Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The U.S. and many other societies are cycling into situations of toxic polarization today; discussion, let alone consensus, often appears impossible and the advantage goes to exclusionary social movements built on malignant rather than goodwill impulses. As Heritage Foundation president Keith Roberts stated in July 2024, “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

As recently as a decade ago, violent social movements were gaining ground primarily in countries and regions that were struggling economically as they integrated themselves into the neoliberal global economy: examples include Russia, Hungary, and other states of the former Eastern Bloc, Turkey, India, and Greece. More recently, however, toxic polarization has also threatened to engulf countries at the core of the liberal democratic political grouping, including France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the U.S.

In every case, the malignant social movement aims to overthrow a political order built—at least notionally—on principles of inclusion and goodwill, which the movement blames for its followers’ loss of economic and political status within their societies. What’s most striking, even counterintuitive, about this takeover is its seeming inexorability, due to the failure of parties of the center and left to offer coherent alternatives—and the resulting landscape in which extreme positions are steadily normalized.

The result is a crisis of democracy, stunting people’s faith in collective self-government owing to its inability to help address practical problems such as climate change, economic inequality, and mass migration. To reverse this trend, we must first understand the conditions that brought it about.

Nine Developments That Produce Toxic Polarization

Toxic polarization becomes possible, if not inevitable, when a convergence of political, economic, and social conditions activate three powerful forces:

Malignant bonding: An impulse to solidify communities built on resentment, bigotry, and a desire to exclude those who are “different”;

The scarcity mind: A psychological state that frames social life as a zero-sum game pitting oneself and one’s social affinity group against a racial, ethnic, or class-based other; and

Trans-historical trauma: The fears and compensating behaviors that accumulate over many centuries of physical and emotional violence and become encoded in our collective behavior.

When they converge, these conditions lay the groundwork for a conventional wisdom built on limited assumptions about what can be achieved by society. This in turn produces a deep sense of alienation from the existing order, especially among the dominant racial, ethnic, and class-based groups, which in turn generates new, exclusionary social movements. By alienation, we mean a feeling of isolation and disconnection from the larger society or from what that society is becoming. Alienation can quickly turn into a lack of sympathy and lead to open hostility toward the supposedly undeserving portion of the population.

The pivotal forces in this process are social movements, which are the incubators and carriers of the zeitgeist. Exclusionary social movements, which come to the fore in periods of toxic polarization, always either exist or are latent. So are inclusionary social movements, which aim to build on a very different set of impulses: empathy, goodwill, good-faith communication, mutual aid, and an openness to finding common ground in inclusive and widely beneficial change.

Traditionally, these two types of movements either clash or coexist, but neither seizes the upper hand for more than a limited period. Today, however, we are witnessing the convergence of nine key developments, some of them dating back decades, which favor the rise of powerful and possibly long-lasting exclusionary social movements:

Decreased economic progress and social mobility: The developed world has witnessed a decline in economic expansion and social mobility stemming from the outsourcing of jobs and vastly unequal growth patterns in the developing world. Rising global levels of migration, partly due to the imposition of neoliberal economic policies, complemented by insurgencies in the Middle East and parts of East Asia, have caused dominant ethnic groups in receiving countries to feel threatened. Often, the concern is with “job theft” or crime, but the underlying impulse is racial or cultural prejudice.

Self-inflicted austerity: Four decades of fiscal austerity, rationalized by neoliberal economics and concentrated primarily on social spending, stalemate and stigmatize previously successful efforts to bring underprivileged and socially marginalized groups into the circle of prosperity.

Over the past two centuries, the state has emerged as the core agency for delivering on the promises of the inclusive or goodwill agenda. Austerity has the knock-on effect of “starving the state,” causing programs that large sections of the population depend on to deteriorate along with the goodwill agenda they were founded on. Benefits are curtailed, service worsens, and the citizenry become disgruntled or even alienated from the system that created and built loyalty through them.

A deteriorating retail encounter with the state: An additional effect of constraints imposed by austerity and rising debt is a decline in the state’s delivery of services. Bureaucratic agencies become less efficient and responsive and more impersonal. Also, the physical infrastructure deteriorates. These developments leave residents feeling further alienated from the state.

Rising debt at all levels: While the severity of debt burdens is often debatable, they reinforce austerity at the government level and hold back households’ and governments’ ability to invest for the future, further weakening inclusive movements. Over the past 50 years, these debt burdens have come increasingly under the control of global banks, investors, and multinational institutions: a “debt industry” that sees them as an opportunity to exploit rather than a means of equitable growth and development.

A sense of national decline: Political and economic collapse, stalemated wars that cost money and lives and lead to crises in national morale, and the erosion of a previously exalted geopolitical status give rise to a sense of decline within the society. Fifty years of failed wars, from Vietnam to Iraq, have been costly in blood and treasure, but are remembered in the American popular imagination as gallant missions that would have succeeded if the cause had not been betrayed by defeatist politicians.

Fear of loss of potency: This is fed by a fear of declining fertility, especially within the dominant ethnic group; declining birth rates contribute to a sense that their overall position in society is crumbling. This creates a platform for theories like the “Great Replacement” to take hold, leading in turn to further marginalization of ethnic minorities and migrant communities and a new wave of racial bigotry and violence.

Among men within the dominant ethnic group, the decline in birth rates aggravates misogyny based on a zero-sum, scarcity-based belief that women, by claiming their rights, are infantilizing and castrating them. This sometimes results in a violent backlash against women’s rights.

Energy, environmental, and technological crises: Global warming generates fears that the current living model is unsustainable, or that the crisis is a hoax intended to persuade people to accept a lower living standard. Fears of nuclear warfare endure but are now accompanied by concerns about new, high-tech forms of warfare and surveillance being used against people. The increasing role of sophisticated, computer-based systems in nearly every aspect of daily life creates a deepening fear that many long-time occupations will be eliminated or downgraded, damaging millions of workers’ confidence in both their livelihood and sense of personal worth.

Growth of corporate and financial power: As union power declines and business evolves into a new model in which companies are managed as a collection of salable assets rather than productive enterprises, people grow more alienated from the capitalist system. On the right, people are encouraged to blame stigmatized groups (the Jews, the Chinese, the Arabs) for wielding economic power against them and covertly encouraging their “replacement” by migrants.

Inclusionary movements lose their capacity for movement-building:Social movements built on goodwill, while in the ascendancy, come to rely on the state to address challenges related to inclusion, through policies and programs that address socioeconomic inequality and marginalization. But with the state on a starvation diet, the leadership of these movements no longer have the means to address their inclusionary goals; their policies and programs become—or appear to become—untenable. The leadership can no longer deliver results for their popular base.

Focused, in an electoral democracy, on winning elections, the leadership seek a new formula and new backing that will enable them to remain in power. They concede that capital is in the driver’s seat and that challenging its interests and ambitions is futile, leading to a shifting of focus to crafting technocratic, “third-way” policies such as welfare reform and marginally milder alternatives to closing the border. These fail to win back the movement’s base, instead creating an opening for exclusionary movements to expand their popular support.

Over time, the leadership of the exclusionary movement are emboldened to claim the accomplishments of the inclusionary movement as their own, seizing control of the historical-cultural narrative. In this telling, the abolition of slavery, the vast expansion of the middle class in the postwar decades, and the end of legal segregation become examples of America’s greatness rather than the outcome of decades of struggle against violent opposition from exclusionary movements.

When it refuses to buy into this version of the story, the inclusionary movement is demonized for failing to celebrate America. (“The American people rejected European monarchy and colonialism just as we rejected slavery, second-class citizenship for women… and (today) wokeism,” the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 “Mandate for Leadership” declared. “To the left, these assertions of patriotic self-assurance are just so many signs of our moral depravity and intellectual inferiority.”)

Exploiting Alienation

The scarcity mind informs both the framing of the nine developments just described and the response to them. Some are quite real—declining economic growth, austerity, the resulting rise in migration and insurgencies, the climate crisis, and the rise of corporate power—and some reflect a psychological state—fear of the other, fear of debt in the abstract, and fear of national decline. Collectively, they nurture a profound feeling of alienation.

As alienation increases, people grow more desperate to be seen and heard, to belong, and to feel that the powers directing society are on their side—and not someone else’s. These impulses generate new, exclusionary social movements, fueling a zeitgeist that spreads malignant bonding and toxic polarization, and which can then be used to forge a dynamic and passionate new political thinking of the right.

Alienation gives malignant bonding a powerful, long-lasting pull, at least while the conditions that facilitate it persist. In our time, Roberts’s “second American Revolution” takes its place within a pattern of self-renewal that began with the 1968 “silent majority” election of Richard Nixon in a campaign built on coded racism (“law and order”) and extends to the 2016 and 2020 elections that brought Donald Trump to power and then solidified his right-wing populist MAGA movement.

Starving the state helps sustain this cycle as it accelerates the delegitimation of the inclusionary agenda. To gain power, however, a social movement needs resources and a conduit to the institutional and financial apparatus of capitalism and the state. For this, it needs the support of at least a portion of what we might call the Third Force: the elites, including propertied individuals who amass capital and control access to it and the institutions that defend and promote their interests.

The Third Force typically finds it easiest to form alliances with exclusionary rather than inclusionary movements, since the former find their organizing principle in imagined scarcity and dreams of a lost golden age and, therefore, seldom question existing wealth arrangements. Additionally, exclusionary movements fetishize power, making them useful partners in controlling marginal social elements.

At the same time, often-chaotic exclusionary social movements need the organized, disciplined institutional structures and expertise that the Third Force can build for them:

– Think tanks that can turn ideological preferences and resentments into policies (example, the Heritage Foundation);

– Media and messaging platforms (example, Fox News, Newsmax, and social media influencers);

– Advocacy groups (example, the Federalist Society); and

– An electoral machine and fundraising capabilities that can pull together a group of well-to-do donors behind a populist leader (example, the Republican Party, political action committees).

Over time, these resources enable exclusionary movements and their leaders to generate new elites, operating on a somewhat different set of assumed principles than the previous elites, but still desiring to establish a new status quo. The nature of this new set of arrangements always depends greatly on the movement’s relationship with the Third Force.

The success of this cycle of self-renewal blocks progressive political forces from implementing changes that might address the concrete issues giving rise to feelings of alienation: economic stagnation and austerity, the loss of workers’ power and the rise of a corporate-financial hegemony, and technological fears.

A Way Forward for Inclusive Movements?

An exclusionary movement built on alienation and malignant bonding, when combined with the resources of the Third Force, can radically change the direction of society, potentially reversing decades of social and economic progress. It can also, as we have just seen, change the direction of the rival inclusionary movement, neutralizing it while setting it up as the enemy for supporters of the exclusionary movement to rally against.

Even in the long periods when inclusionary movements have been ascendant, their rivals work to undermine them. In the 1960s and early 1970s in the U.S., when it seemed that many inclusionary goals, ranging from socioeconomic equality for people of color to universal health care, were within reach, the seeds of a powerful reaction opposing these goals were already sprouting. But inclusionary leaders often ignored or dismissed them. Real or perceived crises were then exploited, often very successfully, by exclusionary social movements as grounds for pinning the blame on their opponents.

One reason why this strategy is effective for the exclusionary movements is that attacks on vulnerable groups—women, migrants, racial and ethnic minorities, and gender nonconformists—are easily rationalized and emotionally gratifying to embattled working people who are used to occupying a more favored place in society. Another and equally important reason is that inclusive social movements often respond by emphasizing the gap between society’s goals and its achievements, rather than highlighting its real accomplishments as reason to believe it can do better. This approach easily devolves into blaming and shaming the exclusionary movement’s target audience, which that movement can then easily exploit.

Our next article will address the following questions related to the inclusionary movements: What makes them—despite generating mass support for long periods—susceptible to this cycle, and what does this tell us about the requirements for making them successful in the long run? Why have the inclusionary movements not been able to sustain and renew themselves to the same degree as their exclusionary rivals? What holds them back, and how can they find the capacity to do so?

This article was produced by Human Bridges. 

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Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Presidential Debate, ABC News, screenshot.

Santa Anas in Philadelphia

The Santa Ana winds — “Devil Winds” — that blow west every Fall across the Los Angeles basin, make everybody jumpy. They are stronger and more insistent than the moist breezes from the Pacific and more than a little menacing because they bring the threat of fire. I haven’t lived in LA for more than 20 years but can still hear their rising whoosh and smell the rapid desiccation of foxtail and Eucalyptus. There’s a wind-spread fire burning right now in the hills east of Los Angeles.

But Santa Anas are also idiot winds. They dry-out your mouth, eyes and nose, making it hard to speak, see straight or even breath. It’s just possible Dylan had them in mind in 1974 when he recorded “Idiot Wind” for the album Blood on the Tracks:

Blowing like a circle around my skull
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol….

Blowing through the buttons of our coats
Blowing through the letters that we wrote….
It’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves

Written after the Watergate hearings, and recorded just weeks after Nixon’s resignation, the song is apposite again, 50 years later. Was it an idiot wind that was blowing last night in Philadelphia?

Another great debate – not!

When Harris told Trump in front of an audience of about 75 million that in any negotiation “Putin would eat you for lunch,” she was indulging in a bit of displacement. It was she, not the Russian dictator who was dining on the former president. That was the second alimentary reference of the evening that went badly for Trump. The first – Trump’s vehement assertion that Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio were catching and eating local cats and dogs – was quickly refuted by one of the ABC News moderators, David Muir. He told Trump that his colleagues had called the Springfield city manager and that there were no credible reports of pets being snatched and consumed. “Talk about extreme” Harris added, unnecessarily.

And so it went. Harris mocked and scolded, Trump sputtered and fulminated. On abortion, Harris dispatched Trump’s repeated claim that “everybody wanted it returned to the states” by saying that a woman who is hemorrhaging from a miscarriage but denied a therapeutic abortion “doesn’t want that” and neither does a young girl who has been raped. Harris could have mentioned the more than one million women who obtained legal abortions in the U.S. in 2023, but those statistics remain politically taboo, at least in a presidential debate.

When Muir asked Trump if he had any regrets about his response to the January 6 riot, he predictably parried – at once claiming no responsibility for the mayhem, and that no crimes had been committed, except the dastardly shooting of Ashli Babbitt by Capital police. (Babbit’s killing was arguably needless, though she was the avant-garde of a mob attempting to storm a suite of Congressional offices.) And of course, Trump refused to concede that he had lost the 2020 election, saying he had won with a record 76 million votes. Harris’s annihilating reply was that Trump had been fired by 81 million voters.

Only on foreign policy did Trump score any conceivable points, but when a madman speaks truth, it sounds like lies. He was right that pre-invasion negotiations with Putin were fumbled, that “a deal is begging to be made,” and that the U.S. was “playing with World War Three.” But rather than engage any substantive geo-political discussion, (admittedly difficult in the allotted two minutes), Harris preferred to pontificate. She trotted out the domino theory, that a Putin victory in Ukraine would lead him to try to conquer Poland and then the whole of Europe and challenged Trump to say which side he was on. By refusing to take the bait, Trump won on substance but lost on style. He failed to follow-up and ask Harris what a Ukrainian victory would look like (a complete withdrawal of Russian forces from Ukrainian territory, including the Crimea?) and whether such a triumph was worth the likely cost – possibly including a wider European war. If not, shouldn’t the parties begin serious negotiations now? But Trump’s image of a negotiated settlement goes no further than the fantasy of himself standing before a bank of cameras and microphones, one arm draped around the shoulders of little Vladimir and the other around little Volodymyr.

Americans are focused on phony issues

ABC News and the two candidates aren’t the only ones responsible for the poor quality of the discussion at last night’s debate. The American electorate bears responsibility too. They are consistently concerned with what impacts them least, and least worried about what affects them most. Last week’s New York Times/Sienna College Poll, for example, ranks “the economy, including jobs and the stock market” (22%) and “immigration” (12%) as subjects of greatest concern, and “inequality” (3%) and climate change (1%) among the least.

Despite claims to the contrary, the overall state of the economy has improved since the end of the Trump administration. Overall growth (GDP), wages (adjusted for inflation), employment levels, and stock market valuations are up. Passage in 2021 of the Biden sponsored Child Tax Credit (part of the American Rescue Plan) cut childhood poverty in half, though refusal by Congressional Republicans the following year to renew the law, returned five million children to poverty. Well paid industrial jobs are increasing, especially in Republican states, and unions, led by the UAW, are increasing in power.

Instead of the rising cost of bacon (a food as poisonous to people as it is cruel to pigs), Americans should focus on the ongoing increase in inequality. The U.S. ranks 27^th (out of 82) in global economic mobility – well behind Slovenia, Ireland and the U.K., not to mention the Scandinavian countries. The child poverty rate remains stuck at about 16%. The overall poverty rate is 11% (defined as an individual salary below about $15,000), and the average personal savings rate is just 3% — that means almost nobody can save enough money either to buy a house or comfortably retire. To be born rich or poor in the U.S. is essentially a life sentence. Wage inequality has fallen slightly during the Biden administration, especially at the bottom of the wage distribution, but not nearly enough to indicate a significant trend. To paraphrase James Carville, it’s not the economy, it’s the inequality, stupid!

The second issue that most Americans focus on is immigration or “the border.” Nearly 30% of Americans, according to Gallup, think immigration is the most important issue facing the country, and 8 in 10 , according to a Monmouth Poll, think it is either a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem. Trump has staked his whole claim on the White House on “fixing the border”, including a pledge to forcibly deport some 20 million immigrants he calls “insane,” “murderers,” “vermin” and blood poisoners. (There are probably no more than 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.) In response to the blood libel, Kamala Harris has pledged to revive a bi-partisan plan promoted by Biden – and sunk by Trump – to significantly reduce asylum claims and periodically close the southern border when the number of migrants exceeds a given level. In short, she promises to do the same as Trump, only less.

If there is a crisis on the border, it’s a humanitarian one entirely of our own making. The economic embargo placed on Venezuela has forced hundreds of thousands into poverty and exile. Failure of the U.S. to uphold democratic norms in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, unwillingness to tackle the American demand for illegal drugs, labor exploitation by multinational corporations and local compradors, and climate change have all led to mass migration from Mexico, Central America and elsewhere. In 2022, more than 150,000 unaccompanied children were met by authorities on the U.S./Mexican border, with an unknown number – perhaps 120,000 – held in some kind of temporary or long-term custody. There are too few judges and legal advocates to handle the number of asylum applicants. The crisis is not the number of migrants to the U.S., it is our poor treatment of them.

Without migration, the U.S. would have a diminishing population, reduced productivity, lower living standards, and rising inflation. Whole industries – including hospitality, agriculture, construction and healthcare – would grind to a halt, if Trump was able to implement his planned mass deportations. More than half of all U.S. farmworkers are immigrants, and nearly 17% work in the healthcare industry. Over the next decade, migrants (legal and illegal) are projected to add an additional $7 trillion to the U.S. economy. If there’s an immigrant crisis in the U.S., it’s that there’s not enough of them.

Devil wind and climate change

To nobody’s surprise, global warming – the greatest human and environmental crisis of this or any other time – received short shrift at last night’s debate. There was just one question about it near the end of the debate, hedged with the preface that the issue was of great concern to “young people.” Harris started to answer, promisingly enough, by saying that the matter was not one for the future but the present, and that myriad American were already suffering from excessive heat, storms and flooding because of climate change. But then she quickly went off track, and spoke about industrial policy, car manufacturing, and economic nationalism. She concluded by boasting about increased U.S. production of natural gas! Trump refused to answer the question at all, preferring to talk up the wonders of tariffs, and a supposed Chinese bribe of the Biden family. Neither the moderators not Harris pressed Trump to return to answer the question. That was when I again heard in my ears Dylan’s nasal rendering of the phrase “idiot wind,” the first word somehow compressed into one plangent syllable. The single issue that will most impact debate viewers – in the U.S., along the Mexican border, in Europe and everywhere else — was the one thing that could not be spoken in what is likely to be the only presidential debate.

Idiot wind
Blowing every time you move your mouth….
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

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Kamala Harris won the debate. People being bombed in Gaza did not.

The banner headline across the top of the New York Times home page — “Harris Puts Trump on Defensive in Fierce Debate” — was accurate enough. But despite the good news for people understandably eager for Trump to be defeated, the Harris debate performance was a moral and political tragedy.

In Gaza “now an estimated 40,000 Palestinians are dead,” an ABC News moderator said. “Nearly 100 hostages remain. . . . President Biden has not been able to break through the stalemate. How would you do it?”

Vice President Harris replied with her standard wording: “Israel has a right to defend itself. We would. And how it does so matters. Because it is also true far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Children, mothers. What we know is that this war must end. It must when, end immediately, and the way it will end is we need a ceasefire deal and we need the hostages out.”

“End immediately”? Anyone who isn’t in fantasyland knows that the only way to soon end the slaughter of Palestinian civilians would be for the U.S. government — the overwhelmingly biggest supplier of Israel’s armaments — to stop sending weapons to Israel.

Meanwhile, a pivot to advocating for a cutoff of weapons to Israel would help Harris win the presidency. After the debate, the Institute for Middle East Understanding pointed out that the need to halt the weapons is not only moral and legal — it’s also smart politics. Polls are clear that most Americans want to stop arming Israel. In swing states, polling has found that a large number of voters say they’d be more likely to cast a ballot for Harris if she would support a halt.

What Kamala Harris and Donald Trump said about Israel and Gaza in their debate was predictable. Even more certain was what they absolutely would not say — with silences speaking loudest of all. “Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth,” Aldous Huxley wrote, describing “the greatest triumphs of propaganda.”

By coincidence, the debate happened on the same date as publication of a new afterword about the Gaza war in the paperback edition of my book War Made Invisible. To fill in for the debate’s abysmal silences, here are a few quotes from the afterword about the ongoing carnage:

+ “After the atrocities that Hamas committed on Oct. 7, the U.S. government quickly stepped up military aid to Israel as it implemented atrocities on a much larger scale. In truth, as time went on, the entire Israeli war in Gaza amounted to one gigantic atrocity with uncountable aspects.”

+ As with the steady massacres with bombs and bullets in Gaza since early October, “the Israeli-U.S. alliance treated the increasing onset of starvation, dehydration, and fatal disease as a public-relations problem.”

+ “In the war zone, eyewitness reporting and photojournalism were severely hindered if not thwarted by the Israeli military, which has a long record of killing journalists.”

+ “Although the credibility of Israel’s government tumbled as the Gaza war dragged on, the brawny arms of the Israel lobby — and the overall atmospheric pressure of media and politics — pushed legislators to approve new military aid. . . . Official pronouncements — and the policies they tried to justify — were deeply anchored in the unspoken premise that some lives really matter and some really don’t.”

+ The United States persisted in “violating not only the U.S. Conventional Arms Transfer Policy but also numerous other legal requirements including the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, the U.S. War Crimes Act, the Leahy Law, the Genocide Convention Implementation Act, and several treaties. For U.S. power politics, the inconvenient precepts in those measures were as insignificant and invisible as the Palestinian people being slaughtered.”

+ “What was sinister about proclaiming ‘Israel’s 9/11’ was what happened after America’s 9/11. Wearing the cloak of victim, the United States proceeded to use the horrible tragedy that occurred inside its borders as an open-ended reason to kill in the name of retaliation, self- protection, and, of course, the ‘war on terror.’ It was a playbook that the Israeli government adapted and implemented with vengeance.”

Israel’s war on 2.2 million people in Gaza has been “a supercharged escalation of what Israel had been doing for 75 years, treating human beings as suitable for removal and even destruction.” As Israel’s war on Gaza has persisted, “the explanations often echoed the post-9/11 rationales for the ‘war on terror’ from the U.S. government: authorizing future crimes against humanity as necessary in the light of certain prior events.”

That and so much more — left unsaid from the debate stage, dodged in U.S. mass media and evaded from the podiums of power in Washington — indict not only the Israeli government but also the U.S. government as an accomplice to mass murder that has escalated into genocide.

Silence is a blanket that smothers genuine democratic discourse and the outcries of moral voices. Making those voices inaudible is a key goal for the functioning of the warfare state.

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Last month, I reported on the Biden administration’s new nuclear doctrine to prepare the United States for a coordinated nuclear challenge from Russia, China, and North Korea.  The Biden doctrine revives the concept of “escalation dominance,” one of the main drivers of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s.  

President Biden’s neglect of arms control and disarmament means that the next president will inherit a nuclear landscape that is more threatening and volatile than any other since the Cuban missile crisis more than 60 years ago.  The Cuban missile crisis, however, was a wake up call for both President John F. Kennedy and General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, leading to a series of arms control and disarmament treaties beginning with the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963.  

We need another wake up call.

Currently, there is little discussion of reviving arms control and disarmament.  Instead the mainstream media and many commentators are making the case for additional nuclear weaponry and the modernization of weapons currently in the nuclear arsenal.  The influential British newsweekly, The Economist, is leading the way in this campaign, arguing that the concept of deterrence demands that the United States build up and modernize its nuclear arsenal.  An oped in the New York Times this week, written by the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, argues that credible deterrence will prevent our adversaries from “even considering a nuclear strike against America or its allies.”

Deterrence requires that nuclear weapons must be in a high state of readiness in order to address the danger of surprise attack, which increases the possibility of unintentional use of nuclear weapons.  We need a discussion of alternatives to deterrence, such as negotiations for confidence-building measures as well as arms control and disarmament.

Instead, we are getting a discussion of the need for low-yield nuclear weapons.  The Economist and others have been making the case for such weapons—20 kilotons of explosive power, roughly Hiroshima-sized—that can be delivered with “extreme precision and less collateral damage.”  U.S. think tanks, such as the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), have argued that the “line between low-yield tactical nuclear weapons and precision-guided conventional weapons in terms of their operational effects and perceived impact is blurring,” and that “nuclear arms are more efficient at destroying large-area targets.”

The current discussion is dangerously reminiscent of the nuclear discussion of the 1950s, which was dominated by false notions of a vast Soviet superiority in deployed nuclear ballistic missiles, the so-called “missile gap,” as well as the so-called “bomber gap” regarding strategic aircraft.  The conventional wisdom in the defense community was that we were facing a powerful enemy that was undertaking costly efforts to exploit the potential of nuclear weapons in order to gain unchallenged global dominance.  Is history abut to repeat itself, particularly in view of exaggerated concerns regarding greater threats from both China and North Korea as well as the possibility of Sino-Russian collusion?

Henry Kissinger, the most famous and most controversial American diplomat of the 20th century, was responsible for initiating the idea that nuclear powers could wage a war that would involve limited use of nuclear weapons.  In his “Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy,” Kissinger made the case for limited uses of nuclear weapons, which attracted him to Richard Nixon who made Kissinger the national security adviser in 1969.  It was fifteen years before a U.S. president—Ronald Reagan— and a Soviet leader—Mikhail Gorbachev—agreed that a “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought,” and that the two sides must not “seek to achieve military superiority.”  The initiative for these statements originated with Gorbachev, and they received greater attention in Soviet media than in their U.S. counterparts.

Now, we are facing a disturbing situation that finds the United States modernizing its nuclear arsenal at great cost; China ending its doctrine of limited nuclear deterrence and expanding its nuclear arsenal, and Russia threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine and issuing warnings of a World War III.  Russian publications are discussing the possibility of placing a nuclear weapons in space.  U.S. defense analysts project that China could have as many as 1,000 nuclear warheads over the next ten years.  

Washington’s “Nuclear Employment Guidance” is based on the threat of nuclear coordination between Moscow and Beijing, but there is no evidence of such coordination and it’s unlikely that these former adversaries are formalizing their nuclear and strategic plans.  U.S. guidance is based on worst-case analysis, but there needs to be a recognition of similar worst-case analyses in Moscow and Beijing. In view of greatly expanded U.S. defense spending over the past several years as well as the discussion of a strategic missile defense, Russia and China have much to worry about.  Even worse, the United States quietly announced in July that it will deploy conventionally armed ground-launched intermediate-range missiles in Germany on a rotational basis beginning in 2026.  This is madness.

Iran’s nuclear program is also expanding in size and sophistication, and North Korea has a nuclear arsenal that rivals three nuclear powers—Israel, India, and Pakistan—that were never part of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.  Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.  North Korea’s Kim Jong Un has similarly indicated an interest in discussing nuclear matters with the United States.

The only remaining nuclear disarmament treaty—the New START Treaty—expires in February 2026, and there is no indication that U.S. and Russian officials are planning for talks to renew the treaty.  The election year predictably finds Kamala Harris and Donald Trump boasting about maintaining and improving U.S. military prowess.  Next to nothing is known about Harris’s view of nuclear matters, and the thought of facing a new nuclear age with Trump back in the White House is positively frightening.  We are confronting this difficult situation because the Bush and Trump administrations abrogated two of the most important disarmament treaties in history: the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.

It’s time for the nuclear experts of the nine nuclear powers as well as the general public to read M.G. Sheftall’s “Hiroshima: The Last Witnesses.”  These first-person accounts educate and re-educate the global community on the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago.  The accounts of gut-wrenching recollections should be enough to make any sane individual reject the notion of “modernizing” nuclear weapons or discussing “tactical” uses of nuclear weapons.  

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Photo by Sarah

Polish-British author Joseph Conrad wrote that colonialism is not a pretty thing when one looks at it closely. Conrad, a subject of two colonial empires, well understood the institution’s grotesque features.

When a group of people, let’s call them Group A, occupies the territory of another population—we can call them Group B—and implants its own people on Group B’s land, social relations rapidly deteriorate. A person can comb history books and find precisely zero exceptions to this.

The oppression and conflict that Conrad said invariably came from various forms of colonialism 100 years ago equally apply to the twenty-first century. I especially have in mind Israel’s illegal occupation of the remaining 20 percent of historic Palestine (Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem) and Russia’s illegal occupation of about 25 percent of Ukraine (the Donbas region in the east and the Crimean Peninsula).

Here are some typical features of colonial expansion:

Group A steals much of the land that has been consigned to Group B by international law, consensus, convention, or treaty. But Group A gives all those things two enthusiastic middle fingers. Its leadership wants what it wants and sends in the troops. They throw many people from Group B out of their homes, and where they end up is none of Group A’s concern.

For those from Group B who get to stay in their homes (for now), soldiers from Group A can with impunity come into those homes and take away whomever they wish without charge. Detainees can be gone for days, months, or years. The captives can be children or grown-ups. They can be students, militants, soldiers, protestors, professors, bakers, nurses, or farmers.

Some return with physical marks on their bodies. Then, of course, there is the inevitable sexual violence. Many return with deep psychological scars. They are sometimes not recognizable to others and often not even to themselves. Some never return in any sense to the lives they led before the men wearing foreign uniforms and insignia showed up on their doorstep.

Group A’s army also allows its civilian settlers, many of whom are religious fanatics, or uber-nationalists (there is little difference between them in my view), or people who just want a pleasant life subsidized by their state, to harass, beat, steal from, and shoot at civilians from Group B.

The army also lets them commit arson, burning homes and the people inside them. If Group A can’t have it, they will burn it down.

Also, Group A’s army uses civilians from Group B as human shields when they want to go into areas where Group B’s civilian population, after years of abuse, has cultivated a deep hatred for the soldiers of Group A.

Group A’s army and government severely restrict the movement of Group B’s people. There are curfews. There are also roads and facilities for its own citizens, but people from Group B are suspect and are not allowed to use those designated roads or facilities. If they use them, they will be punished.

After all, Group B is less than human. Some places are fit for people, not two-legged beasts.

Group A recruits some from group B to be police, to surveil their own population. They collaborate so they can have a molecule of power and privilege, anything that elevates them a millimeter above the collective heads of the other two-legged beasts.

Group A’s leaders encourage defaming, impeding, or destroying the cultural practices and artifacts of Group B. They ransack, bulldoze, or burn cultural centers, places of worship, museums, schools, and community centers. Whatever preserves a people’s memory or propels their culture into the future has to be dissolved. At the very least, those cultures are interrogated and found to be substandard.

Members of Group A believe that Group B has no identity. Pseudo historian and amateur ethnographer Vladimir Putin said there are no Ukrainians. That is a strange statement given that he is at war with Ukrainians, not faceless, nameless phantoms. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, an extreme right-wing figure who has helped to author Palestinian suffering and dispossession, claims there is no such thing as a Palestinian. One wonders whom he has worked so hard to expel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also implied that there are no Palestinians when he said that a group of people called Palestinians have no right to a state.

Group A can then endow itself with a rationale: Non-people don’t have a claim to anything. Only human beings can own land and houses. Only people can have a country.

Italian writer and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi said that it’s far easier to do horrible things to those who have been turned into non-people. I don’t know if Netanyahu has read him, but it seems that the Israeli prime minister regularly puts a version of the dehumanization that Levi observed into practice. In fact, Netanyahu has made a career of it.

However, all this cannot go on forever, so a minority of people from Group B sometimes do horrible things to the soldiers or civilians of Group A. They do it out of vengeance, the pain of irrevocable loss, or a doomed attempt at deterrence. At root, there is the desperation of a people with little or nothing left to lose.

Speaking of writers, if Putin ever read Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work, he read it poorly. Dostoevsky’s novels feature characters who feel they have little left to lose. When people’s lives are denuded of meaning and severed from human connection, they can become very dangerous. Powerful sociopaths, like Putin and Netanyahu, are often blind to this simple fact of cause and effect.

So, it’s not about religion or some genetically endowed hatred for Group Such-and-Such. It’s the conditions that Group A creates and imposes, and their demonization of an entire (non-) people that compels a fraction of Group B to take it upon themselves to wield a knife, fire a gun, or strap on a bomb.

In addition to dealing with desperate individuals, if a colonizer only manages to dominate part of a place or incompletely suppresses it, and that place still has an army, then they are up against lots of angry, traumatized people who have guns and training. Currently, Putin is facing this dilemma.

Group A always prefers expansion over the security of its people. It is willing to expose them to severe threats so it can get what it wants. And what it wants is to grow in its rapid, chaotic, unmeasured manner, like a collection of cancer cells, even if the malformed mass kills off some of its own. Planners know the risks, but they are willing to accept them even though most of the rest of us do not.

Colonialisms past or present produced and continue to produce control, power, and wealth. They also generated and continue to generate oceans of violence and misery.

You do not, dear reader, need to be a trained historian or political scientist (I am not) to apply these scenarios, to one degree or another, to what is happening today in various places around the world.

Sometimes, there is little we can do to stop human rights abuses and violations of international law that are the results of colonialism; at other times, there is much we can do. In the cases of Ukraine and Palestine, there is much we can do.

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Labor disputes are continuing to rage between unionized hotel workers and the bosses at three major chains: Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt.

Over Labor Day weekend, more than 10,000 UNITE HERE members went on strike at 25 hotels in nine cities after months of unresolved contract negotiations. While most are back on the job for now, they’re urging guests not to patronize any of their target hotels until the union secures good new contracts. (They’ve mapped hotels with labor disputes here)

Among the workers’ key demands: higher wages in line with the rising cost of living, fair staffing and workloads, improved benefits, and a reversal of pandemic-era cuts.

Of course the companies are claiming they can’t afford to meet the union demands. But a hard look at these hotels’ spending practices shows they’ve had no shortage of extra cash when it comes to enriching those at the top.

Hilton, Marriott, and Hyatt have blown $16 billion combined on stock buybacks over the past five years. This shady financial maneuver artificially inflates the value of a company’s shares. This, in turn, inflates the value of the stock-based pay that makes up about 80 percent of CEO compensation.

To put that buyback outlay in perspective, it’s about four and a half times as much as these three hotel giants spent during this period on long-term capital expenditures, such as technology upgrades, hotel improvements, and other investments needed for long-term competitiveness.

The hotel chains’ spending on CEO pay-inflating stock buybacks amounted to 16 times as much as their contributions to employee retirement funds over the past five years.

It’s hardly a surprise that the gaps between CEO and worker pay at these firms are gigantic.

The three men at the helms of Marriott, Hilton, and Hyatt each made more than $20 million last year, while median pay for their workers ranged from $44,805 at Marriott to $48,435 at Hilton. The CEO-worker pay ratios at these firms ranged from 460 to 1 at Hyatt to 549 to 1 at Hilton.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The horrors of the Second World War sparked the creation of international organizations and international laws to ensure that such horrors would never occur again.  The center piece of these international bodies was the United Nations and its regional and functional agencies that were designed to provide international guardrails to limit the use of force.  The National Security Act of 1947 was designed in part to make sure that U.S. administrations played an active role in managing and even transforming the international community.

There was an economic component as well, including the Bretton Woods System, which included the World Bank to stimulate international development in those countries most devastated by the war.  The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was designed to manage international trade, and the International Monetary Fund was created to monitor the balance of payments.  U.S. officials were at the center of all of these institutions, placing Washington at the center of the world of multilateralism.  The current global trend toward isolationism and ultra-nationalism is threatening these institutions.

As a result of increased international activity, the staff of the White House grew from several dozen individuals in the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt to the current level of more than several thousand in the administration of President Joe Biden.  The bureaucratic growth was marked by the Council of Economic Advisers (1946), the National Security Council (1947), the Special Trade Representative ((1963), the Office of Management and Budget (1970), and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1976).  The Supreme Court has demonstrated exceptional deference to the powers of the president in the field of national security, and the U.S. Congress largely accepted without question the U.S. role in the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and a variety of other international organizations and security arrangements.  

Nevertheless, there are too many engines of chaos in the international community that point to greater violence far beyond the boundaries of the immediate protagonists.  Two and a half years of war between Russia and Ukraine threaten to engulf Central and Eastern Europe in a greater conflict. The International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, but that has not restricted his travels to member countries of the ICC let alone ameliorated his terrorist tactics in waging the war. 

A year of war in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas threatens a greater regional conflict that could involve two major non-Arab players, the United States and Iran.  Again, the ICC is considering arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, but there has been no let up in the genocidal campaign that Israel is waging in Gaza or the forced displacement of Palestinian civilians in the West Bank.  Israeli use of U.S.-supplied weaponry is certainly inconsistent with international law, and points to U.S. complicity in Netanyahu’s war.  Only Britain thus far has demonstrated a willingness to limit the supply of certain weapons to Israel.

Meanwhile, the West pays no attention to the global catastrophe that is Sudan, African’s third largest country, where millions have been displaced, tens of thousands have been slaughtered, and there may soon be a famine that will rival the famine that enveloped Ethiopia in the 1980s.  Like Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Gaza, the civil war in Sudan will be an engine for chaos far beyond its borders.  The nations that border Sudan are already fragile, particularly Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Libya.  There is arms smuggling throughout the region, and it is very likely that Sudan—like Libya—will split into two geographic parts.  And there is the added risk from outside participants—such as Russia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Iran— that supply the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) or the Rapid Support Forces RSF).  The ICC is currently gathering evidence of the crimes and atrocities committed by the SAF and the RSF.

With the exception of the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928, which renounced war as an instrument of national policy, there are no international laws that regulate—let alone prevent—war.  Genocide and torture are banned by various protocols, but this has not gotten in the way of Putin, Netanyahu, or the Bush administration in fighting the Global War on Terror.  The atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were acts of terrorism because neither city was a strategic target, and the overall purpose was to force a Japanese civilian community to pressure its leaders to surrender to the United States, the very definition of terrorism.  

U.S. atrocities in Vietnam should have led to a serious debate regarding the need to differentiate between military and civilian targets, but there has been no international discussion of the importance of agreeing to humane rules of war.  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of innocent civilians are being killed in Ukraine and Gaza, and more than 150,000 civilians have been slaughtered in Sudan.  

Two decades of U.S. warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan led to large numbers of civilian deaths.  The Defense Department went to significant lengths to control and suppress information about the human cost of war. It invited U.S. journalists to “embed” with military units but required them to submit their stories to the military for pre-publication review in order to co-opt the embedded journalists and make independent and objective reporting more difficult. It has erased journalists’ footage of civilian deaths in Afghanistan. And it has refused to disclose statistics on civilian casualties. “We don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks once said.

The United States is devoting insufficient attention and resources to the possibility of bilateral dialogue with potential adversaries that could ameliorate the international horrors that currently exist.  Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has stated that there are “no barriers” to nuclear negotiations with the United States.  There has been no response from the Biden administration. China wants the United States to ease its pressures on Beijing in order to stabilize bilateral relations and to enter discussions of nuclear matters.  At this point in time, President Joe Biden is the first U.S. president to avoid travel to China in more than 50 years.  Putin is looking for ways to reopen a dialogue with the United States, but Biden believes he has nothing to say to the Russian president.

The Biden administration is taking credit for building an alliance system in Asia against China, rebuilding the alliance in Europe against Russia, and working to isolate Iran in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.  Impressive partnerships have been formed with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines in the Asia Pacific region; NATO has been expanded to its geographic limits in West and East Europe; and efforts are being made to encourage Arab nations in North Africa and the Middle East to isolate Iran.  

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Photo by Mohammed Ibrahim.

September 1, 2024, twenty-seven Palestinian families woke up to mourn their loved ones, including at least 11 who were killed at a “safe” shelter, Safad School in Zaitune neighborhood east of Gaza city. On the same day, the Israeli occupying army recovered the bodies of six Israeli captives, who died as a direct or indirect result of an Israeli incursion into a tunnel in Rafah.

By the end of the day, the smiling faces and names of these six Israelis were prominently featured across digital and print media, while the murdered Palestinians, were reduced to mere statistics, nameless and faceless. Both groups, however, share one tragic commonality: their demise was caused by the same killer. Bombing without discrimination is a murder without distinction.

Despite being warned of the risk of attempting to release the prisoners by force, Netanyahu opted to sacrifice the Israeli captives to eliminate a political burden that could be seen as an obstacle to achieve his “war goals.” Their disappearance⎯by a deal or death⎯would free Netanyahu’s hand and ease pressure from the public, who otherwise supports his war of genocide in Gaza.

Inarguably, there is an inherent interest for the Palestinian Resistance in protecting the life of the Israelis, simply to exchange them with Palestinian hostages held in Israeli jails. On the other hand, the Netanyahu coalition government has a political motive to reduce the value of Israeli prisoners in the hands of the Palestinian, and their death could be an option.

The Israeli public protesting in the streets today, individually and collectively, are responsible for nurturing Netanyahu’s unrealistic war objectives. The findings in a Pew Research poll conducted last March and April revealed that 67% of Israelis supported Netanyahu’s “war goals.” In fact, a staggering 86% believed Gazans should not have self-governance, not even the Palestinian Authority. Less than half of Israelis supported prisoner exchange, and 60% opposed halting the war for any such exchange.

In December, 2023, support for Netanyahu’s war goals was even higher, between 76 and 84 percent. It’s significant to mention that the support for the war among Israeli Jews mirrored that of Jewish Americans. In the U.S. 62% of American Jews approved the Israel’s war conduct, compared to 38% of the general American population.

These statistics reflect a broader issue of deep-seated Israeli Jewish dehumanization of Palestinians. A bigotry germinated in the political Zionist culture, where in the Israeli religious and cultural plurality most Jews perceive themselves to be more equal than non-Jews. Before anyone from the professional victim pack cries out October 7, this predominant attitude among Israeli Jews is neither an anomaly nor a new phenomenon.

In a polling eight years ago, 2016, an undisputed majority of Jewish Israelis (79%) believed that Jews are entitled to “preferential treatment” over non-Jews. When asked if Palestinians should be deported from their homes, the majority of Israelis agreed.

Imagine, the American Jewish leadership protestation if 40% (1/2 of the Israeli percentage) of white or Christian Americans supported a preference over the other. In the meantime, progressive Americans can ruminate on their reaction if a similar percentage of Americans favored expelling Native Americans from their homes.

Palestinians need not imagen, for this is what they face under the American financed Israeli Jewish apartheid.

It is this Israeli public mindset that drove Netanyahu and his racist ministers to take a chance to recover the Israeli prisoners by force, calculating that success would yield significant political rewards from the same public who is protesting today. In case of failure, the retrieval of bodies reduces the value of the exchange for the Palestinian Resistance. In other words, the Netanyahu coalition favors to play victim over dead Israelis rather than releasing Palestinian hostages from Israeli jails.

Currently, there are approximately 97 Israeli captives held in Gaza, with 33 confirmed dead, most due to Israel’s indiscriminate bombings. Additionally, Netanyahu has “successfully” recovered the bodies of 37 dead settlers in the past eleven months. In spite of this blunder, Netanyahu capitalized on the innate anti-Palestinian Israeli Jewish bigotry to maintain strong support among Israelis, and American Jews for the war of genocide in Gaza.

This time, however, the same public who supported Netanyahu’s “war goals,” amassed in the streets of Tel Aviv blaming him for choosing to save his government coalition at the expense of Israeli prisoners. Even U.S. President Joe Biden broke his public silence blaming Netanyahu for not doing enough to reach a deal.

Biden’s latest remarks contradicted his own government officials who falsely absolved the Israeli prime minister regarding the ceasefire negotiation. Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken claimed Netanyahu had accepted the so called “bridging proposal,” while CIA Deputy Director, David Cohen blamed the Palestinian Resistance for the breakdown in ceasefire talks.

To contextualize the extent of the influence of the Israeli firsters within the Biden administration, consider recent developments in Israel. During last week’s Israeli cabinet meeting, the Minister of War stormed out accusing Netanyahu of endangering the lives of Israeli prisoners. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Israelis filled the streets protesting Netanyahu’s mercurial position on the ceasefire plan. This is while American officials and Israeli firsters, Sayanim, including Zionists like Blinken and Cohen, lie blatantly about Netanyahu’s acceptance of a ceasefire plan when in reality he added 11th-hour demands derailing the plan that was already agreed to by Palestinians.

Western appeasement of Israel, based on the flawed belief that this would give them leverage over Israeli leaders, is rooted in a corrupt philosophy promoted by Israeli firsters, Sayanim. Israeli firsters in the West use their positions to sanctify Israeli Jewish life while they demonize the Palestinian life. In the media, the Sayanim excuse Israeli atrocities against Palestinians, and as government officials, they sanitize Israeli malevolency by forging government expert’s reports helping Israel escape accountability and avoid global scrutiny.

Surrounded by Sayanim, Joe Biden has been beguiled by Israeli firsters throughout his political career. This is one of the many reasons the “sanctified” 6 Israeli Jews count more than the life of the 41,000 “dehumanized” Palestinians.

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Vaccination campaign, Gaza, Youtube screengrab.

The Israeli war on Gaza has become a war on Palestinian children. This was as true on October 7 as it is today.

On August 17, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for a seven-day ceasefire to allow children in Gaza to be vaccinated against polio. “I am appealing to all parties to provide concrete assurances right away, guaranteeing humanitarian pauses for the campaign,” he said.

The first such case of the devastating epidemic was discovered in the town of Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

“It is scientifically known that for every 200 virus infections, only one will show the full symptoms of polio, while the remaining cases may present mild symptoms such as a cold or a slight fever,” Palestinian Health Minister Majed Abu Ramadan said on that same day.

This means that the virus may have spread to all parts of Gaza Strip, where the entire healthcare system has been largely destroyed.

The ten-month-old Palestinian baby who was first to contract the poliovirus, like many more, never received a vaccination dose against the disease.

To prevent an even greater disaster in war-stricken Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO), along with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), said that they have to vaccinate 640,000 children throughout Gaza within a short period of time.

The task, however, is a difficult one, as the vast majority of Gazans are crammed into unsafe refugee camps – massive tent encampments, mostly in central Gaza with no access to clean water or electricity.

They are surrounded by over 330,000 tons of waste, which has further contaminated already undrinkable water which, according to experts, may have been the cause of the poliovirus.

The challenge of saving Gaza’s children is complicated by the fact that Israeli bombs continue to be dropped on every part of Gaza, including the so-called ‘safe zones’, which were declared by Israel soon after the start of the war.

The other problem is that Gaza has, for months, subsisted without electricity. Without an efficient cooling system, the majority of the vaccines could become unusable.

But there is more to the suffering of Gaza’s children than the lack of vaccination.

As of August 19, at least 16,480 children have been killed as a direct result of the war, in addition to thousands more who remain missing, presumed dead. The number, according to the Palestinian Minister of Health in Gaza, includes 115 babies.

Many children have starved to death, and “at least 3,500 children in Gaza are facing (the same fate) amid a lack of food and malnutrition under Israeli restrictions on the delivery of food,” a ministry spokesman said.

Additionally, so far, more than 17,000 children in Gaza have either lost one or both parents since the start of the war on October 7.

One of the main reasons as to why Gaza’s children account for the majority of victims of the war is that homes, schools and displacement shelters have been the main targets of the relentless bombardment.

According to a statement by the UN Experts last April, “more than 80% of schools in Gaza (have been) damaged or destroyed.”

“It may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” they wrote.

The trend of targeting schools continues. On August 18, Palestine’s Education Minister, Amjad Barham said that over 90 percent of all Gaza schools have been destroyed, the official Palestinian news agency, WAFA reported.

Of the 309 schools, 290 have been destroyed as a result of Israeli bombing. This has left 630,000 students with no access to education.

While homes and schools can be rebuilt, the precious lives of killed children cannot be restored.

According to the Palestinian Ministry of Education, as of July 2, 8,572 students in Gaza and 100 in the occupied West Bank have been killed at the hands of the Israeli army. 14,089 students in Gaza and 494 in the West Bank have also been injured.

These are the worst losses suffered by Palestinian children within a relatively brief period of time since the Nakba, the destruction of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. The tragedy worsens by the day.

No child, let alone a whole generation of children, should endure this much suffering, regardless of the political reasoning or context.

International and humanitarian law has designated a “special respect and protection” for children during times of armed conflict, the international humanitarian law databases of the Red Cross resolve.  These laws may apply to Palestinian children in theory, but certainly not in practice.

The betrayal of these children by the international community shall stain the collective consciousness of humankind for decades to come.

Indeed, this is a war on Palestinian children – a war that must stop before a whole generation of Palestinian children is completely erased.

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In the U.S. in 2022, 49,476 people died by suicide, and there were approximately 1.6 million suicide attempts. Not included in suicide statistics is the even more common U.S. “death of despair” of drug overdose death, numbering 107,941 in 2022. While most of us are not attempting to kill our pain in a manner that puts us in the emergency room or the morgue, the majority of Americans are less dramatically trying to disconnect from painful lives.

It is convenient for apologists of U.S. society to see those of us overwhelmed by our pain—anxious, depressed, dissociating, or in some other way having difficulty functioning—as suffering from a “mental illness” and in need of “treatment.” However, the more that Americans have bought the idea that there is an epidemic of mental illness which requires greater access to treatment, the more fucked up we are all getting, and the more we enable a fucked up society to become increasingly more so. Not only is psychiatric treatment—which for most patients means psychiatric drugs—not helping many of them while making some feel even worse; we have also been sidetracked from examining what it is about society that is fucking up so many of us, and we have been diverted from pursuing those nooks and crannies that have yet to be dehumanized.

First, how are the majority of us today disconnecting from our painful lives? Next, what is the core source of our painful lives? And finally, what is a path that makes more sense than increasingly more mental health treatment?

Using Drugs to Disconnect

One way to disconnect from our emotional pain is through psychoactive drugs, which includes not only cannabis, alcohol, and illicit hard drugs, but a wide array of psychiatric drugs. Drugs are by no means the only way we try to disconnect, but I will begin with them.

Recently reported in the journal Addiction, a 2022 U.S. survey revealed that there are now “more daily and near daily” cannabis users (17.7 million) than there are such high-frequency alcohol users (14.7 million). While far more people continue to drink alcohol than use cannabis, the median alcohol user reported drinking 4 to 5 days in the past month compared to the median cannabis consumer who used it 15 to 16 days in the past month; and cannabis users were 7.4 times more likely than alcohol drinkers to use it on a daily basis.

While there is little hypocrisy among alcohol and cannabis users about trying to disconnect from their unpleasant realities to feel better, there is enormous hypocrisy when it comes to psychiatric drugs among some users and most prescribers, who would rather call these drugs “medication,” even though these drugs are in the same psychoactive category as alcohol and cannabis.

Thankfully, there are a handful of non-hypocritical, non-bullshitting psychiatrists such as Joanna Moncrieff, co-chairperson of the Critical Psychiatry Network and author of The Myth of the Chemical Cure (2008). Moncrieff points out, “Psychiatric drugs are psychoactive substances, like alcohol and heroin. . . . Alcohol helps to reduce social anxiety not because it corrects an underlying biochemical imbalance, but because features of alcohol induced intoxication include relaxation and disinhibition.” Moncrieff explains that psychiatric drugs—rather than correcting an abnormal state in the manner of insulin for diabetes— “induce an abnormal or altered state,” and are in the same category as alcohol.

Just how many of us are using psychiatric drugs? In 2020, it was reported that 16.5% of U.S. adults were prescribed psychiatric drugs; so out of a U.S. adult population of 258.3 million in 2020, 42.6 million adults were taking the edge off with prescribed “medication.” This total does not include the millions more Americans under 18 put on psychiatric drugs, often to make their inability to adjust to an alienating school and other surroundings less painful for their parents.

Disconnecting By Other Means

Today, much of the U.S. economy is fueled by buying and selling that which disconnects us from painful realities. For many of us, our “drug of choice” is not an actual drug.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), during his lifetime, saw religion serving as the major drug of choice, as he famously said about religion in 1843: “It is the opium of the people.”

With the rise of the corporatocracy and the loss of power of both the Mafia and the Catholic Church, “deadly sins” such as greed, lust, and gluttony have been legalized and commercialized, not only providing huge profits for the corporatocracy, but also providing the ruling class with other non-drug disconnects for those individuals who are turned off by organized religion.

Gambling—the buzz of betting, winning, and losing—is one of the most powerful ways to disconnect from how fucked up we feel about our lives. Statista reported in 2023, “The gross gaming revenue of the gambling industry in the U.S. reached almost 53 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, growing significantly over the 2020 figure.” Problem gambler statistics include: two million American adults meet severe gambling criteria; four to six million American adults meeting mild or moderate gambling criteria; and Americans in their early twenties are the fastest-growing group of problem gamblers (one study of college students estimated the percentage of “disordered gamblers” to be 7.89%). Once upon a time, Americans had to get off our asses to be a problem gambler, but now all it takes is a smart phone to place bets.

Porn? Worldmetrics.org reports that “Pornography is a $12 billion industry in the United States,” and, “The global porn industry is estimated to be worth over $97 billion,” a global industry that many Americans are enriching. Worldwide, worldmetrics.org reports “10% of adults admit to internet sexual addiction”; and in the U.S., the average age of first exposure to porn is eleven; 40 million Americans are regular visitors to porn sites; and 200,000 Americans are “porn addicts.”

Overeating may top the list of non-drug ways Americans try to disconnect from the pain of our lives. While obesity is sometimes the product of an unlucky slow metabolism (sometimes caused by psychiatric drugs), most obesity results from overeating in order to kill our emotional pain—including the pain of loneliness and boredom. How obese are Americans? Assessed between 2017 to 2020, the prevalence of obesity among U.S. adults 20 and over was 41.9%, and the prevalence of severe obesity was 9.2%, according to the CDC, which notes: “This means that more than 100 million adults have obesity, and more than 22 million adults have severe obesity.” An increasing number of us eat to kill our emotional pain, then become obese, which damages our physical health, which causes us even more suffering.

Shopping? “Compulsive buying” is routinely defined as uncontrolled urges to buy with resulting significant adverse consequences such as bankruptcy or a spouse demanding a divorce. Using this definition, a telephone survey found 5.8% of Americans qualified for compulsive buying. And millions more Americans, without significant adverse consequences, are buying shit that they don’t need in order to divert themselves from their dissatisfying lives.

Two of my personal favorite disconnects are spectator politics and spectator sports. The best spectator-politics buzz of my life was the 1973 Watergate Hearings, but spectator politics doesn’t seem to have the diversionary value it once had for me. And spectator politics can often increase pain, which I first experienced as a kid when the televised Vietnam War resulted in great anxiety about a future of either getting killed in a war that seemed to have no end, fleeing to Canada, or becoming one of those miserable male teachers in my school avoiding the draft. Luckily for me, when I was thirteen in 1969, my favorite New York City sports teams—the Jets, Mets, and Knicks—suddenly transformed from futile and frustrating to champions; and the buzz they provided made them my “gateway drugs” that began a lifelong “drug addiction” to using spectator sports to disconnect from painful realities.

The above list of non-drug ways of disconnecting is by no means a comprehensive one. From playing video games to watching gamers play video games on YouTube, the list of diversions in our consumer society is damn near endless.

The Source of the Pain We Are Disconnecting From

In the 1960s and 1970s, there were many prominent thinkers dissecting our increasing dehumanization. A small sample from this group of well-known authors who immediately come to mind include: Erich Fromm, Lewis Mumford, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, Jane Jacobs, E.F. Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, Kirkpatrick Sale, Jerry Mander, John McKnight, and Wendell Berry.

Back in that era, the misery caused by capitalism—the prioritizing of profit over life resulting in human beings feeling alienated—was a given; and so original thinkers were delving into just how dehumanization was playing out throughout society: from technology, to schooling, to healthcare, to transportation, to the mass media, to neighborhoods and communities, to architecture and urban planning, and to every aspect of our lives. Back then, it was not all that radical to conclude that we are increasingly being forced to become machine components alienated from our humanity so as to fit into a large machine.

Lewis Mumford, in this two-volumed The Myth of the Machine (1967, 1970), details the origins and the scope of the “megamachine”: a social and bureaucratic system that functions impersonally like a gigantic machine. To make the megamachine work efficiently, people are dehumanized to be machine cogs, and Mumford describes the structure that makes it possible for authoritarian control over large populations be it in a labor machine, a military machine, a school machine, or a healthcare machine.

My experience is that while alienated young critical thinkers nod in intellectual agreement to a neoliberal capitalist explanation for their malaise, they resonate emotionally to the idea of being forced to be dehumanized cogs so as to fit into a particular machine within the megamachine.

There are of course different experiences of the megamachine.

There are those of us who simply cannot fit into any labor machine, becoming homeless or institutionalized in a prison, mental hospital, or in some other way.

Then there are those of us who are able to adjust and adapt enough to fit into a money-making machine so as to not end up on the streets, but pay the price of alienation from our humanity. Some of us experience that alienation in anxiety, depression, dissociations, and various ineffectual rebellions, which today are commonly called “mental illnesses.” While others, in denial of their alienation, become capable only of relationships with machine-like people, incapable of a truly loving human relationship, including with their spouse and children.

Then there are the most fucked up of all. These are the control-freaks atop of hierarchies who are running large machines within the megamachine. We’re talking about Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates. We’re talking about the most frighteningly fucked up machine-like individuals in society.

To be sure, a handful of Americans have lucked into a way of obtaining money that is somewhat outside the direct control of the megamachine, but most of them are aware that their lucky deal can be eliminated at any time by the megamachine. Moreover, they likely experience the pain of other components of the megamachine (for example, the healthcare machine); and they would be incredibly lucky not to experience the pain of the megamachine’s crushing of an unlucky family member or close friend.

What Are Our Options?

Sadly, it is quite realistic to be hopeless about dismantling the megamachine. Even during a time in U.S. history when the megamachine was nowhere near as technologically and militarily powerful as it is today, when Native Americans were far more cohesive and talented warriors than any group is today, they had no chance against machinery that has no shame about genocide, and had they continued their fight, the result would have been total genocide.

Certainly, a few times in U.S. history, political activism has made life within the megamachine less horrific. During the Great Depression in the 1930s, when financial impoverishment was causing severe pain for many people, New Deal legislation made the financial lives of some of them less painful. And during the 1960s and 1970s, the activism of Ralph Nader and Nader’s Raiders resulted in less physically dangerous surroundings through the creation of theOccupation and Safety Health Act, Environmental Protection Agency, Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act, Safe Water Drinking Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and other health and safety measures.

However, throughout U.S. history, the megamachine has only grown in scope and power, and its destructive impact on us has been both direct and indirect.

The dehumanizing impact of the megamachine is direct when, for example, workers are fully aware of simply being replaceable machine cogs who receive nothing of value in return for their efforts except money to survive in the megamachine. The impact is direct when, in addition to the labor machine, we suffer alienating dehumanization in various other machines such as in a school machine and healthcare machine.

The megamachine’s horrors are also indirect. One of the few positive developments in my mental health profession is increasing awareness of the powerful relationship between “adverse childhood experiences” (such as emotional and physical abuse and neglect) with later emotional and physical difficulties. However, the seldom-asked question in our society is why so many parents are abusing, neglecting, and otherwise traumatizing their children? Abusive and neglectful parents are themselves almost always products of the megamachine’s violence (including its wars, layoffs, and other traumatizations), resulting in powerlessness, resentment, rage, substance abuse, and little frustration tolerance in parenting, which results in adverse childhood experiences.

Big Pharma and their partners in psychiatry have successfully sold a biochemical, individual-defect story of our malaise, which has made billions of dollars for drug companies. This narrative also enables the megamachine to go unchallenged. The “mental illness” explanation for suffering is today the cultural norm, and those remaining critics of the megamachine’s destructive impact are now, unlike the 1960s and 1970s, pushed far to the margins of society.

Moreover, the mental health machine has been an abject failure when it comes to helping people. Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 2002-2015, acknowledged in 2011, “Whatever we’ve been doing for five de­cades, it ain’t working. When I look at the numbers—the number of sui­cides, the number of disabilities, the mortality data—it’s abysmal, and it’s not getting any better.” And in 2021, New York Times concluded that psychiatry had done “little to improve the lives of the millions of people living with persistent mental distress. Almost every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use—went the wrong direc­tion, even as access to services expanded greatly.”

Mental health machine “treatment”—be it biological, chemical, electrical, or behavioral techniques—is aimed at adjustment to the megamachine. Psychoactive drugs are the only treatment employed by the overwhelming majority of psychiatrists, while a few of them also use electroshock. And most of my psychologist colleagues offer techniques such as cognitive-behavioral therapy to help people adjust to the megamachine.

So, if dismantling the megamachine any time soon is unrealistic, what makes sense?

First, it helps to recognize the reality that the megamachine—directly and indirectly—results in painful alienation from one’s humanity and life in general, and this pain fuels anxiety, depression, suicidality, and other compulsions to disconnect and numb ourselves. To the extent that we do not deny, shame, or pathologize our disconnections as well as the pain that fuels them, we have a better chance to be accepting, loving, and wiser with ourselves and others.

Of great importance, it is helpful to acknowledge that while it is difficult to remain fully human within the megamachine, it is possible not to be completely damaged by it. To accomplish this, we can embrace “harm reduction,” an idea that comes to us from social justice advocates who recognize that, given the nature of society, illicit drug use will continue, but that there are less dangerous ways of using such drugs (for example, sterile syringes rather than dirty ones). Harm reduction can be applied to both drug and non-drug disconnects. Furthermore, not only is it helpful to embrace this concept for ourselves, by helping others navigate their machines with the least dangerous disconnects, we will feel more fully human.

Finally, while we can be realistic about the domination of the megamachine, we can also recognize that hidden nooks and crannies of non-machine life remain. We may have become so beaten down by the megamachine that we lack the energy to find those hidden cracks in which there are gems of humanity and life, so many of us need to acquire the energy required to keep seeking. If we keep searching, my experience is that we will eventually discover others who can energize us to keep looking, and when we find such people, we must value them. If we then find those nooks and crannies in which life remains, we can connect and restore some of our humanity, and we can become further revitalized by energizing other seekers.

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“Shock!“ was a most common reaction.  Yet the two elections in eastern Germany were not all that  surprising, just somewhat better or worse than expected, depending on which side you were on.

In Thuringia there was a clear victory, with 32.8 percent, for the Alternative for Germany (AfD), its first such victory in all of Germany! This gives it first choice in forming a state government to replace the ten-year rule of a LINKE; Bodo Ramelow. But since every other party has rejected all ties to AfD–thus far–it will hardly succeed, and the Christian Democrats (CDU) with 23.6 percent, will then get their turn at squaring the circle. For years the CDU ruled out any coalitions “with far right or left,” but except for a thin Social Democrat remnant (7.3 percent), the AfD, the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW) and the LINKE are all that is left to deal with. Some resolves will have to crumble. But which?

Is the AfD a fascist party? Björn Höcke, its boss in Thuringia, one of its three best-known national leaders and its main rabble-rouser, has never concealed his admiration for Germany’s days of swastika glory. He was recently fined for shouting the forbidden Nazi stormtrooper slogan “Alles für Deutschland” to a mob of tough-looking supporters. So at his next rally he shouted only ”Alles für…” and let them add the missing word. Openly racist and viciously anti-immigrant, his party pushed most other parties in a similar direction – to keep their voters. But it kept on growing, despite countless organized anti-AfD rallies and marches.

Historians recall that one hundred years ago, in 1924, Germany’s first basically fascist party gained government seats in Thuringia (under another name, since Hitler’s party had been briefly forbidden). In January 1930, three years before its all-German take-over, two Nazi Party men joined in a Thuringian coalition cabinet. Several Jewish leaders were forced to resign, the famous Bauhaus art school had to leave Weimar, Communist teachers and mayors were expelled, books banned, and Nazification of the police force was begun.  Can history repeat itself?

In neighboring Saxony the AfD came in second on Sunday,  only narrowly beaten – 31.9 to 30.6 -by the conservative Christian Democrats (CDU)), rather like pre-Trump Republicans in the USA. It was no great new victory; they have held first place in Saxony ever since 1990 when – with all the other lucky East Germans – they got “reunited” with West Germany. Yet somehow there are many ungrateful folk these days who do not fully appreciate their luck, and while the CDU just managed to end up with its nose ahead, its erstwhile partners all took dives. The Greens barely squeezed past the 5 percent dividing line in Saxony and can thus remain, feebly, in the state parliament. They failed to reach that line in Thuringia,  with only 3,2 percent. The Social Democrats lost feathers like any molting pigeons, getting measly single-digit results in both votes. And the big-biz-buddy Free Democrats (FDP), never ever properly appreciated in East German regions, failed to reach even two percent in both states and can now be written off. completely. It  is exactly those three loser parties that now rule the roost nationally in a so-called “traffic-light” coalition (the red-green-yellow party colors). It is currently judged to be the least popular in recent history. People everywhere are dissatisfied or disgusted.

But now both states face the staggering task of forming a majority government; trying to fit the remaining pieces together like a badly-kept jigsaw puzzle. Minority governments involving less than half the deputies and “tolerated” by other parties are permissible. But they risk constant blackmailing by the tolerators and are shaky as a last leaf in autumn, threatening to fall with every stronger breeze. In both states, therefore, CDU conservatives, lacking votes from the “moderate” partners they often despise on a national level but now dearly miss, may be forced to rely on far worse partners, the kind they loved to hate. Think George W. Bush teaming up with Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders!

Thus, aside from the far-far right AfD, which – at least thus far and despite many shared genes– only a few already dare to openly embrace, they find almost only the LINKE party and the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance, which broke away from it last January. The CDU – despite almost intestinal pain and anger – may now feel itself compelled to alter or ignore troublesome taboos and offer cabinet seats to those horrible LINKE “extremists”  or even local  Sahra adherents.

But there are questions and problems among them too. First of all, the LINKE is in miserable shape. From a national highpoint of 11.9 percent in 2009 its popularity has sagged lower and lower ever since, with a sad 4.9 percent in 2021, and now less than 3 percent, close to an electoral vanishing point. Its main strength always used to come from the former GDR areas. Now even this advantage is in tatters, only partly because old GDR enthusiasts are dying out. In its stronghold  Thuringia, where it once won 28 percent of the voters, somehow even having its Bodo Ramelow as the state’s prime minister for the past ten years didn’t prevent it on Sunday from dropping to fourth place with 13.2 percent.

It was far worse in Saxony, where the LINKE dropped from 10.4 to a pitiful 4.5. That number, less than 5, would have kept it from getting even a single seat in the state legislature in Dresden. But thanks to a lucky state rule, if a party elects two or more delegates directly in their own districts then it gets the number of seats based on its total percentage. Since just exactly two did win out, the party stays in with six seats. Both are from less reactionary Leipzig. The very controversial Julia Nagel, 45, has long been a popular leader in her large, very leftist young people’s neighborhood. The other, Nam Duy Nguyen, 38, is the son of two Vietnamese contract workers who chose to stay in eastern Germany after their jobs were lost during unification and now run a food kiosk. He won thanks to his team campaign knocking on over 40,000 doors, speaking to people about their problems and wishes, also his playing in the local soccer team, and his pledge to take only € 2500 of his income as deputy, contributing the rest to worthy causes. He received an amazing 40 percent of the vote, well ahead of all opponents! Just those two lone victories changed the line-up in the legislature and made them possible choices for a new coalition!

Far more decisive in electoral terms was the rise of Sahra Wagenknecht’s young alliance, which celebrated an even more jubilant victory than the AfD. Many, many people on the left rejoiced! In less than eight months the Alliance (or Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, hence BSW) had achieved two-digit results, almost twelve percent in Thuringia, over thirteen percent in Saxony, putting them in a remarkable third place in both, making it impossible to ignore them and leading perhaps to invitations to join one or both new state governments. The media is obsessively occupied with analyzing this sudden new force in German politics, no easy job for anyone, with many sparks.

Last year the LINKE, heading towards oblivion, was torn by internal debate about NATO’s and Putin’s role in the Ukraine war, about sending armaments to Zelensky, even about taking a clear position on the war in Gaza. Many members were dismayed at seeing LINKE leaders bow to media and government pressures on these issues and, aside from expectable demands for social improvements, failing to really oppose the frightening rush toward a wartime military, economy and psychology. The Linke’s proud repute as Germany’s only “party of peace” was being diluted and compromised, they felt, and this was a major cause of its decline. Nor, it was said, had the leaders abandoned their hopes of getting accepted as respectable participants in reform measures instead of challenging the status quo social system. The criticism of these clearly suicidal tendencies led some of the best LINKE leaders and many members to applaud Wagenknecht’s move to start a militant new party.

Now she and her dozen or so co-founders could stress opposition to sending arms shipments to warring nations, especially Zelensky-Ukraine and Netanyahu-Israel. While carefully condemning Putin’s military invasion they also condemned NATO’s decade-long policy of increasingly dangerous expansion and provocation and demanded pressure for a negotiated end to the Ukraine war, followed by a search for a new peaceful Europe, including Russia, and renewing trade and détente.

Such positions have been viewed as almost high treason for the past two years, and are still squelched in many ways, especially because, in a seeming paradox, the AfD also demands similar pressure for peace in Ukraine. This made it easier to demonize the BSW and AfW as allied “Putin-lovers.” Wagenknecht’s statement that the BSW would only join coalitions with parties which, like hers, demanded the weapon-sales stop and withdrawal of American long-range missiles and atomic weapons from Germany, which made it the likely first (or second) victim of a war started by an attack or a human error, with only six-minutes for clarification or correction. These BSW conditions, basically correct but politically very difficult, are not making the formation of new governments any easier, while simple arithmetic still pressures the CDU to combine either with the AfD or one or both leftist parties.

The AfD is not a “peace party.” Its leaders support NATO growth, a bigger arms build-up in Germany, a renewal of military conscription as well as presenting the monopolies, with those making armaments in the lead, with magnanimous tax advantages worth many millions. But its call for negotiations and peace in the Ukraine, for whatever reasons, possibly purely pragmatic ones in the hunt for votes, may explain, at least in part, why it and the BSW were the only two winners in these East German states – where friendship with the USSR and demands for peace were once so intrinsic in all forms and levels of GDR education, culture and media attention  It is possible that this  still retains some effect, even though GDR generations are dying out. And while officials, politicians and pundits fear and hate just such unwanted feelings,  Wagenknecht enthusiasts admire her peace demands above all else, crucial as they are in a world balancing on the edge of total atomic annihilation.

Nevertheless, some questions about the BSW are arising on other matters. Most frequently, they regard her views on immigration, currently a subject of huge angry attention, with almost hysterical rabble-rousing, spread most extensively by Das Bild, the daily rag published by the Axel Springer company.  The matter was greatly worsened by the killing of three people during annual festivities in the Rheinland town of Solingen by a young Syrian asylum-seeker long marked for expulsion. The follow-up:  increased calls to keep “unwanted foreigners out of our Germany,” for tighter, tougher border controls, purposely unfriendly red tape, fenced-in camps for those in waiting, less pocket money or even medical assistance for asylum-seekers or “economic immigrants.” The tougher the better, with the AfD in the lead, the two “Christian” parties close behind, and the government parties forced to keep more or less in step to plug up further voter leakage. The frightening atmosphere was at times almost reminiscent of Hitlerian scapegoat anti-Semitism.

Unlike the solitary resistant LINKE, Sahra Wagenknecht joined in. Though in cooler, more civilized tones, she too echoed basically similar “The boat is full” reasoning and supported cooperation with the police against “foreign felons.” Her policy was originally justified as an attempt to win uncertain voters away from the fascistic AfD. It may indeed have won some voters – but not many from AfD ranks, who rarely switched leftwards. (More, however, from previously non-voter ranks.)  But some critics felt that a stress less on stricter regulations than on internationalism and solidarity with workers of all ethnic backgrounds might be a better leftist response, even if it won fewer votes.

Also worrisome for some is her lack of stress on the active working-class struggles they expected with the party split. Not only varied reforms and improvements, necessary as they are, but real fights directed not against a few monopolists, especially American ones, but against a monopoly system. Indeed, Sahra has seemed to want a return to the “good old days” in West Germany of the 1960s, with the generally “fair treatment” of smaller enterprises and the middle class before some monopolists took over. But weren’t they really dominant all along – and remain largely dominant? Daimler and Siemens were pulling in millions then. Now, above all firms like Rheinmetall, which makes Panther tanks, they are reckoning in billions! But should or can they really be controlled? Must they not be taken over and turned upside down? Completely? What are Sahra’s goals?

And finally, there are questions about naming a party for its one leader, for failing as yet to recruit  – or accept – new members, or to hold a first congress and adopt a program until after the Bundestag elections in September 2024. Sahra seems to enjoy leadership, and is popular nationally for about 9 percent in the polls, more in the East as the elections demonstrated (and commonly at the cost of the LINKE). More than half the BSW election posters showed her attractive face – although she was not a candidate in Thuringia or Saxony. How much will other voices in the BSW be heard? What real  actions will her party take, especially if it joins coalitions, possibly in the state of Brandenburg as well, which votes on September 22nd? There are many questions.

Some questions were indeed asked by those members of the LINKE, including a number of conscious Marxists, who opposed Sahra’s split. Despite their defeat at recent party congresses by those they often viewed as opportunists, pragmatists, “reformers” – or worse – they urged sticking it out and staying in the LINKE. There are signs that the catastrophic downhill slide of the party, leading straight to oblivion (with all that means, not only politically but also forthe entire party structure, with its offices, jobs, financial support), has finally forced a change in thinking.  With the catastrophe so close, few in the party leadership could deny any longer the need for a profound change. Was a last chance in sight?

The two co-chairpersons, Wissler and Schirdevan,  despite doubtless good intentions, proved fully unsuccessful in the role of rescuing cavalry officers. They surprised nearly everyone, shortly before the elections, by announcing they would not run for re-election at the party congress in Halle on October 18-20. Three candidates have thrown their hats in the ring. If their words can be materialized and their expressed hopes realized there may really be a genuine, sharp change in course. Is a rescue possible? Will the two leftist parties damage or complement one another? Is it possible, singly or doubly, to revive a struggle against the millionaires and billionaires in Germany and beyond, against war-hungry generals, manufacturers and corrupted politicians,  and to promote new thinking and above all new action in the direction of a social system without greedy profiteering, without further exploitation of the poor and hungry – and, above all, without further war or threat of war. A big peace demonstration is planned for October 3rd. Its hopeful effect, a new start at the LINKE congress, positive developments in a good-sized BSW, may help bring first, limited successes against powerful, increasingly dangerous German expansion and provocation. One way or another,  positive or negative,  will Germany certainly exert great influence– on Europe and the world.

But first let us see what voters in the pleasant towns, lakes, pine woods (and some shut-down pit mines and factories) of Brandenburg may decide at their election on September 22nd.

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Photograph Source: MINISTÉRIO DAS COMUNICAÇÕES – CC BY 2.0

Millions of Brazilians woke up on August 31 in a country without X, after the Supreme Court ordered the national telecommunications agency to block the social media platform. This move culminated over a year of X’s refusal to follow Brazil’s telecommunications laws, particularly those requiring deplatforming of suspects in internet crime investigations. In a single day, X lost 22 million users, while alternative platform Blue Sky gained 2 million new Brazilian users in just three days. The order to ban the platform initially came from Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes, a figure vilified by the Bolsonaros and the international far right, and was ratified by a 5-0 vote in the Supreme Court’s 1st working group three days later.

The Court order came 12 days after Elon Musk closed X’s Brazilian offices to avoid liability for criminal charges against the company. With X owing R$9 million in fines, the Supreme Court froze the Brazilian assets of Musk’s company Starlink—a minor player in Brazil’s internet service provider industry, serving 250,000 clients in a country of 220 million. After the ban, a furious Musk used his own social media platform to attack one of Brazil’s 11 Supreme Court Ministers, Alexandre de Moraes, inadvertently doxing allies by publishing court documents containing their personal data.

Hailed as a victory for sovereignty while criticized by the far right as an affront to U.S. free speech principles, the X ban is the latest chapter in over a year of conflicts between Brazil and the world’s richest man

To understand how Brazil reached this point, we must go back to October 18, 2018, between the first and second rounds of Brazil’s Presidential elections. That day, investigative journalist Patricia Campos Mello published an article in Folha de São Paulo exposing a group of Brazilian businessmen for spending R$12 million to slander presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s rival, Fernando Haddad, on Meta’s WhatsApp platform. Using illegally acquired personal data, the group microtargeted segments of the population with disinformation. For instance, evangelical voters were bombarded with doctored photos falsely claiming that, as mayor, Haddad distributed baby bottles with penis-shaped nipples to São Paulo pre-school students. As a result, Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court—comprising 3 Supreme Court Justices, 2 Superior Court Judges, and 2 lawyers—immediately launched an election fraud investigation.

This led to a surge in threats against judges in the Supreme and Superior Electoral Courts, extending to their families and calling for a military coup to shut down the Supreme Court. Among those making the call was Jair Bolsonaro’s son, Congressman Eduardo, who recorded a YouTube video seen by hundreds of thousands, saying, “All you need to shut down the Supreme Court is a single soldier or corporal […] Do you think anyone will protest in its defense?”

Unlike some countries, the Brazilian judiciary lacks its own police force. According to the 1988 Constitution, judiciary police duties are assigned to the regular police. The system’s failure to adequately address threats against Supreme and Superior Electoral Court judges prompted Chief Justice Dias Toffoli to issue a decree on March 14, 2019, allowing Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes to directly supervise a federal investigation into these threats.

As a result, Moraes became the main target of a hate campaign by Bolsonaro’s allies, who argued that, as a victim, he was unqualified to investigate his aggressors. Meanwhile, online threats against the judiciary intensified.

On October 29, 2021, the Superior Electoral Court announced the results of its investigation, with 5 of its 7 Justices confirming that the Bolsonaro campaign had used social media to commit election fraud in 2018. Unable to determine the fraud’s impact, the Court issued no punitive measures. However, Justice Moraes, set to take over the Presidency of the Superior Electoral Court six weeks before the 2022 presidential elections, announced that they now understood the scheme and that anyone using similar tactics in 2022 would “go to jail for attacking elections and democracy.”

Moraes, a conservative appointed to the Supreme Court by coup president Michel Temer in 2017, was already a target of Bolsonarista claims of a “communist dictatorship of the toga.” His upcoming role as head of the electoral court during the presidential election drove the Brazilian far-right into a frenzy.

As destroying the Supreme Court and installing a military dictatorship became the Bolsonarista rallying cry, de Moraes ordered several preventive arrests. These included Congressman Daniel Silveira for abusing his authority by repeatedly urging the army to shut down the Supreme Court while defying court orders. Sara Giromini, who styled herself as Sara Winter after the English fascist leader, was also arrested. She set up an Azov-inspired paramilitary camp outside Brasília, then led followers to camp out in front of the Supreme Court, launching increasingly large fireworks at the building for three days while making online threats against de Moraes and his family.

Clearly inspired by U.S. events—especially since Eduardo Bolsonaro attended the January 5 Washington DC “war council” meeting before the Capitol attack—the Bolsonaros began crafting their own “stop the steal” narrative, drawing more allies from the international far-right. As this campaign grew, Glenn Greenwald joined the attacks on Moraes, using elements of U.S. law that resonated in the Global North but were irrelevant in Brazil’s legal context.

After months of claiming “communists” would steal the elections, and deploying his federal highway police to suppress voting in pro-Lula districts on election day, Bolsonaro lost and fled the country before his term ended, leaving the presidency to his Vice President, General Hamilton Mourão.

In the last 60 days before Lula took office, two Bolsonaro supporters were arrested for attempting to detonate a bomb at Brasília’s airport, while another group staged a violent attack on Brazil’s Federal Police headquarters. Thousands of Bolsonaro supporters camped outside military barracks, demanding the shutdown of the Supreme Court.

A week after the inauguration, on January 8, a crowd invaded the National Congress and Supreme Court. Their goal, according to a detailed coup plan found in Bolsonaro’s Justice Minister Anderson Torres’ house, was to pressure Lula into declaring a state of siege, which would have handed national security to the armed forces. Lula refused to fall for the trick, relying on his federal police to disperse the rioters. Meanwhile, high-tension electrical towers were sabotagednationwide.

Two months after the capitol riots, a series of school massacres terrorized the nation. Investigators uncovered dozens of neo-Nazi cells targeting children on social media, attempting to incite them to commit school massacres on April 20 in honor of Hitler’s birthday. The Justice Ministry summoned social media representatives and provided a list of accounts requesting deplatforming. X initially resisted. Etela Aranha, then Secretary of Digital Rights, recalls:

“I told them, ‘I’m talking to you because there are profiles of actual terrorists. They use the names and faces of school massacre terrorists, posting videos with songs saying, “I’m going to get you kids, you can’t outrun my gun.” There are clips showing the terrorist’s picture followed by real school massacres.’ The Twitter representative said this didn’t violate their terms. After strong pushback from the justice minister and social pressure, Twitter changed its policy and cooperated with the investigation.” It was one of the last times the company would respect a request from the Brazilian government.

Fast forward to April 3, 2024. A libertarian pundit and former PR operative named Michael Shellenberger tweeted excerpts from emails by X executives, dubbed “Twitter Files Brazil,” alleging crimes by  Alexandre de Moraes. Shellenberger claimed Moraes had pressed criminal charges against Twitter Brazil’s lawyer for refusing to turn over personal information on political enemies. Elon Musk quickly shared the tweets, which went viral and were embraced by the international far right, delighting former President Bolsonaro and his supporters.

Aranha soon exposed the flaws in this narrative. The only criminal charge against Twitter Brazil mentioned in the leaked emails came from the São Paulo district attorney’s office after the company refused to provide data on a leader of Brazil’s largest cocaine trafficking organization, the PCC. Shellenberger had cut an email section about the São Paulo investigation and mixed it with unrelated complaints about Moraes.

Pressed by Brazilian reporters, Shellenberger said: “I regret my mistake and apologize. I don’t have evidence that Moraes threatened to file criminal charges against Twitter’s Brazilian lawyer.”

Three days later, Elon Musk announced his company would stop obeying court orders in Brazil and reinstate accounts of those deplatformed, including Alan dos Santos, a fugitive hiding in the U.S. On X, Musk tweeted a series of insults against Moraes, demanding he “resign or be impeached.”

That night, Moraes ordered X to be included in an ongoing obstruction of justice investigation related to the January 8, 2023, coup attempt and announced a series of fines for refusing to comply with court orders, which have now risen to R$9 million.

Tension continued to mount and on August 7, Musk threatened to close X’s offices in Brazil, claiming court orders to remove accounts of suspects in an online election fraud investigation amounted to “censorship.” His statements were immediately praised by Bolsonaro and allies in the  international far right but had no basis in Brazil’s free speech laws.

Like other nations such as Germany and France, Brazil views the right to free speech as fundamental but not absolute—a right that must coexist with other essential rights. According to Brazil’s constitution, no fundamental right can be used to deny another. This principle allows Brazil to ban actions legal in the U.S., like inciting pedophilia or practicing Nazism. In the case of the digital militia investigation, the court ruled that the right to free expression cannot be used to undermine the right to free and fair elections, another fundamental right in Brazil.

On August 17, Musk fired 40 workers and closed X’s offices in Brazil, leaving behind debts and criminal charges but pledging to keep the platform operational. This violated Brazil’s telecommunications laws, which require any media company operating in the country to have a legal representative. The Supreme Court froze Starlink’s assets until Musk settled his debts, and Moraes warned that if X didn’t appoint a legal representative, the platform would be banned. Instead of complying, Musk escalated his attacks on Moraes and President Lula, sharing an AI-generated image of Moraes behind bars with his 195 million followers.

On August 29, Moraes gave X  24-hours to comply with Brazil’s laws. When X missed the deadline, he ordered Anatel, the national telecommunications agency, to instruct all internet service providers to block X.

With X now offline in Brazil, on Monday, September 2, the Supreme Court held a plenary session to rule on Moraes’ order, upholding it by a vote of 5-0 in the Court’s 1st working group.

Justifying his vote, Minister Flavio Dino stated that a foreign company cannot operate in national territory “and expect to impose its own view on which laws it believes are valid or should be enforced […] Economic power and the size of a bank account do not grant immunity from jurisdiction.”

The Court has made it clear that X can reopen in Brazil by complying with the nation’s laws. Whether Musk will do that is another story. On Monday, September 2, Brazilian news outlets reported that Musk sought help from the Biden administration’s U.S. Embassy in Brasília to develop a strategy to overturn the Supreme Court ruling.

This article originally appeared in United World, and can be seen in its original format here

The post Inside Brazil’s X Ban: How Elon Musk Started–and lost–a Fight With Brazil’s Judiciary appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Olympic Rings on the Eiffel Tower (https://commons.wikimedia.org/)

The Eiffel Tower was unquestionably the focal point and the superstar of the recent Olympic Games in Paris. That is understandable, since Gustave Eiffel’s master piece has been the emblem of the city for a long time. However, the tower is also a symbol of the wealth and power of the bourgeoisie, the “capitalist class”, a patriciate whose exclusive ranks also happen to include the ladies and gentlemen of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). A soupcon of history may help us to understand the centrality the tower in the recent Olympic extravaganza in the “city of light”.

Eiffel’s steel pillar was erected in 1889 to celebrate the centenary of the beginning of France’s “Great Revolution” in 1789, but also to erase the memory of less “great” but more recent and very traumatic revolutions, namely those of 1848 and 1871, the latter known as the Paris Commune. All those revolutions constituted eruptions of a complex class struggle between the poor and the rich. The poor were typically referred to as ceux d’en bas, “those below”, or as le menu peuple, the “little people”, but they can also be described as the “demos”, a term of Greek origin we encounter in the word democracy, meaning “power by and for the little people”; in any event, they were – and are – the kind of people who can expect revolutionary changes to improve their mostly miserable lot, for example in the shape of lower prices for bread and other essentials. Looking down on the poor were ceux d’en haut, “those above”, that is, the rich folks on the higher levels of the social pyramid, the nobility and the bourgeoisie, the well-to-do burghers who found the established social and economic order to be quite satisfactory and abhorred the thought of revolutionary changes. It is not surprising, therefore, that the revolutions France experienced in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871, and took place, not exclusively but predominantly, in Paris, happened to be mostly the work of the “little” women and men of the country’s capital.

The democratic achievements of those revolutions should not be underestimated, because it was during the great upheaval of 1848, for example, that universal suffrage was introduced and that slavery was abolished. However, each revolution saw members of the bourgeoisie “kidnapping” the revolutions and thus managing to achieve the “liberal” political and capitalist social-economic objectives of their class; and this was done at the expense of the nobility and the Church but especially of “those below”, whose efforts to realize far-reaching democratic reforms were repressed in 1848 and whose attempted construction of a socialist society, manifested in the 1871 Paris Commune, was smothered in blood. After that triumph, the bourgeoisie was the mistress of France.

Before the Great Revolution of 1789, Paris had been a “royal city”, radiating the power and the glory of the centuries-old feudal order whose figurehead was the king. Countless monumental buildings and vast squares, featuring imposing statues of kings and cardinals and such, belonged to the privileged classes of that “Ancien régime”, the nobility and the (upper) clergy, and of course also the monarch. (But the latter preferred to reside in a sumptuous palace in Versailles, away from the busy capital and its “madding crowds”.) The architectural externalization of this “kingliness” of Paris as well as the city’s major tourist attraction was then the Pont Neuf, the very first stone bridge across the Seine, “gifted” to the city by King Henry IV around 1600. The power of the Church, intimately associated with the monarch, was reflected in the multiplicity of prayer houses and monasteries, which caused Paris to impress – or intimidate? – visitors and residents alike as a Catholic “new Jerusalem”.

In Paris, the nobility preferred to reside in the city’s western reaches, in big and fancy residences known as hôtels in the district of Saint-Germain and along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which ran parallel to the Champs Élysées to the village of Roule, perched on a hillock that would later be crowned with the Arc de Triomphe. Earlier, the aristocrats had lived mostly in the Marais, a neighborhood of central Paris, situated near the Bastille, with as its hub a “royal square” (place royale) that is now called Place des Vosges. But most of their hôtels in that district had been taken over by prosperous members of the “up-and-coming” bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie also inhabited other fine neighborhoods of central Paris, for example the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin and its side streets, including the Rue de la Victoire, where the young Napoleon and his bride, Josephine, were to live for some time.

The “little people” lived in run-down, often slum-like neighborhoods of the still quasi-medieval city center, featuring narrow, crooked, and dirty streets, and also in the city’s eastern districts and suburbs (faubourgs), especially the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, situated just beyond the Bastille and the demolished medieval city walls, a defensive system of which the Bastille had been a major stronghold. The faubouriens of Saint-Antoine revealed themselves in 1789, and again in 1830 and 1848, to be the shock troops that pulled the chestnuts out of the revolutionary fire; they did so, inter alia, by storming the Bastille on that famous fourteenth of July 1789 and by attacking the Tuileries Palace, and chasing the king from it, on August 10, 1792.

In some way, France’s revolutions came down to attempts by the “little people” to conquer Paris and to “de-royalize” the “royal city”. In 1793, during the “Great Revolution”, it was not a coincidence that the king was executed in the middle of the most royal of Parisian royal squares, the Place Louis XV, later to become known as Place de la Concorde. Other squares lost their regal names and statues, and royal symbols such as de fleur-de-lis were replaced by republican attributes such as the tricolore flag and the motto “liberty – equality – fraternity”. The “de-royalization” of the capital inevitably also involved a “de-clericalization” that saw countless monasteries and churches being closed and demolished, or in some cases transformed, for the benefit of the “great unwashed”, into hospitals, schools, or warehouses for the storage of large supplies of flour, wine, and other essential foodstuffs, this to avoid their prices to skyrocket in case of poor harvests.

The French capital appeared destined to become a city of, and for, the “little people”, the demos, a literally democratic city. However, this was not appreciated by the well-to-do burghers who supported the revolutionary movements as long as they targeted the feudal established order, but felt threatened and became reactionary when the Parisian revolutionaries started to pursue objectives that violated the “liberal” ideas and capitalist interests of the bourgeoisie. This happened in 1792, 1848, and 1871. Each time, the bourgeoisie managed to repress the attempted revolutionary radicalizations, to thwart the efforts to make Paris more plebeian, and, instead, to transform the former “royal city” a little more into a bourgeois metropolis.

A systematic embourgeoisement of Paris was launched under the auspices of Napoleon, who had been hoisted into the saddle of power by the bourgeoise and proved to be a keen promotor of its class interests.^[1] The Corsican, the scion of a family that may equally well be said to have belonged to the lower ranks of the nobility as to the higher levels of the bourgeoisie, was largely responsible for the fact that western Paris, prior to the Great Revolution monopolized by an elite of high birth, the nobility, could be colonized by an elite of high income, the (higher levels of the) bourgeoisie. This was achieved by the construction of wide avenues, inspired by the already existing Champs Elyées, along which rich folks could built prestigious homes to live in or to sell or rent out at high prices; those avenues converged to a large star-shaped space, the Place de l’Étoile. Western Paris thus became the exclusive habitat of the rich, the gens de bien, the propertied class.

Afer Napoleon and the 1815-1830 “Restauration”, a brief comeback of the Bourbon monarchy and the nobility as well as the Church, the embourgeoisement of Paris restarted under the rule of a “constitutional” king of the House of Orleans, Louis-Philippe, known as the “bourgeois king” because he championed very liberal policies. And spectacular progress towards the bourgeoisification of Paris was made when a nephew of Napoleon ruled France as Emperor Napoleon III for a couple of decades in the middle of the nineteenth century. Under the auspices of the Prefect of the Department of the Seine, Georges–Eugène Haussmann, known as “Baron Haussmann”, boulevards, vast squares and parks, and impressive monuments were created that transformed the historical center of Paris into a modern metropolis. However, the “Haussmannization” of the city also featured a contrarevolutionary dimension. First, the majority of the slums were made to disappear from Central Paris together with their poor and restless, and therefore potentially revolutionary, denizens. Room was thus made for beautiful but expensive constructions, immeubles de rapport, “buildings that generate money”, such as shops, restaurants, offices, and handsome apartements. Those projects provided juicy money-making opportunities for wealthy burghers but especially for the big banks that made their appearance on the economic stage at the time, among them the Crédit Lyonnais, Société Générale, and Rotschild Bank, the latter from 2008 tot 2012 employer of the present President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron. No less than 350,000 poor folks were thus exiled from the city centre.

The gens de bien, the “propertied people”, moved in, and the gens de rien, the “propertyless folks”, were forced to move out of the heart of the city. They were driven out eastward, to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and other outlying districts of the city, the eastern “Paris of poverty” that happened to be a very different planet compared to the western “Paris of luxury”. It was from the plebeian east that, in 1789, the Parisian demos had invaded central Paris for the purpose of “de-royalizing”, “revolutionizing”, and, indeed, “democratizing” the ville royale. In 1871, the Paris Commune constituted a final attempt to achieve that goal, but the uprising was repressed by troops that, coming from Versailles, penetrated Paris via the city’s western districts, where they were welcomed with open arms, but ran into increasingly tough resistance as they made their way toward the eastern reaches; the fighting ended there with the execution of countless captured Communards.

The bloody repression of the Commune sealed the triumph of a French bourgeoisie that was henceforth resolutely, almost fanatically, contra-revolutionary. The “Era of Revolutions” was over, in France and in the country’s revolutionary hotbed, Paris. The possibility of a conquest of the capital by its plebs appeared to have vanished forever; conversely, the city’s embourgeoisement, launched under Napoleon, now seemed to be a fait accompli.

This triumph of the bourgeoisie was to be certified symbolically in 1889, on the occasion of the centenary of the outbreak of the Great Revolution, by the erection of the Eiffel Tower, an oversized kind of totem pole that conjured up modernity, science, technology, and progress, values identified with by the bourgeois “tribe” in France as well as abroad, in general, and by France’s newborn “Third Republic”, in particular. The “republican pillar” simultaneously functioned as a phallic symbol of the young, dynamic, and potent class the victorious bourgeoisie believed itself to be.

Rising high above the waters of the Seine and conjuring up a lighthouse, Eiffel’s creation seemed to radiate the bright light of modernity to the four corners of the land and, indeed, the world. From a bourgeois point of view, the tower also had the merit of overshadowing the very horizontal Pont Neuf, emblem of the former royal Paris, as well as Notre Dame, the architectural face of the former ville royale. The pillar thus proclaimed the superiority of the new, republican, capitalist France of the bourgeoisie, to the old, monarchical, feudal France dominated by the nobility and the Church. Last but not least, the tower replaced the Pont Neuf as the greatest tourist attraction of the French capital and effectively shifted the city’s center of gravity from the Île de la Cité, hub of the Parisian wheel, to the city’s bourgeois western parts, the sumptuous domain of the bourgeois beau monde.

The Eiffel Tower during the Paris World Fair of 1889,  by Georges Garen (Wikimedia Commons)

Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian specialist in ancient myths and religions, has argued that archaic people tended to be overwhelmed by the vast, seemingly chaotic and in many ways mysterious and frightening world they inhabited, a world (or universe) of which they were only an infinitesimal, insignifcant, and powerless part. They experienced the need to bring order and surveyability to this world, that is, transform its chaos into a cosmos, a world that remained mysterious but was at least to some extent familiar, understandable, and less fearsome. This task was typically accomplished by finding and marking a center, that is, a place with great meaning in space as well as time, a sacred space: that spot was considered to be the center of a geographic space, the earth, and simultaneously as the locus of a high point in time, the place where the gods had created human beings and/or the world.

A very old and big tree and a real or imaginary mountain, such as a pyramid, might fucntion as such a sacred spot. Alternatively, a pillar or tower could be constructed and proclaimed to be the centre (or navel, axis) of the world and/or the locus of creation. Arguably the most famous example of such an axis mundi was the ziggurat or step–pyramid in the city of Babylon, the famous Tower of Babel, known locally at the time as Etemenanki, “temple of the creation of heaven and earth”. Such constructions functioned as symbolic connections between earth and heaven, they enabled humans to ascend or at least approach heaven and, conversely, permitted the gods to descend on earth to create humans; consequently, they were also viewed as ladders and featured steps, representing rungs, as in the case of the terraces of Etemenanki, the “hanging gardens” of Babylon, proclaimed by the Greeks as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

The Eiffel Tower’s construction, location, and most striking features may be interpreted with the help of these Eliadian insights. The French revolutions that rocked Europe and the entire world, but above all France itself, starting in 1789 and lasting until 1871, brought about the demise of the old cosmos of feudal and monarchical France, dominated by the duo of nobility and Church. After nearly a century of revolutionary chaos, a new cosmos emerged, a capitalist rather than feudal order with a republic as political exoskeleton, and dominated economically and socially by the (haute) bourgeoisie. Other countries were to follow suit, but France was first to achieve virtually perfect bourgeois status, it was the primordial bourgeois state.

The French capital, where most of the crucial revolutionary events had taken place, revealed itself to be the epicenter of an emerging international capitalist and bourgeois cosmos. It was therefore only fitting that the bourgeois metropolis erected a monument to confirm and celebrate its sacred status with respect to space and time: first, as epicentre of the new bourgeois and capitalist world, and second, as locus of the uneasy birth, via revolution(s), of this new world. The Eiffel Tower, highest building in the world, was that monument, a kind of step-pyramid whose perpendicularity, interrupted by three floors, also conjured up a ladder, much as the terraces or “hanging gardens” of Babylon had done. And indeed, the Eiffel Tower proclaimed Paris to be the Babylon, the city of cities, of the new bourgeois cosmos.

In other European countries too, the bourgeoisie came to power in the course of the nineteenth or early twentieth century, via revolutions or not, but no capital was ever “bourgeoisified” as early and as thoroughly as Paris. Russia, Germany, and the Habsburg Empire were monarchies, linked with “established” Churches, whose capitals were to remain not just royal but imperial cities boasting mostly magnificent imperial and aristocratic palaces as well as exuberant churches. In Britain, the liberal upper–middle class became a partner, but only a junior partner, of a conservative landowning nobility that continued to set the tone politically, socially, and also architecturally and urbanistically. London thus continued to be an urban world with two feudal architectural poles, on one end the Tower, a medieval, Bastille–like fortress, a fossil of royal absolutism, and on the other end the tandem of Buckingham Palace, a British Tuileries Palace, and Westminster Abbey, London’s Notre Dame; and it is not a coincidence that the style of most grand architectural creations of the time became known as “Victorian,” reflecting, even emphasizing, its monarchical connections.

In comparison with other capitals, Paris looked über–bourgeois after 1871. It is hardly surprising that the city was admired, visited, and praised by bourgeois women and men, young and old, conservative as well as avant-garde, from all over the world, that is, the “Western” world that was becoming increasingly industrial, capitalist and, indeed, bourgeois. From the four corners of the earth, well-to-do burghers converged on Paris like Catholic pilgrims converge on Rome or Muslim pilgrims on Mecca. Conversely, a bourgeoisified Paris, most effectively symbolized by “Haussmannian” town planning and architecture, migrated to cities all over the world where the bourgeoisie likewise triumphed politically, socially, and economically. Featuring imposing residences and expensive “money-generating buildings” overlooking wide avenues or vast squares, as well as imposing government edifices, banks, stock exchanges, theatres, palace hotels, and deluxe restaurants, Bucharest, Brussels, and Buenos Aires, for example, tried very hard to resemble the French capital.

In 1871, the curtain came down on France’s dramatic “Era of Revolutions”, but below, and occasionally above, the surface, lower-intensity class conflict persisted, and with it, the symbolic “Battle for Paris” fought between rich and poor. The bourgeoisie believed to have won that battle, but its victory was never truly complete. Eastern Paris remained plebeian, and as equally plebeian, even proletarian, revealed themselves the mushrooming new suburbs to the east and north of the capital, such as Saint-Denis; that is where the immigrants settled who came from all over France as well as abroad, looking for work in the capital but unable to afford the high prices of accommodation in the city’s center and western neighborhoods.

During the 135 years that have passed since the erection of the Eiffel Tower, Paris managed to remain bourgeois, but not as securely as one might think. This bourgeois supremacy was in fact threatened on a number of occasions. However, the German occupation of 1940-1944 did not constitute a problem in this respect, as one might think. Under the auspices of the occupant and the collaborator regime of Vichy, both eager practitioners of policies of low-wages and high-profits, the bourgeoisie prospered in France and especially in Paris. Hitler, himself a petit bourgeois who had been coopted by Germany’s haute bourgeoisie and governed on its behalf, was an admirer of Paris; he did not wish to destroy the city but, in cooperation with architect Albert Speer, made plans to transform Berlin so that the German capital could replace Paris as bourgeois Babylon. The Führer also opined that many Frenchmen were not unhappy with the German presence in the “city of light” because it eliminated “the menace of revolutionary movements”.^[2]

And indeed, a potentially revolutionary situation, threatening bourgeois supremacy in Paris, arose there in August 1944, when the Germans were pulling out of the city and Allied troops, coming in from Normandy, had not yet arrived. An opportunity thus opened up for the leftist, communist-led Resistance to come to power in the capital, and potentially in the entire country, in which case extremely radical, anticapitalist reforms would very likely have been introduced. But that scenario was foiled by the Americans. General de Gaulle, whom they had previously ignored, something for which he would never forgive them, was quickly transferred by them to Paris and presented there as the uncontested supremo leader of the Resistance, which he really was not, and soon to be head of the government of liberated France. His grand entry into the capital was staged not on Place de la Bastille or another site in eastern Paris, but on the Champs Elysées, the major thoroughfare of the same western districts where in 1871 an enthusiastic welcome awaited the troops on their way from Versailles to smother the Commune in blood. De Gaulle was to ensure that in France the bourgeois social-economic order remained intact – with, as cherry on the sundae, a Paris that was to remain equally bourgeois.

Hitler visits Paris on June 23, 1940 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/)

Charles de Gaulle strolls down the Champs Élysées on August 26, 1944 (https://en.wikipedia.org/)

That the bourgeoisifcation of Paris was never completely secured, also became evident in May 1968, when workers and students went on strike and demonstrated in the Latin Quarter and elsewhere in the city centre and the situation threatened to degenerate into civil war or revolution. On the other hand, the City of Light also experienced attempts to perfect its embourgeoisement. Interpretable this way are the great projects that were undertaken in eastern Paris, first by de Gaulle’s successor as President, Georges Pompidou, who arranged for the last slums of central Paris to make room for an art centre that was to receive his name. A little later, under the auspices of President François Mitterand, in theory a socialist but in reality a “bourgeois gentleman” (bourgeois gentilhomme), initiatives such as the construction of new opera on Place de la Bastille and a new ministry of finance as well as a sports stadium in the working-class neighorhood of Bercy, officially purported to rejuvenate the city’s east end for the benefit of its plebeian denizens; in reality, Mitterand’s urbanistic schemes came down to a gentrification for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and especially its jeunesse dorée or “gilded youth”, for whom western Paris probably looms a tad too bourgeois in the sense of “dull”.

In 2018, a new menace emerged for bourgeois Paris in the shape of a movement whose numerous and rowdy participants became known as the “yellow vests”. The protestors were “the usual suspects”, that is, plebeians from the capital’s eastern districts and suburbs, but they were joined in their weekly invasions of the city by counterparts from all over France and even from abroad. They demonstrated most provocatively not only on Place de la Bastille and elsewhere on their “home turf” in eastern Paris, but also, provocatively so, in the heart of the western “Paris of luxury”, including the Champs Elysées. The gilets jaunes were gunning for the person and politics of President Macron, a former banker and as much as bourgeois-president as Louis-Philippe had been a bourgeois-king. Bourgeois Paris trembled as the movement dragged on until, in 2020, de COVID-19 pandemic provided a perfect rationale for outlawing large gatherings.

The recent organization of the Olympic Games may be viewed, and understood, from the same perspective. The modern Olympics have effectively been described as a form of “celebration capitalism”,^[3] that is, a feast for the bourgeois “capitalist class” whose crème de la crème consists today of the hyper-rich owners, large shareholders, and managers of multinational enterprises, media moghuls, their allied financiers, jurists, and billionaire celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Céline Dion, and so forth. The primordial objective of this class is the maximization of profits. And the function of the Olympic Games is to enable this accumulation of riches with the collaboration of the host-city and the host-country, who are supposed to facilitate this privatisation of the profits not exclusively, but primarily, by the socialization of the costs.^[4] This elite of multinational capitalism sponsors the Games, and its members include mostly corporations whose home turf is the USA, now the centre of gravity of the capitalist world system, such as Coca-Cola, but also French companies like Louis Vuitton (LV), purveyor of all sorts of luxury products, a firm that flourished during the German occupation, as mentioned not a bad time at all for France’s bourgeois elite, typical consumers of the expensive goods made available by LV.

This international elite was willing to hold its Olympic celebration in Paris, but in a congenial Paris, in a Paris in which they could feel at home, and that meant the western, bourgeois part of the city, the “Paris of luxury”. Conversely, for the bourgeoisie, the “capitalist class” of Paris and all of France, the Olympic Games constituted a golden opportunity in two ways. First, to register unseen profits, for example by charging skyhigh prices for rooms in the fine hotels of western Paris that are pricey even at normal times, and also for balconies on the higher floors of favorably located “money-generating” buildings, whence well-heeled tourists could acclaim the passing athletes. Second, and more importantly at least for our purposes, to the bourgeoisie the Olympics also offered the possibility to reconfirm and even advance the embourgeoisement of the city – and to allow Paris to shine again, if only for a few weeks, as the Babylon of the international bourgeoisie. It was in this context that a “social cleansing” (nettoyage social) of the city was carried out, namely the expulsion of the homeless and the concomitant “obfuscation of poverty” (invisibilisation de la pauvreté).^[5]

Thus we can also understand why, on opening day, the boats loaded with thousands of athletes departed from the Austerlitz Bridge, situated on the cusp of the city’s historic center and its eastern neighborhoods, the “Paris of poverty”. By starting there, the Olympic show turned its back to plebeian Paris. Place de la Bastille, the primordial revolutionary locus delicti, and, behind it, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, once the den of the revolutionary lion, much of it literally barricaded, could thus be left unseen and unmentioned, it sufficed that the Olympische torch had briefly passed through that district earlier, namely on on July 14, Bastille Day. Unperturbed by unpleasant associations with the Revolution and with revolutions in general, the flotilla could thus happily descend the Seine to western Paris, the Paris where a sporty “celebration of capitalism” was as welcome as the troopgs coming from Versailles and General de Gaulle had been in 1871 en 1944, respectively.

Inevitably, the Games also had to make use of some of the sports infrastructure that happened to be located elsewhere, such as the national football and rugby stadium in the plebeian suburb of Saint-Denis, an impressive venue known as Stade de France. However, as many events as possible, including the most spectacular ones, took place in western neighborhoods. The marathons finished on the vast Esplanade des Invalides, and the cyclists arrived at the photogenic spot that could be viewed as the topographic focal point of the Parisian Olympics, virtually at the base of the Eiffel Tower, where temporary facilities had also been erected for events such as tennis and beach volleyball. That also happened to be the place where the athletes had disembarked from the boats to attend the opening ceremony. On that occasion, Eiffel’s pillar, sparkling with thousands of lights, proclaimed to the Parisians, the athletes, and the entire world not only that the Olympic celebration of capitalism was welcome in Paris but also that Paris continued to belong to the bourgeoisie – at least until imperiled again by a second coming of the “yellow vests” or the appearance of yet another plebeian horde.

1. See Jacques R. Pauwels, “Napoleon Between War and Revolution”, Counterpunch, May 7, 2021. ↑

2. See the comments on Paris (including the Eiffel Tower) and Berlin in Adolf Hitler, Libres propos sur la guerre et la paix, Paris, 1952, pp.23, 81, 97. ↑

3. See Jules Boykoff, Celebration capitalism and the Olympic games, London, 2014.

4. Jules Boykoff, who developed the concept of “celebration capitalism”, considers the Olympic Games as a reverse form of trickle-down economics, whereby the wealth actually trickles upward, from the poor to the rich. ↑

5. Igor Martinache, “L’olympisme, stade suprême du capitalisme (de la fête)?”, Revue Française de Socio-Économie, 1:32, 2024, https://shs.cairn.info/. ↑

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Netzah Yehuda training exercise. Photograph Source: יעסיעס – CC BY-SA 4.0

The Biden administration’s decision to continue funding the notorious Netzah Yehuda battalion, an ultra-Orthodox unit that operates on the West Bank, is the latest indication that the United States is unwilling to take any steps to counter Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians.  The funding of the battalion marks a major defeat for the human rights experts in the Departments of State and Defense, who argued that Netzah Yehuda should be barred from receiving U.S. support.  This marks one more decision by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that ignores the need for accountability with regard to the barbarous actions of the Israeli Defense Forces.

The Netzah Yehuda battalion is particularly violent in dealing with the Palestinian community. The battallion has killed unarmed civilians and suspects in custody as well as committed sexual assault and torture.  it has attracted many members of an extreme religious-nationalist settler group infamous for establishing illegal outposts on Palestinian land that have no legal basis in Israeli law. In recent years, the Netzah Yehuda battalion has been involved in at least a half-dozen controversial cases involving its soldiers, resulting in jail time, discharge, or harsh criticism for assaulting or killing innocent Palestinians.

U.S. funding of the battalion is a violation of the Leahy Law, passed in 1997, that prohibits the Departments of State and Defense from providing military assistance to foreign security force units that violate human rights.   U.S. embassies and the appropriate regional bureaus of the Department of State vet potential recipients of security assistance.  If a unit is found to have been credibly implicated in a serious abuse of human rights, assistance is denied until the host nation government takes effective steps to bring the responsible persons within the unit to justice.  As a result, security forces and national defense units in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Columbia, Guatemala, and Mexico have been denied assistance in the past.  The United States, of course, plays by different rules when it comes to military support for Israel.

Even before Blinken made his unfortunate decision regarding the battalion, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu obnoxiously proclaimed that “if anyone thinks they can impose sanctions  on a unit of the IDF—I will fight it with all my strength.”  U.S. presidents have been unwilling to stand up to Netanyahu who has led six of the eleven different Israeli governments over the past 28 years.  This funding decision is particularly reprehensible because the battalion was responsible for the death of a 78-year-old American citizen whose stress-induced heart attack was brought on by being bound, gagged, and left on the ground by Israeli forces.  Netanyahu’s government prosecuted no one in this case.

One of the more feckless U.S. moves regarding the war in Gaza was President Biden’s decision  to deliver humanitarian aid to the Palestinians via a floating military pier.  U.S. officials in the Departments of State and Defense argued that the weather conditions in the Mediterranean would compromise any effort to make the pier workable.  The critics were right.  They wanted the Biden administration to put pressure on Israel to open land crossings for aid, but Biden refused to do so.  As a result, the pier was attached to Gaza’s coast line in May and abandoned in July.  

Israeli officials maintain that they are allowing aid into Gaza, but the aid is going in slowly and humanitarian conveys are still being attacked.  A UN vehicle, clearly marked, was attacked several days ago and Palestinian aid workers were killed.  Meanwhile, more than 560 schools in Gaza have been hit or destroyed, and numerous shelters have been attacked.  This points to the moral squalor of Israeli public declarations that deny the targeting of humanitarian missions.

In order to understand the Arab-Israeli conflict (and perhaps appreciate U.S. complicity), it helps to remember the first Israeli edicts against its Palestinian population more than 75 years ago.  With the creation of the state of Israel, the Knesset adopted the British Defense Regulations that enabled Israeli military authorities to close off the Arab areas and restrict entry and exit only to those with permits.  Every Arab inhabitant had to apply to the military government office or to the police in his/her district to obtain a permit to leave his/her village for whatever reason.

The Knesset added its own restrictions to the British regulations.  These enabled the Israelis to deport people from their towns or villages and to summon any person to present himself at a police station or to remain confined to his/her house.  Any Arab could be placed under administrative arrest for an unlimited time, without explanation and without trial.  Violators were tried by military courts and not civilian ones; this is still true today on the West Bank.  Tom Segev, one of Israel’s most distinguished historians, noted in his important book, “1949: The First Israelis,” that “among the soldiers and officers sent to rule over the Arabs were ones who had been found unfit for active service.”  They were vengeful, which is true today on the West Bank.  Segev is associated with Israel’s New Historians, a group challenging many of the country’s traditional narratives.

Another distinguished Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, recorded in his book, “Ten Myths About Israel,” that the discussion of the forced transfer of the Arab population in Palestine began even before Israel received its independence in 1948.  The discussions evolved into a master plan for the massive expulsion of Palestinians, which was known as Plan Delat.  Pappe notes that the Israeli Foreign Ministry created the myth that the Palestinians became refugees because their leaders told them to leave Palestine before the “Arab armies invaded and kicked out the Jews.”

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Photograph Source: Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa/U.S. 6th Fleet – Public Domain

Over 3,000 migrants fleeing from poverty and conflict, the Council on Foreign Relations recently noted, died last year trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe.

Those deaths made barely a ripple in most of the world’s major news media. But this summer one single tragedy on the Mediterranean has been making globs of global headlines.

On Monday, August 19, amid a fearsome sudden storm, a boat deemed “unsinkable” sank off the coast of Sicily’s Palermo. Seven of the 22 people on board perished.

What made this sinking so newsworthy? The ship that sank just happened to be a luxury sailing yacht that sported the world’s tallest aluminum mast. And the casualties from that superyacht’s sinking just happened to include the high-tech CEO once hailed as the “British Bill Gates.”

That chief exec, the yacht’s owner Mike Lynch, had envisioned this voyage as a celebration over a decade in the making. Just weeks earlier, after years of legal battling, a federal jury in Northern California had acquitted Lynch and one of his VPs on charges they had artificially inflated the value of Lynch’s software company. That inflating, prosecutors charged, had sealed the firm’s 2011 sale to Hewlett-Packard for over $11 billion, a deal that netted Lynch personally about $800 million.

But within a year after the sale the value of Lynch’s company had tanked by some $8.8 billion, and H-P was referring allegations of accounting improprieties against Lynch to the British Serious Fraud Office and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The referrals would eventually produce a civil-suit victory for H-P and a 2019 criminal conviction of a key exec at Lynch’s firm.

The 59-year-old Lynch and his finance VP Keith Chamberlain would have much better luck in their own criminal trial on similar charges. Unfortunately for them, they’ll never get to enjoy their acquittal. Lynch drowned in the sinking of his yacht, as did Lynch’s top trial lawyer and the chair of financial giant Morgan Stanley’s international arm, a star witness for Lynch’s defense.

What made this Lynch yacht sinking particularly irresistible for the world’s media? On the same day as the sinking, reports surfaced that Lynch’s acquitted co-defendant Chamberlain had just died after a car ran him over while he was jogging. A sheer coincidence? And how could the captain of Lynch’s superyacht and all but one of his crew escape the boat’s sinking alive while Lynch and six other passengers perished? Such juicy meat for endless conspiracy speculation!

But we need not resort to conspiratorial theorizing to understand why Lynch’s $25-million yacht sank so quickly that stormy night. That blame belongs in no small part to climate change, not some cabal of his billionaire corporate rivals.

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Photograph Source: WAFA (Q2915969) – CC BY-SA 3.0

Israel’s assault on Gaza has now officially surpassed the gruesome milestone of 40,000 Palestinians dead, but in counting only those killed in direct acts of violence that number captures just a fraction of the human loss.

“Most civilian casualties in war are not the result of direct exposure to bombs and bullets,” noted a 2017 studypublished by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “they are due to the destruction of the essentials of daily living, including food, water, shelter, and health care.”

This broader understanding of conflict casualties was applied to Gaza in a July study published in The Lancet, one of the world’s premier medical journals. The study found that at that time, it was plausible to assume that Israel’s military campaign would be responsible for the deaths of some 186,000 people.

To calculate this number, the authors started with the almost 37,400 direct deaths the Gaza health authorities had confirmed as of June 19, with Israeli intelligence services themselves deeming the authority’s counting reliable. The authors then cited a survey of armed conflicts over the last several decades that showed the ratio of direct to indirect deaths was roughly between 1:3 and 1:15.

In other words, for every person killed by direct violence in recent wars, another three to 15 died due to conflict-induced factors, mainly preventable diseases and hunger that resulted from losing access to healthcare, shelter, food, and clean drinking water. The Lancet authors then assumed a rather conservative ratio of 1:4 direct to indirect deaths in Gaza – 37,400 direct deaths plus 149,600 indirect deaths – to arrive at their estimate.

Notably, while Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel killed more than 1,000 people, the direct-to-indirect casualty ratio is not applicable given that the wider Israeli population was not denied the necessities of life for any significant period.

In Gaza, the 1:4 ratio is conservative given that the Israeli air force has subjected Gaza to the most intense bombing campaign in history. In the first 200 days of the onslaught alone, the Israeli air force dropped 20 times more bombs per square kilometer on Gaza than the US did during nine years of the Vietnam War, previously history’s most intense bombing campaign that had itself dwarfed those during World War II. This has left most buildings in Gaza damaged or destroyed and 80 percent of the population displaced, often numerous times.

The Israeli army has also blocked most food, water, fuel, electricity, and humanitarian and medical supplies from entering the strip since October 7. Today, this has left almost half a million Gazans facing “catastrophic” levels of food insecurity, according to the UN, with more than 1.6 million people suffering from acute respiratory infections, jaundice, and diarrhea, 20 of the strip’s 36 hospitals inoperable and the remainder “partially functional.”

The impact of losing access to healthcare is starkly illustrated by the example of pregnant women in Gaza, estimated at 50,000 when the war began. Many have miscarried and are having stillbirths, faced C-sections with unsensitized equipment and without anesthetic, while increasing numbers of newborns are “simply dying,” according to the World Health Organization, because starving mothers are giving birth to critically underweight babies.

The Israeli campaign in Gaza – for which the world’s top two international courts are pursuing charges of genocide and crimes against humanity against the Israeli state and its leaders – has continued unabated since The Lancet published its study. With no reason to believe that the 1:4 ratio of direct to indirect deaths has decreased, the 40,000 Gazans now confirmed killed by violent means entails that the total deaths attributable to the Israeli campaign would be pushing past 200,000. That is 9 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population.

The Israeli army claimed in August that it had killed 17,000 Hamas fighters. While yet to comment on this latest assertion, Hamas itself has said previous Israeli statements of its losses were inflated by more than two-thirds. Regardless of which is closer to the truth, what the range makes clear is that combatants make up a fraction of the 200,000 total deaths for which Israel is responsible.

To properly place the Gaza death toll within the context of historical atrocities, consider that the first extermination camp the Nazis established during WWII, near Chelmno in German-occupied Poland, massacred at least 172,000 innocent people, while the atomic bombs the US dropped on Japan during the same war and their radioactive aftermath are estimated to have killed more than 210,000 souls.

Perhaps most tragically, Gaza Health Ministry figures show that of the 40,000 direct deaths reached by August, 41 percent were children younger than 18 years old. Children tend to be disproportionately affected by the harms of armed conflict. Thus, it is likely that the ratio of indirect deaths within this age bracket is greater than for the general population. However, using The Lancet’s 1:4 ratio as a baseline, it is plausible to assume that the number of children Israel’s Gaza campaign will be responsible for killing is at least 82,000.

For perspective, three children who were laid side-by-side holding hands would take up roughly a meter’s width on average. Some 82,000 children laid side-by-side would form a line over 27 kilometers long. An average person standing on a flat plain would see that line of dead children stretch from them to the horizon and well beyond. That person would have to walk for five and a half hours to reach the end of the line. The drive would take more than 15 minutes on the highway, traveling at 100 km per hour.

All that would apply if today the war ended. As of this writing, however, Israel was still bombing Gaza and blocking access to life’s necessities, thereby ensuring the line of bodies will continue stretching well into the distance.

This first appeared on the Beirut-based Badil.

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Photograph Source: Lorie Shaull – CC BY 2.0

I was proud to be an antiwar activist in Chicago at the time of the Democratic convention in 1968.  I helped organize events there and then the next year worked on the staff of the Chicago Conspiracy trial that followed.

We were very much about movement building.  Including trying as best we could to minimize the division between “political” and “cultural” activists.  That meant movement centers, concerts and more, not just protests.

Back then I didn’t appreciate how extraordinary it was that a U.S. war engendered such widespread internal opposition.  It was decades before I became fully aware of the violence required for territorial expansion, conquest and control that created the continuous history of the USA.

It takes work to overcome the obfuscation of the magnitude of violence required by settler colonialism to expand from sea to shining sea and beyond. Then add in racialized slavery and segregation.  Together with patriarchy, gun worship, and other factors, we live in an immersive, self-renewing Culture of Violence the likes of which has never existed anywhere before.

Support for war and aggression has always been bipartisan.  The names of the political parties have changed and evolved since the U.S. became a modern nation state.  But there has never been a mainstream peace party. Nor is there one now.

Currently, the President sending the limitless money and weapons happens to be a Democrat.  Lest anyone forget the Republican’s loyalty to the cause, however, the “sane” presidential aspirant, Nikki Haley thought it was a great idea to be photographed autographing the U.S. manufactured and supplied bombs before they were loaded on the U.S. made warplanes.

Once and only once

Zooming out to see the long arc of USA! USA! USA! — only that one time did any war engender the kind of mass opposition that showed up in Chicago in 1968 as part of the circa 1965-1975 antiwar movement.

It’s not that opposition to other wars was zero. There were, for example, conscientious objectors during WWI and WWII.  The Civil War never had majority support in the North. It spawned the only other active draft resistance movement in U.S. history.

Which is how it works.  People don’t want to fight in wars they oppose.  I address this because I have learned over the decades that many people are mistakenly persuaded that it was the 1960’s draft that caused the antiwar movement.  If that were true, there would have been comparable opposition to the Korean war.  But there wasn’t.

For many reasons, especially the impact of the freedom movement in the South, there was unprecedented mass opposition to the war on Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos.

Today’s antigenocide movement is also unique.

In modern history there has never been a time when a genocide was significantly opposed while it was underway by people other than those being attacked. Certainly not during the Holocaust.  Meaning no disrespect to those who gave refuge to those fleeing Hitler’s regime, Germany mostly attracted opposition for its expansionist territorial ambitions, not for sending millions of Jewish people and others into gas ovens.

It’s true that the efforts of the South African government in the International Court of Justice, U.N. votes, the Uncommitted movement and huge global protests have yet to save a single Palestinian life, school, hospital, business or residence.  But that doesn’t change the extraordinary nature of the struggle to do so.

What time is it on the clock of U.S. militarism?

Is the military-industrial complex stronger today than it was in 1968? Or weaker?

Stronger, by a lot.  Better funded, more entrenched in every nook and cranny of the economy, certainly more powerful in Congress.  Vastly improved at preventing discussion in the public sphere about militarism or peace.

Specific to the political conventions, my guess is that if asked, more delegates in 1968 would have expressed genuine sympathy for the children of Vietnam than would 2024 delegates on behalf of Palestinian children.  I don’t remember any delegates in 1968 wearing camo hats.

In 2024, no Palestinians were permitted to speak.  The calculation apparently is that Kamala enthusiasm, especially among Black voters, will more than offset any votes lost to Palestinians or their sympathizers.

In her acceptance speech, Kamala Harris said:

And America, we must also be steadfast in advancing our security and values abroad. …As commander in chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world. And I will fulfill our sacred obligation to care for our troops and their families, and I will always honor and never disparage their service and their sacrifice.

Interestingly 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey, who also inherited the nomination from a President who chose not to run, expressed a weak hope for a ceasefire in Vietnam.  So did Kamla Harris about Palestine.  She even paid lip service to Palestinian suffering—without, of course acknowledging who was financing and supplying the weapons that cause the atrocities in the first place.

What’s telling however is this from Humphrey:

But the task of slowing down the arms race, of halting the nuclear escalation—there is no more urgent task than ending this threat to the very survival of our planet, and if I am elected as your President, I commit myself body, mind and soul to this task.

Harris espoused nothing anywhere close to that.  For all the allusions to struggles for civil rights, there were virtually no references to non-violence or Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or any danger whatsoever of nuclear war.  The plan was clearly to reassure voters that President Harris would be a loyal and competent Colonizer in Chief.

Things take time to work out.  At the moment however, the energy and resources for Palestinian solidarity devoted to the Democratic convention appeared to have failed. Maybe even backfired. Here’s how long time Middle East advocate and expert Helena Cobban assessed it:

This week the U.S. Democratic Party put on two big performances that left me even more depressed than last week. In Chicago, the party’s big-bucks powers-that-be put on an intricately choreographed, North Korea-style pageant of “joy” and “unity” in which they very pointedly threw the party’s anti-genocide activists under a bus. And during plane rides around West Asia, meanwhile, Secretary of State Blinken continued his lengthy “performance” of trying to win a Gaza ceasefire deal, while American weapons continued to flow copiously to the most heavily armed and genocidal actor in the region.

For Blinken and his bosses–Pres. Biden, and now also VP Harris–that “performance” of diplomacy is precisely the point. “We are working ceaselessly… ” “We are working around the clock… ” Etc., etc. Their effort in this is either woefully uninformed or wittingly mendacious, or both.

The 1968 antiwar movement was decidedly not anticolonialist.  Most participants were and still are fiercely loyal to the machinery that has produced all the wars before and since.  The same is generally true now regarding the genocide being carried out against Palestinians.

An often-overlooked manifestation of that fidelity, even stronger now than then, is allegiance to the importance of the Presidency.  Worship of the U.S. presidency is itself an expression of support for Empire.  All our lives we have been told that the president of the USA is the most powerful person in the world.

We are supposed to take pride in that.  The wall-to-wall media coverage of the intricately planned spectacle of both parties’ conventions is itself more flaunting of opulence, gigantism and aspirations to red-white-and blue world domination.

Consequently, even a demonstration at a Convention cannot help but be a degree of compliance with the structure of Empire itself.  Inescapably therefore further legitimizing the very thing that some of us at least want to be the change from.  That’s not meant to suggest that there should never be protests at such events. Only that there is a tradeoff worth considering.

The Military Industrial complex is stronger.  White Empire is weaker. 

The more wars the Pentagon loses—which is all of them, albeit at the cost of millions of lives and other damage—the more money it gets.  The more they fail to meet their recruitment goals, the more they up the incentives for enlistment.  And hire mercenaries. And invest in automated warfare.

Virtually every success the Ukrainian military achieves is because they ignore what their Pentagon advisors tell them to do.  The U.S. Navy is routinely outmaneuvered by teenage Houthi rebels. People go to Beijing or Istanbul to negotiate global military and political deals. Not to Washington or Camp David.

The post WWII era of U.S. global hegemony is in irreversible decline.  For peace advocates, appreciating this profound shift is important to our analysis and strategy.

So, to pose a different question, will the movement supporting Palestine in 2024 come to more deeply challenge the underlying racism, militarism and materialism that Rev. Martin Luther King said in 1967 made the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world?”

Theories of change

If a theory of change keeps reinforcing the status quo over decades or even hundreds of years, perhaps it isn’t really a theory of change after all. Or at least not an effective one.  Maybe over time, like a bad marriage it becomes a learned and convenient codependence.

Personally, I don’t want the opposite of what we have now.  I want something way better than that.  As to how we get there, hindsight confirms even more strongly a predominantly non-electoral theory of change.

Elections for school board, municipal offices and ballot initiatives can be significant exceptions.  And there is much to be said for the argument of Aurora Levins Morales and others that electoral participation, especially at the Presidential level, is best understood through the lens of choosing your opponent.

But it’s the Montgomery Bus Boycotts; the Mississippi Summers; the people’s diplomacy efforts; the building of Beloved Communities including Palestinian solidarity encampments; resistance to military service and other strategies in a virtuous cycle that can create more transformative change.

The antiwar movement itself was a marvel of energy, creativity and innovation.  Including interactions with the Vietnamese.  Many activists engaged with Madame Nguyen T. Binh and other Vietnamese leaders to better understand the Vietnamese reality.  This strategy built on lessons the Vietnamese had learned from their successful struggle against the French.

At the time there was also a global anticolonial movement that influenced the context in which the war was understood and opposed.  Many, though by no means all, U.S. peace and justice activists have been in solidarity with the Palestinian movement for many years.  There is a particular bond with the Black community.  The engagement of Jewish Voice for Peace since October 7, 2023 has been remarkable.  While different in form, internationally there is at least as much support for Palestine now as there was for Viet Nam in the 1960’s.

What’s new, what now? 

While it’s as amorphous as all get out, there is a growing component of the movement that is quite different from what existed in 1968.  Maybe it could be called emergent strategies, a term used by adrienne maree brown.  Seeking to grow beyond the narrow limitations of much past and current thinking, many are exploring approaches that combine cultural, economic and spiritual theory and practice into a different kind of movement building.

Not a day goes by that I don’t learn about a new book, article or video expressing this emerging perspective.  BECOMING KIN by Patty Krawec and WHAT IT TAKES TO HEAL by Prentis Hemphill are examples that center the revolution in values that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for.

As part of the National Council of Elders, King and Breaking Silence Project, I have been involved with organizing a series of webinars including. Decolonize; and From Terror to Transformation Can The Violence In Palestine-Israel Become A Turning Point For Humanity? The most recent Only Revolutionary Love Can Save Us Now features a conversation between Michelle Alexander and Rev. Nelson and Joyce Johnson of the Beloved Community Center in Greensboro, North Carolina.

These programs combine new insights with lessons learned over the last fifty plus years.  They explore “making the path by walking” to a broader and deeper way toward lasting change.

Should we do everything we can to stop the current slaughter of Palestinians?  Of course.  Which can be entirely compatible with trying to replace the culture of violence system already working on the next wars and genocides.

To the degree we succeed, millions of lives will be saved.  And, as the John Lennon song Imagineenvisions, in another 56 years we won’t still need to be protesting whatever slaughter the U.S. is involved in then.

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Interior view of the destroyed Fasanenstrasse Synagogue, Berlin, burned on Kristallnacht

On a recent trip to Germany, I sought to better understand how the Nazi Party rose to power, and carried out the Holocaust, in which most of my Hungarian Jewish relatives perished. I gained some new insights, and learned several lessons that may be useful in the polarized United States today, with the election looming and far-right agitation growing.

I visited the Nuremberg rally grounds, and stood on the rostrum where Hitler instilled his poisonous views in German minds in the mid-1930s. I saw German synagogues that were attacked on Kristallnacht in 1938, and toured Auschwitz in southern Poland, where most of my relatives were sent in 1944, as well as the Nuremberg courtroom where some Nazi war criminals were put on trial in 1945-46.

The Nazi Party took power in 1933, and in 1935 instituted the Nuremberg Laws that stripped  German Jews of their citizenship and many of their basic rights. In August 1938, Berlin ordered the mass deportation of all Jews with foreign citizenship, even if they had been born in Germany.

In October 1938, according to Hannah Arendt, 12,000 Polish Jews (including many born in Germany) were forcibly expelled by Germans shouting “Juden Raus! Auf Nach Palästina!” (“Jews Out! Go to Palestine!”), but Poland would not take them in. (At the same time, Germans were playing a board game called “Juden Raus” to simulate such a mass deportation.)

The Dynamics of Kristallnacht

The key turning point was Kristallnacht, or the “night of broken glass” in November 1938, when fascist paramilitaries carried out a violent national pogrom against Jews, in response to the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, by one of those deported German-born Polish Jews. That was the first lesson I learned, that it was the mass deportation of foreign citizens that ultimately set Kristallnacht into motion, which makes me shudder now every time I hear Trump promote the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.

In the following few days, Berlin banned Jews from attending school, organizing cultural activities, publishing newspapers, or owning weapons. Paramilitaries joined by ordinary citizens destroyed hundreds of synagogues, and thousands of shops and homes, immediately killed nearly 100 as the police and military stood by, and incarcerated 30,000 in concentration camps.

The second lesson I learned was that Kristallnacht was deeply unpopular in Germany. Many Germans were concerned that foreign reporters’ accounts gave their country a more negative image abroad (which still mattered in 1938), and they deemed the paramilitary mobs as disorderly, chaotic, and illegal, akin to pogroms in Czarist Russia. Kaiser Wilhelm II was “ashamed to be German,” some individual Party members tried to intervene to protect Jews, and a survey showed that 63% of Party members disapproved of the violent pogrom.

The third lesson I learned was that their opinion didn’t matter one bit. Nazi leadership had decided to set mass, violent persecution into motion, so the voices of dissent among newer Party members (who had joined for the job rather than the ideology) had no effect whatsoever. Kristallnacht was not the result of individual opinions or prejudices, but a structural exercise in power by an extremist political minority to crush democracy and human rights. Even if some Party members questioned the Party’s direction, the machinery of persecution moved forward toward its logical outcome of genocide. Even if some church members objected, it meant nothing unless they’d actively resisted and stood in the way of the machine. So now whenever I see a CNN poll showing a similar majority of Republicans disapproving of political violence, it provides little reassurance.

One of the reasons that internal dissenters were ignored was that their opposition was usually couched in legal terms, decrying the violence of Kristallnacht as illegal, insinuating that any government persecution had to be done instead through legal means. So in the ensuing months and years, in response to the criticism, the State changed the laws to give violent persecution a legal veneer.

That was the fourth lesson I gained from Kristallnacht, that if one objects to abuses of human rights and democracy only on legal grounds, we’ll get caught flat-footed when the laws are changed to legalize the abuses. If we object to U.S. armed paramilitaries merely as illegal “vigilantes” (as I pointed out in 2020), we’re not prepared for a situation when the militia members are deputized and issued orders. Using the military for political ends, such as shooting protesters or deporting immigrants, may be technically illegal now, but President Trump can give an official stamp of approval.

A New Civil War?

The entire experience of personally seeing the sites of the Nazi Party’s rise, including Kristallnacht, offered a fifth lesson that has made me question the current American trend to fear a possible “civil war” in the United States. Numerous books, opinion columns and polls envision an upcoming “civil war” between red and blue states, and the Hollywood action film Civil War provides the gory images. But I’ve grown to see the fear of civil war as both inaccurate and misplaced.

Even if the red vs. blue divide led to a violent cataclysm, it wouldn’t be a war between the states, but a war within the states. As a political geographer who has studied many election maps, I can see that the real divide is not between states, but between the blue metro areas and the surrounding red counties. The dynamic would be less like the American Civil War than like insurgencies in which rural-based militias encircled and assaulted what they viewed as decadent, cosmopolitan cities, as the Bosnian Serb Army did to multiethnic Sarajevo in 1992.

But the United States is not going to have a civil war for one simple reason: one side has nearly all the guns. The political right romanticizes guns and militarism, and far-right militias tend to target human beings (killing at least 114 people in the U.S. in 2001-21). The political left romanticizes peace and relies on legal political movements, and even its most militant factions usually go only so far as to vandalize or destroy property. After all, how many liberals, progressives, or leftists do you know who actually own a weapon?

The only realistic scenario for a new civil war would be if the U.S. military itself divided along political lines, and both sides gained heavy weaponry. Some military enlistees and officers did question the possibility of attacking protesters in 2020, and resisted the Iraq War a decade earlier. The troops are about 43 percent people of color, so (like during the Vietnam War) some could refuse or frustrate orders to use their weapons at home. But there is no evidence of a schism within the military that even approaches the divisions leading up to our original Civil War, or for that matter civil wars in any other country.

So my conclusion is that instead of thinking about a two-sided civil war that isn’t going to happen, it would be much more useful to think through what we would do in case of a one-sided spasm of violence directed at marginalized communities (such as undocumented immigrants), and any governments that defend them. We’re narrowly drawing from our own history in envisioning a new civil war, when what we should really be worried about is a Kristallnacht.

American Kristallnacht

We’re seeing a preview of mob violence in the recent anti-immigrant riots in British and Irish cities, and attacks on refugees and asylum seekers in Germany.  Our own history has plentiful precedents of militarized mob violence against Black, Native, Latin, and Asian communities, and violence against LGBTQ+ communities. In the aftermath of a contested election, it’s conceivable that a one-sided mass assault could be directed not just against government officials or buildings such as the Capitol, but against immigrants, Muslims, Jews, real and perceived leftists in higher education and media, or a combination of individual attacks lashing out at any “enemies of the people.”

It’s possible that the U.S. came within one inch of such a scenario on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania. What would have been the spontaneous reaction from armed Trump supporters had the assassination attempt been successful? The identity of the shooter would have been less relevant than the opportunity to take revenge against Trump’s “enemies.” The 1994 Rwanda genocide began with the downing of a plane carrying the president, signaling to Hutu militias not only to massacre the Tutsi ethnic group, but any Hutus who stood in the way.

When we look forward to any contested election results on November 5, the certification on January 6, 2025, anti-immigrant riots, a threatened mass deportation, or some other trigger for far-right violence, we should heed the lessons of the one-sided Kristallnacht pogrom rather than focus on fanciful visions of a two-sided civil war. No matter if a pogrom is legal or not, or is popular or not, it’s a moral atrocity and an exercise of far-right power to crush democracy and human rights. It can only be stopped by a mass mobilization of people, using our numbers and creativity to exercise our own power to stand in the way.

Resistance to mass deportations

Such a mass mobilization could involve large counterdemonstrations to defend human rights. In Germany, counterdemonstrations grew against extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party leaders, after a recording revealed in January that they were secretly planning mass deportations of refugees and immigrants. The huge rallies may have isolated the AfD and suppressed its share of the European Parliament election vote, even if the party has made major gains in eastern states.

This German experience is of little solace to Americans, given that Trump supporters are openly waving “Mass Deportation Now!” signs, with little pushback from Harris or her supporters. But if mass deportations and family separations are threatened, immigrant workers and their communities may strike and march as they did on the “Day Without Immigrants” in 2006 and 2017, or professional players could carry out a “sports strike” as they did in 2020.

Another mass mobilization could involve popular noncompliance with anti-immigrant directives.  In 1994, California Republican Governor Pete Wilson won a ballot initiative to establish a state-run citizenship screening system. Proposition 187 would have prohibited undocumented immigrants from using non-emergency health care, public education, and other services, and required all providers to report the names of anyone they thought was undocumented. But health care workers, educators, and many others collectively refused to comply en masse with the directives, and a federal judge later overruled Prop 187.

If any future president decided to carry out mass deportations of refugees and up to 11 million undocumented immigrants, it would be a logistical nightmare, requiring either unrestrained mob violence or (as Trump proposes) the use of military personnel. It may be critical to proactively reach out to active-duty Army and National Guard soldiers, preferably via veterans and military families, to educate them about the injustices facing war refugees and undocumented workers. The soldiers could be educated about their own rights and power, not just about becoming individual public refusers, but about more covert collective disobedience (akin to “search-and-avoid” missions in Vietnam and Iraq).

The United States could certainly at risk of a second civil war, but our country is even more frighteningly unprepared for a national pogrom resembling Kristallnacht. If Trump again sabotages the peaceful transfer of power, it may not be another January 6 in Washington D.C., but a far more violent upsurge that is spread across the country. And whether Trump wins and instigates mass deportations, or Harris wins and is pressured by far-right riots like those occurring in Europe, the main targets could well be refugees and undocumented immigrants (or anyone who looks or speaks like them). By preparing and organizing for these grim possibilities, we can have more proactive ways to respond than relying on our weakened legal system, and not be caught surprised again.

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“Escalation dominance defines a situation in which a nation has the military capabilities that can contain or defeat an adversary at all levels of violence with the possible exception of the highest.”

– Reagan Administration’s Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy, “Discriminate Deterrence,” 1988.

There is no greater strategic madness than the belief that nuclear superiority must be maintained at each rung of the nuclear ladder in order to maintain deterrence.  U.S. weapons technology was a major driver of escalation dominance throughout the 1950s and 1960s along with the belief that the Soviet Union would move to a level of nuclear conflict that the United States could not counter.  “Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb” parodied these fears, and the arms control and disarmament developments of the 1970s and 1980s helped to defuse them.  Sadly, the Biden administration has taken a step that suggests a return to escalation dominance, which will spiral a Pentagon budget that will soon reach $1 trillion per year.

“Dr. Strangelove” remains the greatest of movie satires for a host of reasons, not least that it hews so closely to the real-life absurdities of two saber-rattling superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—escalating an arms race that could only end in mutual annihilation.  Now we have a third superpower—China—that is expanding its nuclear arsenal, and the Biden administration has approved a highly classified nuclear strategic plan—the Nuclear Employment Guidance—that seeks to prepare the United States for possible coordinated nuclear challenges from Russia, China, and North Korea.  According to David Sanger in the New York Times, the document is so highly classified that “there are no electronic copies, only a small number of hard copies distributed to a few national security officials and Pentagon commanders.

The importance of escalation dominance in the Cold War was driven by such Cold Warriors as Paul Nitze, who argued that a Soviet nuclear attack would enable the Kremlin to hold the American population hostage and to dictate the terms of peace.  Nitze added that the Soviet Union’s “effective civil defense program” would keep Soviet casualties to two to four percent of their population, a cost that Moscow would be willing to pay to achieve “dominance.”  These absurd notions encouraged the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s to advise U.S. families to build bomb shelters as protection from atomic fallout in the event of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.  President John F. Kennedy said the government would provide such protection for every American; in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan guaranteed protection in the form of his Star Wars missile defense.

Only the United States has spent billions of dollars in the pursuit of a missile defense shield over the entire country.  I wrote about this 25 years ago in a book titled “The Phantom Defense: America’s Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion.”  Now, European leaders are talking about a “European Air Shield,” and the Heritage Foundation—Donald Trump’s think tank—favors a missile defense system that would destroy over 100 incoming missiles.  Trump’s flawed reference to the success of Israel’s Iron Dome defensive system is also illusory because it intercepts small short-range rockets fired by militants in the region and not ballistic missiles.

The next president will inherit a nuclear landscape that is more threatening and volatile than any other since the dangers of the Cuban missile crisis more than 60 years ago.  China is expanding its nuclear arsenal; Russia is threatening the use of nuclear weapons against Ukraine and warning about World War III; Iran’s nuclear program is expanding rapidly in size and sophistication; and North Korea reportedly has a nuclear arsenal that rivals three nuclear states that never joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty: Israel, India, and Pakistan.

The close ties between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are feeding Washington’s nuclear paranoia.  Washington’s failure to hold substantive discussions with these four countries makes the potential for conflict more real.  Our obsession with terrorists obtaining nuclear weapons adds to the exaggeration of the threat and our distorted strategic spending. The fact that Donald Trump may return to the White House, where he once boasted about the size of his nuclear button and promised to return America’s nuclear arsenal to the “top of the pack,” adds to nuclear uncertainty.

Russia and China are willing to enter discussions on nuclear matters with the United States, but only as part of a larger strategic discussion on the tensions and challenges that confront Washington’s bilateral policies with both Moscow and Beijing.  President Biden’s administration has refused to enter such an expanded dialogue, which is a major failure in its national security strategy.  It is essential for the three major nuclear powers to discuss arms control, risk reduction, and the importance of nonproliferation; the United States is primarily responsible for the failure to begin a dialogue.  Instead, Biden and his national security team have been preoccupied with ways to interfere in the broader China-Russia relationship, which has never been stronger.  In fact, it has been Washington’s opposition to Sino-Russian relations that has led Moscow and Beijing to bolster their ties.

The United States has been lacking serious disarmament specialists at the highest levels of the government since the Obama administration when John Kerry was secretary of state and Rose Gottemoeller was undersecretary for arms control and international security and assistant secretary of state for verification, compliance, and implementation.  Kerry and Gottemoeller were fighting an uphill battle because of President Bill Clinton’s decision in 1997 to abolish the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which seriously weakened the entire arms control community in the United States.  ACDA’s demise as an independent voice for arms control weakened national security by narrowing arms control options for presidential decision making.

Unfortunately, we’re in an election season with both candidates battling over who would create a more lethal military force and increase military spending,  The campaign thus far has featured no reference to arms control and disarmament.  The United States is already responsible for half of the global spending on the military, and is the world’s only country that has power projection capabilities that involve every corner of the globe.  Our nuclear inventory contains more warheads than there are strategic targets, and this is certainly true for the other nuclear powers around the world.  There is no greater shared irresponsibility in the international community than the secret decisions that led to the overkill capabilities in the nuclear inventories of the nine nuclear powers.  It will take a serious act of statesmanship to stop the fear-mongering delusions that could once again shape our nuclear weapons policy.

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Not the First Time: Family from the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, Gaza City in what remains of their house destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

Since 2007, when the State of Israel implemented its still-ongoing blockade of Gaza, several different monikers have emerged to describe the conditions for Palestinians living in the territory under the ongoing Israeli siege.  Now, after 11 months of the murderous Israeli assault on the people of Gaza, it is necessary once again to revise what the State of Israel has imposed on the territory.  What the state of Israel has created in the Gaza Strip is nothing less than a death camp akin to what the Nazis created for the massacre of Jews and other so-called enemies of the Reich.

For many years, the descriptor of choice for Gaza emerged – surprisingly — from remarks in 2010 by the former British Prime Minister, David Cameron while on a trip to Ankara Turkey, who described the Gaza Strip as the “world’s largest open-air prison.”  Speaking alongside his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Cameron bluntly insisted that “Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp.”  This characterization of Gaza as a prison bore resemblance to the metaphor used by Michel Foucault to describe the stasis and immobility imposed by authorities on late medieval European towns afflicted by the Plague and became a standard representation of Gaza under the Israeli siege.

Man from the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, Gaza City grieving in the ruins of his house destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

After October 7, 2023, in the initial weeks of the brutal reprisal by the Israeli military against the civilians of Gaza, Masha Gessen in a highly provocative article for the New Yorker, wrote that the prison analogy was no longer applicable to describe what the Palestinians of Gaza were experiencing.  Gessen instead insisted on referring to Gaza as a “Ghetto,” and suggested that what Israel was undertaking in Gaza was precisely what the Nazis did in places such as the Ghetto of Warsaw.  In what was a courageous, as well insightful observation, Gessen wrote that the Israelis were “liquidating” the Ghetto of Gaza just as the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw Ghetto.

Now, after 11 months of incessant daily bombing and killing of a largely defenseless population with no end in sight; with an entire population, including women and children, made to suffer from no food, no clean water, diseases with no medicines and with the hospitals largely destroyed; and with the civilians of Gaza locked inside the space of the territory with nowhere to flee; the Israeli military is re-creating a project akin to the camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and Oswiecim but on a larger spatial scale.  What else but a death camp corresponds to the organized daily slaughter of Palestinians within a confined space carried out by the State of Israel?

An area of the Shuja’iyya neighborhood, Gaza City destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

In such circumstances, the question that beckons for answers is:  how could a nation that claims its heritage from the ashes of the Holocaust and the Nazi death camps — and prides itself on upholding the slogan “never again” — turn around and inflict virtually the same kind of suffering on another group of civilians, and do it seemingly without remorse?  While there are no easy answers to this vexing puzzle, surprisingly one place to begin comes from the insights of two contemporaries from the 19^th century with vastly different political persuasions.

In his celebrated work, The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856), Alexis de Tocqueville asked how the luminaries of the French Revolution, with their “love of equality and the urge to freedom” ultimately crafted a system of authoritarian rule little different from the absolutism they so passionately set out to overturn.*  In seeking to explain this paradox, de Tocqueville signaled a beguiling truth about revolutionaries such as Robespierre and St. Just who he insists, “were men shaped by the old order.”  These individuals may have wanted to distance themselves from the ancien regime they so fervently wished to destroy, but years of conditioning under French absolutism had influenced their outlook and behavior.  Try as they might, these revolutionaries, “remained essentially the same, and in fact…never changed out of recognition.”

The main mosque in the town of Kuza’a (Khan Yunis District) destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

Four years before de Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime, Karl Marx in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, wrote how human beings make their own history, but they don’t make it as they please.  They make it “under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.”  He used this insight to show not how history repeats, but instead how history “rhymes” as human actors in the present recreate in the present what they have encountered from past experience.  Marx famously described the reprise of the past as both tragedy and farce.

In this way, both de Tocqueville and Marx emphasize how human actors emerge from the circumstances around them and in an uncanny way re-enact what they themselves know and have already experienced.  What these two towering figures reveal is that history weighs upon the living as they seek to remake the world of the present.  What kind of “dead weight” did the Holocaust and the experience of the Nazi death camps cast upon Zionism, Jews, and the State of Israel?

In response to this question, the logical but ultimately naïve impulse is to imagine the victims of the Holocaust filled with compassion for those who have experienced similar fates.  Supposedly, those who endured the ravages of the death camps would emerge from their tragedy replete with empathy for the suffering of others.  In some cases, this is undoubtedly true.

Far more credible is the disturbing likelihood that the Holocaust produced heirs thoroughly replete with rancor and bitterness toward humanity, with little compassion for other victims of brutality and injustice, and a deeply resentful if not unique sense of victimhood.  Indeed, these were hapless victims of an unspeakable state sponsored crime who passed such sentiments of bitterness and resentment to subsequent generations, including the current generation of Israelis who by all accounts of public opinion are fully supportive of the fratricidal activities of their government and seem oblivious to the suffering of their Palestinian neighbors in Gaza.  How else is it possible to explain the coarsened cruelty of those Israeli civilians vandalizing aid supplies intended for the starving and suffering people of Gaza, a truly depraved spectacle that conjures up images of the suffering, starving, skeleton-like Jewish captives in the death camps of the Nazis.

Apartment Buildings in Beit Hanoun destroyed by Israel in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge (Photo by Gary Fields).

+++

There is a scene toward the end of the recent award-winning film, The Zone of Interest in which Nazi death camp commanders and various civilian experts are in a meeting, seated around a large table discussing how they will implement the logistics of liquidating a contingent of 700,000 Hungarian Jews who are being transported to the various camp locations.  The coldly blunt, even banal dialogue in this scene on the logistical challenges of processing so many bodies for death is obviously an echo of Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil.  At the same time, the visual imagery in this cinematic re-creation of the meeting is eerily similar to the fleeting images presented on newscasts of the so-called, Israeli “War Cabinet” that usually features the stoic faces of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant.  While we don’t know the exact words exchanged among these Israeli Generals and civilian leaders, the handiwork of this group has been on full display for the world to see for the past 11 months.

In a riveting press briefing of August 26^th, two veteran UNRWA officials directly involved in on-the-ground distribution of medical and food aid to the people of Gaza, Louise Wateridge and Sam Rose described a humanitarian catastrophe that they characterized as unprecedented, something they had never seen in decades of UN work.  People in places such as Al-Mawasi and Deir al Balah, without food, water, medicines or medical care, are living amid lakes of raw sewage in an apocalyptic landscape of carnage in conditions utterly unfit for human habitation.  The situation is worsening by the hour as Israel commands one million starving and sick people to remove themselves again and again — already 16 evacuations in August — and find shelter in a confined space comprising 11% of Gaza that the Israeli military is incessantly bombarding.

Ultimately, the way to comprehend how such a situation described by the two UNRWA officials comes about is to juxtapose the scene from The Zone of Interest on the liquidation of the 700,000 Hungarian Jews, and compare it to the visuals of the Israeli War Cabinet.  There is an unsettling symmetry in this comparison that asks us to ponder how the State of Israel has come to this moment in massacring so many thousands of innocents, while keeping those still alive penned in place, readying them for death by preventing them any route of escape.

* For the rest of this paragraph and the next see Gary Fields, “Nazis:  The Fraught Politics of a word and a People Besieged.”  Jadaliyya.

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