shape of post-war West Asia was first established through an agreement negotiated in secret by the British and the French, the Sykes-Picot Agreement (ratified in May of 1916), named for Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, the diplomats who represented Britain and France respectively. The agreement remains an important object of study for several reasons, and it represents the characteristic duplicity of the Western imperial powers. To both Britain and France, it was a “foregone conclusion” that the Arab regions that had been under Turkish rule were not prepared to govern themselves, and thus that they should govern these regions either directly as colonies or in some advantageous partnership with local elites. But the British had made a series of promises to Arab leaders who were seeking to establish an Arab nation-state after the Ottoman Empire was defeated. On the strength of Britain’s guarantees, the region erupted in the Great Arab Revolt, which began in June of 1916, during the bloodiest year of World War I. Under the Sykes-Picot agreement,

Britain would get complete control over an area of “Mesopotamia” starting north of Baghdad and extending through Basra all the way down the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula. France would get complete control over an area extending along the Mediterranean coast from Haifa to southern Turkey and inland to a part of Anatolia.

There is clear and direct continuity between the colonial ambitions of Britain and France during this period and the founding of Israel as a European colonial outpost on the Arab Mediterranean. While the Sykes-Picot Agreement made Palestine an area of international administration due to its cultural and religious importance, Britain had always taken a special interest in Palestine as a key strategic location, and the Agreement made special exceptions for British control of the ports at Haifa and Acre. Again emerges British duplicity: the following year, in 1917, Britain’s Foreign Secretary famously issued the Balfour Declaration, a statement of the British government’s official support of “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The French perceived this promise of Palestine, which was supposed to be treated as a neutral international zone, to the Zionist cause as a breach of the Sykes-Picot terms and a brazen attempt to consolidate more permanent control of Palestine. The French were of course correct about British designs for the region, and the Balfour Declaration had laid the foundation for the Mandate for Palestine.

In April of 1920, the Entente powers met in San Remo, Italy to divide control over certain Arab territories, creating mandates for the government of areas that were deemed incapable of governing themselves. The allies agreed at that meeting that the occupying British should take on the Mandate for Palestine, and this condition was later stamped with League of Nations approval. Implementation of the Balfour Declaration was incorporated in the League of Nations mandate itself. It is, at this point, regrettably necessary to underscore the fact that the local populations of Palestine were not consulted on whether they wanted their homeland handed from one empire to another, to then be given away without their input. Under British rule, Palestinian institutions had no real power, just as they have no real power under Israeli rule today. If any nationalist movement had a legitimate claim to Palestine, it was that of the Arab people. The remarkable feature of the story of Palestine during and after World War I is the absence of Arab people themselves from the committees and legal instruments we’ve been discussing. But in the logic of empire, the conspicuous absence of the Palestinian people from the decisions about their lives on their own lands requires no explanation: the Mandate of Palestine was a hard-won spoil of war for the British Empire at a time when access to the Suez Canal and control of trade routes in the area were in the highest order of strategic value. The last thing anyone wanted to do was hear from the locals.

The assumption was so perfectly crystallized in the Sykes-Picot agreement: we will divide your lands amongst ourselves in secret and govern you as we see fit. The early leaders of Zionist thought and action understood this, the colonial nature of Zionism. They had known that if it were to come, the Jewish state would need the help of a major colonial power like Great Britain. As the mere advocacy of the idea that the Jewish people are a nation deserving of self-determination and their own sovereign state, Zionism is perhaps unobjectionable. While the author doesn’t have much use for nations or states, there are good reasons that the Jewish people might want their own country. As a matter of practice, however, Zionism has never been something so innocuous. Theodor Herzl, among the Zionist movement’s founding fathers, spoke of the Jewish state as being “a part of a wall of defense for Europe in Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” All colonial endeavors require this framing: we are bringing them western civilization and a superior culture, and we have a duty to rule; they’ll be happy to have progress and prosperity, and they’ll forget about self-determination. An apartheid system was always at least implicit in these goals, as the end result of a white Jewish colony in Palestine was always fundamentally incompatible with democracy and the recognition of Palestinians’ political rights. But the hope of dignity and autonomy is never lost or forgotten, and Palestinians have long beaten the odds and held on for freedom.

As Jews throughout the world have pointed out for over a century, the proponents of the Zionist worldview do not speak for the world’s Jewish people, who construe their Jewish identity in a diverse range of ways, based factors such as country of origin, ethnic or racial identity, languages spoken, religious movement, social class, and level of educational attainment. Jewish people live in almost every country in the world; they speak hundreds of languages and worship in a variety of different ways. They hold views of Zionism that are positive, negative, and ambivalent. But in no way does the idea of Zionism as we find it practiced by the State of Israel hold sway over the entire global Jewish community. There are dozens of Jewish groups around the world that oppose Zionism. But today even many who had positive views of the Zionist project and the State of Israel have come to see the treatment of Palestinians as an unacceptable violation of the most basic human rights.

Just as the State of Israel could not have been created in Palestine absent imperial sponsorship and protection, its current apartheid regime and ongoing genocidal slaughter of Palestinians could not be maintained without the sustained support of the United States. The United States is without equal as a dealer of death and destruction; it is far and away the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of weapons, accounting for more than 40 percent of global arms sales between 2019 and 2023, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (the Institute’s data was last updated in March of this year). And Israel has received more money from the United States than any other country in the world. A report by the Congressional Research Service, published in March of 2023, indicates that “total U.S. aid to Israel obligated from 1946-2023 is an estimated $260 billion.” Just days ago, Israel announced that it has secured another $8.7 billion in military assistance from the United States, so it can continue its campaign of terror against Palestinians and now the Lebanese.

Germany has long been second to the United States in giveaways to Israel: “in 2023 Germany was the second largest supplier of ‘major conventional arms’ to Israel, responsible for 47% of Israel’s total imports.” German society’s relationship with the memory of its Nazi past is so malformed and filled with contradiction and confusion that the country is making another version of the same hideous mistake. Its deference toward the Israeli regime’s brutal massacre of Palestinians in Gaza is akin to the “just following orders” defense in that it allows the actor to disburden himself of personal responsibility and accountability—he is a mere means, a tool used by someone with the power to make decisions. But as humans, we all have the capacity to think critically and make decisions, and horrors such as those unfolding in Gaza today are the inevitable results of attempts to suppress or outsource this human capacity. In Germany today, as in every other country that provides weapons and other assistance to Israel, there is a large and growing bottom-up movement to halt the transfer of money and arms. Earlier this year, in February, the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights announced, “Any transfer of weapons or ammunition to Israel that would be used in Gaza is likely to violate international humanitarian law and must cease immediately.” The UN experts added: “The need for an arms embargo on Israel is heightened by the International Court of Justice’s ruling on 26 January 2024 that there is a plausible risk of genocide in Gaza and the continuing serious harm to civilians since then.”

By design, few in the West have any real sense of the cruelty and brutality that have been constant features of everyday life for decades for millions of Palestinians. The cultivated hatred of Palestinians, and Arabs more generally, is deep and common in many circles of American culture. Today, even the slightest signal of sympathy for Palestinians is frequently met with scorn and vitriol, and the most benign celebration of Palestinian art or culture is castigated. This is by design, for if Palestinians were seen as fellow human beings, a number of facts would start to glare at us. We would have to ask why it is acceptable for Israel to confine Palestinian bodies, subjecting them to some of the most severe restrictions on movement in the world, even relative to other authoritarian regimes. We would have to ask why Palestinians are politically disenfranchised on their own land. We would have to ask why we simply accept the permanent legal, political, social, and economic inequality of Palestinians. In 2018, the apartheid nature of the regime was made explicit and awarded a central place in the Israeli legal landscape. The Knesset enacted a new Basic Law stating, “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.” The Balfour Declaration had at least paid lip service to “the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” But for the strain of Zionism that became dominant, there could not be a productive collective life for the Palestinian people that did not present an intrinsic challenge to Jewish cultural, religious, political, and social supremacy. It may be that there are versions of Zionism that do not necessarily entail this, but the version that has motivated the state of Israel in policy terms as a historical and empirical matter has been this one. In the logic of empire, Palestinians are uncivilized barbarians—they are terrorists and our permanent enemies. The governments of the United States and Israel need you to see Palestinians as some lesser category of human. Imperialist thinking is thus deeply connected historically with Eurocentrism, and though it remains under-appreciated, Eurocentrism is at the very heart of the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza, as well as in Palestine more generally. As economist Samir Amin explained in his 1998 classic Eurocentrism:

Eurocentrism is a culturalist phenomenon in the sense that it assumes the existence of irreducibly distinct cultural invariants that shape the historical paths of different peoples. Eurocentrism is therefore anti-universalist, since it is not interested in seeking possible general laws of human evolution. But it does present itself as universalist, for it claims that the imitation of the Western models by all peoples is the only solution to challenges of our time. Eurocentrism is a specifically modern phenomenon, the roots of which go back only to the Renaissance, a phenomenon that did not flourish until the nineteenth century. In this sense, it constitutes one dimension of the culture and ideology of the modern capitalist world.

Tensions between the Jewish settlers and the locals goes back to the Ottoman period. But as historian Gudrun Krämer wrote in her 2011 book, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, “This had nothing to do with anti-Jewish or anti-Semitic sentiment, but with politics. The Ottoman authorities perceived the immigrants not primarily as Jews, but rather as Europeans, or more precisely, as Russians, and therefore as members of a hostile power against which the Empire had just fought a war.” This insight continues to be important for understanding the current state of affairs in Palestine: the State of Israel (and its pre-1948 antecedents) is a European colonial project, created by and for Europeans who did not merely relocate and settle on the land, but stole it from Arabs of all religious traditions. Contemporary commentary has tended to vastly overstate the significance of religion to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, which is fundamentally political and economic in character. Religion is a salient aspect of the politics of the region, but it is not religious difference alone but an imposed class hierarchy based on race and religion, that underlies the violence. Jews who were actually from the region—that is, Arab Jews—saw the clear connection between the prejudices and discriminatory treatment both they and Palestine’s Muslims were subjected to. Historically, Arab Jews have “been victims of the same kind of anti-Arab ideology that is wielded against the Palestinians.” To the Jews of European ancestry who make up Israel’s majority and ruling class, Arab Jews are often cast as a racialized other with the rest of the native Arab population. The founders of the State of Israel were seldom shy about sharing their anti-Arab hatreds and prejudices; these were part of the core of their ideology, and they were often explicit in their desire to rid their new home in the Arab world of Arabs. The explicit goal of the Zionist movement, from the time of the determination that Palestine would be the site of the Jewish state, was to manufacture a political system in which Arab Palestinians would either be either nonexistent or relegated to a position of permanent second-class status. “The leaders of the Zionist project to establish a Jewish state in Palestine imagined it as empty of its Arab population, which is the cornerstone of the subsequent ethnic cleansing policy.”^[2]

The displacement of the Palestinian people from Palestine “[took] the form of demographic elimination or demographic riddance,” accomplished through “brute violence” and a program of geographical and cultural erasure that meant the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and systematic attacks of Palestinian cultural and religious sites and practices.^[3] What is ultimately desired by the Zionist movement is a thoroughgoing ethnic transformation in Palestine: it must go from brown majority to white majority, from Muslim majority to Jewish majority, from Arab majority to European majority. All the ideological window dressing in the world can’t change the fact of mass expulsion and ethnic cleansing in Palestine. In November of 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a plan to partition Palestine, creating independent Arab and Jewish States, with a Special International Regime for Jerusalem. Consistent with the trend, Arabs had not been consulted on the plan, and it amounted to a massive transfer of their land, whereby more than 55 percent of Palestine would fall under the Jewish State. This is the start of an enduring pattern in which the interventions of the “international community” consistently lead to Palestinian losses in terms of territory and political sovereignty and self-determination. But by the end of the war in 1949, the Partition Plan was effectively abandoned, with Israel conquering and holding about 78 percent of Palestine. In the years between 1947 and 1949, between 750,000 and 1 million Palestinians were expelled from their homes in terror and bloodshed, with at least 15,000 losing their lives to Israeli mass killings. During this period, in what Israel characterized as a defensive program, hundreds of towns were destroyed and thousands of place names were Hebraized (in Israel, there is a whole government committee for changing the names of places).

Today, of course, there is no corner of Palestine that is not strictly and systematically watched and controlled under the most brutal permanent occupation, the illegality of which is widely recognized among international observers and scholars. For some time, arguably, Americans could not be blamed for not knowing this, as American media outlets have long refused to report on Israel’s manifold violations of international law. Most American supporters of Israel seem to have no understanding of or curiosity about what it might have taken to create a majority white, European, and Jewish state in an area of huge cultural and historical importance in the Southern Levant. What we are being asked to believe is that the people fighting for the bare minimum of humanity on their own land against a nuclear-armed, U.S.-backed power are the terrorists. To this point, the United States and Israel have been able to manage the storyline deftly and successfully, comfortably insulated from serious scrutiny by the corporate press. As Alain Gresh observed earlier this year, Israel lies “[w]ith an added advantage that other states lack: Western officials and media start from the assumption that Israel tells the truth.” But despite the expert narrative control and consent manufacture, the number of people willing to believe the official story is shrinking rapidly—too rapidly for the U.S. and Israel, both now desperately seeking ways to better control what comes across our screens. People around the world are looking at their phones, sick from gruesome images coming out of Gaza. They are beginning to understand that they haven’t been told the truth, and they have questions. Try as they might, the United States and Israel are losing the information war. The global community cannot ignore what is right in front of their eyes.

In May of this year, the University Network for Human Rights, in partnership with Boston University, Cornell University, the University of Pretoria, and Yale University, published the most thorough and comprehensive legal analysis to date of the question of whether Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. The authors of the report “conclude that Israel’s actions in and regarding Gaza since October 7, 2023, violate the Genocide Convention.” The report finds “that Israel has committed genocidal acts of killing, causing serious harm to, and inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people.” The report goes on to point out that Israel killed more children during the first four months of its onslaught in Gaza than had been killed in all global wars over the past four years. The majority of the dead in Gaza have been women and children; indeed, according to recent analysis from Oxfam, “More women and children have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli military over the past year than the equivalent period of any other conflict over the past two decades.”

The University Network for Human Rights report also notes that the massacre in Gaza has been “the deadliest conflict for journalists ever recorded.” Investigations conducted by the Committee to Protect Journalists “showed at least 116 journalists and media workers were among” those killed by Israel’s devastation of Gaza. Aid workers, too, have found themselves in Israel’s crosshairs. In August of this year, on World Humanitarian Day, Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), observed, “At least 289 aid workers including 207 UNRWA team members & 885 health workers lost their lives.” “The war in Gaza broke all existing rules of war,” the UN experts said in their statement. Last month, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied territories, said that Israel risked becoming a pariah in the world due to its “continuous, relentless vilifying assault” on UN personnel and aid workers. She and other UN experts questioned the ongoing integrity and legitimacy of the UN as an institution if Israel’s actions pass unchallenged. Israel kills with impunity—it can even get away with killing American citizens. The United States seems to be willing to unravel its own global order to continue its support of Israel’s genocidal campaign.

As I write, Israel has begun its ground invasion of Lebanon, on the heels of several high-profile assassinations, including that of Hassan Nasrallah, who led Hezbollah for over 30 years. According to reports, Iran has responded by launching missiles into Israel. Many in Washington and Tel Aviv have long wanted a full-blown war with Iran, and it now seems close at hand. If the United States government were helmed by responsible, competent people, they would use its still considerable might to deescalate the region and open a way for peace. There are at least 41,000 people dead in Gaza; that Israel and the United States still don’t think they’ve made their point reveals much about the version of Zionism that emerged victorious.

Notes.

^[1] Gudrun Krämer, A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel (Princeton University Press 2011), 39.

^[2] Adel Manna, Nakba and Survival: The Story of Palestinians Who Remained in Haifa and the Galilee, 1948-1956 (University of California Press 2022), 4.

^[3] Nadim N. Rouhana, “Religious Claims and Nationalism in Zionism: Obscuring Settler Colonialism” in Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadim N. Rouhana, eds., When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press 2021), 60.

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The AIDS quilt in front of the Washington Monument. Photo: National Institute of Health.

A nation that had ignored so many AIDS-related deaths could not ignore Ryan White’s funeral. Held on April 11, 1990, in “the gothic expanse of Second Presbyterian Church” in Meridian Hills, an affluent community just north of downtown Indianapolis, the funeral was a somber yet spectacular affair.¹The youngster from Kokomo, Indiana, had become one of the most visible faces of the HIV/AIDS epidemic after he had contracted HIV through contaminated blood products when he was 13. Ryan White lived far longer than doctors had predicted, and his death became a national tragedy. Some 1,500 mourners attended his funeral, while hundreds more, unable to secure a spot in the sanctuary, were stranded outdoors in the bitter cold and rain. Given Ryan’s celebrity status, various stars and dignitaries were in attendance, as well. First Lady Barbara Bush sat directly behind the White family, and Michael Jackson—one of the most famous people in the world at the time—sat next to Ryan’s mother, Jeanne White.² Los Angeles Raiders defensive end Howie Long, singer Elton John, and talk show host Phil Donahue served as pallbearers.³ CNN carried the 45-minute ceremony live on air, and all three major broadcast networks showed footage of the service that evening. Ryan lay in an open casket at the front of the sanctuary, his body adorned with some of the clothing and accessories he cherished—and through which he channeled his rock-star idols like Bruce Springsteen. His faded jean jacket, worn over a red T-shirt, framed his frail body, while reflective Oakley shades rested on his face.⁴

White’s elaborate funeral service was a far cry from the quiet, poorly attended ceremonies held to honor many other people with AIDS (PWAs). Some AIDS deaths were hardly marked at all. Many funeral home employees simply “refuse[d] to touch” the bodies of those who died of AIDS-related causes.⁵ Given the profound stigma attached to the living and lifeless bodies of PWAs, an AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) affinity group called the Marys—taking a cue from artist and activist David Wojnarowicz—began staging “political funerals” in the early 1990s.⁶ These ceremonies reflected the desperation and abjection of the overwhelming majority of PWAs. While Ryan’s funeral had all the trappings of a formal funeral and was legitimated through powerful institutions (the church, the state, and the news media), the Marys’ political funerals were fugitive, insurgent actions intended to indict these very institutions for exacerbating the AIDS crisis.

Whereas the AIDS-related deaths of thousands of men who have sex with men (MSM) and intravenous drug users had mostly been ignored by the federal government, Ryan White’s high-profile death and funeral enabled the passage of the CARE Act, dedicated in his honor by a congressional subcommittee.⁷ And although the CARE Act helped supply desperately needed federal funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, its focus on “a politically safe symbol” also reinforced the “hierarchy of victimhood” at the heart of the 1980s–1990s HIV/AIDS crisis.⁸ “From its start,” religious studies scholar Anthony Petro writes, “AIDS was … a moral epidemic, complete with a hierarchy of victimhood that placed innocent children above implicitly guilty homosexuals.”⁹ Ryan White’s “innocence,” in other words, required the “guilt” of already stigmatized populations—especially MSM and those who use intravenous drugs.

The distinction was not just purely symbolic. While Ryan’s “innocence” pushed the federal government to act on AIDS, the “guilt” of marginalized groups fueled the urge “to punish sick people for their alleged lack of moral purity,” as one Philadelphia Daily News editorial put it. Specifically, the CARE Act contained punitive HIV criminalization and notification statutes and prohibited federal funding for needle-exchange programs. Further, Senator Jesse Helms’s (R-North Carolina) proposed (and narrowly defeated) Ryan White Amendment (Senate amendment no. 1626) would have criminalized blood donation by current or former intravenous drug users and sex workers.¹⁰ The notions of guilt that loomed over the bill also contributed to its funding issues. Though the CARE Act was signed into law in 1990, its grant program would not be fully funded until 1994. The saga of the Ryan White CARE Act thus reveals the limits of respectability politics and the politics of “innocence” during the 1980s and 1990s HIV/AIDS epidemic—and beyond.

Ryan had always been a sickly child. Shortly after his birth in December 1971, Ryan was diagnosed with severe or “classic” hemophilia, which impedes the efficient clotting of blood. At the age of five, Ryan began to receive Factor VIII injections to facilitate blood clotting and to prevent excessive bleeding. A product of the post–World War II boom in medical research, self-administered Factor VIII treatments offered tremendous hope to people living with hemophilia. But because such treatments pooled blood and plasma from thousands of donors, they posed major risks, as well. Each injection introduced the blood of thousands of people into a user’s body. As a result, by 1983 over 80 percent of those with severe hemophilia who had been treated with concentrate showed “serologic evidence of previous exposure to hepatitis B antigen,” although many “considered the risk of hepatitis to be an acceptable price to pay for the benefits of AHF concentrate.”¹¹ Ryan White himself tested positive for hepatitis B in November 1984. As HIV/AIDS spread in the early 1980s—before the pervasive use of heat treatment to eliminate HIV in the blood supply—Factor VIII represented both a “lifeline” and a potential death sentence for people with hemophilia.¹²

White spent much of 1984 in a state of pain and discomfort, and he wasn’t sure why. Twelve years old at the time, Ryan was “looking forward to turning into a typical obnoxious teenager.” But constant night sweats, diarrhea, lethargy, and stomach cramps put a damper on his transition from childhood to adolescence. After he ran a fever of 104 degrees, his mother, Jeanne, took him to the hospital in Kokomo, where an X-ray revealed that he had pneumonia in both lungs. When antibiotics failed to treat the pneumonia, Ryan was transferred to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. There, he was diagnosed with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a rare opportunistic infection that generally signals the presence of a weakened immune system and a more significant underlying condition. While a reliable HIV test had not yet been developed, Ryan’s hemophilia, his reliance on Factor VIII, and his pneumocystis carinii pneumonia diagnosis all indicated that he was now living with AIDS.

The American public learned of Ryan White in July 1985, when officials representing the Western School Corporation in Russiaville, Indiana, barred the teenager from attending classes at Western Middle School (WMS). The decision to deny entry to Ryan might have remained a relatively minor local controversy had it not come out just as the world learned of actor Rock Hudson’s bout with AIDS. Though Hudson had been diagnosed in 1984, news of his illness only broke in late July 1985. He thus became, as the Indianapolis Star put it, “the first person with international recognition to announce he has the disease.”¹³ Hudson’s fame made his illness noteworthy and shocking, but so too did his status as a heterosexual icon. Indeed, Hudson had long personified normative masculinity on the big screen, especially during Hollywood’s “golden age”—starring alongside Elizabeth Taylor in the epic Giant (1956) and Doris Day in several popular romantic comedies, including Pillow Talk (1959)

News of Hudson’s diagnosis heightened public interest in the AIDS epidemic and stoked fears about the disease’s movement beyond the established “risk groups” (the so-called four Hs: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and Haitians).¹⁴Just days after Ryan White was blocked from attending classes at WMS, the Indianapolis Star ran a front-page article (next to a story about Ryan) highlighting the public’s growing concerns about AIDS. “Now a Household Word,” the headline read, “It’s Invading ‘Straight’ World.”¹⁵ Soon, Russiaville, Kokomo (where Ryan and his family lived), and the small communities surrounding them became the subjects of national and international attention. And because AIDS was “now a household word,” Ryan White almost instantly became a household name, a widely celebrated figure with a small army backing his bid to return to school.

A lengthy courtroom battle ensued, one that dragged on into the new year. Finally, in the spring of 1986, Ryan secured the right to attend classes at WMS, a development that received considerable coverage in the news media and solidified Ryan’s status as not only a national and global celebrity, but also the face of HIV/AIDS awareness.

In the wake of his very public legal victory, Ryan and his family embarked on a nationwide publicity tour of sorts. Ryan flew out to New York City to be interviewed on ABC’s Good Morning America and to attend a benefit for the recently established American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). Ryan served as the guest of honor at the lavish amfAR event, held at the Jacob Javits Center and cohosted by actress Elizabeth Taylor and fashion designer Calvin Klein. At the gala, a tuxedoed Ryan and his mother rubbed shoulders with Yoko Ono and New York’s mayor, Ed Koch, while Andy Warhol snapped photographs of the mother-son duo.¹⁶ By February of the following year (a month before the formation of ACT UP), Indiana’s health commissioner, Woodrow Myers Jr., could confidently assert that Ryan was “the best known AIDS victim in the United States if not the world”—and one who posed “the lowest possible political risk” for elected officials seeking to address the epidemic.¹⁷ Myers’s comments testified to Ryan’s growing popularity and the power of his perceived innocence, both of which would help guarantee the passage of the CARE Act following his death.

Ryan’s death and funeral in April 1990 were media spectacles long foretold. As soon as White entered the national consciousness in mid-1985, his seeming proximity to death shaped his life story. In August 1985, when White learned that he faced “several months of school conferences and hearings” before a federal court would decide whether he could return to school, NBC Nightly News reporter Mary Nissenson noted that “Ryan’s doctors say he has only two years to live, so several months seem like a very long time to him.” White’s frequent health scares—marked by lengthy stays at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis—constantly reminded the public of his vulnerability and, by extension, his innocence. As the nurse for the Western School Corporation indicated in a 2011 oral history interview, “Ryan did not attend school much” because he was sick so often.¹⁸ Though Ryan’s death had seemed imminent throughout his time in the national and international limelight, he lived far longer than anyone had anticipated, a fact that only added to his legend and broad appeal.¹⁹ While visiting Southern California in late March 1990, however, Ryan fell gravely ill for the last time. He and his mother promptly returned to Indiana, and he was subsequently hospitalized at Riley in Indianapolis. He died on April 8, 1990.

Ryan’s highly publicized death and funeral helped create the political space in which the federal government would allocate much-needed HIV/AIDS funding via the Ryan White CARE Act. As Ryan lay dying at Riley Hospital for Children, the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee dedicated the CARE Act in his honor. The committee’s formal report on S. 2240—published several weeks later, after Ryan’s death—proclaimed that “young Ryan White changed the world.” “With dignity, patience and almost unvarying good cheer,” the report read, Ryan “introduced to people across America and across the world a face of AIDS that caring human beings could not turn their back upon.”²⁰ The committee report vividly illustrated the power of White’s perceived innocence and exceptional victimhood. While “caring human beings” could apparently spurn other PWAs, they could not in good conscience ignore Ryan.

To be sure, the CARE Act was quite popular with legislators even before Ryan’s name was attached to the bill. An increasingly visible and militant AIDS movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s had prompted a stronger government response to the epidemic, particularly at the federal level.²¹ Upon its introduction in early March 1990—and before it was named for Ryan—S. 2240 boasted one sponsor and 25 cosponsors. It secured another six cosponsors in early April. But Ryan’s name and image rendered the bill all but unassailable. Calling it the Ryan White CARE Act enabled lawmakers and activists to further “sanitize” HIV/AIDS—and, in so doing, to authorize AIDS funding without incurring the wrath of antigay and antidrug forces. Indeed, attaching Ryan’s name to the Senate bill attracted additional cosponsors, thereby establishing a filibuster-proof majority that would keep the virulently homophobic senator Jesse Helms at bay. By the time the bill passed a (heavily Democratic) Senate in May, 66 Senators had cosponsored it.²²

Yet because Ryan was such a potent and popular symbol, the invocation of his name and image by federal lawmakers proved contentious. Everyone wanted to be on Ryan’s side. For Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and other supporters of the CARE Act—even activists who may have privately opposed the use of “a politically safe symbol”—that meant passing the bill in Ryan’s name.²³ For Jesse Helms and his ilk, that meant “protecting” White and other “innocent victim[s]” from MSM, IV drug users, Hollywood elites, and even certain congresspeople. Through his characteristically cruel and incendiary rhetoric, Helms sought to wrest control of Ryan’s name and image away from Kennedy and other CARE Act proponents. Although in one sense his efforts failed, given the wide margins by which the Ryan White CARE Act passed, they also revealed the limits of respectability politics and the politics of innocence in this context. Specifically, Helms correctly identified White as an exceptional PWA who helped direct public attention away from stigmatized groups disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS—particularly MSM and those who use intravenous drugs. Through this and related observations, Helms reinforced the perceived symbolic and moral distance between White and other, more “typical” PWAs and successfully promoted policies to further police and subjugate those in the latter category.

As the Senate debated the proposed Ryan White CARE Act in mid-May 1990, Helms inveighed against “the Hollywood and media crowd,” the “homosexual segment of the AIDS lobby,” congresspeople, and other groups that he claimed were “exploit[ing]” White.²⁴ For Helms, “the cynical exploitation of Ryan White” served “to mask the political movement behind [this] legislation.” Ryan’s name, Helms told his fellow Senators and those paying attention at home, “will be invoked over and over again” by nefarious forces seeking to pass the CARE Act. “The homosexual lobby of America knew the Ryan White story was too good to pass up,” charged Helms. “Therefore, his struggle and his death could be used to frighten the American public into believing that AIDS is waiting to happen to everyone, even if they do not engage in illegal and/or immoral activity.” Although “little Ryan White was not an IV drug user [or] a promiscuous homosexual,” Helms explained, he “was portrayed as a typical victim, not the exception that he was. And the AIDS propaganda machine churned out the demand for special treatment and privileges for the kind of people who caused Ryan White’s death.” According to Helms, AIDS activists and their allies in the press, the entertainment industry, and Congress had tactically concealed “the real tragedy of the death of Ryan White”—that he “would never have contracted AIDS had it not been for the perverted conduct of people who are demanding respectability.”²⁵

Of course, Helms must have known that his cause was futile. An already popular bill, now embellished with the name of perhaps the country’s most celebrated PWA, would easily pass both houses of Congress. Yet although the strategic emphasis on a “politically safe” and “innocent” symbol may have ensured the CARE Act’s passage, it also limited the scope and scale of the legislation.²⁶ The bill, and the rhetoric surrounding it, did not address the structural causes of the AIDS epidemic—homophobia, racism, the unequal for-profit healthcare and pharmaceutical industries—nor did it fully acknowledge the ways in which the crisis disproportionately affected subjugated groups, including people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and those who use intravenous drugs.

Rather, the CARE Act’s focus on sympathetic “victims” such as Ryan fortified prevailing antigay, antidrug, and racial stigmas, ultimately preserving the criminalization and abandonment of PWAs spotlighted by the Marys’ insurgent funerals. On a material level, the CARE Act’s implicit hierarchy of victimhood contributed to the act’s funding issues and enabled the adoption (or near-adoption) of punitive amendments during the CARE Act’s 1990 passage and 1995–96 reauthorization fight. While Senator Helms’s proposed ban on funding for needle-exchange programs and bleach (Senate amendment no. 1624) did not pass in 1990, Senator Kennedy’s related amendment prohibiting federal funds for only the former (Senate amendment no. 1625) did.²⁷ (Kennedy’s amendment actually reinforced an existing federal ban on needle- and syringe-exchange programs, which had been introduced by Helms in 1988.)²⁸ Similar antidrug and antigay exclusions would find their way into the CARE Act reauthorization bill in the mid-1990s.

Efforts to criminalize behaviors that might lead to HIV transmission traced back to the mid-1980s, but the Ryan White CARE Act expanded and formalized such efforts. As Dini Harsono, Carol L. Galletly, Elaine O’Keefe, and Zita Lazzarini explain, the CARE Act represented “an important milestone in the development of US HIV exposure laws.” In order to receive federal funds under the Ryan White CARE Act, states were required to establish and maintain mechanisms through which “to prosecute HIV-infected individuals who knowingly exposed others to HIV.”²⁹ Earlier state and local efforts to criminalize the potential transmission of HIV hinged upon notions of sex-crazed “HIV monsters” indiscriminately infecting “innocents.”³⁰ In the ’80s, sociologist Trevor Hoppe writes, many law enforcement officials and policymakers identified sex workers as vectors of disease who threatened the “general population,” a category that implicitly excluded gay men and other historically subjugated groups. As these actors saw it, “prostitutes were not just killing their clients[;] they were endangering the lives of innocent women and children.”³¹ The Ryan White CARE Act, and the criminalization statute tucked within it, intensified and legitimated these sorts of claims—juxtaposing “innocent” PWAs such as Ryan with the less “respectable” intravenous drug users, sex workers, and gay men who were ostensibly driving the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As Hoppe notes, “the logic of criminalizing HIV has been propelled at least in part by homophobia,” and the CARE Act reflected this logic.³²

The Ryan White CARE Act was still a monumental achievement. Inspired by Ryan White’s name, image, life story, and death, the House and Senate passed their respective bills by decisive margins. After an expedited reconciliation process, the CARE Act was signed into law by President Bush on August 18, 1990, despite the administration’s stated opposition to the “narrow disease-specific approach” taken by the architects of the House bill (HR 4785).³³ The final version of the bill authorized $882 million in AIDS funding for fiscal year 1991 and $4.5 billion in federal grants through 1995.³⁴

Yet debates over funding would persist well into the 1990s, and the full effects of the CARE Act’s draconian antidrug and antigay provisions would only become apparent in the coming years.³⁵ While prosecutions and convictions for HIV-related offenses remain relatively rare in the United States, marginalized populations continue to bear the brunt of such criminalization efforts. For instance, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA’s School of Law, Black men make up over half of all HIV-related convictions in Missouri, while Black women are disproportionately affected by HIV criminalization laws targeting sex work.³⁶

In a 1993 interview with Playboy, the playwright, activist, and ACT UP cofounder Larry Kramer expressed his admiration for Ryan White. “The person most Americans associate with AIDS is Ryan White, the Indiana boy who died of AIDS in 1990,” the interviewer at Playboy told Kramer, before asking where Ryan ranked on Kramer’s “list” of AIDS leaders, heroes, and villains. “I think little Ryan White probably did more to change the face of this illness and to move people than anyone,” Kramer replied. “People respond to courage. Ryan was courageous by confronting the issue and saying, ‘In your face, here I am, and here AIDS is. I am the face of AIDS.’”³⁷ But earlier that year, when Kramer appeared on a panel with Ryan’s mother in Hartford, Connecticut, he “said words to the effect that he was sick and tired of hearing about Ryan White,” Jeanne White later recalled.³⁸

These divergent responses to Ryan White’s story reflect the contested meanings of his life and legacy. While Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the 1980s–1990s AIDS epidemic, his story also reinforced artificial and arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent in ways that intensified racist, antigay, and antidrug stigmas. Even after the rise of protease inhibitors and highly active retroviral therapy in the mid-1990s and PrEP and PEP in the 2010s, those enduring stigmas have continued to justify policies that make marginalized groups particularly susceptible to HIV infection. If we wish to honor Ryan White’s remarkable life, we must repurpose his story to dismantle these stigmas and the destructive policies they have spawned.

Excerpted rom The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America by Paul M. Renfro. Copyright © 2024 by Paul M. Renfro. Published by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. 

This article was commissioned by Charlotte E. Rosen

The post “I Am the Face of AIDS”: Ryan White and the Politics of Innocence in the History of HIV/AIDS appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Featured image: The AIDS quilt in front of the Washington Monument via the National Institute of Health.

A nation that had ignored so many AIDS-related deaths could not ignore Ryan White’s funeral. Held on April 11, 1990, in “the gothic expanse of Second Presbyterian Church” in Meridian Hills, an affluent community just north of downtown Indianapolis, the funeral was a somber yet spectacular affair.¹The youngster from Kokomo, Indiana, had become one of the most visible faces of the HIV/AIDS epidemic after he had contracted HIV through contaminated blood products when he was 13. Ryan White lived far longer than doctors had predicted, and his death became a national tragedy. Some 1,500 mourners attended his funeral, while hundreds more, unable to secure a spot in the sanctuary, were stranded outdoors in the bitter cold and rain. Given Ryan’s celebrity status, various stars and dignitaries were in attendance, as well. First Lady Barbara Bush sat directly behind the White family, and Michael Jackson—one of the most famous people in the world at the time—sat next to Ryan’s mother, Jeanne White.² Los Angeles Raiders defensive end Howie Long, singer Elton John, and talk show host Phil Donahue served as pallbearers.³ CNN carried the 45-minute ceremony live on air, and all three major broadcast networks showed footage of the service that evening. Ryan lay in an open casket at the front of the sanctuary, his body adorned with some of the clothing and accessories he cherished—and through which he channeled his rock-star idols like Bruce Springsteen. His faded jean jacket, worn over a red T-shirt, framed his frail body, while reflective Oakley shades rested on his face.⁴

White’s elaborate funeral service was a far cry from the quiet, poorly attended ceremonies held to honor many other people with AIDS (PWAs). Some AIDS deaths were hardly marked at all. Many funeral home employees simply “refuse[d] to touch” the bodies of those who died of AIDS-related causes.⁵ Given the profound stigma attached to the living and lifeless bodies of PWAs, an AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) affinity group called the Marys—taking a cue from artist and activist David Wojnarowicz—began staging “political funerals” in the early 1990s.⁶ These ceremonies reflected the desperation and abjection of the overwhelming majority of PWAs. While Ryan’s funeral had all the trappings of a formal funeral and was legitimated through powerful institutions (the church, the state, and the news media), the Marys’ political funerals were fugitive, insurgent actions intended to indict these very institutions for exacerbating the AIDS crisis.

Whereas the AIDS-related deaths of thousands of men who have sex with men (MSM) and intravenous drug users had mostly been ignored by the federal government, Ryan White’s high-profile death and funeral enabled the passage of the CARE Act, dedicated in his honor by a congressional subcommittee.⁷ And although the CARE Act helped supply desperately needed federal funding for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, its focus on “a politically safe symbol” also reinforced the “hierarchy of victimhood” at the heart of the 1980s–1990s HIV/AIDS crisis.⁸ “From its start,” religious studies scholar Anthony Petro writes, “AIDS was … a moral epidemic, complete with a hierarchy of victimhood that placed innocent children above implicitly guilty homosexuals.”⁹ Ryan White’s “innocence,” in other words, required the “guilt” of already stigmatized populations—especially MSM and those who use intravenous drugs.

The distinction was not just purely symbolic. While Ryan’s “innocence” pushed the federal government to act on AIDS, the “guilt” of marginalized groups fueled the urge “to punish sick people for their alleged lack of moral purity,” as one Philadelphia Daily News editorial put it. Specifically, the CARE Act contained punitive HIV criminalization and notification statutes and prohibited federal funding for needle-exchange programs. Further, Senator Jesse Helms’s (R-North Carolina) proposed (and narrowly defeated) Ryan White Amendment (Senate amendment no. 1626) would have criminalized blood donation by current or former intravenous drug users and sex workers.¹⁰ The notions of guilt that loomed over the bill also contributed to its funding issues. Though the CARE Act was signed into law in 1990, its grant program would not be fully funded until 1994. The saga of the Ryan White CARE Act thus reveals the limits of respectability politics and the politics of “innocence” during the 1980s and 1990s HIV/AIDS epidemic—and beyond.

Ryan had always been a sickly child. Shortly after his birth in December 1971, Ryan was diagnosed with severe or “classic” hemophilia, which impedes the efficient clotting of blood. At the age of five, Ryan began to receive Factor VIII injections to facilitate blood clotting and to prevent excessive bleeding. A product of the post–World War II boom in medical research, self-administered Factor VIII treatments offered tremendous hope to people living with hemophilia. But because such treatments pooled blood and plasma from thousands of donors, they posed major risks, as well. Each injection introduced the blood of thousands of people into a user’s body. As a result, by 1983 over 80 percent of those with severe hemophilia who had been treated with concentrate showed “serologic evidence of previous exposure to hepatitis B antigen,” although many “considered the risk of hepatitis to be an acceptable price to pay for the benefits of AHF concentrate.”¹¹ Ryan White himself tested positive for hepatitis B in November 1984. As HIV/AIDS spread in the early 1980s—before the pervasive use of heat treatment to eliminate HIV in the blood supply—Factor VIII represented both a “lifeline” and a potential death sentence for people with hemophilia.¹²

White spent much of 1984 in a state of pain and discomfort, and he wasn’t sure why. Twelve years old at the time, Ryan was “looking forward to turning into a typical obnoxious teenager.” But constant night sweats, diarrhea, lethargy, and stomach cramps put a damper on his transition from childhood to adolescence. After he ran a fever of 104 degrees, his mother, Jeanne, took him to the hospital in Kokomo, where an X-ray revealed that he had pneumonia in both lungs. When antibiotics failed to treat the pneumonia, Ryan was transferred to Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. There, he was diagnosed with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, a rare opportunistic infection that generally signals the presence of a weakened immune system and a more significant underlying condition. While a reliable HIV test had not yet been developed, Ryan’s hemophilia, his reliance on Factor VIII, and his pneumocystis carinii pneumonia diagnosis all indicated that he was now living with AIDS.

The American public learned of Ryan White in July 1985, when officials representing the Western School Corporation in Russiaville, Indiana, barred the teenager from attending classes at Western Middle School (WMS). The decision to deny entry to Ryan might have remained a relatively minor local controversy had it not come out just as the world learned of actor Rock Hudson’s bout with AIDS. Though Hudson had been diagnosed in 1984, news of his illness only broke in late July 1985. He thus became, as the Indianapolis Star put it, “the first person with international recognition to announce he has the disease.”¹³ Hudson’s fame made his illness noteworthy and shocking, but so too did his status as a heterosexual icon. Indeed, Hudson had long personified normative masculinity on the big screen, especially during Hollywood’s “golden age”—starring alongside Elizabeth Taylor in the epic Giant (1956) and Doris Day in several popular romantic comedies, including Pillow Talk (1959).

News of Hudson’s diagnosis heightened public interest in the AIDS epidemic and stoked fears about the disease’s movement beyond the established “risk groups” (the so-called four Hs: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and Haitians).¹⁴Just days after Ryan White was blocked from attending classes at WMS, the Indianapolis Star ran a front-page article (next to a story about Ryan) highlighting the public’s growing concerns about AIDS. “Now a Household Word,” the headline read, “It’s Invading ‘Straight’ World.”¹⁵ Soon, Russiaville, Kokomo (where Ryan and his family lived), and the small communities surrounding them became the subjects of national and international attention. And because AIDS was “now a household word,” Ryan White almost instantly became a household name, a widely celebrated figure with a small army backing his bid to return to school.

A lengthy courtroom battle ensued, one that dragged on into the new year. Finally, in the spring of 1986, Ryan secured the right to attend classes at WMS, a development that received considerable coverage in the news media and solidified Ryan’s status as not only a national and global celebrity, but also the face of HIV/AIDS awareness.

In the wake of his very public legal victory, Ryan and his family embarked on a nationwide publicity tour of sorts. Ryan flew out to New York City to be interviewed on ABC’s Good Morning America and to attend a benefit for the recently established American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR). Ryan served as the guest of honor at the lavish amfAR event, held at the Jacob Javits Center and cohosted by actress Elizabeth Taylor and fashion designer Calvin Klein. At the gala, a tuxedoed Ryan and his mother rubbed shoulders with Yoko Ono and New York’s mayor, Ed Koch, while Andy Warhol snapped photographs of the mother-son duo.¹⁶ By February of the following year (a month before the formation of ACT UP), Indiana’s health commissioner, Woodrow Myers Jr., could confidently assert that Ryan was “the best known AIDS victim in the United States if not the world”—and one who posed “the lowest possible political risk” for elected officials seeking to address the epidemic.¹⁷ Myers’s comments testified to Ryan’s growing popularity and the power of his perceived innocence, both of which would help guarantee the passage of the CARE Act following his death.

Ryan’s death and funeral in April 1990 were media spectacles long foretold. As soon as White entered the national consciousness in mid-1985, his seeming proximity to death shaped his life story. In August 1985, when White learned that he faced “several months of school conferences and hearings” before a federal court would decide whether he could return to school, NBC Nightly News reporter Mary Nissenson noted that “Ryan’s doctors say he has only two years to live, so several months seem like a very long time to him.” White’s frequent health scares—marked by lengthy stays at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis—constantly reminded the public of his vulnerability and, by extension, his innocence. As the nurse for the Western School Corporation indicated in a 2011 oral history interview, “Ryan did not attend school much” because he was sick so often.¹⁸ Though Ryan’s death had seemed imminent throughout his time in the national and international limelight, he lived far longer than anyone had anticipated, a fact that only added to his legend and broad appeal.¹⁹ While visiting Southern California in late March 1990, however, Ryan fell gravely ill for the last time. He and his mother promptly returned to Indiana, and he was subsequently hospitalized at Riley in Indianapolis. He died on April 8, 1990.

Ryan’s highly publicized death and funeral helped create the political space in which the federal government would allocate much-needed HIV/AIDS funding via the Ryan White CARE Act. As Ryan lay dying at Riley Hospital for Children, the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee dedicated the CARE Act in his honor. The committee’s formal report on S. 2240—published several weeks later, after Ryan’s death—proclaimed that “young Ryan White changed the world.” “With dignity, patience and almost unvarying good cheer,” the report read, Ryan “introduced to people across America and across the world a face of AIDS that caring human beings could not turn their back upon.”²⁰ The committee report vividly illustrated the power of White’s perceived innocence and exceptional victimhood. While “caring human beings” could apparently spurn other PWAs, they could not in good conscience ignore Ryan.

To be sure, the CARE Act was quite popular with legislators even before Ryan’s name was attached to the bill. An increasingly visible and militant AIDS movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s had prompted a stronger government response to the epidemic, particularly at the federal level.²¹ Upon its introduction in early March 1990—and before it was named for Ryan—S. 2240 boasted one sponsor and 25 cosponsors. It secured another six cosponsors in early April. But Ryan’s name and image rendered the bill all but unassailable. Calling it the Ryan White CARE Act enabled lawmakers and activists to further “sanitize” HIV/AIDS—and, in so doing, to authorize AIDS funding without incurring the wrath of antigay and antidrug forces. Indeed, attaching Ryan’s name to the Senate bill attracted additional cosponsors, thereby establishing a filibuster-proof majority that would keep the virulently homophobic senator Jesse Helms at bay. By the time the bill passed a (heavily Democratic) Senate in May, 66 Senators had cosponsored it.²²

Yet because Ryan was such a potent and popular symbol, the invocation of his name and image by federal lawmakers proved contentious. Everyone wanted to be on Ryan’s side. For Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts) and other supporters of the CARE Act—even activists who may have privately opposed the use of “a politically safe symbol”—that meant passing the bill in Ryan’s name.²³ For Jesse Helms and his ilk, that meant “protecting” White and other “innocent victim[s]” from MSM, IV drug users, Hollywood elites, and even certain congresspeople. Through his characteristically cruel and incendiary rhetoric, Helms sought to wrest control of Ryan’s name and image away from Kennedy and other CARE Act proponents. Although in one sense his efforts failed, given the wide margins by which the Ryan White CARE Act passed, they also revealed the limits of respectability politics and the politics of innocence in this context. Specifically, Helms correctly identified White as an exceptional PWA who helped direct public attention away from stigmatized groups disproportionately affected by HIV/AIDS—particularly MSM and those who use intravenous drugs. Through this and related observations, Helms reinforced the perceived symbolic and moral distance between White and other, more “typical” PWAs and successfully promoted policies to further police and subjugate those in the latter category.

As the Senate debated the proposed Ryan White CARE Act in mid-May 1990, Helms inveighed against “the Hollywood and media crowd,” the “homosexual segment of the AIDS lobby,” congresspeople, and other groups that he claimed were “exploit[ing]” White.²⁴ For Helms, “the cynical exploitation of Ryan White” served “to mask the political movement behind [this] legislation.” Ryan’s name, Helms told his fellow Senators and those paying attention at home, “will be invoked over and over again” by nefarious forces seeking to pass the CARE Act. “The homosexual lobby of America knew the Ryan White story was too good to pass up,” charged Helms. “Therefore, his struggle and his death could be used to frighten the American public into believing that AIDS is waiting to happen to everyone, even if they do not engage in illegal and/or immoral activity.” Although “little Ryan White was not an IV drug user [or] a promiscuous homosexual,” Helms explained, he “was portrayed as a typical victim, not the exception that he was. And the AIDS propaganda machine churned out the demand for special treatment and privileges for the kind of people who caused Ryan White’s death.” According to Helms, AIDS activists and their allies in the press, the entertainment industry, and Congress had tactically concealed “the real tragedy of the death of Ryan White”—that he “would never have contracted AIDS had it not been for the perverted conduct of people who are demanding respectability.”²⁵

Of course, Helms must have known that his cause was futile. An already popular bill, now embellished with the name of perhaps the country’s most celebrated PWA, would easily pass both houses of Congress. Yet although the strategic emphasis on a “politically safe” and “innocent” symbol may have ensured the CARE Act’s passage, it also limited the scope and scale of the legislation.²⁶ The bill, and the rhetoric surrounding it, did not address the structural causes of the AIDS epidemic—homophobia, racism, the unequal for-profit healthcare and pharmaceutical industries—nor did it fully acknowledge the ways in which the crisis disproportionately affected subjugated groups, including people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and those who use intravenous drugs.

Rather, the CARE Act’s focus on sympathetic “victims” such as Ryan fortified prevailing antigay, antidrug, and racial stigmas, ultimately preserving the criminalization and abandonment of PWAs spotlighted by the Marys’ insurgent funerals. On a material level, the CARE Act’s implicit hierarchy of victimhood contributed to the act’s funding issues and enabled the adoption (or near-adoption) of punitive amendments during the CARE Act’s 1990 passage and 1995–96 reauthorization fight. While Senator Helms’s proposed ban on funding for needle-exchange programs and bleach (Senate amendment no. 1624) did not pass in 1990, Senator Kennedy’s related amendment prohibiting federal funds for only the former (Senate amendment no. 1625) did.²⁷ (Kennedy’s amendment actually reinforced an existing federal ban on needle- and syringe-exchange programs, which had been introduced by Helms in 1988.)²⁸ Similar antidrug and antigay exclusions would find their way into the CARE Act reauthorization bill in the mid-1990s.

Efforts to criminalize behaviors that might lead to HIV transmission traced back to the mid-1980s, but the Ryan White CARE Act expanded and formalized such efforts. As Dini Harsono, Carol L. Galletly, Elaine O’Keefe, and Zita Lazzarini explain, the CARE Act represented “an important milestone in the development of US HIV exposure laws.” In order to receive federal funds under the Ryan White CARE Act, states were required to establish and maintain mechanisms through which “to prosecute HIV-infected individuals who knowingly exposed others to HIV.”²⁹ Earlier state and local efforts to criminalize the potential transmission of HIV hinged upon notions of sex-crazed “HIV monsters” indiscriminately infecting “innocents.”³⁰ In the ’80s, sociologist Trevor Hoppe writes, many law enforcement officials and policymakers identified sex workers as vectors of disease who threatened the “general population,” a category that implicitly excluded gay men and other historically subjugated groups. As these actors saw it, “prostitutes were not just killing their clients[;] they were endangering the lives of innocent women and children.”³¹ The Ryan White CARE Act, and the criminalization statute tucked within it, intensified and legitimated these sorts of claims—juxtaposing “innocent” PWAs such as Ryan with the less “respectable” intravenous drug users, sex workers, and gay men who were ostensibly driving the HIV/AIDS epidemic. As Hoppe notes, “the logic of criminalizing HIV has been propelled at least in part by homophobia,” and the CARE Act reflected this logic.³²

The Ryan White CARE Act was still a monumental achievement. Inspired by Ryan White’s name, image, life story, and death, the House and Senate passed their respective bills by decisive margins. After an expedited reconciliation process, the CARE Act was signed into law by President Bush on August 18, 1990, despite the administration’s stated opposition to the “narrow disease-specific approach” taken by the architects of the House bill (HR 4785).³³ The final version of the bill authorized $882 million in AIDS funding for fiscal year 1991 and $4.5 billion in federal grants through 1995.³⁴

Yet debates over funding would persist well into the 1990s, and the full effects of the CARE Act’s draconian antidrug and antigay provisions would only become apparent in the coming years.³⁵ While prosecutions and convictions for HIV-related offenses remain relatively rare in the United States, marginalized populations continue to bear the brunt of such criminalization efforts. For instance, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA’s School of Law, Black men make up over half of all HIV-related convictions in Missouri, while Black women are disproportionately affected by HIV criminalization laws targeting sex work.³⁶

In a 1993 interview with Playboy, the playwright, activist, and ACT UP cofounder Larry Kramer expressed his admiration for Ryan White. “The person most Americans associate with AIDS is Ryan White, the Indiana boy who died of AIDS in 1990,” the interviewer at Playboy told Kramer, before asking where Ryan ranked on Kramer’s “list” of AIDS leaders, heroes, and villains. “I think little Ryan White probably did more to change the face of this illness and to move people than anyone,” Kramer replied. “People respond to courage. Ryan was courageous by confronting the issue and saying, ‘In your face, here I am, and here AIDS is. I am the face of AIDS.’”³⁷ But earlier that year, when Kramer appeared on a panel with Ryan’s mother in Hartford, Connecticut, he “said words to the effect that he was sick and tired of hearing about Ryan White,” Jeanne White later recalled.³⁸

These divergent responses to Ryan White’s story reflect the contested meanings of his life and legacy. While Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the 1980s–1990s AIDS epidemic, his story also reinforced artificial and arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent in ways that intensified racist, antigay, and antidrug stigmas. Even after the rise of protease inhibitors and highly active retroviral therapy in the mid-1990s and PrEP and PEP in the 2010s, those enduring stigmas have continued to justify policies that make marginalized groups particularly susceptible to HIV infection. If we wish to honor Ryan White’s remarkable life, we must repurpose his story to dismantle these stigmas and the destructive policies they have spawned.

This is excerpted from The Life and Death of Ryan White: AIDS and Inequality in America by Paul M. Renfro. Copyright © 2024 by Paul M. Renfro. Published by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the author. 

The post “I Am the Face of AIDS:” Ryan White and the Politics of Innocence in the History of HIV/AIDS appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

U.S. Indian Industrial School, located in the eastern part of Genoa, Nebraska. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. CC0

I am a direct descendant of family members that were forced as children to attend either a U.S. government-operated or church-run Indian boarding school. They include my mother, all four of my grandparents and the majority of my great-grandparents.

On Oct. 25, 2024, Joe Biden, the first U.S. president to formally apologize for the policy of sending Native American children to Indian boarding schools, called it one of the most “horrific chapters” in U.S. history and “a mark of shame.” But he did not call it a genocide.

Yet, over the past 10 years, many historians and Indigenous scholars have said that what happened at the Indian boarding schools “meets the definition of genocide.”

From the 19th to 20th century, children were physically removed from their homes and separated from their families and communities, often without the consent of their parents. The purpose of these schools was to strip Native American children of their Indigenous names, languages, religions and cultural practices.

The U.S. government operated the boarding schools directly or paid Christian churches to run them. Historians and scholars have written about the history of Indian boarding schools for decades. But, as Biden noted, “most Americans don’t know about this history.”

As an Indigenous scholar who studies Indigenous history and the descendant of Indian boarding school survivors, I know about the “horrific” history of Indian boarding schools from both survivors and scholars who contend they were places of genocide.

Was it genocide?

The United Nations defines “genocide” as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Scholars have researched different cases of genocide of Indigenous peoples in the United States.

Historian Jeffery Ostler, in his 2019 book “Surviving Genocide,” argues that the unlawful annexation of Indigenous lands, the deportation of Indigenous peoples and the numerous deaths of children and adults that occurred as they walked hundreds of miles from their homelands in the 19th century constitute genocide.

The mass killings of Indigenous peoples after gold was found in the 19th century in what is now California also constitutes genocide, writes historian Benjamin Madley in his 2017 book “An American Genocide.” At the time, a large migration of new settlers to California to mine gold brought with it the killing and displacement of Indigenous peoples.

Other scholars have focused on the forced assimilation of children at Indian boarding schools. Sociologist Andrew Woolford argues that scholars need to start calling what happened at Indian boarding schools in the 19th and 20th century “genocide” because of the “sheer destructiveness of these institutions.”

Woolford, a former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, explains in his 2015 book “This Benevolent Experiment” that the goal of Indian boarding schools was the “forcible transformation of multiple Indigenous peoples so that they would no longer exist as an obstacle (real or perceived) to settler colonial domination on the continent.”

Indigenous writers have explained how this transformation at Indian boarding schools occurred. “Federal agents beat Native children in such schools for speaking Native languages, held them in unsanitary conditions, and forced them into manual and dangerous forms of labor,” writes Indigenous law professor Maggie Blackhawk.

What my grandmother witnessed

Secretary of the Interior Debra Anne Haaland has stated that every Native American family has been impacted by the “trauma and terror” of Indian boarding schools. And my family is no different.

One of the more horrific stories that my maternal grandmother shared with her grandchildren was that she witnessed the death of another student. They were both under the age of 10. The student died of poisoning after lye soap was put in her mouth as a punishment for speaking her Indigenous language.

We know that similar punishments happened and children died at Indian boarding schools. The Department of Interior reported in 2024 that 973 children died at Indian boarding schools.

Tribes are increasingly seeking the return of the remains of children who died and are buried at Indian boarding schools.

Lasting legacy

The U.S. government is beginning to encourage survivors to tell their stories of their Indian boarding school experiences. The Department of the Interior is in the process of recording and documenting their stories on digital video, and they will be placed in a government repository.

At 84 years old, my mother is the only living Indian boarding school survivor in our family. She shared her story with the Department of the Interior this past summer, as did dozens of other survivors.

Haaland stated these “first person narratives” can be used in the future to learn about the history of Indian boarding schools, and to “ensure that no one will ever forget.”

“For too long, this nation sought to silence the voices of generations of Native children,” Biden added at the apology ceremony, “but now your voices are being heard.”

As a descendant of Indian boarding school survivors, I appreciate President Biden’s apology and his effort to break the silence. But, I am also convinced that what my mother, grandmother and other survivors experienced was genocide.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

UBS, the giant Swiss private bank, has been tracking newcomers to the ranks of the world’s billionaire class for going on a decade now. The latest annual UBS count of the world’s new billionaires, released last November, announced a bit of history. For the first time ever, UBS noted, more people are now becoming billionaires via inheritance than through their own “entrepreneurship.”
This UBS revelation didn’t attract much public attention. But you can bet that plenty of billionaires noticed. The legitimacy of billionaire fortunes has always rested on the entrepreneurial myth our super rich invoke at every opportunity. Our brilliance, that myth goes, made us our billions. How dare any government make any move to tax away any significant chunk of our “self-made” riches!

The Biden administration has so dared, most notably by proposing a “billionaire’s tax,” a levy that would have the holders of fortunes worth over $100 million paying taxes annually on the growth in the value of their financial assets, the bedrock of billionaire wealth.

For the billionaire venture capitalist — and one-time Democrat — Marc Andreessen, that Biden tax proposal would be “the final straw.” Andreessen has since then joined the pro-Trump ranks.

But more than taxes have been driving high-tech movers and shakers to Trump. America’s tech-related fortunes all “grew to their gargantuan proportions in a remarkably permissive political environment,” notes John Naughton, a wealth analyst at the UK’s Open University. But activist regulators like Lina Kahn at the Biden administration’s Federal Trade Commission have of late been canceling the blank checks Big Tech has so enjoyed cashing.

This new Biden-era federal refusal to automatically do Big Tech’s bidding has energized billionaires once content to pay relatively little attention to politics. Elon Musk has come to symbolize that new energy — and stands to gain the most from it. Trump has already promised to name Musk the head of a new “government efficiency commission” he plans to create once back in the White House.

That perch could easily give Musk the leverage he needs to swat away federal probes into his operations already underway in agencies ranging from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Photograph Source: Israel Defense Forces – CC BY-SA 2.0

The fact that we are still having to contend with the immediacy and toxicity of settler colonialism in this, the year 2024 is nothing short of astounding. It’s probably amazing that we are still even here with philosophy such as this strangling our world. Almost every strain of entitlement and the brutal negating of the rights of others comes down from this short-sighted and ultimately extinction-level mindset.

Ownership entitlement barrels into neighboring bodies and lands. The literal tanks that crush bodies move forward. It is as if the world couldn’t understand the figurative so the gods decided on a visual you couldn’t deny. Tanks running over bodies. Yet, the people still say (in the manner of abusers everywhere)……well, it’s a shame they made those soldiers do that. Beware, however, of the risks involved with such behaviors– you might get PTSD and not want to eat meat if you engage in running over other humans with your tank. I usually leave bits like that unexplained as I give the reader credit for knowing of current events, but this I feel I have to elaborate on….the ever-disgusting CNN did a story looking into Israeli soldier PTSD after “seeing” bodies run over by tanks. The passive voice use was incredible and it seemed to be taken as gospel that these bodies forced the soldiers to do these acts. It was almost as if a piece was created to make you feel sorry for the executioners at gas chambers. Many of you may know that there was a similar trauma that was reported on in regard to German soldier morale during WW2. Those perpetrating atrocities like the mass shootings of Jewish people and dumping bodies in pits were committing suicide and exhibiting what we, of course, now call PTSD. This seems to have been the impetus for more mass industrialized killing in the form of the gas chambers—to spare the boys the more evident dirty work. This is a chilling fact as we see history repeating itself—we certainly don’t need to see the IDF get more industrialized with their murders (is that even possible, though?).

The notion that the murder itself is the rot never seems to be a consideration when regimes go full fascist. When your soul is gone, how do you get it back? If you’re one of these entities, I suppose you try to hide the death from your own, which is, of course, being done with the systematic slaughter of journalists in the area. With this method, your soul is irretrievably gone, but you can pretend it still exists.

In this current horror, we have the continued dehumanization of Palestinians—even infants are swallowed up as causative agents of their own doom. Americans reacted with rightful disgust and revulsion at events like 9-11 or the Oklahoma City bombing, conveniently ignoring that the Israeli military is parroting the very same types of legitimacy for targets such as these. If your perceived enemy is hiding in a place or occupies it (or you just make up a tale that they are hiding there), go ahead—the thinking goes, kill civilians to get to them. Those nutcases who did Oklahoma City were upset about what they perceived as the federal government killing civilians with issues like Ruby Ridge, and in their addled minds they thought it was fine to attack a government installation that just so happened to have a daycare center in it. When you let loose the notion that it’s okay to kill innocents because of the “reasons” you have concocted, then any type of sickness and murder becomes just fine with that mentality. The thing is, we as Americans are paying for this in the case of the Palestinian genocide At least none of us funded McVeigh and Nichols.

Americans would never stand for their hospitals being bombed, their doctors and nurses being murdered and removed from patient care because a pretend underground Doctor Evil lair is said to be under these places. Comically, it’s even being discussed that a bunch of gold is under a hospital in Lebanon, so I guess that means it needs bombing? It’s insanity.

This mirrors the United States settler colonialism mindset that decided to exterminate the bison. You see, that animal made a life with quite a lot of free time and abundance available to the tribes who lived in the same area. As most of you know, at least Americans reading this, by removing the bison, you took the means to live with dignity away from the tribes and made eradication and relocation more easily reached. It’s what they are doing when they stop aid shipments to Gaza when they bomb hospitals when the orthodox settlers burn down ages-old olive trees. Of course, this is nothing but genocide and taking ancient cultures and making their continuation impossible. The very behaviors we were horrified at by ISIS in terms of destroying cultural landmarks is going on as we speak. Then you can claim the people were savages anyway–look they don’t even have any impressive buildings or ways to sustain themselves. If that very predictable, essentially prison break/riot raid last October hadn’t happened, it would have to have been invented to achieve this sort of expansionist wet dream. Individuals like Jared Kushner and his oceanfront development plans need space to grow, like an infection in a Petri dish culture.

Many will say this is all quite terrible, but it is the way of things. Societies move in this direction and the “strong” overtake the “weak”. To that, I say, when you have a healthy individual, one able to thrive in the community and assist others—if that person becomes ill with a bacterial agent that leads to their eventual demise, would you call that biological agent the strong, overtaking the weak? No, you would rightly view it as a parasitic invader that disrupted the healthy equilibrium of that individual. This is what we have going on with settler colonialism. The mindset is toxic and like a germ that runs out of biological agents to feed on, it will ultimately die as well. There’s no eventual success or inevitability about it. It’s all malady and decay.

The notion that we can own each other or steal the ability to live and thrive from others is, of course, a civilizational sickness. Going full on epidemiological, it’s difficult to get a society healthy again when a toxic agent is let loose. In this case, we’ve been dealing with an ongoing contagion of mental derangement in the form of settler colonialism for such a long time. But to say this is the only way to live is to disregard the vastly longer time frames that humans lived in smaller collective groups and if the behavior was similar in those small groups we would have died out long ago. No, this is a creeping illness spread by the need to control and to steal. There is nothing inherently human about it; it’s simply the most sociopathic of us has been able to take over the mechanisms of power and have brainwashed the masses that this is simply how things work. Ted Bundy as Emperor. There are other ways to live; this is a rich and beautiful planet willing to allow us abundance and life, but one thing it isn’t open to is billionaires, wanton murder, and short-term thinking. That’s gonna get us all killed. The only pragmatic mindset is to realize the status quo is not tenable.

Truly, to accept that this is simply the way of the human is to sign off on our demise and I’m not quite ready to do that. I Have people that I love and I want better for them and I want better for the people across the world I don’t even know. With every plague, there are individuals for whatever reason that are immune to the agent. Outliers, if you will. I think those who fully understand the toxicity of the current system are those outliers, and it will fall upon us to continue to expose the rot and place it in sunshine and clarity.

Because deep down we all know we are living in sickness–of the soul, of the system, and the only way out is a disavowal of it all. Our empathy and true pragmatism needs to spread in just as aggressive a manner as the toxic settler colonialists spread death, contagion, and despair.

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Photograph Source: Haxorjoe – CC BY-SA 3.0

The two leading foreign policy columnists for the New York Times are Thomas L. Friedman and Bret Stephens, whose opeds are frequently apologies for Israeli policy.  In the past week, both used the occasion of the death of Yahya Sinwar to make the futile case for “Build[ing] Peace from Sinwar’s Death” and marking Sinwar’s death as an “opportunity” for the dawn of hope,” respectively.  Once upon a time, Friedman was an excellent correspondent in the Middle East, based in both Beirut and Jerusalem, and the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem, which was an intelligent and thoughtful account of the region.  Stephens has long been a right-wing apologist for Israel, once having served as the editor of the Jerusalem Post.

Both journalists argue that it is up to the Palestinians to take the lead in building a more politically moderate Middle East and to create conditions for the start of real diplomacy.  Neither Friedman nor Stephens acknowledges the difficult task of getting access to a new Hamas leadership or the even more difficult task of getting a notoriously right-wing Israeli government to compromise on any aspect of an Arab-Israeli peace plan.  Stephens risibly refers to the possibility of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “living up to his Churchillian self-image,” (whatever that could possibly mean).

Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times, October 2024:

“A reformed Palestinian Authority, with massive Arab and international funds, would attempt to restore its credibility in Gaza, and the credibility of its core Fatah organization in Palestinian politics—and sideline the remnants of Hamas.”

I would argue that the general consensus is that the Palestinian Authority is hopelessly corrupt to the core (helped to that condition by Israel), and there is no support for its president, Mahmoud Abbas.

“…the participation of a reformed West Bank Palestinian Authority in an international             peacekeeping force would take over Gaza in the place of the Sinwar-led Hamas.”

The notion that Israel will ever accept a two-state solution, particularly after the horrific nightmare that took place on October 7, 2024, and its demolition of both Hamas and Hezbollah, is particularly far-fetched.

“The death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar…creates the possibility for the biggest step  toward a two-state solution between Israelis and Palestinians since Oslo [1993], as well as normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia—which means pretty much the entire Muslim world.”

Netanyahu has never believed in the creation of a two-state solution, and this has been true for the past 30 years ever since the Oslo Accords endorsed such a solution thirty years ago.

Bret Stephens in the New York Times, October 2024:

“But the opportunity in Sinwar’s death and Hamas’s military evisceration is that it begins             to open a space for young  Gazans …to openly and assertively reject Hamas’s brand of             maximalist fanatical, Islamist policies.”

Stephens doesn’t name any specific Arab leader capable of creating the “conditions for another attempt by Israel and the Palestinians to negotiate a different future in both Gaza and the West Bank.  To do so, the Israelis would have to withdraw settlements from the West Bank and foreswear future fortifications in Gaza.  Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant are talking about the exact opposite—adding to the settlement projects in the West Bank and returning settlements to Gaza.  As for the so-called young Gazans in northern Gaza, they are simply waiting to die, according to Philippe Lazzarini, the head of the main UN aid agency for Palestinians.

“Creating well-supplied humanitarian safe zones (perhaps administered by NATO security forces) for Gazan women, children, the elderly and men who have passed a security screening can further safeguard civilians and separate them from potential combatants.”

There is no reason to believe that Israel would ever accept “NATO security forces” in Gaza.

“Finally, an Arab mandate for Palestine…could provide a long-term answer for all sides: a credible Arab-led security force in Gaza; European-led economic reconstruction; a  long-term path toward a politically moderate, economically prosperous Palestinian state; and closer ties between Israel ad friendly Arab states.”

Similarly, there is even less of a possibility that Israel would accept an “Arab-led security force in Gaza.”  Friedman and Stephens surely know this.

Neither Friedman nor Stephens cites the criminality and inhumanity of Israel’s bombing campaign, which includes the murderous ethnic cleansing being conducted in northern Gaza, a region that Israel previously claimed was devoid of a Hamas presence.  According to Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, the smell of death is everywhere in northern Gaza, where Israel denies entry to the missions needed to clear the bodies or provide humanitarian assistance.

These Israeli actions are the major obstacles to getting a cease-fire in Gaza and Lebanon, and ensure that the measures cited by Friedman and Stephens cannot be employed. Israel’s continuing attacks on aid workers in Gaza, its continuing refusal to allow aid into Gaza, its continuing bombardment of schools and hospitals belie any intention to reach an agreement with Palestinians.  Nevertheless, Secretary of State Antony Blinken maintains that “The fundamental questions is: Is Hamas serious?,” regarding the possibility of cease-fire talks.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu does everything possible to embarrass U.S. envoys trying to arrange a cease-fire in the region.  Friedman and Stephens believe that the Biden team has an important role to play, but Netanyahu goes out of his way to embarrass the United States on its diplomatic missions.  The latest Israeli effort was to intensify the bombing campaign in Lebanon as Secretary of State Blinken was completing his 11th mission to the region to arrange a cease-fire.  And to make matters worse, the bombing campaign targeted the historic coastal city of Tyre, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984. Thus far, Israel is not prepared to take any steps to advance the cause of peace, and the Palestinians and the Arab states are powerless to do anything about this.

Plus ca change, plus ce le meme chose.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In early October 2024, Professor Joseph Massad of Columbia University gave an interview to the online news site Electronic Intifada. In it he explained that there is a “huge gap” between the academic (evidence-based) understanding of aspects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (such as the Jewish supremacist nature of Israeli society and its resulting apartheid policies) and the mainstream media assumptions about (a “democratic” and “progressive”) Israel. The latter define the popular and official reporting about that country and its Zionist ideology. 

Massad’s observation describes a problem that distorts more than just views of Israel. The United States has a popular and official perception, again promoted by mainstream media, of itself and the world encapsulated by catch words such as freedom, capitalism, progress, individualism, morality etc. Other countries develop their own fanciful self-images. However, in the case of the U.S. and Israel, the two images have merged in the storyline delivered to U.S. citizens by the mass media for at least the last hundred years.*

So strong is this merger that, in the case of President Joe Biden and his government, this shared identity necessitates an unquestioning support of Israel’s “right of self-defense” even when “defense” covers up offense and offense amounts to the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of the Palestinians. The end product of this remarkable act of collective self-deception is the U.S. government’s complicity in an ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza enclave, and U.S. domestic approval of the suppression of pro-Palestine protests—in violation of America’s own standards of free speech.

Israel’s Media-Shaped World

There is nonetheless a growing, but still small, segment of U.S. citizens willing to look beyond the mainstream media. For those who do so, the discrepancy between popular perceptions and evidentiary reality is relatively easy to spot. This is because there are alternative sources of information on the peripheries (not all of it reliable, of course) and, combined with a modicum of critical thinking skills, one can learn to judge the evidence. 

This is much harder for Israeli Jews. In the Zionist state not only have the national media, with only rare exceptions, been co-opted to promote a popular mythology but all the schools, colleges and universities as well. Most information related to the conflict with the Palestinians is censored and the resulting closed information environment has been getting more and more restrictive. Indeed, over the past twenty years (picking up a lot of steam since October 2023), views opposing official ones are considered seditious. And this in turn has paved the way for today’s popular Zionist approval of barbarism. Here is how the Israeli journalist Gideon Levy (one of the last critical media voices in the country) describes the present Israeli state of mind:

“Over the past year, Israel has united around several assumptions: firstly, that the massacre of 7 October had no context whatever, occurring solely because of the innate bloodthirstiness of Palestinians in Gaza. Secondly, all Palestinians bear the burden of guilt for Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians. Thirdly, after this terrible massacre, Israel is allowed to do anything. No one anywhere has the right to try to stop it. [For instance] wreak destruction indiscriminately across the [Gaza] territory; and kill more than 40,000 people, including many women and children. Barbarism has become legitimized in both Israeli discourse and the army’s behavior. Humanity was removed from the public conversation.”

Facts supporting Levy’s judgments are readily available in English on worldwide web sites such as Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, among others. But these are not mainstream broadcasters and so the majority of Americans, and almost no Israeli Jews, ever see full and accurate reports on what is really going on in the Occupied Territories, south Lebanon and other regional areas subject to Israeli attack. Ignorance is not bliss in this regard, it is the equivalent of living a lie.

From an Evidentiary Point of View 

Let’s take a look at an example of how this internal propaganda creates a delusional state of mind first in Israel and then the U.S. In mid-November 2023, the UK’s Sky News posted an interview with a 29 year old Israeli pilot who flies F-15 jets against Gaza targets. The pilot, who comes across as a personable fellow, told the interviewer that “Every civilian casualty is tragic whether it is in Gaza or in Israel.” However, he added that “the Israeli air force aborts attacks if civilians are identified on the ground.” The pilot insists that “every operation that is undertaken, both in the air and on ground, is 1. Hamas related and 2. Cleared in order to avoid civilian casualties.” Under the circumstances this pilot follows every order with a clear conscience. And, why wouldn’t he? He lives in a world where he is part of the “most moral army in the world,” where “all military operations are legitimate and proportionate and all civilian casualties are unintended.”

There is little doubt that the pilot believes what he is saying. Indeed, he sounds much less callous than the Israelis described by Gideon Levy. Of course, pilots fly fast and high enough to never clearly see the slaughter they cause. For the Israeli infantry things are different. On the ground, the demoralizing force of continuous combat will likely lead to an increasing morale problem. To date this trend has been largely countered by the fact that these soldiers have been raised and educated in a media-shaped world (only now clashing with an evidentiary one). However, cracks are forming and there are reports of refusals to return, over and again, to the multiplying number of Israeli front lines.

Seen through the window of the real evidentiary world, the pilot and his fellow citizen soldiers are now replicating the behavior of the past oppressors of the Jews. In doing so they are helping to destroy international law and the standards of human rights. In fact, they are all doing their part in a nationwide display of barbarism.

Let us take another look through the window into the evidentiary world. This time we will compare reality to the performance of Mathew Miller, who has served as spokesperson for the United States Department of State since 2023. His job is to explain U.S. actions in a rationalizing way and his speciality is half-truths. He has a harder job than the pilot because many of those he is speaking to, primarily the Washington press corp, have access to information (sometimes first hand information) that contradicts the worldview Miller promotes. However the reporters can’t do much about it except to tut-tut and roll their eyes. Most of their editors are under enormous cultural and political pressure to stay the course supporting the pro-Israeli line — and countervailing  evidence be damned.

Here is an example of the kind of misleading half-truths that Miller and his bosses spin. On 19 September 2024, Miller was asked to respond to criticism that “the US calling for calm [in Gaza] while continuing to arm Israel was not a successful strategy for reducing tensions in the Middle East.” The contradiction presented was an obvious one, so how did Miller finesse it? He replied, “We are mandated – we are required by statute to guarantee that … Israel has a qualitative military edge over rivals in the region. It’s not a discretionary question.” What Miller leaves out here is that, by law, this mandate is conditional. There are at least three U.S. laws that make it so: 

+ The Leahy Law, which prohibits the U.S. Government from using funds for assistance to foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating them in the commission of gross violations of human rights.

+ The Genocide Convention Implementation Act, provides for criminal penalties for individuals who commit or incite others to commit genocide.

+ The Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids the provision of assistance to a government which “engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” This Act also bars military assistance to states impeding U.S. humanitarian aid. 

In September, 2024, according to UN sources, 90% of all humanitarian aid for the Palestinians, including American aid, was delayed or denied by the Israelis. Israel’s violation of all of these U.S. laws has been testified to by every credible human rights organization on the planet. The Biden administration and Congress have ignored the evidence and the humanitarian laws.

Ironically, this overall situation has generated anti-Zionist sentiment worldwide that the Israel labels antisemitism, which they then use to garner support for their barbarism.

Another Example of Our Media-Shaped World

Though U.S. attitudes toward the present situation in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, specifically the genocide in Gaza, are the most notable examples of Americans living in a mostly media-shaped world, it is not the only ongoing case. The devastating war in Ukraine has also been distorted—again by not presenting a full story. 

The full story about the Russian invasion of Ukraine would have informed the public that, against the advice of American diplomats expert in relations with Russia, U.S. politicians pushed the eastward expansion of NATO after the December 1991collapse of the Soviet Union. At the time it was easy to do so because the new Russian Republic was in political and economic disarray. Today, the disarray has passed and the Russians have repeatedly expressed the fact that they feel threatened by “an encroaching NATO.” By the way, they did try to negotiate the issue as Ukraine turned toward the West and sought to join both the European Union and NATO. Western rejection of Russia’s efforts to negotiate helped  triggered the Russian invasion.

Conclusion

Mainstream media in the U.S. has been co-opted to the point that, at least on issues of foreign policy, it is little more than a vehicle for government agitprop. As Jonathan Cook puts it, “They are not journalists. They are propagandists for their governments.”

Can most of us tell the difference between biased reporting and what is really going on? If that reporting conforms to a standing cultural worldview, the answer may well be no. The problem becomes worse when most of our friends, neighbors and family members actively treat the media reports as true. 

By now it should be obvious just how dangerous this situation can be. American wars in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Ukraine (and this is just the short list) have garnered popular support through selectively biased reporting and government deception. The willingness of Israeli Jews to turn themselves into an approximation of the past oppressors of their European forefathers, with the full support of numerous American administrations, is likewise based on an incomplete and biased history, reported over and over, to the point that, until recently, it appeared as prima facie true.

One might have hoped that a good liberal education would have inculcated most citizens with the ability to recognize and resist this flaw in media and political chatter, but this was not to be. The job of education has always included turning out loyal citizens and not independent thinkers. And now, even what liberal education does take place, is dying out.

There is no easy answer. We are victims of our cultures, the manipulative power of our media-allied leaders, as well as our genetic roots that urge us in the direction of tribalism. Those who resist all this may be saner for the effort, but they are also seen as “social mistakes.”

*See Lawrence Davidson, America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood, (2001).

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Image by Tim Mossholder.

Every day when breakfast is served, Americans come face to face with the impact of immigrant workers without whom breakfast items would be too expensive for everyday consumption and/or if short on time, the nearest drive-through fast-food establishment, cars lined up for blocks, would charge an arm and a leg for a simple egg, cheese, and sausage sandwich. Without immigrant workers, costs will skyrocket beyond the reach of many Americans. And thankfully, undocumented immigrants are safer for US citizens than their own neighbors.

“A NIJ-funded study examining data from the Texas Department of Public Safety estimated the rate at which undocumented immigrants are arrested for committing crimes. The study found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half (1/2) the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter (1/4th) the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.” (Source: Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate, National Institute of Justice, September 12, 2024)

“Substantial research has assessed the relationship between immigration and crime. Numerous studies show that immigration is not linked to higher levels of crime, but rather the opposite.” (Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave,’ Brennan Center for Justice, May 29, 2024)

In that regard, there’s been some chatter initiated by Texas Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales about 13,000 immigrants convicted of homicide. “A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security said the data sent to Gonzales is being misinterpreted, and goes back four decades, long before the Biden administration.” (Source: More Than 13,000 Immigrants Convicted of Homicide Are Living Outside Immigration Detention in the U.S. ICE Says, NBC News, Sept. 28, 2024)

Immigrant laborers get their hands dirty when nobody else will. They are absolutely essential to the food supply chain, e.g., according to the Migration Policy Institute they are 30% of crop production workers across the country. In some instances, their numbers dictate survival of a basic food industry.

Some food production enterprises will cease to function without immigrant workers, e.g., 64% if Nebraska’s meat processing workers are immigrants. No immigrants, no steaks.

“Foreign workers make up about 68% of the workforce on American hog farms. Immigration is a key part of pork production, and many producers rely on foreign labor because it’s difficult to find a local workforce.” (Source: Immigration in the Swine Industry: Hiring Foreign -Born Labor, Pork Information Gateway). Moreover, immigrants make up 40% of the overall meatpacking workforce. No immigrants, no pork.

California supplies 33% of America’s vegetables and 75% of America’s fruit and nuts via a workforce dominated 65% by immigrants. They are at the core of the food supply chain to America. Additionally, California is America’s 4^th largest beef producer, and the state is America’s dairy leader. Immigrants do 2/3^rd of California’s agricultural work, supplying America’s all-important food chain. Without immigrants, breakfast costs will skyrocket beyond the reach of everyday Americans. Food inflation will eat America alive.

Iowa is one of America’s top pork and corn producers. A recent article in Bleeding Heartland, an independent website about Iowa politics, entitled Anti-Immigration Plans Could Have Unintended Consequences for Iowa AG d/d August 29, 2024: A major cattle producer in Sioux County claims: “If all of Sioux County’s immigrant labor left tomorrow, we’d have a huge problem. … We don’t have the people to replace them.” Moreover, according to the article: “It is not simply a matter of replacing immigrant labor with workers born in the United States. It is difficult finding people who want to do the backbreaking work of mucking out manure, hauling bedding for the animals, and moving thousands of pounds of feed for them every day.” No immigrants, no beef.

Bleeding Heartland’s article followed on the heels of a reversal of mean-spirited, lowbrow legislation: “In a victory for immigrant communities and families, on June 17 a federal district court in Iowa issued a preliminary injunction to block SF 2340, one of the worst, most far-reaching immigration laws ever passed in the state of Iowa.” According to Emma Winger, deputy legal director, American Immigration Council: “Sadly, we are still seeing copycat laws and proposed measures that would cause irreparable harm for immigrant families, including in Arizona, Texas, and Oklahoma. These types of laws create absolute chaos and human suffering and have no place in our legal system.” (Source: Iowa Blocks Hateful Anti-Immigrant Law, American Immigration Council, June 17, 2024)

And beyond the basic necessities of food supply, industry increasingly relies upon migrant workers. For example, in Ohio: Unions, Businesses Eye Migrants to Fill Labor Gaps in Ohio Reuters, May 2, 2024: “Help accessing immigrant communities to find workers to hire has been among the top three requests the Columbus Chamber of Commerce has fielded from local businesses in recent years, said Kelly Fuller, the chamber’s vice president of talent and workforce development.”

In the U.S., the expansion of the labor force via immigrants has kept the economy growing and consumer spending up without driving inflation even higher. According to Brookings Institution economist Tara Watson: “Immigration is bolstering a U. S. workforce that would otherwise be set to decline as the baby boomer generation retires. And especially in some fields, we have long-run structural needs that Americans are just not going to fill,’ Watson said, pointing to a lack of home health aides and other direct care workers,” Ibid.

In Charleroi, Pennsylvania David Barbe of Fourth Street Foods claims: “We operate 26 production lines for sandwiches, dinner, and breakfast bowls.” Out of 1,000 employees, 700 are immigrants on the assembly line. “The hours are long and monotonous, and Barbe says he gets almost no local applicants.” (Source: Charleroi, Pennsylvania, Business Owner Says Immigrant Population Works Jobs Americans Do Not Want, CBS News, September 18, 2024)

Pennsylvania thrives on newfound immigrants: “It is hard to overstate the importance of entrepreneurship since new businesses are the main driver of job growth in the United States. Immigrants play a particularly important role in this—founding businesses at far higher rates than the U.S. population overall. Today, millions of American workers are employed at immigrant-founded and immigrant-owned companies.” Pennsylvania claims 70,200 immigrant entrepreneurs paying $13 billion in taxes with $4.4 billion paid to social security and 650,200 total immigrant workers in the labor force. (Source: Immigrants in Pennsylvania, American Immigration Council)

Immigrants may be a political football that is easy to kick around but ironically, America’s biggest risk of becoming a third world country is loss of immigrant labor, resulting in grocery store shelves become increasingly empty, restaurants using paper plates/plastic forks to replace migrant help, and local farmer’s markets experiencing vicious, sometimes deadly, street fights by local citizens over scarce precious food items.

America’s Economic Growth Depends Upon Immigrants

“Immigrant workers are responsible for 88% of labor force growth in America since 2019.” (Source: Immigrants Will Be America’s Only Source Of Labor Force Growth, Forbes, October 16, 2024).

Labor force growth is crucial to economic growth, raising living standards for all citizens. According to the Dallas Fed: “While technological advances and incentives for investment will contribute to productivity growth, immigration will be vital to propping up labor force growth… The United States would have experienced no labor force growth during the past five years without immigrants and their children. Between 2018 and 2024, the number of workers with U.S. parents declined by 1.3 million, while the number of immigrants and children of immigrants in the U.S. labor force grew by 5.4 million,” Ibid.

America’s colleges and universities hold a special status in the eyes of the world: “Immigrant-origin students are the fastest growing group of students in higher education, driving over 90 percent of the domestic enrollment growth at U.S. colleges and universities from 2000 to 2022.” (Source: Immigrant-Origin Students in U.S. Higher Education – September 2024, Higher Ed Immigration Portal, Oct. 1, 2024)

Immigrants have never been more important to America’s growth and future. Immigrant labor does the backbreaking work that regular Americans refuse, the backbone of America’s food chain and industrial assembly lines. They do hard work in a quiet reserved manner. They are irreplaceable and the single most crucial factor to America’s future economic growth, which would stagnate without their resourcefulness and dedication to hard work.

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Image by Katelyn Perry.

Murder has changed the city’s shape—this stone

                                                                 is a child’s head—

and this smoke is exhaled from human lungs.

Each thing recites its exile . . .                a sea

                                              of blood—and what

do you expect on these mornings except their arteries set to sail

into the darkness, into the tidal wave of slaughter?

–Adonis, trans. Khaled Mattawa

***

What can they do
to you? Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can
bust you, they can break
your fingers, they can
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can’t walk, can’t remember, they can
take your child, wall up
your lover….

–Marge Piercy

Lately, I’ve been struggling with writer’s block. It’s hard to know how to speak, where to begin, how to find the words, the right tone, syntax, form, and genre to wake the sleeping to the news that too few in the U.S. want to confront: that the world is on fire, the country is skittering toward fascism, and we have precious little time to MacGyver a response to the avalanche of crises.

Yes, friends, fall, election season, and climate collapse are upon us, bringing with them both beauty and existential dread, and most certainly tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, landslides, bombs, and weapons enough to decimate universities, schools, and hospitals in Gaza. Weapons enough to burn people alive in war crimes and supremely callous acts of wanton destruction. And, of course, it’s that season to once again try to negotiate with our corporate captors to decide which of their handmaids will sit at the wheel of the global death mobile that Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower euphemistically termed the “Military Industrial Complex” or MIC in his famous 1961 farewell address.

The American War Machine

With John F. Kennedy’s Camelot myth-making machine poised to sweep its way into the White House, the outgoing president warned of the dangers that the MIC poses to democracy in the U.S. The industries that sprang up alongside the military and were fueled by tax dollars during World War 2 were never “demobilized” but instead continued to grow and expand in influence such that the U.S. spends more on the military “than 144 countries combined,” and more than its top 10 competitors combined, including Russia and China.

Sixty years later, after American-made coups and catastrophes too many to number (though the Howard Zinn co-authored A People’s History of American Empire: A Graphic Adaptation is a great place to start), the MIC has grown exponentially. Its carbon- and mineral-sucking Windigo tentacles now fan out in all directions, across industries, agencies, and institutions. We’re talking everything from fossil fuels, steel, aluminum, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals, to food, phones, computers, media, and universities, not to mention some 800 military bases in 80 countries, spewing oil, carbon, and petrochemicals worldwide. For insights into how the U.S. corporate media spin washes U.S. imperialism, check out Norm Solomon’s new book War Made Invisible.

The taxes we’ve paid year after year have helped to build up this Windigo thing, this menace at home and abroad. If you’re unfamiliar with the Doomsday Clock, which is brought to you by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, trust me when I tell you that the clock registering 90 seconds to midnight should definitely be keeping us up at night.

It may not be a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil, but It seems Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated both a law of nature and of capital when he warned us in his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” The daily business of deluging Gaza–not to mention Lebanon now–with massive American-made bone-crunching, child-annihilating bombs, missiles, and drones also has serious climate impacts from which no border walls or iron domes can insulate us. A January 2024 study in Social Science Research Network (SSRN) conservatively estimates the carbon “emissions from the first 60 days of the Israel-Gaza war [as] greater than the annual emissions of 20 individual countries and territories.”

Every major U.S.-supported military assault causes explosive, metastatic growth to industries that excel at fomenting surveillance, death, and destruction. And the cycle of destruction demands ever more extraction, ever more land- and resource-grabs. Colonialism, extraction, and war without end. The American Liturgy of Death.

Knowing this, who doesn’t want to turn up their nose at the electoral shit sandwich we’re being force-fed by our corporate captors? At the fact that in response to our demands for bread and roses, the state continually cries austerity but has unlimited cash when it comes to wars? But the oft-quoted mantra on the left that Trump is a symptom rather than the cause of a society drifting toward fascism is just as true of Kamala Harris as it is Donald Trump.

Cornel West and Jill Stein, no doubt, have far more palatable, and – but for being third party candidate in what can legitimately be called the most important presidential race in U.S. history – more humane and rational platforms than either Harris or Trump. But this election is not a moral referendum. At best, it’s an opportunity for harm reduction, a chance to choose our captors, a chance to decide which of the two major party candidates we stand a better chance organizing against.

Who can blame anyone whose families have been burned or buried alive by 2,000 -pound bombs, if they cannot bring themselves to vote for Harris? And when it comes to the Israeli hostages, it seems pretty clear also that the continual supply of weapons Biden has provided Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to turn Gaza into a hellscape has also been disastrous for the Israeli hostages, not to mention the nearly ten thousand Palestinian prisoners, including doctors, nurses, and other medical workers journalists, and writers, being tortured and sexually abused in Israeli prisons. As so many of the Israeli hostage families themselves acknowledge, Netanyahu has repeatedly put the hostages in harm’s way, whether by bombing them in the tunnels, by starving them along with the rest of Gaza, or by prolonging the war for his own political gain and survival. But politically, and morally, Netanyahu and Trump may as well be twin sons of different mothers.

It’s important, though, to recognize that the reign of our American-made wannabe Mad King Trump is in some very real ways, as wikileaks helped expose in 2016, a monster the DNC helped create: a greedy, amoral, sadistic high tech American Frankenstein. King Kong with better weapons. The Democrats thought that even Republicans would be repulsed by the beast and run screaming into their arms. Instead, they helped move the country and the Overton window more firmly in the direction of fascism and placed us all closer to the boot.

But domestically, at least, Harris has demonstrated far more restraint, far more respect for democratic norms than Trump has, and they will both be driving the same American War Machine, one with some semblance of breaks, the other without. More than twenty years post 9-11, we are, as NSA Whistleblower William Binney has argued, living in “turnkey totalitarianism” wrapped in a gauntlet of militarized surveillance (American and Israeli technologies intertwined) that’s just waiting to be fully unleashed, and Trump is just the guy to not only assent to it, but to revel in it, to enjoy it.

Trump’s complete disregard for both Foreign and Domestic Emoluments Clauses of the Constitution gives him ample motivations to want to gut environmental regulations and go full bore on “Drill, Baby, Drill.” If U.S.-based fossil fuel companies have a strategic stake in Israeli control of the levant gas fields off the coast of Gaza, Trump is almost certain to want a personal piece of the action in ways that Harris, as an ex-prosecutor, is likely to see for what it is–rank corruption. Per Patrick Wintour’s coverage in The Guardian, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is among the developers gunning for the removal of Palestinians and “prais[ing] the ‘very valuable’ potential of Gaza’s ‘waterfront property.’“

Is anyone surprised that U.S. support for Israel, which long co-existed alongside a host of discriminatory anti-Semitic laws in the U.S., has never been about anything but getting a foothold to use the Middle East as its personal gas pump, as markets to be cracked open by bombs, missiles, and drones – Palestinian, Iraqi, and Iranian lives, bodies, and cultures be damned? To the financial elites, the Middle East is one big Green Zone. John Cusack’s 2008 film War, Inc. pretty well nails it. Blowing shit up is the most reliable American export at a time when oil and weapons manufacturers are busy blowing through the money you and I could sure use for food, housing, healthcare and education.

When War Comes Home

Harris and the DNC know Trump is a loaded gun. They know he’s the personification of James Baldwin’s white supremacist “moral monster,” and they’re watching, mouths agape, as people back away from the party, morally repulsed by Biden’s seemingly limitless tolerance for Netanyahu’s genocidal, morally bankrupt strategies and tactics, repulsed by the DNC’s refusal to platform a single Palestinian speaker, by the DNC’s refusal to acknowledge the basic humanity of Palestinians, Muslims, and Arab-Americans. No meaningful investigations for journalist Shireen Abu Akleh or Aysenur Eygi (both assassinated by Israeli snipers), no personhood. No promise or prospect of it but for the moral courage of Palestinian-Americans, anti-Zionist Jews, and allies, putting their bodies on the line to stop it.

But as it’s been to organize against the genocide in Gaza under Biden and some semblance of democratic norms, it will be far harder under Trump. As Christopher Ketcham has reported in The Intercept, Trump’s white supremacist followers­– including “the Boogaloo Bois, Proud Boys, Three Percenters, [and] Oath Keepers,” have long been egging him on to follow in the footsteps of Augusto Pinochet, the murderous dictator the U.S. helped install in Chile in a September 11, 1973 coup against the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. The t-shirts of the “very fine” fascists Trump publicly embraces sport images of people being tossed out of airplanes, a terrifying form of summary execution practiced by the U.S.-supported troops under Pinochet, and more broadly by U.S. trained and funded troops in Latin America more broadly, and during the American War in Viet Nam. Notably when the U.S. instituted an arms embargo against Pinochet in 1976, Israel ramped up their own weapons sales to Chile.

It will be far harder when Andrew Tate is greeted with open arms, alongside other misogynists, xenophobes, and white supremacists at the aptly named White House. It will be far harder when the entire fraying regulatory framework is gutted under Project 2025, and civil servants are replaced with handpicked loyalists. It will be far harder when millions of Brown, Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color are swept up in the mass deportations Trump promises, far harder when Tribal Nations are once again terminated, lands up for sale and lease to the highest bidder.

It will be far harder when not only cops but armed fascists are empowered to routinely assault BIPOC, queer/trans people and women in the streets, far harder when women are routinely scrambling to contend with far higher rates of sexual violence, of forced pregnancies, DIY abortions, and an uptick of violence at home. It will be far harder when people with disabilities are treated as wholly disposable burdens on the state. It will be far harder when union organizers, dissident professors, students, musicians, journalists, and writers who support Palestine and BDS against Israel are not simply disciplined, fired, beaten, and/or blacklisted, but imprisoned, tortured, and forcibly silenced or disappeared, as has so often happened under U.S. and Israeli-supported fascist crackdowns.

So these are the choices we face going into the final weeks of the election. The Democrats, let’s not forget, played a key role in setting up the dangerous game of electoral chicken in which we’re now engaged. But Maya Angelou’s dictum “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time,” ought to hold double for politicians who tell you their favorite book – assuming they read at all – is Mein Kampf.

Let’s vote accordingly and get back to the all- important work of organizing, educating, challenging, divesting from, and dismantling the American and Israeli war machines while there’s still time.

***

The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and do not represent the views of my employer Washington State University Vancouver.

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Photograph Source: Israel Defense Forces – CC BY-SA 2.0

The use of human shields in war is not a new phenomenon. Militaries have forced civilians to serve as human shields for centuries. Yet, despite this long and dubious history, Israel has managed to introduce a new form of shielding in Gaza, one that appears unprecedented in the history of warfare.

The practice was initially revealed by Al Jazeera but, subsequently, Haaretz published an entire expose about how Israeli troops have abducted Palestinian civilians, dressed them in military uniforms, attached cameras to their bodies, and sent them into underground tunnels as well as buildings in order to shield Israeli troops.

“[I]t’s hard to recognize them. They’re usually wearing Israeli army uniforms, many of them are in their 20s, and they’re always with Israeli soldiers of various ranks,” the Haaretz article notes. But if you look more closely, “you see that most of them are wearing sneakers, not army boots. And their hands are cuffed behind their backs and their faces are full of fear.”

In the past, Israeli troops have used robots and trained dogs with cameras on their collars, as well as Palestinian civilians, to serve as shields. However, Palestinians who were used as shields always wore civilian clothes and thus could be identified as civilians. By dressing Palestinian civilians in military garb and sending them into the tunnels, the Israeli military has, in effect, altered the very logic of human shielding.

Indeed, human shielding has historically been predicated on recognizing that the person shielding a military target is a vulnerable civilian (or prisoner of war). This recognition is meant to deter the opposing warring party from attacking the target because the vulnerability of the human shield ostensibly invokes moral restraints on the use of lethal violence. It is precisely the recognition of vulnerability that is key to the purported effectiveness of human shielding and for deterrence to have a chance of working.

By dressing Palestinian civilians in Israeli military uniforms and casting them as Israeli combatants, the Israeli military purposefully conceals their vulnerability. It deploys them as shields not to deter Palestinian fighters from striking Israeli soldiers, but rather to draw their fire and thus reveal their location, allowing the Israeli troops to launch a counterattack and kill the fighters. The moment these human shields, masked as soldiers, are sent into the tunnels, they are transformed from vulnerable civilians into fodder.

The Israeli army’s treatment of Palestinian civilians as expendable might not come as a surprise given the racialized form of colonial governance to which they have been subjected for decades. The deep-seated racism explains the ease with which Israeli President Isaac Herzog publicly claimed that there are “no innocent civilians” in the Gaza Strip as well as the prevailing indifference among Israel’s Jewish public to the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been killed.

Indeed, most Israelis were not shocked when their political leaders repeatedly called to “erase” Gaza, “flatten” it, and turn it “into Dresden”. They have either supported or have been apathetic towards the damage and destruction of 60 percent of all civilian structures and sites in Gaza.

Within this context, dressing Palestinian civilians in military garb and sending them into tunnels is likely to be perceived in the eyes of most Israeli soldiers – and large sections within the Israeli public – as not much more than a detail.

Nonetheless, this new form of human shielding does shed important light on how racism plays out in the battlefield. It reveals that the military has taken to heart and operationalized Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s racist guidelines that “we are fighting human animals,” exposing how Israeli soldiers are relating to Palestinians as either bait or prey. Like hunters who use raw meat to lure animals they want to capture or kill, the Israeli troops use Palestinian civilians as if they were bare flesh, whose function is to attract the hunter’s prey.

Racism also informs Israel’s disregard for international law. By randomly detaining Palestinian civilians – including youth and the elderly – and then dressing them in military garb before forcing them to walk in front of soldiers, the Israeli troops violate not only the legal provision against the use of human shields but also the provision that deals with perfidy and prohibits warring parties from making use of military “uniforms of adverse Parties while engaging in attacks or in order to shield, favor, protect or impede military operations.”  Two war crimes in a single action.

The horrifying truth, however, is that no matter how much evidence emerges around Israel’s use of this new human shielding practice or, indeed, any other breach of international law, the likelihood that it will change actions on the ground is small.

Hopes that international law will protect and bring justice to the Palestinian people have historically been misplaced because colonial racism – as critical legal scholars from Antony Anghie to Noura Erekat have pointed out – informs not merely Israel’s actions but also the international legal order, including the way the International Criminal Court (ICC) metes out justice. To get a glimpse of this racism, all one needs to do is browse the website of the International Criminal Court to see who it has been willing to indict.

First appeared in Al Jazeera English

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Fireball from the Operation Ivy King nuclear blast on 15 November 1952, Enewetak Atoll. Image: Dept. of Energy.

Nuclear weapons are scarcely mentioned in the U.S. 2024 political campaign nor in campaign media coverage. These costly and grotesque machines would seem non-existent on the election trail. Yet, Russia threatens to nuclear bomb Ukraine, Ukraine is threatening to build nuclear weapons, Israel threatens to bomb Iran’s nuclear reactors, China is doubling its nuclear weapons stockpile, and the United States has begun a $1.7 Trillion “modernization” of its nuclear arsenal; already way over budget and years behind schedule.

Trump surrogates, however, have announced their future nuclear weapons plans. Robert O’Brien, Trump’s fourth former National Security Advisor in Project 2025 and in Foreign Affairs magazine, wrote the U.S. should withdraw from the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban, CTBT, and prepare to test nuclear weapons in the Nevada desert.

John Bolton, Trump’s third National Security Advisor, fired for opposing visits from the Taliban’s to Camp David, advises a future President Trump, “unsigning the CTBT should be a top U.S. priority”.

The Trump Administration seriously discussed plans to break out of the CTBT in 2020 with a “rapid test”, citing unsubstantiated claims Russian and China had conducted low yield nuclear explosions. Congress rushed $10 million at the time to prepare the Nevada National Security Site, NNSS, the former Nevada Test Site, for renewed nuclear testing.

The CTBT is a foundational nuclear arms control treaty whose negotiations began in the 1950’s Eisenhower Khrushchev era. No nuclear tests have been conducted by the major nuclear powers since the CTBT was signed by 187 countries in 1996; 178 of those have ratified it. The U.S. Senate has not ratified the treaty, last defeating ratification in 1999, 51-48 (ratification requires a 2/3 supermajority). Russia has withdrawn its ratification due to the Senate balking. So far, neither nuclear power has violated the treaty. North Korea has exploded six nuclear devices since 2006, the last in 2017.

Mikhael Gorbachev unilaterally halted Soviet nuclear tests in 1985. Congress suspended nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site in 1992 over President George HW Bush’s objection, in a veto-proof margin of 68-26 in the Senate. The US signed the Test Ban Treaty in 1996.

A Partial Test Ban Treaty agreed by President Kennedy and Soviet Prime Minister Khrushchev in 1963 banned nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, underwater and in space. Growing scientific data showed that American and Soviet nuclear tests were poisoning their own citizens. The Eisenhower Administration had fumbled total test ban negotiations begun in 1956.

People on the ground in Nevada, where the majority of U.S. nuclear weapons tests took place from 1951 to 1992, have negative views about nuking their beloved high desert. Seventy-five percent of Nevadans oppose nuclear testing. Former officials of the Nevada National Security Site, formerly the Nevada Test Site, said the NNSS “wanted nothing to do with full-scale underground nuclear testing.”

Executive Director of Nevada’s Office of Nuclear Projects, Frank Dilger, said, “There is no need for full-scale underground testing. Project 2025 should have been labeled Project 1995 because the ideas are all old…for nuclear issues”.

Nevada Assembly Majority Leader Sandra Jauregui (D) said, “The risk of nuclear testing is too great.”

Former Obama Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz warned that “resuming explosive nuclear testing in Nevada will set off a diplomatic chain-reaction that will damage our national security and international standing.”

The original Nevadans, the Western Shoshone people, suffer the most significant harm from the nuclear detonations on the Nevada Test Site. The Great Nevada Basin, known to the indigenous people as Newe Sogobia, was deeded to the Shoshone Nation by treaty in 1863. Like many native tribal names, Shoshone means “people”, something the Atomic Energy Commission ignored when it confiscated 1350 square miles of Shoshone land to build the Nevada Test Site. More than 900 nuclear devices, both atmospheric and underground, were detonated there. Paleo-Indian peoples had lived in the Great Nevada Basin as long as 12,000 years ago.

“I saw my family dying”, said Ian Zabarte, Principal Man of the Western Shoshone Nation. “My grandfather’s skin fell off. We began to understand that nuclear weapons and fallout came through our community. The U.S. came to our country to test bombs. They didn’t ask for our consent. They didn’t tell us what was happening. I cannot let this go.”

In 1988, the American Peace Test rallied more than 8000 people at the Nevada Test Site to protest nuclear testing; 3000 were arrested, including musician Kris Kristofferson and astrophysicist Carl Sagan. Twelve hundred people were arrested in one day, setting an American record.

From 1945 until 1963, the U.S. conducted hundreds of nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, undersea, and even in space at numerous sites, including the Marshall Islands, Johnston Atoll, and the Nevada Test Site.  The dozen nuclear explosions launched from Johnston Atoll into space spread radiation around the globe knocked out phone service in Hawaii and distant New Zealand and littered Johnston Atoll with bits of Plutonium.  The highest yield U.S. nuclear tests over one megaton (one million tons of TNT) were reserved for the Marshall Islands, a U.S. Trust Territory after WWII. Cumulatively, from 1946 to 1962, the U.S. nuclear tests on the Marshall Islands totaled more than 200 Megatons, 200 million tons of TNT, or eighty percent of the explosive power of all U.S. nuclear tests.

Compensation claims by newly independent Marshall Islanders reveal a pattern of lies, racist profiling, and unethical medical experiments dealing with Marshall Island inhabitants by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Congress has paid Marshall Islanders $750 million in compensation, but far less than the billions of dollars the Marshall Islanders demand. Some Marshall Islanders will never return to their home islands due to residual test radiation.

The Soviet Union conducted 219 atmospheric tests at its nuclear test facility in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. France also conducted 50 atmospheric nuclear tests in Pacific Polynesia, refusing to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty barring atmospheric tests. France conducted another 160 tests in Polynesia and Algeria until it signed the CTBT in 1996. Taken together, the Nevada Test Site, Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, and the French testing site in Pacific Polynesia remain some of the most toxic sites on Earth. All are located on former colonized indigenous lands.

Other sites associated with the production of fissile material, the core of nuclear weapons, rank high as the nation’s most toxic places, including Hanford, WA, Rocky Flats, CO, and Savannah River Site, SC. Hundreds of smaller locations associated with the mining of uranium, primarily on native lands, and the manufacture of atomic weapons are also listed as “legacy sites” by the DOE; many will never be reclaimed.

The most prevalent radio-isotope produced by atmospheric nuclear tests was Carbon 14.  Readily absorbed by the oceans, C14 stays radioactive for 5000 years. Other radionuclide fallout will contaminate the Nevada Great Basin for tens of thousands of years. Many children living near the Nevada Test site thought the white flakey fall-out from nuclear tests was snow, played in it and caught it on their tongues.

Modern sensitive radiology instruments have to be manufactured from salvaged steel milled before nuclear testing, especially sunken ships from WWI. All modern steel has traces of radiation from nuclear testing, making “pre-war, pre-nuclear testing” extremely valuable.

Following the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, banning atmospheric testing, underground nuclear explosions still leaked radiation into the atmosphere and groundwater. All told the Nevada Test site spewed more than 500 times the radiation released at Chernobyl.

The qualitative measure of radiation, as it affects living tissue, is termed a “sievert”.  The Nevada Test Site released over four million “sieverts” of radiation across the United States. One “sievert” is a unit equivalent dose producing a 5.5.% chance of a fatal cancer in a human.

Citizens living near the test site, downwinders”, have experienced increased infant mortality, premature deaths, debilitating illness and high cancer rates due to radiation exposure beginning with the very first nuclear detonation, the 1945 Trinity test at Alamogordo NM. Congress did fund the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, RECA, in 1990 to pay some uranium workers and miners in the production of the first atom bombs. Some military troops and pilots, who, under orders, marched and flew through nuclear test fallout received benefits.  And some “downwinders” who suffered generations of cancers and pre-mature deaths from nuclear explosion tests in Nevada received $50,000. If informed at all about the nuclear tests “downwinders” were erroneously told by the Atomic Energy Commission no ill effects would result from the above ground or underground nuclear explosions. Some of these families lived only miles from the blast site.

RECA expired in June of 2024 and to date, no amount of cajoling of House Speaker Mike Johnson has convinced him to bring renewal of RECA to the Floor for a vote, though it has passed in the Senate and would likely pass in the House.

U.S. military and atomic experts also warn against withdrawing from CTBT and blowing up the nuclear testing taboo. Having amassed voluminous data collected from over 1000 nuclear test explosions, the U.S. has for better or for ill, orders of magnitude more technical information about nuclear explosions than anyone other than Russia. Breaking the CTBT would risk other countries quickly testing and closing the lead the U.S. has in nuclear explosion chemistry and physics.

The U.S. has not exploded a nuclear device since 1992, but it maintains a stockpile of over 5,000 nuclear warheads. (the U.S. has manufactured over 70,000 nuclear warheads since 1945). This “strategic stockpile” is analyzed for potency and safety at the same Nevada National Security Site, the same historic site where nuclear explosions took place. DOE warehouses as many as 15,000 stored and surplus plutonium pits at the PANTEX plant in Texas.

The NNSS, with a budget of $5 billion over 10 years, conducts sophisticated experiments that gauge the characteristics of plutonium as it ages. Some nuclear bombs in the U.S. arsenal are over 50 years old, prompting Congress to appropriate tens of billions of dollars for new plutonium pit production at Savannah River Site DC and Los Alamos NM. A federal court recently determined that these plans violate the National Environmental Protection Act, NEPA.   A controversial JASON report determined that plutonium pits would be reliable for at least 100 years. Still, plans for new pits and new nuclear bombs forge ahead.

Last year’s frenzy from DOE announcing a successful “fusion reaction” had little to do with generating limitless electricity in the future and almost everything to do with developing high-powered lasers to assay plutonium in the U.S. strategic stockpile. “Sub-criticality” tests subject plutonium samples from the nuclear stockpile to intense pressures, heat, and shock, shy of nuclear fission, “criticality.” Nearly one-half of DOE’s $50 Billion budget goes into nuclear weapons programs.

One obstacle to the CTBT agreement, and to many nuclear weapons control treaties, has been verification. Dozens of promising nuclear control treaties have been scuttled since 1946 due to a lack of confidence in a verification regime. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, CTBTO, established by the United Nations and based in Vienna, Austria, has assembled an international series of 300 monitoring sites to detect any illicit nuclear explosion. Based on seismic, hydro-phonic, and chemical assays of the atmosphere, the CTBTO can, within minutes, differentiate between an earthquake, large ocean waves, and landslides from a possible illegal nuclear test.

Were the United States Senate to ratify the CTBT, and Russia to re-ratify it, along with nine other nuclear powers, including China, it would come into force. The gold standard for verification, on-site inspections of adversaries’ test sites would then become law; on-site inspection, on demand.

Politicians should be crystal clear: the U.S. will never restart nuclear explosive testing. The Senate must assert leadership in nuclear diplomacy it once demonstrated, and ratify the CTBT. The U.S., as the only country to detonate nuclear weapons in war, must halt the nuclear arms race beginning again.

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Hiroshima Palestine Community Vigil marking one year of a nightly standing in front of the atomic bomb dome in solidarity with the people of Palestine.

Hearing the announcement that Nihon Hidankyou had won the Nobel Peace Prize, Toshiyuki Mimaki-san pinched himself and said: “I thought it would have gone to the people working hard for Peace in Gaza.” Two days later, we witnessed the image of Sha’ban al-Dalou, a 20-year-old engineering student, burning alive in his tent outside the Al-Aqsa hospital in Northern Gaza, an IV still in his arm. These days, as we protest the genocide of the Palestinian people in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome here in Hiroshima, it is impossible not to recall the radioactive fires and mass death as part of a long lineage of American weapons experiments that continue to this very moment in Palestine.

“When I saw children being carried with blood covering them in Gaza, I remembered the scenes that took place in Japan 80 years ago,” Mimaki-san shared with the press in Oslo, recalling his experience as a 3-year-old exposed to the Hiroshima bomb. But his statements on Gaza were eliminated from most mainstream media. How deplorable – yet unsurprising – that the words of a survivor of nuclear genocide expressing empathy with other child victims of war be manipulated to obscure the current genocide.

Hibakusha commitment to No More Hiroshimas! No More Nagasakis! should guide us to solidarity with the Palestinian people, not distract us from it. From Hiroshima, Palestine solidarity activists urgently repeat: Palestine is a nuclear issue. Free Palestine must include a Nuclear-Free Palestine and resistance to the normalization of militarization, proliferation of nuclear weapons, AND power – that exists to create nuclear weapons. Anti-nuclear activists worldwide should be sounding the alarm about Palestine and taking concrete action to stop all weapons and escalation to nuclear war.

The Nobel Peace Prize has long been “tarnished” and used to peacewash nuclear deterrence. In 2009, Obama was awarded the prize for his supposed commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, then actually spent close to $1 trillion on upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Both Biden and Obama celebrated the win, while the Israeli ambassador to Japan, Gilad Cohen, criticized Mimaki-san for his comparison of Gaza to Hiroshima. Can we imagine if UNRWA – the UN agency whose schools, hospitals, and aid workers have been utterly destroyed and massacred while trying to do their jobs – had won this year’s Peace Prize?

In the years following the bomb, the American occupation censored anyone writing, speaking, or making art about their experiences of instant obliteration and radiation sickness. Not only were survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki shunned and shamed by their own communities, they were subjected to invasive medical testing by the U.S. Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission for most of their lives. Nevertheless, they have worked tirelessly to abolish nuclear weapons by recording and repeating their personal testimonies. Most hibakusha who were children at the time are now in their 80s and 90s and continue to share their legacy to the next generation of anti-nuclear activists.

Hiroshima, the “International Peace City” has a complex history of both being a victim and perpetrator of war. As a historic military outpost and center of the Japanese Navy, the symbol of the Atomic Bomb dome and the victimhood narrative of Hiroshima exemplify for the right-wing nationalists the root of Japan’s weakness and threat to its national security. This perceived need for “security” has justified the rapid militarization of Japan and bulwarking against China by building up missile bases in Okinawa, buying drones from Israel, manufacturing robots for Israeli weapons’ firms, or loosening regulations around defense equipment transfers.

This same victimhood narrative obscures the atrocities of imperial Japan in China, Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific — the extensive networks of sex slavery, chemical weapons experiments, genocidal extermination, and colonial territorial expansion. An estimated 40,000 Koreans were killed in the bombs and thousands more exposed to radiation after being mobilized to Hiroshima and Nagasaki as forced labor. In response to the peace prize, Korean A-bomb survivor group president, Kim Jin-Ho, says that both the U.S. and Japan should apologize to the Korean hibakusha community: “Japan, being both an aggressor in war and a victim of the atomic bomb, needs to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and guide us toward a world without nuclear weapons.”

Chukakuha and student activists at all-night sit in in the early morning hours of August 6th protesting the Israeli delegate attendance to Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Ceremony, Japan’s rapid militarization, and the protest restrictions imposed by the City.

As leaders of the anti-nuclear movement, hibakusha must refuse this ongoing Japanese nationalist victimhood narrative that exceptionalizes their experience and continue to utilize their position as peacemakers to advocate for all victims of the nuclear fuel cycle — from Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the Congo to the Sahtu Dene people in Canada who transported the uranium for the Hiroshima bomb, to the marginalized victims of nuclear testing in Bikini Atoll, Micronesia, Kazakhstan, the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, the Navajo Nation, the Nevada Test Site downwinders, Algeria, and more. By relating these global histories of nuclear colonialism, we can better understand how the anti-nuclear movement intersects with anti-colonial, anti-imperial struggles like the Palestine Solidarity movement, which is also an anti-war and anti-weapons testing movement.

In 2023, the G7 Summit was held in Hiroshima, where Kishida and the other nuclear states released their paradoxical “Hiroshima Vision” statement, committing to nuclear disarmament through the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Many hibakusha expressed shock and disappointment that the states who refuse to sign the TPNW could proclaim their continued commitments to nuclear weapons as a method of “safety” from the hypocenter of the nuclear bomb: “Nuclear weapons, for as long as they exist, should serve defensive purposes, deter aggression and prevent war and coercion.” One could argue that the city itself has become a peacewashing pawn of the Japanese national government under the thumb and “nuclear umbrella” of U.S. influence.

The city’s government has become increasingly conservative, removing the classic anti-nuclear manga, Barefoot Gen, from grade school peace education materials and utilizing parts of the Imperial Rescript on Education, part of the Japanese imperial militarist training, as part of training text for new city employees. The February arrest of five anti-war activists on false charges of attacking a Hiroshima City worker during last year’s August 6th anti-war protests was used to justify the banning of protests during this year’s Peace Memorial Ceremony. Under the guise of maintaining “silence” and “safety”, the city repressed public dissent while still inviting Israel – effectively peacewashing their own complicity in the genocide.

As activists pressured the city to disinvite Israel, Mimaki-san’s hidankyou was the only one of seven local hibakusha groups that sent a letter to the Mayor requesting a cancellation of Israel’s invitation. In the end, both Rahm Emanuel, the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, and an Israeli delegate attended the ceremony, laying flowers for atomic bomb victims as death toll in Gaza soared to 40,000. Activists staged actions throughout the park that day, including an all-night sit-in to protest the restrictions on free speech, which successfully defeated the regulations on no speakers or protest material during the ceremony. Zengakuren students, union workers, and older activists from across Japan sat through the night and the early morning ceremony, waving Palestinian flags and demanding an end to Japanese militarization.

Other groups of anti-war activists and Buddhist monks staged a die-in during the ceremony while activists from all around Japan waved signs at the entrances to the park. Inside the ceremony itself, protestors held their keffiyehs high over their heads during the 8:15am moment of silence for the victims of the bomb. On the evening of the 6th, as colorful floating lanterns drifted down the river to commemorate Hiroshima’s ancestors, Waleed Siam, a Palestinian Ambassador to Japan, gave a virtual address at a People’s Peace Ceremony. His image was projected to a crowd in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome, a massive fiery explosion in Gaza as his Zoom background, calling for justice and “for the world to uphold the principles it so often preaches but rarely practices.”

The saving grace of anti-nuclear movement solidarity with Palestine came from Nagasaki, where the Mayor disinvited Israel from their August 9th Peace Ceremony and instead invited a delegate from Palestine. In the aftermath of this invitation, Emanuel and the rest of the G7 ambassadors refused to attend the ceremony, shocking the Nagasaki community, including hibakusha. Local activists with Nagasaki for Palestine held their own event, welcoming the Palestine delegate with peace music sung by a hibakusha choir.

The mental gymnastics that we have had to do to understand the logic behind each of these scenarios – the manipulation of “peace culture” to justify war; the use of genocide testimonies to hide genocides; the respectability politics of “silence” to censor and control dissent – is mindboggling. “Peace” and its longtime advocates like the hibakusha continue to be manipulated by the press, and local and world governments to disguise their lucrative forever wars and performances of diplomacy.

With the doomsday clock set at just 90 seconds to midnight, the message of No Nukes! is prescient. By erasing Palestine from the lips of the few remaining hibakusha, the newsmedia continue their complicity in abetting this genocide. As we sink deeper into the horrors of Gaza and the blood continues to spill throughout the region, the voices of the hibakusha remind us of our responsibility to human life — and again and again their voices get co-opted to justify war. But we have heard their stories and we know the messages. How much further will we let ourselves be pulled into the abyss of genocide denial and human indignity?

In the words of hibakusha poet, Tōge Sankichi:

にんげんをかえせ
Ningen o kaisei
Give me back humanity

No Nukes! No War! Free Palestine!

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Photograph Source: UK Government – CC BY 2.0

Once upon a time, here in the United States, we taxed the rich. Significantly. Today, by contrast, we’re actively enhancing their fortunes. Including the biggest personal fortune of them all, the quarter-trillion-dollar stash that belongs to Elon Musk, the current numero uno on the Forbes real-time list of the world’s largest fortunes.

Musk owes a hefty chunk of his own personal fortune to the taxes average Americans pay. He just happens to be, notes a just-published Politico analysis, “the single biggest beneficiary of U.S. government contracts.”

Two of Musk’s commercial operations, Tesla and SpaceX, have received billions in American taxpayer support. The federal government, Politico points out, has essentially “outsourced its space program” to SpaceX, and Tesla, a shaky electric vehicle company when Musk bought it, only “took off after receiving $465 million in subsidies from the Obama administration in 2010.”

All the tax dollars that Musk has collected from the Defense Department, NASA, and the U.S. intelligence community — coupled with the “generous government subsidies and tax credits to the electric-vehicle industry” that have so boosted Musk’s Tesla — have Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Max Boot fairly fuming.

Taxpayers like himself, Boot notes, are subsidizing the “fire hose of falsehoods” that now appear on X, the former Twitter, the social media app that Musk bought for $44 billion two years ago. Our tax dollars have essentially supersized our world’s single wealthiest individual.

Back in the middle of the 20th century, the United States took quite a different approach to the money pouring into rich people’s pockets. From the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, the incomes of America’s richest faced a tax bite that would be unimaginable today.

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Cover art for CounterPunch magazine, V. 20 N. 11 by Nick Roney.

When CounterPunch went to press 30 years ago on paper printed with ink that smeared your fingers, Bill Gates was worth a mere $6 billion, the atmosphere was clotted with a (barely) liveable 357PPM of carbon dioxide, Bill Clinton was plotting his first missile strikes (Iraq, of course), Larry Summers was scheming how to turn Brazil into the US’s toxic waste dump and Al Gore’s great invention was little more than a dial-up traffic jam.

The fateful year 1993 wasn’t the dawn of neoliberalism, but it was the year the control room passed into the hands of the so-called New Democrats and the great counter-revolution of austerity at home and muscle-flexing abroad shifted into hyperdrive. It wasn’t just trade that was being globalized, but trade enforced by military power, backed by 835 overseas bases.

The Cold War was over (or at least put on pause) and new wars began: Colombia, Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, Yugoslavia, Sudan, and Afghanistan. Instead of shrinking, NATO swelled, seeking strategic advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union, provocations we’re now feeling the predictable and deadly consequences of.

At home, Clinton, in his own fragrant words, turned the economy “over to the fucking bond market.” He pushed through NAFTA, allowed Robert Rubin to wreck the Mexican peso and kept on Alan Greenspan to strangle the aspirations of working people.  Then Bill and Al went to work slashing and burning the few strands of the social safety that had survived the Reagan years, starting with welfare, food stamps, and aid to mothers with dependent children. As the ranks of the poor grew, the lavishly financed prisons greedily swallowed them up. By the time Clinton left office in 2000, the federal prison population had more than doubled, from 70,000 to 145,000, largely thanks to vengeful crime bills he concocted in collaboration with Joe Biden. These were the kinds of punches that CounterPunch was born under and we came out CounterPunching from the crib. As our esteemed contributor Ishmael Reed says, “Writin’ is fightin’.”

First issue of CounterPunch.

CounterPunch went online in 1998, just in time for Clinton’s war on Serbia. Now we’re at war in Europe again and have greenlit the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. No one asked us if we wanted another war. It was imposed on us by powers that don’t ask for consent.

You could say CounterPunch came of age in wartime and we’ve spent the last 25 years covering bloody conflicts, even when we desperately want to write about something else. Now we’re in the midst of a genocide.

I don’t consider myself a war correspondent by any measure. That harrowing calling was taken up by writers like Robert Fisk, John Ross, Franklin Lamb, Uri Avnery, Saul Landau,  Ariel Dorfman, and Patrick Cockburn. People who wrote under literal fire. Writers you’ve all read here on CounterPunch. In the past two years, alone two of our writers, Boris Kagarlitsky and Prabir Purkayastha, have been arrested and jailed for the crime of writing honestly about their own authoritarian regimes.    

Still, I have been covering wars for nearly three decades now, even when I’d rather be writing about cerulean warblers, steelhead trout struggling for life in the cool emerald pools of the Klickitat River or the way the mists hang on the last stands of ancient Sitka spruce forest in the Oregon Coast Range in late October. New wars keep intruding, regardless of who controls the Congress or the White House, and the old ones don’t end. Not really: Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Serbia, Libya, Ukraine and now Gaza. Poor, enchained, blasted Gaza again. History keeps getting recycled, only more gruesomely.

Obama bombed more people than any Nobel Laureate this side of Henry Kissinger. Who was there to call him out? Not the New York Times or Washington Post. The wars of the last 30 years have been enabled by the very journalistic institutions that were meant to challenge them. Journalism failed when it was needed most. Worse than failed. In many ways, it was complicit. We refused to be complicit. Our critiques of Obama’s wars were just as unflinching as the ones we had leveled at Bush or Trump or Biden. War is war no matter who is programming the drone strikes.

Not everyone saw it that way. We lost readers. We lost donors. People complained we didn’t give Obama (and now Biden) a chance to prove himself. If we shifted into a more comforting form of journalism, as so many other publications have done, who will be left to put the constraints on a military machine that is running rampant over our lives, our democracy, and the future of our planet?

The proof about Obama and his sidekick Joe Biden was right there in the escalating body count: the Afghan surge, Asian pivot, droning of American citizens, a genocidal war on Yemen, a CIA coup in Honduras, the jailing of people who blew the whistle on his wars. By the time cruise missiles were hitting Sirte and Benghazi, previously disaffected readers started returning. Damn, you were right! Believe me, we took no pleasure in it.

Now here we are again in a distressingly familiar position. Every time Democrats take power complacency sets in. People were exhausted by the tumult and drama of the Trump follies. People needed a breather after Covid, assuming there is such a happy state. Readership and revenues shrink. We feel it here, too. Becky and Deva keep a close eye on our bottom line and it doesn’t look good. The economy has flatlined at the very moment the world is hurtling toward both a nuclear confrontation and a climate-driven ecological collapse. And now we’re confronted by an election, where both candidates–one a moron and the other a human oxymoron–are moving farther and farther to the right. Harris has adopted Dick Cheney’s foreign policy and Larry Summers’ austerity economics.

But this is no time to look away. Danger signs are flashing on all fronts, from the bellicose threats against China and the deepening quagmire in Ukraine to the pulverization of Gaza City, Khan Younis, Rafah and now Beirut. The marketing of liberal wars usually comes in humanitarian guises like the so-called right to protect. But, now these virtuous claims must be put to the test. That’s what we are here to do. It’s what we’ve done for almost 30 years now, even when people have said that we can’t go on. Even when the accounts are low and the prospects bleak. Can’t go on? We must go on. What choice do we have?

In the end, we’ve largely depended on the kindness of our readers to survive. And, though there have been some very close calls, this simple and direct approach of appealing directly to those who know us best hasn’t failed in 30 years. We’ve grown in the decade since Alexander Cockburn died. The online readership is probably twice what it was in August 2012. We’re publishing more pieces each week and adding new writers every day. The website has been completely revamped into a more efficient and flexible WordPress design that even a crusty Luddite like me can’t screw up too badly. It even works on smartphones, where the analytics say more than half of the site’s visitors read CounterPunch. To keep up, our staff (still tiny by most standards) has more than doubled in size, from three to seven: Becky, Deva and Nichole in the business office, Andrew keeping the site running and the hackers at bay, and me, Josh and Nat on the editorial side.

That means our costs have more than doubled. But we haven’t resorted to gimmicks and trickery. We still depend almost exclusively on the community of online readers who utilize CounterPunch for free: no clickbait, no ads, no paywalls.

We’ve taken hits. But we’ve counterpunched with words and ideas, facts and names. And we’re still standing, bloodied and bruised, but upright, ready for the next round. And with you in our corner, we’ll come out swinging.

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